Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [114]
Though Dana had begun getting headaches again—she’d been prone to migraines long before she’d been diagnosed—her CAT scans continued to come back negative. Nearly five years had passed since she’d first had the surgery—at which point she would technically be in remission. My sister was married in a beautiful ceremony in Hawaii. For a moment, just a moment, all seemed right in my sister’s world. She had the life she’d always dreamed of; she was married, had children, and even had horses she kept at the ranch.
Then, while on her honeymoon, Dana suddenly suffered another seizure. And when she got back, the CAT scan showed something it hadn’t in years.
My sister’s brain tumor was growing again.
CHAPTER 16
Valletta, Malta
February 11–12
In the previous four days—since the morning before our trip to Agra—we’d spent a total of five hours visiting both the Taj Mahal and Lalibela. Our flight time, by way of comparison, was nearly ten hours, or twice as long.
It was this slowing of the pace—and the extent of our travels to that point—that left both Micah and me feeling lethargic by the time we landed. But Malta, with its European flavor and atmosphere, energized us almost immediately.
The island was gorgeous, with white rocky cliffs plunging to the blue Mediterranean. The sky was cloudless, crisp and winter bright—it was our first stop where the temperature was cool—and after donning our jackets we boarded the buses and made our way to the various sites.
Because of the size of our group, we were split into three sections; ours would head first to the Hypogeum, an underground temple complex discovered in 1902 that was found to contain the remains of six to seven thousand bodies. The complex is a labyrinth, consisting of chambers built over three levels, and descending to a depth of nearly forty feet. Dating back to nearly 3,600 B.C., it is far older than either the Pyramids or Stonehenge. It is, in fact, the oldest known structure of any kind in the world, and had been carved from the limestone using the simplest of tools: bone, flint, and hard rocks.
Combined with the ruins in other parts of Malta that we’d visit—the Tarxien Temple, which is the oldest known freestanding statue of a deity, and the megalithic temples aboveground, which are the oldest freestanding stone buildings ever discovered—it represents one of the earliest advanced civilizations in the world. Yet no one knows who these early people were, where they came from, what happened to them, or where they went. The civilization seems to have vanished as mysteriously as it arrived.
Despite this fascinating history of the lost inhabitants, it was Malta itself that Micah seemed most interested in. As we drove along paved roads in which everyone obeyed traffic laws (by then, it seemed downright strange), I could see Micah smiling.
“You know what this reminds me of?” he asked.
“What?”
“My trip to Italy,” he said. “Right after I graduated from college, when Tracy and I went biking around. It looked just like this. Well, parts of it anyway. That trip was a blast.”
“Gee, really?” I feigned surprise. “Exploring, meeting new people, having fun? That doesn’t sound like your kind of thing.”
He smiled, no doubt thinking back to our Mission Gang days. “Did I ever tell you what happened when we first got to Europe?”
I shook my head.
“Well, Tracy and I flew into Madrid, but because we each had free miles on different airlines, we weren’t on the same flight. We were supposed to land at about the same time, but when I went to his gate to meet him, he wasn’t on the plane. The thing was, Tracy had everything in his suitcase—the guidebook, directions, maps, even the tools I needed to put my mountain bike back together. And I’m in a foreign country. No one spoke English, I couldn’t read any of the signs, I couldn’t even figure out who to ask to find out why Tracy hadn’t arrived. I didn’t even know where the city was in relation