Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [134]
“You need a break,” she said. “Go to the beach house for a couple of days. I’ll be fine here.”
“Yeah . . . okay . . . let me get my things . . .”
She put her hand on my computer. “This stays here,” she said. “I want you to relax. Take long walks by the water, sleep in. Do absolutely nothing for a few days.”
My first night there, I slept seventeen straight hours. When I woke, I read for a little while, then slept another nine.
My brother called me a few days later.
“Heard about your little breakdown,” he said. “I told you it would catch up to you.”
“You were right.”
“How you doing now?”
“Better,” I said. “I think I was just tired and needed sleep.”
“I think you need to learn to slow down.”
“Like you?”
“Hey,” he said, “I’m not the one who crashed. And in fact, I think I’m ready to go back to work. I’m starting another business.”
“Doing what?”
“Same thing,” he said. “Making garage cabinets.”
“Good for you.”
“Yeah, I’m excited about it, and with Christine pregnant, it’s time. Besides, I’ve been getting bored lately. All my friends are working. No one has time to do anything fun.”
Despite myself, I laughed. “Imagine that,” I said.
In the fall of 2001, despite the lessons I should have learned, I threw myself back into work with a vengeance. If anything, I grew even busier than I’d been before.
Savannah and Lexie were born on August 24; Lexie Danielle had been named for my sister. While my wife took care of the twins and recovered, I took care of the other three kids and the household, at the same time pushing myself to finish the novel. A month later, I was on the road touring the country for A Bend in the Road. My wife, with twins, a toddler, and two older sons, somehow managed to keep the household running smoothly.
But again, there was more. There was always more.
At birth, Lexie had a small hemangioma—a collection of excess blood vessels in the soft tissue beneath her chin. It was the size of a pencil eraser at birth; by the time I went on tour for A Bend in the Road, it was a bulbous, purple mass that made her chin seem small in comparison.
It ruptured while I was on tour. Cat and I were talking on the phone, when she suddenly screamed, “I’ve got to go! Lexie’s chin is gushing blood!”
Lexie was seven weeks old when she was rolled into surgery; that night, I signed books for eight hundred people, hating myself for not being with my family.
But still, I continued to work like a demon. I finished the first draft of The Guardian while in Jackson, Mississippi, and as soon as I got back home, I wrote a screenplay based on the same novel. I then composed text for a Web site that had more words than my first novel. In my spare time, I began working on a television pilot based on The Rescue for CBS, agreeing to serve as an executive producer if the network picked it up. Then, in late December 2001, I heard from my editor.
The Guardian, I was told, would need extensive revisions—including a complete rewrite on the last half of the book—and I couldn’t imagine having to start all over on the novel. Yet, with a deadline looming, I needed a novel for the coming fall. Instead of reworking the novel, I began writing Nights in Rodanthe, to be published that fall in its place. The Guardian, my publisher and I decided, would be published in spring 2003, and I would edit it when Nights in Rodanthe was completed. While the time pressure on Nights in Rodanthe was intense—it had to be completed by April—it meant I had to do something else as well; namely I would have to write a third novel that year, immediately after finishing The Guardian, to be ready for fall 2003. The preliminary title was The Wedding.
In other words,