Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [15]
For my brother and me, the quake required that we inspect the damage ourselves, and we spent the next few days probing and searching like FEMA representatives. Perhaps it was our way of trying to get the fear out of our system, and it seemed to work during the daytime. At night, though, we’d lie in bed, having trouble falling asleep, and suffering from nightmares.
The aftershocks continued for days after that first big quake. In the beginning, my parents would continue to rush into our room as they had the night of the first quake. But as the aftershocks continued, their responses grew slower, until finally they stopped getting up to check on us at all. After that, the three of us would rush into their room.
In the midst of yet another aftershock we kids thundered into their room, launched ourselves airborne from the foot of the bed, and heard the whumph of air escape our parents’ lungs as we landed on top of them. My dad, obviously tiring of this sort of thing awakening him in the middle of the night, heard my mom’s exortations to “Do something, Mike!” and decided to put a stop to it once and for all. Getting out of bed—naked again, but by then we’d grown used to it—he suddenly performed what resembled an Indian rain dance in the middle of the bedroom. Waving his arms, he spun in circles, chanting, “Stop earthquake, stop, oh, yey, mighty earthquake be gone . . .” and in the moment that he stopped circling and chanting, the earth suddenly stopped shaking.
All we could do was stare at him. We were awestruck as he crawled back into bed and shooed us from the room.
I don’t suppose I need to explain the significance of such an event to young minds, and after we crawled under the covers in our own beds, my brother and I understood exactly what this meant. Coincidence? I think not.
As Micah explained solemnly, “Our dad has magic powers.”
This, of course, made us see our father in a completely different light, a new and exciting light, and I must say that when I got back to school, I wasn’t reticent in sharing this information with others in my class. They, too, were amazed.
In addition to stopping earthquakes, my father was also able to stop the rain from falling. Not all the time, mind you, but only when we were driving in the car, and only for a little while. It didn’t matter how hard the rain might be coming down, but as we hurtled down the highway, my dad would glance over his shoulder and sometimes ask us if we were ready for the rain to stop. If we said yes, he’d tell us to close our eyes, remind us not to peek, and then, in the moment that he said “Stop,” the rain would stop falling. It would be utterly quiet for about a second—the roar against the roof completely silenced—and then, just as suddenly, we’d hear the rain begin to pound again. As he explained: “It takes a lot of energy to stop the rain—I can’t keep it up for long.”
It wasn’t until a few years later that I noticed my father only seemed to have these powers when we were approaching a highway overpass.
In 1972, things began to change in our family. With my sister now in kindergarten, my mother started working, so after school we found ourselves alone. We had an older neighbor who was supposed to look in on us, but she seldom did. Instead, we’d head up to her apartment, tell her that we were home, then ignore her for the rest of the afternoon. This suited her perfectly. She was more of the “contact in case of only dire emergencies, lest I miss my soap operas” kind of baby-sitter, and besides, we’d been on our own in the afternoons for so long by then that we didn’t really need someone to watch over us.
Unsurprisingly, my brother and I suffered an exceedingly high number of injuries during our early years. Already, I’d had my head cut open by a rock thrown by a teenager (which not only involved the police, but a visit by my father to said teen, where the teen was threatened with grave