Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [34]
The next thing he knew, he heard a squishing noise coming from his shoe. Figuring that he must have stepped in a puddle of some unknown liquid, he kept going, trying to ignore it.
As he put it, “But I realized the squishing only seemed to be growing louder. When I looked down at my shoe, I noticed that my sock was turning pink, and my shoe was soaked. Obviously, I told myself, I’d stepped in some wine left behind by some teenagers. So there I was, step, squish, step, squish. And I could feel my foot getting slimier, and then I suddenly realized that I must have cut myself on the glass. So I sat down and took off my shoe. My sock and shoe were soaked in blood, and all of a sudden, the blood spurts from a cut over my ankle like water from a drinking fountain. It spurted high with every heartbeat. Looking back, I must have cut—or at least nicked—an artery, because it was really spurting.”
He yelled for his friend, who came running. Using the bloody sock, they put a tourniquet on the ankle, and with his friend’s help my brother hobbled home and called for my mom.
Because it was a weekend, she happened to be at home and she examined his ankle as it spurted blood all over the kitchen linoleum.
“Looks pretty bad,” she said succinctly. And as always, she knew exactly what to do.
She stuck a Band-Aid on it.
Then she told Micah to put his hand over the Band-Aid, and told him he might want to rest it for a while before he went outside to play again.
As wild as we were, my mom always made it a point to bring us to church every Sunday, and that continued in California. My brother and I were often bored and would poke each other. The challenge, however, was that the other wasn’t allowed to flinch, and the poker couldn’t appear to be moving, so that our mother wouldn’t catch us.
Dana didn’t like this particular game very much, and while my mother didn’t know what was going on, my sister certainly did. She took church very seriously—because our mom did, I suppose, and she wanted to be just like her—and in between her prayers, she would frown at us, trying to get us to stop.
Dana loved to pray. She prayed in the morning, she prayed at night. She asked God to bless everyone she knew, one at a time. She prayed for relatives and friends and strangers, dogs and cats and animals at the zoo. She prayed to become kinder and more patient, despite the fact that she didn’t need help in either department. She seemed completely at ease with the world, and had a way of making others comfortable around her. In her own gentle way, my sister had quietly become the rock that my brother and I began to cling to whenever misfortune befell us.
But as much as Dana loved church and praying, it was her fault that we never arrived at Mass on time. Usually we rolled in about ten minutes late, and always after the rest of the congregation was seated. I didn’t mind coming late (as I said, I was frequently bored), but I didn’t like the way everyone would turn to watch us as we tried to find a seat. And in moments like those, I wished my sister would be a little more like my brother and me, at least in one respect.
Dana, despite her other wonderful qualities, was not a fast mover. When she woke up in the morning, she never got out of bed right away. Instead, she would sit cross-legged on the mattress and simply stare into space, looking dreamy and disoriented. She would stay in that position for twenty minutes—“Waking up” as she described it—and would only then begin getting ready to go. And even then, everything was slow. She ate slowly, she dressed slowly, she brushed her hair slowly. Where our mom could tell Micah and me to get ready and we’d be dressed within minutes, my sister took her time. My brother and I had to walk to school, but more often than not, my mom would have to drive my sister in, so that she