Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [71]
The next morning, I sat down at my dad’s typewriter, rolled in the first sheet of paper, and began to write. I chose horror as a genre and conjured up a character who caused accidental death wherever he went. Six weeks and nearly three hundred pages later, after writing six or seven hours a day, I’d finished. To this day, I can remember typing the final sentence, and I don’t know that I’d ever felt a higher sense of accomplishment with anything I’d done in my life.
The only problem was the book. It was terrible and I knew it. It was atrocious in every sense of the word, but in the end, what did it matter? I didn’t intend for it to be published; I’d written it to see if I could. Even then, I knew there was a big difference between starting a novel and actually finishing one. Even more surprising, I found that I’d actually enjoyed the process.
I was nineteen years old and had become an accidental author. It’s funny the way things happen in life.
Because I was away from home eight months a year, my brother and I had little time to see each other. Micah continued to spend weekends trying new and exciting things. Meanwhile, my injury continued to plague me; I ran neither cross-country nor track, but concentrated on making a comeback.
I’d made good friends with a few other freshman the year before, some of whom were on the track team, and they became the ones I would depend on to get me through yet another challenging year. But I’d learned something by heading off to college. My dependence on family had diminished more than it had for either my brother or sister. Dana still lived at home and was a freshman in college; though Micah was living in his own apartment, he still made it home three or four times a week. Whenever I called home, it always seemed as if he was there.
Soon after I’d left for my sophomore year, my mom mentioned that Brandy wasn’t doing well. She was twelve years old—not old for some breeds, but ancient for a Doberman—and I could hear the concern in my mom’s voice. My mom loved her, as we all did, and when I pressed my mom, her answers were slightly evasive.
“Well, she’s lost a little weight, and her arthritis seems to be getting worse.”
When I came home for fall break, I was shocked by Brandy’s appearance. I hadn’t seen her in two months but in those two months she’d gone from being relatively healthy to a walking skeleton. Her stomach caved in, and it was possible to count her ribs from across the room. As she slowly wandered toward me, I could see the happy recognition in her eyes. Her tail—bone thin and nearly hairless—waved a slow greeting. I crouched down and stroked her softly, feeling her shake and tremble beneath my hand. I swallowed the lump in my throat.
I spent most of the next two days with the dog, sitting beside her and patting her gently. I knew even then that she wouldn’t last until Christmas; I murmured quietly to her, reminding her of all the adventures we’d had together growing up.
The day before I was to head back to Notre Dame, we woke to find that Brandy had died.
My brother and I held back our tears as we went to get our sister. Dana made no pretense of being tough, and began to sob immediately. It was the sound of her wailing that made my brother and me both begin to cry as well, and later that morning, with tears stinging our eyes, we dug a hole in the backyard and buried her. She was gone now except for memories that we would hold forever.
“She waited until you were home,” Micah said earnestly. “I think she must have known you were coming back and wanted to see you one last time.”
Years later, we discovered the truth of what happened to Brandy. Brandy, we learned, hadn’t really died in her sleep. She’d died at the veterinarian’s office earlier that morning, with my mother holding her tight as the final injection was administered. Afterward, while we were still sleeping, my mom had brought Brandy back home and placed her in the bed for us to find. She didn’t want us to know that Brandy had been put down; she wanted the three of us to believe