Three Weeks With My Brother (2 page)

“I’m going to see if the mail’s come in yet.”

A minute later, I was out the front door.

Because our house is set a ways back from the road, it usually takes five minutes to walk out to the mailbox and back. The moment I closed the door behind me, the mayhem ceased to exist. I walked slowly, savoring the silence.

Once back in the house, I noticed that my wife was trying to clean the cookie crumb drool from her shirt while holding both babies simultaneously. Landon was standing at her feet, tugging at her jeans, trying to get her attention. At the same time, she was helping the older boys with their homework. My heart surged with pride at her ability to multitask so efficiently and I held up the stack of mail so she could see it.

“I got the mail,” I offered.

She glanced up. “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” she answered. “You’re such a big help around here.”

I nodded. “Just doing my job,” I said. “No reason to thank me.”

Like everyone else, I get my share of junk mail and I separated the important mail from the nonimportant. I paid the bills, skimmed through articles in a couple of magazines, and was getting ready to toss everything else into the circular file cabinet when I noticed a brochure I’d initially put in the trash pile. It had come from the alumni office at the University of Notre Dame, and advertised a “Journey to the Lands of Sky Worshipers.” The tour was called “Heaven and Earth,” and would travel around the world over a three-week period in January and February 2003.

Interesting, I thought, and I began to peruse it. The tour—by private jet, no less—would journey to the Mayan ruins in Guatemala, the Incan ruins in Peru, the stone giants of Easter Island, and the Polynesian Cook Islands. There would also be stops at Ayers Rock in Australia; Angkor Wat and the Killing Fields and Holocaust Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia; the Taj Mahal and the Amber Fort of Jaipur in India; the rock cathedrals of Lalibela, Ethiopia; the Hypogeum and other ancient temples in Malta; and finally—weather permitting—a chance to see the northern lights in Tromsø, Norway, a town located three hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle.

As a child, I’d always been fascinated with ancient cultures and faraway lands, and, more often than not, as I read the description of each proposed stop, I found myself thinking, “I’ve always wanted to see that.” It was an opportunity to take the trip of a lifetime to places that had lingered in my imagination since boyhood. When I finished looking through the brochure, I sighed, thinking,
Maybe one day . . .

Right now, I just didn’t have the time. Three weeks away from the kids? From my wife? From my work?

Impossible. It was ridiculous, so I might as well forget about it. I shoved the brochure to the bottom of the pile.

The thing is, I
couldn’t
forget about the trip.

You see, I’m a realist, and I figured that Cat (short for Cathy) and I would get the chance to travel sometime in the future. But while I knew that someday it might be possible to convince my wife to travel with me to see the Taj Mahal or Angkor Wat, there wasn’t a chance we’d ever make it to Easter Island or Ethiopia or the jungles of Guatemala. Because they were so far out of the way and there were so many other things to see and places to go in the world, traveling to remote areas would always fall into the category of
Maybe one day . . . and I was fairly certain that
one day would never come.

But here was the chance to do it all in one fell swoop, and ten minutes later—once the cacophony in the living room had died down as mysteriously as it had arisen—I was standing in the kitchen with my wife, the brochure open on the counter. I pointed out the highlights like a kid describing summer camp, and my wife, who has long since grown used to my flights of fancy, simply listened as I rambled on. When I finished, she nodded.

“Mmm . . .” she said.

“Is that a good mmm, or a bad mmm?”

“Neither. I’m just wondering why you’re showing me this. It’s not like we can go.”

“I know,” I said. “I just thought you might like to see it.”

My wife, who knows me better than anyone, knew there was more to it than that.

“Mmm,” she said.

Two days later, my wife and I were walking through the neighborhood. Our oldest sons were ahead of us, the other three kids were in strollers, when I brought the subject up again.

“I was thinking about that trip,” I said, oh-so-casually.

“What trip?”

“The one that goes around the world. The one in the brochure that I showed you.”

“Why?”

“Well . . .” I took a deep breath. “Would you like to go?”

She took a few steps before answering. “Of course I’d like to go,” she said. “It looks amazing, but it’s impossible. I can’t leave the kids for three weeks. What if something happened? There’s not a chance that we could get back in an emergency. How many flights even go to a place like Easter Island? Lexie and Savannah are still babies, and they need me. All of them need me . . .” She trailed off. “Maybe other mothers could go, but not me.”

I nodded. I already knew what her answer would be.

“Would you mind if I went?”

She looked over at me. I already traveled extensively for my work, doing book tours two to three months a year, and my trips were always hard on the family. Though I wasn’t always willing to dive headfirst into the chaos, I’m not
completely
worthless around the house. Cat has a schedule that frequently gets her out of the house—she has occasional breakfasts with friends, volunteers regularly at school, exercises at the gym, plays bunco with a group of ladies, and runs errands—and we both know she
needs
to get out of the house to keep from going crazy. In those moments I end up being solo dad. But when I’m gone, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, for her to do anything outside the house. This is not good for my wife’s state of mind.

In addition, our kids like having
both
of us around. When I’m gone, if you can imagine it, the chaos in the house multiplies, as if filling the void of my absence. Suffice it to say, my wife gets tired of my traveling. She understands it’s part of my job, but it doesn’t mean that she likes it.

Thus, my question was a fraught one.

“Is it really that important to you?” she finally asked.

“No,” I said honestly. “If you don’t want me to go, I won’t. But I’d like to.”

“And you’d go alone?”

I shook my head. “Actually, I was thinking about going with Micah,” I said, referring to my brother.

We walked in silence for a few moments before she caught my eye. “I think,” she said, “that would be a wonderful idea.”

After Cat and I returned from our walk—and still in a state of partial disbelief—I went to my office to call my brother in California.

I could hear the phone ringing, the sound more distant than that on a landline. Micah never answered his home phone; if I wanted to talk to him, I had to dial his cellular.

“Hey Nicky,” he chirped. “What’s going on?”

My brother has caller ID, and still tends to call me by my childhood name. I was, in fact, called Nicky until the fifth grade.

“I have something I think you’ll be interested in.”

“Do tell.”

“I got this brochure in the mail and . . . anyway, to make a long story short, I was wondering if you want to go with me on a trip around the world. In January.”

“What kind of trip?”

I spent the next few minutes describing the highlights, flipping through the brochure as I spoke. When I finished, he was quiet on the other end.

“Really?” he asked. “And Cat’s going to let you go?”

“She said she would.” I hesitated. “Look, I know it’s a big decision, so I don’t need an answer now. We’ve got plenty of time until we have to confirm. I just wanted to get you thinking about it. I mean, I’m sure you’ll have to clear it with Christine. Three weeks is a long time.”

Christine is my brother’s wife; in the background, I could hear the faint cries of their newborn baby girl, Peyton.

“I’m sure she’ll think it’s okay. But I’ll check and call you back.”

“Do you want me to send the brochure?”

“Of course,” he said. “I should probably know where we’re going, right?”

“I’ll FedEx it today,” I said. “And Micah?”

“Yeah?”

“This is going to be the trip of our lives.”

“I’m sure it will be, little brother.” I could almost see Micah grinning on the other end. “It will be.”

We said our good-byes, and after hanging up the phone I found myself eyeing the family photographs that line the shelves of my office. For the most part, the pictures are of the kids: I saw my children as infants and as toddlers; there was a Christmas photograph of all five of them, taken only a couple of months earlier. Beside that stood a photograph of Cathy, and on impulse I reached for the frame, thinking of the sacrifice she’d just made.

No, she wasn’t thrilled with the idea of me leaving for three weeks. Nor was she thrilled that I wouldn’t be around to help with our five children; instead, she’d shoulder the load while I traveled the world.

Why then, had she said yes?

As I’ve said, my wife understands me better than anyone, and knew my urgent desire to go had less to do with the trip itself than spending time with my brother.

This, then, is a story about brotherhood.

It’s the story of Micah and me, and the story of our family. It’s a story of tragedy and joy, hope and support. It’s the story of how he and I have matured and changed and taken different paths in life, but somehow grown even closer. It is, in other words, the story of two journeys; one journey that took my brother and me to exotic places around the world, and another, a lifetime in the making, that has led us to become the best of friends.

C
HAPTER
1

M
any stories begin with a simple lesson learned, and our family’s story is no exception. For brevity’s sake, I’ll summarize.

In the beginning, we children were conceived. And the lesson learned—at least according to my Catholic mother—goes like this:

“Always remember,” she told me, “that no matter what the church tells you, the rhythm method
doesn’t
work.”

I looked up at her, twelve years old at the time. “You mean to say that we were all
accidents
?”

“Yep. Each and every one of you.”

“But good accidents, right?”

She smiled. “The very best kind.”

Still, after hearing this story, I wasn’t sure quite what to think. On one hand, it was obvious that my mom didn’t regret having us. On the other hand, it wasn’t good for my ego to think of myself as an accident, or to wonder whether my sudden appearance in the world came about because of one too many glasses of champagne. Still, it did serve to clear things up for me, for I’d always wondered why our parents hadn’t waited before having children. They certainly weren’t ready for us, but then, I’m not exactly sure they’d been ready for marriage either.

Both my parents were born in 1942, and with World War II in its early stages, both my grandfathers served in the military. My paternal grandfather was a career officer; my dad, Patrick Michael Sparks, spent his childhood moving from one military base to the next, and growing up largely in the care of his mother. He was the oldest of five siblings, highly intelligent, and attended boarding school in England before his acceptance at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. It was there that he met my mom, Jill Emma Marie Thoene.

Like my dad, my mom was the oldest child in her family. She had three younger brothers and sisters, and was mostly raised in Nebraska where she developed a lifelong love of horses. Her father was an entrepreneur who ran a number of different businesses in the course of his life. When my mom was a teenager, he owned a movie theater in Lyons, a tiny town of a few hundred people nestled just off the highway in the midst of farmland. According to my mom, the theater was part of the reason she’d attended boarding school as well. Supposedly, she’d been sent away because she’d been caught kissing a boy, though when I asked about it, my grandmother adamantly denied it. “Your mother always was a storyteller,” my grandmother informed me. “She used to make up the darnedest things, just to get a reaction from you kids.”

“So why did you ship her off to boarding school?”

“Because of all the murders,” my grandmother said. “Lots of young girls were getting killed in Lyons back then.”

I see.

Anyway, after boarding school, my mother headed off to Creighton University just like my dad, and I suppose it was the similarities between my parents’ lives that first sparked their interest in each other. Whatever the reason, they began dating as sophomores, and gradually fell in love. They courted for a little more than a year, and were both twenty-one when they married on August 31, 1963, prior to the beginning of their senior year in college.

A few months later, the rhythm method failed and my mom learned the first of her three lessons. Micah was born on December 1, 1964. By spring, she was pregnant again, and I followed on December 31, 1965. By the following spring, she was pregnant with my sister, Dana, and decided that from that point on, she would take birth control matters into her own hands.