Three Weeks With My Brother Read online

  My mom also seemed to know everyone’s parents, and when I’d meet someone new, this new friend would frequently mention how much their mom liked visiting with my mom. This always struck me as a mystery, because my mom had no social life. Almost all her evenings and weekends were spent at home with us, and she ate lunch alone. Nor, by the way, did my parents socialize together, or even go out on what might be considered a date. In all my years growing up, I remember my parents going out to a party together only once, and it was downright shocking to us when they casually mentioned that they were going out for the evening. I was thirteen at the time, and after they left, Micah, Dana, and I called a powwow to discuss the extraordinary turn of events. “They’re leaving us on our own? What can they be thinking? We’re just kids!” (Never mind that we were on our own every day . . . but who needs logic when you’re feeling sorry for yourself?)

  How, then, did people know her? It turned out that various parents of new friends were attended to by my mom at the optometrist’s office, and struck up conversations with her. But it wasn’t simply idle talk; my mom had a way of getting people to open up to her. People told her everything—she was the veritable Ann Landers of Fair Oaks, and occasionally, when I mentioned a new friend, she’d shake her head, and say something like, “It’s fine if he comes here, but you can’t go over there. I know what goes on in that house.”

  Yet, my mother was—and always will be—an enigma to me. While I knew she loved me, I couldn’t help but wonder why she wouldn’t acknowledge my successes. While we kids were the center of her life, she let us run wild in dangerous places, doing dangerous things. These inconsistencies have always puzzled me, and even now, I’m at a loss to explain them. I’ve long since given up trying to understand it, but if there was anything consistent in the way she raised us, it was in her refusal to allow any of us to indulge in self-pity of any kind. She achieved this through a maddening style of argument, in which the following three statements were repeated in various sequences:

  A. It’s your life + social commentary.

  B. What you want and what you get are usually two entirely different things.

  C. No one ever said that life was fair.

  For example, an argument I had with her when I was eleven:

  “I want to go out for the football team,” I said. “There’s a Pop Warner league, and all my friends are playing.”

  “It’s your life,” she answered. “But I don’t want to be responsible for you hobbling around on crutches your whole life because you blew out your knee as a kid. And besides, we don’t have the money for it.”

  “But I want to.”

  “What you want and what you get are usually two entirely different things.”

  “That’s not fair. You always say that.”

  She shrugged. “No one ever said that life was fair.”

  I paused, trying another approach.

  “I won’t get hurt, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  She looked me over. “Someone your size? You’d definitely get hurt. I’ve seen football players. You’d be nothing more than a bug on the windshield to them. You’re too small.”

  She had a point there. I was small.

  “I wish I was bigger. Like my friends are.”

  She put a consoling hand on my shoulder. “Oh sweetie, no one ever said life was fair.”

  “I know. But still . . .”

  “Just remember this, okay?” she’d offer, her voice softening with maternal affection. “It’ll help you later in life when you’re disappointed about anything. What you want and what you get are usually two entirely different things.”

  “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should try another sport.”

  My mom would smile tenderly, as if finally conceding the argument. “Hey, do what you want. It’s your life.”

  The older I got, the more I hated these arguments, because I lost every one of them. But still, deep down, I could never escape the feeling that my mom was probably right about most things. After all, she spoke from experience.

  CHAPTER 9

  Easter Island, Chile

  January 29–30

  As we looked out the airplane window, Easter Island slowly came into view, a remote and exotic sight that only underscored how far from familiar surroundings we were.

  Easter Island, like most islands in the South Pacific, was first settled by Polynesians. But because Easter Island was so far from the rest of populated Polynesia—nearly 2,200 miles from the coast of Chile, it’s the remotest inhabited island in the world—the native people developed their own unique culture, which included the carving of giant statues known as the Moai.

  Of all the places listed in the original brochure, Easter Island had been the most intriguing to me. I’d read about the Moai and had longed to see and touch them ever since I was a child. Because it was so remote, I fully realized that this trip might be the only time I ever set foot on the island, and I craned my neck, looking out the window as we circled in preparation for landing.

  What struck me immediately was the scarcity of trees. I suppose I’d imagined the palms and rain forests typical throughout the South Pacific, but instead the island was largely covered with grassy meadows, as if part of Kansas had been dropped into the middle of the ocean. Later, we’d find out from the archaeologists that the absence of trees partially explains the cultural history of Easter Island, but at the time I remember thinking how odd it seemed.

  Another interesting thing about Easter Island is the time zone in which it is located. Because we were flying west, we would cross time zones and lose a day on our way to Australia, but it enabled us to maximize our days. If we left at ten, for instance, and flew for five hours, we might arrive only three hours after we departed, as measured by local time. But because the island is part of Chile and thus shares the Eastern Time Zone (along with New York and Miami, despite lying geographically west of California), we were told that the sun wouldn’t set until 10:45 P.M.

  Dinner was served outdoors, and afterward, a few of the tour members strolled over to a seaside bluff to watch the sun go down. Waves crashed violently against the rocks, the plumes rising forty to fifty feet in the air. In the west, the sky turned pink and orange, before finally changing into the brightest red I’ve ever seen. And then an impenetrable darkness descended.

  Micah and I were sitting together, watching all of this when he finally turned to me.

  “I think I know what your problem is,” he said.

  “What problem?”

  “Why you get so stressed all the time.”

  “Why do you keep talking to me about this? Here I am, enjoying my first South Pacific sunset, and you want to start probing my psyche.”

  “Your problem,” he said, ignoring me, “is that you need more friends.”

  “I have friends. I have a lot of friends.”

  “Guy friends?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But do you do anything with them? Do you go out with them? Go fishing or boating or whatever it is you do down south?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Sometimes, or rarely?”

  I hesitated. “Okay, so I don’t do much with them. But I can’t. To have the time to go out with friends, I’d have to give up time with my family. I have too many kids to do that. And besides, most of my friends have kids, too. I’m not the only one who doesn’t have a lot of free time to just hang out.”

  “You should, though. Just hang out. Not all the time, of course, but you should try to make it more regular. Like I do. I joined an indoor soccer league and we play every Thursday. Just a group of guys out there having fun. You should do something like that.”

  “We don’t have an indoor soccer league. I live in a small town, remember?”

  “It doesn’t have to be soccer. You can do anything. The point is that you should do something. Relationships are the most important thing in life, and friends are part of that.”

  I smiled. “Why do I get the impression t
hat you think the solution to all my problems is to be more like you?”

  “Hey, if the shoe fits.” He shrugged, and I laughed.

  “So you still think you have to take care of me, huh?”

  “Only when I think you need it, little brother.”

  “And what if I started talking to you about God, because I think you need it?”

  “Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll listen.”

  Above me, the sky was filled with stars clustered together in unrecognizable constellations, and the words rose up almost unexpectedly.

  “God keeps his promise, and he will not allow you to be tested beyond your power to remain firm; at the same time you are put to the test, he will give you the strength to endure it, and so provide you with a way out.”

  Micah glanced over at me. Despite the darkness, I could see him raise his eyebrows.

  “First Corinthians,” I said. “Chapter 10.”

  “Impressive.”

  I shrugged. “I just always liked that verse. It reminds me of the footprints story—you know the one where God walks with man on the beach. Scenes from the man’s life flash in the sky, and during flashbacks of the most trying times of the man’s life, he sees only one set of footprints. Not because God abandoned the man in times of need . . . but because God carried the man.”

  Micah was quiet for a moment. “So you don’t think he abandoned us?”

  “No,” I said. “And I don’t think he wants you to abandon him either.”

  The following morning, we set off to see the first of the Moai statues, which were located less than a few minutes from the hotel, just up the coast. Had we known where we’d be going, we could have seen them from our hotel room.

  As we rode in the vans with the archaeologists who made their living studying them, we were informed that at one time there were roughly fourteen different tribes on the island, each with its own ruler. These rulers ordered the carving of these statues from volcanic rock—most were made to resemble said rulers—and over time, these statues grew larger and larger, as each ruler tried to impress on the people his own importance. Some of the Moai weigh up to thirty tons, and stand twelve feet high; one unfinished statue mea-sures sixty-six feet and is estimated to weigh nearly fifty tons.

  Afterward, we were told about the absence of trees.

  When it was first colonized, Easter Island had resembled other islands in the Pacific, but as the population expanded, trees became the most overused of all the natural resources. They were employed in construction of dwellings and for cooking fires; mature trees were used to roll the Moai across the island. In the past when Polynesians migrated, as islands became overcrowded, people would head off in their canoes in search of new territories; because Easter Island was so isolated, there was nowhere else to go. Overcrowding and overuse of the resources led to civil wars; the wars continued through generations. Through it all, trees continued to be cut down. In the end, most had been wiped out, and the natives ended up burning anything they could in order to cook, including their homes and canoes. Shore fishing became the sole source of food, but a La Niña effect is suspected to have suddenly cooled the waters around the island. It lasted two years, killing much of the ocean reef, and the fish became much less plentiful. In the end, the natives turned to cannibalism.

  Over time, a few palms eventually sprouted again, but to speed the process, mature palm trees were imported from Tahiti. These trees, however, turned out to be diseased, and they not only died, but ended up killing most of the remaining palms on the island. Now, there are only a few spots where they still remain.

  The first statue we saw was fascinating. So were the second and third. By the time we viewed the fourth and fifth statues, the novelty began to wear off. Though the local archaeologists assured us that each was different, to my untrained eye they all looked pretty much the same: eye sockets, long ears, nose, and mouth, all carved from lava rock.

  From there, we headed to the volcano quarry, where they’d been carved. To reach it, you had to cross the island, and the distance these statues had been transported fascinated me more than the statues themselves. As we drove, I tried to imagine how many people it had taken to move a single statue, let alone hundreds.

  As we drove toward the quarry where the Moai had been carved, lush, open pastures unfolded on either side of us. Beyond the pastures, we could see herds of wild-looking horses loping along.

  Horses were a symbol of prosperity on Easter Island. They had been imported in the late 1800s, but because the island was so isolated, feed was prohibitively expensive to import. The owners allowed the horses to run free so they could forage on the island grass. Their muscles were lithe and their coats gleamed in the sunlight, inspiring Micah to take a photograph of them.

  The volcano rose 1,400 feet, and everywhere along the base you could see abandoned statues. Some lay on their side, others were half buried along a trail that progressed to the far side of the island. At the quarry itself, others stood in various stages of completion. Again, there was no answer as to the reason; there was speculation about the wars, but as with so many of the places we went, nothing was certain. For all intents and purposes, it looked as if the workers had left for the day, with the full intention of returning on the next.

  A winding trail leads to the peak of the volcano, and about a third of our group eventually made their way to the summit. From the top, it’s possible to see the curvature of the earth, and Micah and I were the first to reach it. Under blue, cloudless skies and with temperatures in the seventies, the hike was refreshing. Surrounding the island was nothing but an endless expanse of water, and I wondered how the first Polynesians had ever survived in the open Pacific long enough to discover the island.

  At the top, we took pictures before sitting near the edge of a sheer drop-off. As we relaxed, Micah pulled up the picture he’d taken of the horses. He stared at it.

  “Mom would love this,” Micah said. “She would have wanted to frame it.”

  “Yes, she would,” I said. “Dana, too.”

  “Do you remember when we took those horseback riding lessons?”

  “Actually, I don’t. You and Dana did that, remember?”

  “Yeah, why didn’t you ride with us?”

  “Because,” I said, “there wasn’t enough money and you two were more excited about it than I was.”

  He put his arm around me. “The poor middle son. Always feeling left out.”

  “I didn’t feel left out. I was left out.”

  “No you weren’t. Mom and dad were always proud of you. They used to tell me that I should do better in school, like you.”

  “That’s why they took my report card down from the fridge, right?”

  “They didn’t do that.”

  “Yes they did.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  He laughed. “Isn’t it funny the way memory works? We remember different things, but especially when they scarred us—you know, the kinds of events that people lie on the couch and talk to their therapists about. I remember once I asked for a stereo and headphones for Christmas. Not a big one—just one for my room, you know? I must have been about twelve or so, and I begged for that thing. I must have hounded mom for months about it, and on Christmas morning, I remember going out there and seeing it under the tree: headphones and the stereo. There was a card that said, ‘to Micah.’ I was so excited—it was the best gift I ever got. Then mom comes out and when I thanked her, she started saying, no, no, no. ‘Just the headphones are yours. The stereo is for the family.’ I was crushed. I mean, it’s the only thing I wanted. And besides, what good are headphones without a stereo? It’s like getting a single shoe.”

  “Our parents were crazy sometimes, weren’t they?”

  “Sometimes? Yeah. You could say that.”

  I sat in silence for a few moments, musing on the past. Gradually, people began leaving t
he summit; the tour had a schedule to maintain. “Come on,” I finally said. “Let’s get going. We’ve got to see some more statues.”

  When I looked at Micah, he seemed oddly contemplative. I suddenly knew he was thinking about the past as well. His eyes were focused on the horizon.

  “No. Let’s wait here for a couple more minutes,” he said quietly. “Then we’ll go.”

  I looked toward the horizon, following my brother’s gaze. “Okay.”

  After descending the volcano, we journeyed to the single most photographed spot on Easter Island.

  Giant statues of the Moai—about twenty or so—stand together in a straight line along the coast. Until a few years ago, all had been toppled over, some broken into pieces. The archaeologists who joined us as guides had helped not only to repair them, but position them upright once more.

  These, I thought, were the statues that Jakob Roggeveen, a Dutch admiral, must have seen when he became the first European to discover the island on Easter Sunday, 1722. Legend has it that his first thought was that the island was inhabited by giants. Only when he drew nearer to shore did he realize that men of normal size were working among the statues.

  The statues, however, hadn’t been completely restored. Originally, we learned, all the statues on the island had eyes. Carved from wood, they were painted with pupils, but had eventually decayed, leaving nothing but the sockets and giving the statues a skeletal appearance.

  “Why do you think they aren’t going to put eyes in again?” Micah asked me. “They stood them upright, so it’s not as if they believe the statues shouldn’t be disturbed.”

  “I have no idea. Maybe they think it would give tourists like us the willies.”

  Micah stared toward the statues. “I wouldn’t get the willies.”

  “Neither would I.”

  He paused. “I think they’d look better with eyes.”