Read Three Weeks With My Brother for Free Online Page B

me. He was pulling us to the center of the room as if to huddle, when my dad came bursting through our bedroom door. He was buck naked and wild-eyed. None of us had ever seen him naked before, and the sight of him standing in the doorway was in some ways even more shocking than what was happening around us. My mom was right behind him—unlike him, she was wearing a gown. Surging into the room, they enveloped us and forced us down to the floor, piling us together. Then, they both lay on top of us in an attempt to protect us from falling debris.
    The ground continued to rumble, the walls continued to sway, but there was something calming about being heaped together as a family. As scary as it was, I remember suddenly feeling that we were going to be okay—that somehow this obvious sign of parental love and concern was enough to protect us. It wasn’t until I saw the damage on television that I realized how bad it had been. Throughout the city, buildings had crumbled and freeways had buckled. The Richter scale had estimated the quake at a magnitude of 7.2, making it one of the largest quakes ever measured in the area.
    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: