The Walk (2 page)

The water before me is as blue as windshield wiper fluid. I feel the twilight breeze against my unshaven, sunburned face, and I close my eyes. I’ve come a long way to get here—nearly 3,500 miles. But, in ways, I’ve come much
further. Journeys cannot always be measured in physical distance.

I slide the backpack off my shoulders and sit down on the sand to untie my shoes and pull off my socks. My threadbare, once white, now-gray cotton socks stick to my feet as I peel them off. Then I step forward on the wet, shell-studded sand and wait for the receding water to return and cover my feet. I’ve had hundreds of hours to think about this moment, and I let it all roll over me: the wind, the water, the past and present, the world I left behind, the people and towns along the way. It’s hard to believe I’m finally here.

After a few minutes, I go back and sit cross-legged in the sand next to my pack and do what I always do at the pivotal moments of my life: I take out a pen, open my diary, and begin to write.

My writing habit began long ago—long before this diary, long before my walk. The Christmas I was eight years old, my mother gave me my first diary. It was a small, yellow vinyl book debossed with deep flourishes. My favorite feature was its brass key and lock. It made me feel important to have something in my life of such consequence that I needed to lock it up from the world. That Christmas night was the first time in my life that I wrote in a diary. I figured with the lock and all, only I would be reading it, so I wrote the entry to myself, a habit I would continue the rest of my life.

I’ve touched that writing so often that it’s barely legible. My mother’s entry was one of those events she spoke of, the kind that look like nothing except through time’s rearview mirror. My mother died from breast cancer forty-nine days later—on Valentine’s Day.

It was early in the morning, before I usually got up for school, that my father led me into the room to see her. On
the nightstand next to her bed there was a single yellow rose in a bud vase and my homemade Valentine’s card, with a drawing of a heart with an arrow through it. Her body was there, but she wasn’t. She would have smiled and called to me. She would have praised my drawing. I knew she wasn’t there.

In my father’s typical stoic manner, we never spoke about her death. We never talked about feelings nor the things that gave rise to them. That morning he made me breakfast, then we sat at the table, listening to the silence. The people from the mortuary came and went, and my father managed everything with the steadiness of a business transaction. I’m not saying he didn’t care. He just didn’t know how to show his feelings. That was my father. I never once kissed him. That’s just the way he was.

I started writing in my diary because my mother told me to. After her death, I continued because to stop would be to break a chain that connected me to her. Then, gradually, even that changed. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the reason I wrote was always changing. As I grew
older, I wrote as proof of my existence. I write, there-
fore
I am
.

I am.
In each of us, there is something that, for better or worse, wants the world to know we existed. This is my story—my witness of myself and the greatest journey of my life. It began when I least expected it. At a time when I thought nothing could possibly go wrong.

Before my world collapsed, I was a Seattle advertising executive, though, admittedly, that title rings a bit pretentious for someone who decorated his office with Aquaman figurines and Einstein posters. I was an
ad guy
. You could ask what got me into this line of business, but I really couldn’t tell you. It’s just something I always wanted to do. Maybe it was because I wanted to be Darrin on
Bewitched.
(I had a boyhood crush on Elizabeth Montgomery.) In 1998, I graduated from college in graphic design and landed a job before the ink on my diploma dried.

I thrived in the ad world and relished the life of a young rising star. A wunderkind. I won two ADDY’s my first year and four the next. Then, after three years of making my bosses rich, I followed the preferred path of ad agencies, law firms, and organized religion and split off to form my own company. I was only twenty-eight years old when they pressed the name of my agency in vinyl lettering on my office door.

MADGIC
Advertising and Graphic Design

The company grew from two employees to a dozen in just nine weeks, and I was making more money than a
Barbra Streisand ticket scalper. One of my clients proclaimed me a
poster boy for the American dream
. After two years, I had all the accoutrements of material success: my own business, a Lexus sports coupe, European vacations, and a beautiful, $1.9 million home in Bridle Trails—an exclusive, wooded neighborhood just north of Bellevue with an equestrian park and riding trails instead of sidewalks.

And, to complete this picture of success, I had a wife I adored—a brunette beauty named McKale. Potential clients would ask me if I could sell their products, and I would show them a picture of McKale and say, “I got her to marry me,” and they would nod in astonishment and give me their business.

McKale was the love of my life and, literally, the girl next door. I met her when I had just turned nine, about four months after my mother died and my father moved us from Colorado to Arcadia, California.

It was late summer, and McKale was sitting alone in her front yard at a card table, selling Kool-Aid from a glass pitcher. She wore a short, above-the-knee skirt with pink cowboy boots. I asked her if I could help, and she looked me over for a moment then said, “No.”

I ran upstairs to my bedroom and drew her a large, poster board–sized sign:

(I thought the K on
Kold
was a nice touch.) I went back down and presented my creation. She liked my sign
enough to let me sit next to her. I suppose that’s really why I got into advertising: to get the girl. We talked and drank Dixie cups of her black cherry elixir, which she still made me pay for. She was beautiful. She had perfect features: long, coffee-brown hair, freckles, and chocolate-syrup brown eyes that even an ad guy couldn’t over hype. We ended up spending a lot of time together that summer. Actually, every summer from then on.

Like me, McKale had no siblings. And she too had been through tough times. Her parents divorced about two months before we moved in. As she told the story, it wasn’t a usual divorce preceded by a lot of yelling and breaking of things. Her mother just up and left, leaving her alone with her father, Sam. McKale’s mind was always processing what had gone wrong though, at times, she seemed stuck, like when a computer locks up and you sit there watching the hourglass, waiting for something to happen. It’s a shame that humans don’t come with reset buttons.

Our broken pieces fit together. We shared our deepest secrets, insecurities, fears, and, at times, our hearts. When I was ten, I started calling her Mickey. She liked that. It was the same year we built a tree house in her backyard. We spent a lot of time in it. We played board games, like Mouse Trap and Sorry, and we even had sleepovers. On her eleventh birthday, I found her there sitting in the corner, crying hysterically. When she could speak, she said,
“How could she leave me? How could a mother just do that?” She wiped her eyes angrily.

I couldn’t answer her. I had wondered the same thing.

“You’re lucky your mother died,” she said.

I didn’t like that. “I’m lucky my mother died?”

Between sobs she said, “Your mother would have stayed if she could. My mother chose to leave me. She’s still out there somewhere. I wish she had died instead.”

I sat down next to her and put my arm around her. “I’ll never leave you.”

She laid her head on my shoulder. “I know.”

McKale was my guide to the female world. One time she wanted to kiss just to see what the big deal was. We kissed for about five minutes. I liked it. A lot. I’m not so sure she did because she never asked to do it again, so we didn’t.

That was the way it was with us. If McKale didn’t like something, we didn’t do it. I could never figure out why she always got to make the rules, but I always followed them. I eventually decided that’s just how things were.

She was very frank about growing up a girl. Sometimes I’d ask her things, and she’d say, “I don’t know. This is new to me too.”

When she was thirteen, I asked her why she didn’t have girlfriends.

She answered as if she’d given it a lot of thought. “I don’t like girls.”

“Why?”

“I don’t trust them.” Then she added, “I like horses.”

McKale went horseback riding just about every week.
Every month or so, she invited me to come, but I always told her I was busy. The truth was that I was terrified of horses. Once, when I was seven, Dad, Mom, and I took a summer vacation to a dude ranch in Wyoming called Juanita Hot Springs. On our second day, we went on a horseback ride. My horse was a paint named Cherokee. I had never been on a horse before, so I held onto the leather saddle horn with one hand and the reins with the other, hating every moment of it. During the ride, some of the cowboys decided to race, and my horse decided to join them. When he bolted, I dropped the reins and clung to the horn, screaming for help. Fortunately, one of the cowboys turned back to rescue me, though he couldn’t hide his contempt for my “city boy” ways. All he said was, “I been riding since I was three.” Not surprisingly, I never shared McKale’s love of horses.

Horses aside, we were almost always together, from elementary school through the awkward ages, including the middle-school years—the armpit of life. At the age of fifteen, McKale physically matured, and high school boys started buzzing around her house like yellow jackets at a barbecue. Of course, I noticed the change in her too, and it drove me crazy. You’re not supposed to have those kinds of feelings about your best friend.