Every Second Counts-Lance Armstrong(4)

We wound through northeasternFrance, racing parallel to theEnglish Channel, and Jan Ullrich
and I marked each other. Once again, he was the rider to beat, the most talented and credible
challenger in the peloton. He came into the race superbly fit, in much better form than in the
previous year, with jutting cheekbones and muscles bulging under his racing skins. “It's now or
never,” Ullrich declared.
We went to Verdun, the garrison town about 160 miles from Paris where 600,000 soldiers from
France and Germany and America lost their lives in World War I, and where I'd won my first
Tour stage in 1993. This time, we raced in a team time trial. The 41.5-mile course was buffeted
by wind and rain, and about halfway through, two of our Postal riders, Christian Vande Velde
and Roberto Heras, hit a newly painted road line. Vande Velde's bike skidded out from under
him, and their wheels touched. They went down in a clattering heap. Christian broke his arm
and had to abandon the Tour. Roberto would ride sorely for a week.

We rode on for days through a relentless downpour. Finally, we turned away from the coast and
toward the mountains, and after eight stages we reached the foothills of theAlps.
By the time we arrived, we were behind, badly. A previously unsung French rider named
François Simon and a talented young Russian named Andreï Kivilev had succeeded in a major
breakaway, and Simon was the leader in the yellow jersey–by a huge margin of 35 minutes. It
had happened because we were too conservative. When they got down the road, nobody
wanted to chase them down–we thought it was more important to conserve our strength as
much as possible early in the race, and so did everybody else. It was like a poker game to see
who was bluffing, only nobody was willing to put their cards on the table, so Simon opened his
huge gap unchallenged. I was well back in 24th place, and Ullrich was in 27th.
There would be some long, hard days of chasing ahead, particularly given the presence of
Kivilev. Simon was not a climber and we all knew he would recede in the mountains. But
Kivilev, a 27-year-old riding for Cofidis, was in fourth place, 33:14 ahead of me, and I suspected
he wouldn't go away. I'd been watching him for some time, and what I saw was a cyclist who
was rising fast to the top of the sport, who had both work ethic and ability. The truth was,I
wished he was on my team instead of someone else's. But what I couldn't know at the time was
that Andreï would never get the chance to fulfill his potential: two years later, he would be
killed in a high-speed crash. His performance in this Tour would become a haunting suggestion
of what might have been.
The breakaway blew up Johan's carefully plotted race plan for our Postal team. We had to sit
down and make a new strategy. Johan kept calm. We would simply have to ride harder, he said;
it would take us a few days longer to get the yellow jersey. “We'll have to attack at every
opportunity,” he said.
Once again the first mountain stage would be critical, psychologically and physically. The
mountains were always where the field sorted itself out, and where real fitness prevailed. In this
Tour, the first mountain stage would be the Alpe d'Huez, which was among the most mythically
cruel mountains inFrance.
It was a stage of 130 miles, with 6,000 feet of climbing over three big peaks ratedhors de
catégorie –beyond category in difficulty. But the first two climbs were mere precursors to the
Alpe d'Huez, a steep 12 miles up with 21 switchbacks.
I wanted the Alpe d'Huez. It's among the most famous and most historically revered climbs in
the Tour de France. It's not very long, but it's very steep, and all of the switchbacks have been
numbered, and on every number a former winner's name is written. It's a cycling lover's climb.
But as a team, we were not in good shape. It had been a hard first week, between the rain and a
constant crosswind on the roads. Christian was out. Roberto had tendinitis in his knee, which
was heavily bandaged. Also, Tyler Hamilton had crashed on a stage toAntwerp, and had
tendinitis all through his left arm and wrist. Those of us who weren't outright injured were sore
and tired. The wind meant you could never take a rest on the bike, and the cost was beginning
to show. The effects of the Tour were cumulative; every day took a little more away from your
legs.
With so many riders on our team injured or not feeling well, we had doubts about how we
would hold up over those three peaks. I was feeling okay–but I couldn't ride at the front all by
myself and still expect to have anything left for the Alpe d'Huez.
Meanwhile, Ullrich's Deutsche Telekom team looked strong and healthy to a man–and leading
Ullrich up the mountains would be my old friend Kevin Livingston.
That morning, Ullrich and his team did the hard work early, riding at the front of the peloton.
We hung back and paced ourselves. Sometimes you have to be flexible; to employ a different
style of riding than you're accustomed to.
I radioed Johan that I wanted to come back to the car. Johan sped up, and I drifted over to talk
to him. As I rode parallel to the car window, we discussed the situation. “Maybe it's not a bad
thing to show some weakness,” Johan said. “If they think you're in bad shape, they'll ride harder.
We'll relax until the bottom of the Alpe d'Huez. And then we go.”
Basically, Johan wanted me to bluff. By feigning fatigue, I might sucker Telecom into spending
too much energy trying to put me away. I'd have to be both an actor and a cyclist for much of
the day. But if it worked, it would give us a better chance of winning the stage, we decided.
As we rode up the first severe peak, the Col de Madeleine, I sagged over my handlebars and
grimaced. The first mountain stage is always a shock to the body, and the riders who aren't in
great shape can crack right away. Halfway up the Madeleine, three riders abandoned the
race–pulled over and quit. I acted as though I might soon join them. I lagged at the back of the
peloton, in the posture of a suffering dog, head hanging, as if I'd rather be anywhere but on a
bike. Other riders began to wonder if I was sick, and so did the television announcers covering
the race. Even my own teammates were a little anxious.
Each team had a follow car with a TV in it, from which the race directors watched the action
carefully and listened to the comments from other teams. Later, it would be hugely entertaining
to watch a replay of the race and listen to the announcers. My friend, commentator Paul
Sherwen, called the action for theU.S.telecast. “Armstrong looking in a spot of trouble,” he
said.
I slogged along at the back of the group. The back was where the hangers-on were, barely
keeping pace. A rider at the back was a rider in for a long day. “We haven't seen Lance
Armstrong riding anywhere near the front of this group,” Sherwen said. “He's having a rough
ride.”
Ullrich and his Telekom teammates took the bait–they surged to the front and started riding at a
hot tempo, excited. Clearly, they had gotten the message that I was hurting. They responded
exactly as Johan had predicted they would. They did all the work at the front, while we drafted
at the back.
For the next several hours, Telekom led the peloton. They pumped at their pedals up and down
the mountain passes, for miles and miles. Meantime, I rode along looking weak. I sucked water
from a bottle, I hung my head, and my chest heaved with the supreme effort of turning the
wheels.
My teammate José Luis “Chechu” Rubiera faded back to the car to pick up more water bottles,
as if I needed them. Johan handed several bottles through the window to Rubiera. “There's
obviously a problem here for Armstrong,” Sherwen reported. “. . . Armstrong is obviously
drinking an awful lot of liquid today.”
Johan asked Chechu how I was really doing. “Hey, he is flying,” Chechu said. “He's just easy.”
A member of the TV press came by on a motorbike and interviewed Johan through the window
of his car. Johan knew that whatever he said would be picked up by the other teams, listening to
the coverage.
“I don't know what's happening,” Johan said. “This is not normal for Lance, I've never seen him
like that, and the rest of the team is not so good, either. So for the moment we'll just try to
survive.”
At the front, Telekom drove on all the harder, surging. The road began to bite into everyone's
legs. The hillsides were verdant and grew steeper. The road narrowed, and the cliffs crept closer
to our shoulders, and around corners you could see glaciers in the distance.
The announcers continued to provide useful commentary on my weak form. “It's a long way
back to see Armstrong, he does not look good, and he should not be riding so far down the
group, he's obviously having a horrendous day.”
We went over the top of another big climb, the Col du Glandon, and headed down the most
beautiful descent in the entire Tour, past a dammed lake at the bottom of an undulating, green
valley, with jagged ice peaks looming.
“Don't you think we should move to the front?” Chechu asked.
“Just wait,” I said. I added, in Spanish, “Miramos, esperamos, decidimos,atacamos.”
“Let's see, let's wait, let's decide, and then attack.”
I slipped up to 12th place over the Glandon. We skirted a lake, and ran along the edge of a giant
granite cliff. The shifting temperatures began to get to us; it was hot in the valleys and cold on
thepeaks, and the disparity made your muscles seize up.
The stage leader up to that point was a Frenchman, Laurent Roux, and just behind him was
Ullrich. I was more than seven minutes behind.
“Just a little?”Chechu asked. “Shouldn't you move up just a little?”
“Chechu,” I said.“Miramos, esperamos, decidimos, atacamos.”
Johan drove the team car up, and I consulted with him in person. Johan stuck his head out the
window and I rode close to the car. Over the years, I've picked up some Flemish from Johan,
and as we put our heads together, we talked half in English and half in Flemish.
“Okay, this looks great,” he said. “Everything's perfect. When we get to the bottom of the Alpe
d'Huez, that's when you go. And when you go, govollebak .”
Vollebakmeans “full gas.” Floor it.
“Vollebak,” he said again. “You got it?”
“You're going to seevollebak like you've never seenvollebak ,” I said.
I rejoined Chechu. We began to approach the Alpe d'Huez. Ullrich was still riding at the front.
Chechu said, “Now?”
“Okay. Watch the show,” I said.
We surged forward. The huge crowds on the sides of the road seemed to part as we accelerated.
We swooped over a bridge, passed a rushing white waterfall. We came around a long, sweeping
left-hand turn–and hit the foot of the mountain. The road kicked up.
There was Ullrich just ahead.
I raced up to his wheel.
“Armstrong has maybe been playing an incredible poker game today by sitting at the back and
letting everybody else do the work,” Sherwen said.
I locked onto the back of Ullrich's bike, with Chechu next to me.
Until that moment, Ullrich had thought I was done. All he had heard all day was that I was
hurting and out of contention. And now here I was.
I passed him.
I purposefully looked over my shoulder. I stared into Ullrich's sunglasses for a long moment.
It was important to really look at the face of a rival: a guy's mouth, the way he's sweating, and
whether he's squinting behind his glasses. The look told you everything: whether he was tired or
fresh, how much he had left in him. Ullrich was clearly hurting. His earpiece dangled down, his
jersey hung open, and so did his mouth.
I stared over my shoulder for a moment longer, and later spectators would say it seemed I was
taunting Ullrich, as if I was saying, “I've been playing with you all day, and now the real race is
just starting. Catch me if you can.” But the truth is that I was checking to see what the shape of
the other riders was, too. I wasn't looking only at Ullrich–I was looking over his shoulder. What
I saw convinced me to make my move.
I faced front again. I stood up on the pedals, and took off.
I was gone. Within seconds I was out of his view. It was a shock tactic, totally spontaneous, and
it worked. With that one acceleration, I was away, and Ullrich couldn't respond.
Johan babbled excitedly in my ear. “He's dropped, he's dropped!”
I steadily lengthened the lead, ticking my legs over. As I worked uphill, here came the last man
between me and the finish line, Laurent Roux, who had started the climb with a seven-minute
lead. I passed him.
I kept my eyes trained on the road just ahead of me, sightless except for the next hairpin turn.
About halfway up the climb, I thought I passed Chris Carmichael standing on the mountainside,
grinning like an idiot. I noted that he was wearing a pair of electric-blue Oakley shoes.
I crossed the finish line. I bared my teeth and shook my fists so hard I nearly threw myself off the
bike. I had been riding for six hours and 23 minutes.
I braked and dropped off the bike, exhausted. We'd won one of the most famous of Tour stages,
on a day when no one expected me to, and with tactics rather than aggression. It was as oddly
satisfying as any stage victory could be. We'd never be able to use the same trick again–but it
had succeeded this once.
Later,Carmichaelcame to visit me at the team hotel. I said, “You were wearing those ugly-ass
shoes, weren't you? I saw those shoes.Carmichael, how can you wear those things?”
Iwanted thatyellow jersey. I wanted to pull it on and show it to my son, so he could say, “Yo-yo,
Daddy.” But I was still riding from behind; despite the Alpe d'Huez performance, I continued to
trail the overall leader, Simon.
Luke and Kik arrived the next day, in time to see me win a romantic time-trial stage in the
mountains, from the ski town ofGrenobleto the winter resort of Chamrousse. It moved me into
third place overall, still chasing Simon. But something far more significant happened that day.
Kik met me at the finish line, and we went to our hotel, so we could have a few minutes to
ourselves in my room before dinner. She pulled out an envelope. In it was the result of the
ultrasound test that would tell us whether the babies she was carrying were boys or girls.
When we had decided to try in-vitro a second time that fall, we knew it meant that Kik would
have to go through part of the process alone, because of my training schedule. Before, we had
carefully planned our attempts to get pregnant in the off-season so that I could be with her for
her appointments, but this time we didn't have that choice; if we wanted another baby, Kik
would have to do it while I was racing. She had found out we were having twins without me.
We didn't want her to find anything else out by herself, or have any more long-distance phone
conversations.
Instead, she asked the doctor to write the answer down on a piece of paper and seal it in an
envelope. Kik carried the envelope home and sat it on a desk for several days, and then packed it
in her backpack.
It was a beautiful alpine evening as Kik and I lounged in my hotel room, which looked out on
the village. From the window we could see her parents down below, having a drink and relaxing
at a sidewalk café table, along with Bill Stapleton and Bart Knaggs, while Luke ran around on a
grassy lawn.
Kik took the envelope out of her backpack, and announced that she was so nervous she had
sweaty palms.
“Give me that,” I said.
I snatched it out of her hand, while Kik giggled. I tore it open, stared at the sheet of paper, and
threw back my head and shouted with laughter.
“Let me see, let me see,” Kik said.
I teased her for a moment, holding the paper above my head, and then I gave it to her. Kik
glanced down and saw the number 2, and the letter “g.” For an instant she misread it, she
thought it said, “garçons,” French for “boys,” but then she looked again and it said, “Two girls,
congratulations.” Kik squealed in delight.
For some reason it was the last thing we expected. I'd loved the idea of twins from the get-go; I
was fascinated by the possibility, the uniqueness and yet sameness of them. We talked about
two boys, or a boy and a girl, but the notion of twin girls simply never occurred to us. Now that
they were a reality, we were ecstatic. Bart Knaggs and his wife, Barbara, had twin girls. They
were beaming comical little blond things, and Bart had taught them each to say, “I'm a genius!”
Now that we'd have our own set, it seemed to me a beautiful completion of our family
chemistry, to have a pair of female counterparts to Luke.
I hugged Kik and stuck my head into the hallway and yelled the news to my teammates. Then I
went over to the window and threw it open, and leaned out over that beautiful span of grass,
and I shouted the news out the window.
“Hey, Ethel!”I yelled down to Kik's mother.
“Yeah!” she answered, looking up.
“It's two girls!” I yelled.
The whole terrace erupted. Everyone below screamed and cheered. Ethel wept, and then Kik
wept and we just stood there waving the piece of paper out the window. A little later, we came
down and had dinner with everybody, and toasted our daughters.
The family visit was only a brief respite from racing. Over the next couple of days, we rode deep
into thePyrenees. It was a different kind of scenery; theAlpswere covered with industrial towns
or ski resorts with condo developments big as skyscrapers, but thePyreneeswere wilder, smaller
yet somehow more dramatic, with long green valleys and snow-capped peaks. As we rode, the
mountains kept taking their toll. Another rider, Christophe Moreau ofFrance, threw his bike
down in disgust and quit the race with lung problems.
Ullrich and I continued to shadow each other, sometimes riding side by side. He crunched his
large gears while I bobbed up and down on the pedals in smaller gears. The difference in our
styles was visible: he pedaled 75 times a minute, while I pedaled 90. He was a big, rolling,
pantherish rider, while I looked, someone said, like a cat climbing a tree.
Simon was still 13 minutes ahead of both of us, in first place. But in thePyreneeswe faced three
huge mountain stages, with a total of 11 major peaks to climb. We knew the day would come
when Simon would break, and suspected it would come on a grueling climbing stage called Pla
d'Adet, a long, 120-mile day that would take us over six peaks.
The stage took us past the place where my old friend Fabio Casartelli had died during a Tour
descent in 1995. A beautiful marble monument marked the place, and during the spring in
training I'd pulled over and stood in the mist. The other Postal riders went on, but I stayed for a
few long minutes. I was taken aback by how much emotion I still felt each time I rode past, and
I remembered how I'd sobbed in my hotel room.
But during the race itself I didn't have time to contemplate. There was too much else to pay
attention to, between Ullrich, Simon, the pursuit of the yellow jersey, and the constant climbing
and descending.
Shortly before we reached the final climb, something frightening happened that reminded us all
again of just how perilous and tragic the sport could be. I was riding just behind Ullrich on a
difficult descent at about 50 miles per hour. There weren't many turns, but it was fast, and there
was gravel that made your wheels slide around.
Ullrich glanced back over his shoulder for his teammates, and fussed with his microphone. He
reached for his mike with one hand, and began talking into it. He pulled the mike closer and
ducked his head; it was hard to communicate in the wind from the speeding descent.
Ahead, a turn came up.
He didn't see it.
I thought,Uh-oh. I was already leaning on my own brakes.He'd better brake, I thought.Why
doesn't he brake?
Ullrich's head came up, but not in time. He sailed straight over the shoulder of the road and
down a precipice. One second he was there and the next he had vanished.
It looked horrific–like he had gone headfirst over a cliff.
He's finished, I thought. I immediately slowed down and radioed Johan to see if Ullrich was all
right.
As I slowed down, other riders did, too. Kevin Livingston pulled over, and stopped. “We're
waiting,” I told the other riders. “We're all going to wait for him.”
After a moment, Johan radioed me to say that he could see Ullrich climbing up the cliffside, and
he seemed fine. Luckily, he had fallen onto a grassy bank of a steep gully, and was struggling to
get his bike upright and rejoin the race.
I continued to ride slowly, waiting for Ullrich to catch up. This was what racing custom
dictated. It's not something American audiences necessarily understand, but it's an intrinsic part
of the sport and any other top rider would have done the same for a respected opponent.
Ullrich deserved the respect of the entire peloton. He had never broken; he fell back, but he
always fought to the head of the pack again, and I could never completely ride away from him.
No matter what, he was always there, next to my shoulder, unwilling to concede the race. You
should always honor your fiercest opponent: the better your opponent, the better you have to be.
He caught up to me. I said, “You okay?” He nodded. “I'm fine,” he said. We accelerated up the
road. We resumed race pace, and stayed shoulder to shoulder, dead-even until the last 3.7 miles.
The final climb, to Pla d'Adet, was one that I knew well: I'd rehearsed it three different times in
the spring, studying the steep parts. It was a slope where you could put some time between
yourself and the other riders, and now I was ready to. Much as I admired Ullrich and was glad
he was all right, I wanted to get rid of him now. I wanted that yellow jersey, and a stage win
would give it to me. I thought,Yo-yo Daddy.
When we hit the final climb, I jumped out of my seat and charged. Ullrich made no real attempt
to follow. Within seconds it seemed like I was 100 yards ahead of him. Behind me, he put his
head down and kept on.
I rode on alone, and within a half-mile I passed the last cyclist ahead of me, Laurent Jalabert
ofFrance. Later Jalabert said, “He made it look so easy that it was beautiful.”
But Jalabert was wrong, it wasn't easy. It hurt, deep inside where muscle met bone. I simply
pretended it didn't hurt, controlling my demeanor. I understood how demoralizing it was to
spend a day like that on a bike and get passed by a rider who doesn't seem to suffer. It's a mental
and physical defeatedness that no one else knows except the cyclists themselves.
Of course it hurt. If you looked closely you could see that it did, in my bloodshot eyes. The truth
is that there's no such thing as riding effortlessly in the Tour. It simply didn't hurt as much as it
could have, because all the training I had done through the year paid dividends. I was well
prepared, I knew which parts of the mountain were the worst, and I'd learned to use even,
consistent efforts, and avoid crises. But it still hurt.
I crossed the finish line alone, and toppled off the bike, spent, the new leader of the Tour de
France. We had done what Johan asked, and attacked at every opportunity–and the result was
that we had won three of the last four stages, and made up 35 minutes and 24 places in the
standings. In two days alone, we'd made up 22 minutes. It set a record for the biggest deficit
ever overcome.
Johan pulled up in the team car, exultant. That day, he had a passenger, Phil Knight, the
co-founder of Nike. Knight had been to virtually every great event in the world, and witnessed
countless thrilling moments, but he had never seen a Tour de France stage before, and now as
he climbed from the car, he looked stunned by it all: the rainbow colors of the peloton
jet-streaming by, the wrecks and recoveries, the precipitous climbs under scorching sun. I looked
at his face and knew we'd created another cycling enthusiast. “That is the single greatest day in
sport that I have ever seen,” Knight raved.
At last I pulled the yellow jersey over my shoulders. It was a relief to wear that garment I'd been
chasing so hard.
Ullrich and I continued our epic battle through the rest of thePyrenees, sweat pouring off our
chins in the high heat of the mountains. On the last of the mountain stages, after we had
mounted the massive 6,874-foot Col du Tourmalet, Ullrich slipped ahead of me across the finish
line, to win the stage. As he did so, he dropped a hand and trailed it behind him, reaching out for
mine. I grasped it.
I didn't know exactly what he meant by it, but I guessed it had something to do with
companionship. We had ridden hard together. He may have meant it as a kind of
congratulations, too, because afterward, he conceded the race. I had a five-minute lead, which
now seemed safe–all I had to do was stay upright until we reachedParis.
“I'm finished,” Jan said. “I had no chance this year against Lance. I'm not sure I did anything
wrong. I left the other guys behind me.”
The victory was assured, but there was one last thing to do before I stepped onto the winner's
podium: address the doping suspicions. The topic had dogged me for months, and it had never
waned throughout the race. A headline inL'Equipe said,MUST WE BELIEVE IN ARMSTRONG?The
article said, “There are too many rumors, too many suspicions. He inspires both admiration and
rejection.” Along the course, some French spectators had booed me.
It was traditional for the wearer of the yellow jersey to hold a press conference before arriving
inParis, and I was looking forward to it. I wanted to face the skeptics and the accusers and look
them in the eye. I wanted to answer the charges, and I wanted to declare my innocence.
About 300 reporters showed up, and for over an hour, I fielded every inquiry they could fire at
me.
“I've lived by the rules,” I said. I pointed out that I'd been tested no fewer than 30 times in the
pastTours, and never once had I failed. “The proof is there,” I said to one reporter. “You just
don't want to believe that.”
I added that I would never take a substance like EPO or human growth hormone and jeopardize
my health after what I'd been through.
“I give everything I've got,” I said. My performances were the result of hard work; of the fact
that I had trained and been on the bike when no one else was riding, in the off-season and in all
weather. I'd ridden theAlpsin the snow. “And I didn't see any other riders there,” I said.
The innocent, I said, could never prove their innocence. How could you prove a negative?
Another reporter rose and questioned me about an Italian doctor named Michele Ferrari, who
had come under investigation for doping. He had also made an unfortunate and ill-considered
remark back in 1994, when he said that EPO was “no more harmful than orange juice.” His files
had been seized, and in them was a reference to me. Now my association with him was, to some
people, further evidence that I was a doper.
I knew Michele Ferrari well; he was a friend and I went to him for occasional advice on training,
I said. He wasn't one of my major advisors, but he was one of the best minds in cycling, and
sometimes I consulted him. He had instructed me in altitude training and advised me about my
diet. (The fact was that Ferrari, no matter what else you thought of him, was an expert analyst.
He understood the combination of technique and physiology as few people did, and he could
discuss everything from chainrings to wattages with authority. He had a precision of knowledge
that I appreciated.)
I refused to turn on Michele, or to apologize for knowing him, and as far as I could tell, there
was no evidence against him. The investigation was based on the fact that, a few years earlier,
he had treated a cyclist named Filippo Simeoni, who was later found to have doped. “He's
innocent until a trial proves otherwise,” I said.
The reporter asked me how I could square an anti-drug stance with maintaining a relationship
with Ferrari. “It's my choice,” I said. “I believe he's an honest man, a fair man, and an innocent
man. Let there be a trial. With what I've seen with my own two eyes and my experience, how
can I prosecute a man whom I've never seen do anything guilty?”
I said that I knew the legitimacy of the entire sport of cycling was in question, and that I'd
become the lightning rod for it. “Cycling is under the microscope and I have to answer for that,
and I'm fine with it,” I said. But I found it sad that the Tour had become an event so permeated
by suspicion.
“It's a race; it shouldn't become a trial,” I said.
Finally, I rose. I said all I had left to say: “I leave here an honest man, a happy man, and
hopefully a winner.” And I left the room.
“I needed that,” I said to Bill on the way out.
There were no more challenges the rest of the way toParis, on or off the bike. We simply rode
and enjoyed the view, of those fields and fields and fields of sunflowers.
By the time we crossed the finish line on the Champs-Elysées, we'd ridden 2,150 miles–in 86
hours, 17 minutes, and 28 seconds, to be precise. I took deep satisfaction in the performance,
because it had been a race won with tactics as well as strength, and Postal had become a more
complete and mature team.
Ullrich's team leader, Rudy Pevenage, paid us a funny compliment. “We keep waiting for
Armstrong to have a bad day,” he said. “But the only bad day he has is the morning-after
hangover inParis.”
There was somethingstraightforward about the formula of training and racing: I worked hard
and I won. A race was a simple undertaking, with a start and a finish line, and the outcome
determined by skill. You either won or lost, and the concreteness of that answer was
comforting. What else could you say that about?
Nothing–especially not after September 11.
I flew back to the States and stopped inNew Yorkfor a couple of days. I disappeared for an
afternoon, and no one could find me. Finally, I came back to the hotel.
I'd been riding my bike inCentral Park.
I lovedNew York; it was a grand phosphorescent city, and it had been good to me personally.
By now I knew it pretty well because I had to pass through all the time on my way toEurope.
Walking or biking around town was like negotiating an obstacle course, and it gave me a sense
of accomplishment. Once you learned to loveNew York, you loved it more, and more
complicatedly, than other places.
It's said that September 11 happened to everyone, and it did. But it happened to New Yorkers,
first, and foremost, and worst.
That morning, I was at home in Austin, just another father watchingSesame Streetwith my small
son. The phone rang, and I picked it up and Bill Stapleton said, “You better turn on the news.” I
flipped over to a cable news channel, and I couldn't believe my eyes. I sat there, helpless, staring
at the horrible displacement of the skyline.
Shortly after September 11, the Red Cross called, wondering if I would come toNew Yorkand
help boost the morale of the firefighters and rescue workers, as a way to thank them. I accepted
immediately–I wasn't sure a goodwill visit from me meant much, but I hated just sitting and
watching at home inTexas, and it would give me a chance to do something. I said I would like
to go unannounced, with one rule: no press.
I asked Bart Knaggs to come with me, and together we flew toNew Yorkon the evening of
September 20. All the major airports were still closed, so we landed at a private airport inWhite
Plains. I remember that as we flew over the city, AC/DC's “Back in Black” was playing on the
plane's sound system, and it seemed appropriately dark. A friend from Nike, Dave Mingey, met
us when we landed, along with representatives from the Red Cross; they had worked together
to set up my tour of the city.
We went straight to a pier on theHudson Riverthat had been transformed into a makeshift
command center. It resembled the active floor of a business convention, with hundreds of
people, from the fire department to the Coast Guard to the steelworkers' union to the FBI,
running around in a state of organized confusion as they directed the rescue and recovery efforts.
I met with some people from the Red Cross, and I stared at a wall of pictures. Everywhere,
pictures of the missing were posted: friends, family members, husbands, sons, cousins.Please
Call . I'd never seen anything like it. One flyer showed a picture of four kids, with a scratched
crayon plea–Daddy, please come home, we miss you. I'd never expected to see such a thing, and
I never want to again.
But what struck me most was the wishfulness of it. Even in the midst of that destruction,
people were in a kind of determined denial, able to hope that a husband, or a wife, or a daughter
would come walking through the door. In the face of the awful question–If they're not at home
and they're not in the hospital, then where are they?–people chose to deny the worst and hope
for the best.
The next morning was a Saturday, and it began early with a Red Cross rep taking us on a tour of
firehouses. We started on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and as I walked up to the first
firehouse, I felt like a fool. I was an unannounced visitor, and maybe the firefighters didn't need
one; maybe they had enough visitors. In front of the station there was a constant stream of
well-wishers bringing food and gifts, leaving candles and murals behind. I worried that when I
walked up, they'd say, “What the hell are you doing here? Get out of here.”
I stepped inside the firehouse of Bowery Station 33, where they had lost 11 men from their unit.
I stood there for a moment, not certain what to do. But then a firefighter recognized me. He
said, “Fucking Lance Armstrong,” like a true New Yorker, and then he hugged me, and he
started to cry. Some more firefighters gathered around and we shook hands. “Nobody told us
you were coming,” they said.
One of them turned around and yelled to a guy who was sitting in the kitchen. He came out, and
shook my hand, and I could tell he was heavily affected, maybe by the loss of his friends, or by
what he had seen, or both. We talked for a bit, about what had happened, and what they had
seen. They told me stories of the stench and the heat and the body parts everywhere.
The most troubled-seeming firefighter was a real cycling nut. One of his buddies said, “You
guys should race.” It turned out every station house kept a couple of bikes, old junkers, for
errands. The firefighters spent long hours together in the firehouse kitchen, cooking and eating
together, and whenever they needed more groceries, somebody jumped on the bike and went
down to the store, threw all the stuff in the front basket and then pedaled back.
Somebody handed me a bike with big fat tires. I laughed and got on. The cycling nut jumped on
his bike and started riding up and down the street, wanting to race, saying, “Come on,come on.”
One of his buddies said, “Look, he's having a really hard time. We're all having a hard time, but
that guy is having a really hard one.”
My friend the firefighter took off down the block, pedaling hard. He seemed so serious. It must
have been a welcome escape, to get out there and sprint around on that bike. So I rode after
him.
We were in the middle of a downtown street inNew York City, surrounded by people and cars,
but he was possessed. He mashed the pedals, while I chased him. We rounded a corner and
headed back to the firehouse, and he beat me handily. All of the other firefighters whooped and
clapped him on the back, and he broke into a huge grin.
I hung around for another thirty minutes or so, and then shook hands and went to the next
firehouse.
We visited ten firehouses in all. Every one was the same, and I told Bart, “I could do this all
day.” They had big kitchens with long tables where firefighters and devastated family members
sat around, mess-hall style. The chalk duty boards hadn't been changed: the date still read 9/11,
and the names of the men were still posted. I don't know if they've changed them even yet.
Outside, the firehouses were decorated with memorial candles, posters, andflowers, and crowds
stood around thanking the firefighters, or just gazing, quiet and reverential, as if they were in a
museum.
Some people think heroism is a reflex, an anti-death knee jerk. Some people think heroism is a
desire to matter, to be of use. Then there is the quieter heroism of “going to work every day and
making a living for one's family,” asNew Yorkmayor Rudolph Giuliani said of the people who
died in those buildings. By the end of that trip I decided it was some combination of the three.
But whatever it was, these guys had it.
Later that afternoon I was invited to meet with Giuliani. I was ushered into a command post,
and he stood up and gave me a hug. Lying face-down on his table was a biography of Abraham
Lincoln. Giuliani was exhausted, and deeply affected, but he was totally in control, obviously
the perfect man for the job at that time. The mayor turned to another gentleman in the room,
and introduced me: Bill Clinton. They invited me to ride with them in a helicopter tour of
Ground Zero.
It looked like the entire lower part ofManhattanhad turned into a junkyard. There was shredded
metal scattered everywhere; shards of material had even been flung onto the tops of other
buildings. There was no camera that could show the 360-degree perspective, the utter scope of
the damage. The metal and broken glass glinted in the sunlight, and in the heart of Ground Zero
itself, you could see the inferno, the forklike heap of wreckage smoldering, surreal. Some of the
adjacent buildings had huge gouges taken out of them, as if a giant had dragged his finger
through them. In one building, what must have been a 40-foot steel girder hung out of a
window, as if it had been thrown like a spear.
Afterward, I went to a rest area where rescue workers–who had come from all over the country,
as far away as Texas, California, and Ohio–were sleeping in rotations in a large warehouse, on
cots. I sat and chatted with them, listening to their experiences. They had driven from across the
country to help with the terrible job, and they were exhausted and shattered, and yet working
around the clock. Mainly, they were angry. TheNew York Post had run a fold-out picture of
Osama bin Laden with the captionWANTED DEAD OR ALIVE,and that thing was posted all
throughout the building. That's when I realized we were in a war.
The salvage effort was an undertaking of backbreaking labor, and it changed my ideas about
what real work was, because everything had been blown to smithereens, and the only people
who knew what to do about it were the ones who could wield a jackhammer or drive a bobcat;
the welders and grapplers and carpenters, doing a kind of work that many people aren't familiar
with anymore. It was riskywork, too, because each time they hoisted a piece of smoldering
metal, something else fell, or burned. Broken glass showered on their heads, and the heaps of
smoking junk literally burned the soles of their boots away, but they kept digging, first to find
anyone alive, and then just to find anyone at all.
The posters fluttered from kiosks and restaurant windows and chain-link fences and concrete
walls. Brothers sisters wives husbandscousins friends. New Yorkers wept in taxis, on trains, and
sometimes they just stood still in the middle of the street and cried. Every day the rescue and
recovery workers would pry up another giant piece of steel, exposing the core offire, and
another plume of smoke would shoot into the air. And everybody would feel the wreckage
within their own hearts, a seemingly endless interior hemorrhage.
The last thing I did was go toUnion Square, where I watched a candlelight vigil, and listened to
some peace demonstrators. I respected their position, but I'd seen too much wreckage. I wanted
to say, “My friend, fuck peace.” It was difficult to feel charitable, difficult to summon anything
but a deep, unpitying, unforgiving vengefulness, all of the most un-Biblical of sentiments. All
you had to do wasgo to a wall or a fence, and look at those pictures of the missing, or go down
to Ground Zero and smell that place. I was hard-pressed to believe that God was in the air.
Death was in the air–that was death and burning that we smelled.
But good was there too, actual good, in the daily selfless acts of digging performed by
volunteers. The concrete was pulverized, the steel was twisted, and in the midst of that a rescue
worker would find a child's toy, preserved. I didn't know what to make of that kind of
chance–or of the fact that the men who flew into those buildings did so while praying.
One of themore interesting features of death is its deniability. It's as if the human temperament
has a built-in capacity to ignore its own potential for nonexistence. How we can deny something
so blazingly apparent, I don't know. But we do, maybe because we need to in order to live
productively from day to day. Otherwise we'd be so stunned by the brevity of each second that
we'd never go to work and we'd all move toTahiti.
I had been stripped of my capacity for denial, and now so were New Yorkers. Talking to them
was like talking to newly diagnosed cancer patients. We shared the same sensations: of a dread
diagnosis and a hard new eye on reality. I was reminded again that survivorship was an
evolution: you had to learn to survive all kinds of things, not just your own illness.
The strangeness of that period was complicated by the fact that my five-year cancer anniversary
was coming up, and meanwhile the twins were due at any moment. Previously, I'd thought of
the five-year anniversary as a big damn day. That was the day my doctors would say, “Okay,
guy. See you later.” Now it felt swamped by the enormity of what had happened inNew York,
and by the impending arrival of two new infants. Again, it came down to perspective: taxes,
scandal, gossip, headache, traffic jams. It was all about separating the large from the small.
When my five-year checkup finally came, it was smaller than I'dimagined, an anticlimax. Kik
stayed home, because by now she was in the seventh month of her pregnancy. Instead I flew
toOregonwith Bill Stapleton, so we could combine the trip with a business meeting at the Nike
headquarters. So one morning in the fall of 2001, I went to see Dr. Nichols at
theOregonHealthSciencesUniversity, inPortland, for my last cancer checkup.
I slouched in my seat on American Airlines, brooding and sick, and not getting better. The
numbers weren't falling. By now the flight crew knew me. I was the bald guy, with no eyebrows
or eyelashes and the skin that looked parched.The guy who looked like death–and who felt like it.
A flight attendant came down the aisle.
“How's it going?” he asked.
“You know what?” I said. “It's not going very well. It's not going well at all.”
Even though I was on my way to my last checkup, it wasn't the end of cancer for me. I was
surer than ever that cancer would always be with me, in terms ofother people's cancer. It was
there in the form of friends who were sick, friends who died: in the loss of my friend Stacy
Pounds, and of my first great friend and benefactor in Austin, J. T. Neal, and a little boy named
Billy Rutledge, and a little girl I adored, Kelly Davidson.
Kelly had been diagnosed with neuroblastoma when she was in only the third grade. We'd met
and bonded when we were both in remission, bald and fearful. We both needed physical action,
and we both had smart mouths. I had gotten better, but she hadn't. The disease became
increasingly hard to manage, but she kept trying.
I gave her a bike, and some Rollerblades, and we would go racing around together. She was
indefatigable on them. She was the only person who could tell me what to do. “Are you coming
over to ride bikes?” I asked her one day. “Yeah, and after that we're going fishing,” she said.
But she got sicker. She underwent kidney surgery and had a tumor removed from her abdomen.
“You fight,” I told her. “It hasn't beaten you, and it can't beat you. I don't let anything kick me
without kicking back.”
The kid who had threatened to zip away from her doctors and nurses on Rollerblades grew
weak and needed a wheelchair. Soon she lost her hearing. First it was a matter of weeks, and
then days. She entered a hospice, and failed rapidly.
I had called her fromEuropeshortly before the 2000 Tour. “Is there anything I can do for you?” I
asked.
“Yeah, wear yellow for me,” she had said.
Kelly died in August of 2000. Kik and I had tried to sort through the pending grief, tried to say
the right things and be there the best we could, let her know how much we appreciated her. But
when we lost her, we felt helpless and empty.
We were inEuropeand couldn't get home, but my mother went to Kelly's funeral in our place,
and read a letter from us. For the time being, our grief got cloistered, down the dark steps,
padlocked, several layers below.
When we got back toTexas, we saw Kelly's family, but I couldn't think of the right things to
say. I marveled at their strength. Kelly's mother, Jamie, got a job in medical research, and they
launched a pediatric cancer foundation named for their daughter. One day Kik went with Jamie
to see Kelly's gravesite. I couldn't make myself go. Kik described it: a peaceful spot under a
lovely shade tree where people had placed flowers and little trinkets there for her. Luke and Kik
put some flowers there for her, too–yellow, so she would know they were from us.
Not through my own choice, I was thrown into this cancer kinship, and for whatever reason, I
survived, while there were legions of people who did not. Tests on a bicycle were flimsy
compared with this sort of test, when something happened to somebody that you loved, and it
called on you to be a stronger person than you were capable of being. All you could do was try
to fortify yourself. But grief was inevitable, looming out there for all of us, sometime.
On the day of my final checkup, I rose early in my hotel room and drank the barium that would
show up on theX rays and scans. Then I headed over to the medical center for the tests. Bill and
my good friend from Nike, Scott MacEachern, went with me. They drank cups of coffee and
chatted, while I put on a hospital robe and had a chest X ray and then an abdominal-pelvic CT
scan. Dr. Nichols watched the readings to make sure nothing ominous was there, while Scott
and Bill hung out with their coffees. Next, I gave blood so they could check for cancer markers.
The testing wasn't arduous, it was just a nuisance, and it only lasted an hour and a half or so. It
was a box I was checking off, the last item on the long list. But it was evocative of everything
I'd been through five years earlier: the sleeping 16 to 20 hours a day, and all the pills, and the
logbook to keep track of what I was taking and when. All of the things I'd done to try to stay in
front of the disease and educate myself, determined not to be helpless about my health. And it
was evocative of what my ill friends went through every day.
Finally, Dr. Nichols did a last brief physical examination of me, going about his usual business in
a clinical way. And then he was finished, and we sat down together.
“Your chances of ever having trouble with this again are in essence zero,” he said. “You need to
put this disease out of your mind, in terms of your own cancer.”
I shook hands with Craig, and that was it, that was the big moment. I high-fived my friends and
left that office for the last time. I called Kik and said, “All done.” She started screaming and
carrying on, and I just grinned.
When I got back toAustin, we had a party to celebrate the occasion. We had about 100 friends
and family out to our future home site in the hills aboveAustin, the property we named Milagro,
Spanish for “miracle.” It was a cedar-studded expanse on a hillside, and I'd cleared a lot of the
brush myself and had a small cabin built. I put in a huge rolling expanse of lawn for the kids,
designed expressly for rolling down soft green hills, and I added a firepit, and dug out a dirt
road.
For the party we put up strands of colored lights and built an outdoor stage for my friend Lyle
Lovett, whoperformed, and after a while another of our good friends, Shawn (Sunny) Colvin,
hopped up and joined him. Our friends spread blankets on the lawn and lounged, or fed
themselves from a Mexican food buffet and drank margaritas. At the end of the evening I stood
up, with Kik beside me, and thanked everybody for coming and remarked on how appropriate it
was that we had named the property Milagro, because that's what it seemed to me, miraculous.
Once, I'd wondered if I would live. Now it almost felt like cheating, to have been given my
health and a whole life back, to have a healthy son like Luke, and twin girls on the way, and to
be able to look at things with different eyes.
But the five-year mark wasn't the end of anything, not really. My story was encouraging for
people who were beating cancer, but what about the people who weren't doing as well, who
were flagging, and who lacked the energy to fight anymore? Who were losing ground, or not
responding, or struggling to face something, whether the loss of a loved one inNew York, or the
next round of chemo?
I couldn't help them with the primary problem of surviving, and I couldn't change the basic
biology of cancer. I couldn't help anybody. In the end, all I could do was try to encourage their
attitude and will, try to talk about what cancercouldn't do.
It couldn't take away your spirituality, or your intelligence. It couldn't take away your love.
CHAPTER 5
Headwinds
When your value is constantly measured, and you're compensated for it, as an athlete is, you can
get confused and start equating winning with a good and happy life.
The troubleis, nobody who does what I do for a living is happy-go-lucky. I don't bomb down a
hill at 70 miles an hour with a smile on my face. If you want to win something, you've got to
have single-mindedness, and it's all too easy to wind up lonesome while you're at it.
A race is an exercise in leaving others behind, and sometimes that can include the ones you love.
It's a delicate problem, one I've yet to solve. For instance, one day I took my son bike-riding
with me. I put him in a little trailer and hitched it to my bike, and we went pedaling off.
Luke said, out of nowhere, “No moreairplane , Daddy.”
“What?” I said, turning around.
“Daddy, no moreairplane . Stay home with me now.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
Spending life on the seat of a bike is a solitary exercise, and things go by in constant accelerated
motion. Speed is a paradoxical equation: a thousand small, dully repetitive motions go into the
act of going really, really fast, and you can get so fixed on the result, on the measurements and
numbers and cadences, that you miss other things. Your strength as an athlete can be a
weakness: the qualities that make someone fast don't always make them perceptive. Life
becomes a blur.
Like every other season of my adult life, I entered the 2001–2002 cycling season with a sense of
urgency, put there by cancer. When I wasn't trying to pedal faster on the bike, I was still trying
to outrun the disease, and I focused on two sets of numbers, my pedaling cadence, and my blood
markers, to tell me how I was doing. But maybe I missed some things, too.
That September, I had an irrational sense that the cancer was back. The battle with cancer is
started and ended, and won and lost, on a cellular level, and I worried that the disease could lie
dormant, hide out, and come back in ten years, or 20 years, just when I had strolled off into the
sunset. I didn't ever want to disrespect the illness, or its track record. You could never turn your
back on it.
I wasn't feeling well, and it made me uneasy. I was tired, and it wasn't from drinking unseemly
amounts of beer, either, though that may have had something to do with it. I was stressed and
physically exhausted from the long year, but I felt more than the usual fatigue. I was sleeping for
12 and 14 hours every night, long bouts of black, unconscious sleep.Monstrous sleep. It
reminded me exactly of how I'd felt when I was sick.
The more I thought about it, the more I thought about it. I thought about it every hour.
Finally, I called my friend and general practitioner, Dr. Ace Alsup.
“Ace,” I said, “I gotta come in for some tests.”
“Why?”
“I just don't feel good. I'm nervous, and I don't want to be nervous.”
“What do you want to do about it?” Ace asked.
“I want you to take my blood, and test it,” I said. “I want blood tests, and I want them today.
Please, call me the second you get the results, because I'm nervous as hell.”
He said, “Okay. Come on down.”
That afternoon, I slipped out of the house. I pocketed my keys and walked out the door without
telling Kik. By now she was near the end of the pregnancy, and while she carried the twins with
her usual grace, it couldn't be easy on her. I didn't want to worry her needlessly, didn't want to
say to her, “Oh, I'm driving down to Ace's office for some blood work.” I kept my worry to
myself. Nothing else would reassure me–I just needed those numbers. So I made up some
excuse about what I was doing that afternoon, and I snuck out.
I drove down to Ace's office, and he drew blood, and then I drove back home, and I sat by the
phone. He promised he would call me as soon as he got the results. All I cared about was my
HCG level, the critical blood marker for testicular cancer. HCG is a hormone that's perfectly
common in pregnant women, but it shouldn't be present in more than trace amounts in a young
man. If my HCG level was more than two, it would mean only one thing: the cancer was back.
When it came to cancer, numbers were everything. All I wanted to know from Ace Alsup was
that it was less than two.
When I was sick, my HCG skyrocketed. One morning, College called and asked how I was
doing. I said, “The numbers went up.” My HCG level was over 109,000. The cancer was
spreading and now it was in my brain. My mother had spent the morning crying, but I was
strangely relieved. College took me to lunch, to get me out of the house.
“I don't know why she keeps crying,” I said. “I'm cool with this. At least now I know everything.
Now I know what to do.”
I sat there, alone, waiting for Ace Alsup to call back, and I asked myself what I'd do if the
disease had returned. I told myself,Okay, you've got a choice: you can give in . . . or fight like
hell and hope to live forever . When I was first sick, some doctors told me that my chances of
living were 50 percent, some said 40 percent, and some said 20 percent. But one thing was for
certain: any odds at all were better than 0 percent.
The phone rang. I picked it up–it was Ace.
“Just tell me it's less than two,” I said. “If I hear that, I hang up the phone, and I'm done.”
“It's less than two,” he said.
I thanked him, and I hung up, and that was the end of it. But it wasn't the end of my unease on
the subject.
I live with a constant sense of being pressed for time. I have to do everythingnow –get married,
have children, win races, make money, ride motorcycles, jump off cliffs–because I might not
have the chance later. It's an odd gift, that sort of concentrated living, and perhaps I don't
always apply it to the right things. I'm either going at 150 percent, or I'm asleep.
When I get locked on to something, I don't hear, see, or notice anything around me. I hired a
young Aussie guy named Christian Knapp to be my training aide. Christian was a
jack-of-all-trades, a masseur and physical trainer whose job was to help me work out, and
accompany me on a motorbike when I went on long rides, to protect me from traffic. One spring
afternoon we rode out together and spent seven hours on the bike, battling through a rainstorm.
Toward the end of the day we finally came down, relieved, from the foothills into a beautiful
green valley–and got hit by a sudden blast of wind, rushing straight into us. Chris idled next to
me on the motorbike.
“Man, I bet you're bummed about this headwind,” he said.
I looked at him.
“What headwind?” I said.
We spent thatNovember inAustin, waiting out the last month of Kik's pregnancy peacefully; the
twins were due right around December 1. But then, on the day before Thanksgiving, Kik went
in for a routine checkup and mentioned to the doctor that she'd felt a little peculiar that
morning. Dr. Uribe examined her briefly and said, “What's your husband doing today?” Kik
replied that I was scheduled to leave for a series of business meetings.
“Well, you better call him to tell him to cancel the rest of his day, because you're having these
babies. You need to go home and get a bag.”
Kik called me, and said, “Can you cancel your meetings?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said.
“Good. We're having these kids.”
Kik drove home and walked in the door, and she said, “Pack our bags.” We stood there and
smiled at each other. It was the last time, Kik noted, that we would be together, just us, without
being surrounded by children. We arranged for Luke to be picked up by his grandparents, and
then, giggling with excitement, we threw some things into a suitcase. I was standing in the
foyer holding the bags when the doorbell rang. I opened the door.
“Random drug control,” the woman announced.
“You gotta be kidding,” I said.
The lady thrust a piece of paper at me. “These are your rights.”
I just stood there helplessly. “Ha,” I said. I put down the bag.
She handed me the paper.
“You know what?” I said.
She stared at me.
“My wife is in labor. So it better be fast.”
She gasped, and she whirled around to her male companion, who was still coming up the walk,
and said, “Oh, my God, hurry up, hurry up.”
But even in a hurry, the drug-testing procedure takes 15 to 20 minutes. I had to pee in a
container, and then it had to be distributed into two other different containers, and the pH had
to be tested, and then there was a bunch of paperwork to fill out. It seemed like there were 50
forms to get through. “Sign this form, and read this one,” the lady said. I shoved the papers
around and scribbled my name, while Kik stood there with her eyes wide and pleading, about to
pop.
Finally, we got them out of the house, and I hustled Kik to the car and we drove to the hospital,
and settled Kik into a room.
College met us there; we'd called him to tell him the good news. He had ordered his Tex-Mex
lunch to go, and he brought it along with him. He settled into a couch in Kik's room and opened
his lunch, and we chatted and ate chips and salsa. We teased College, who was a confirmed
bachelor, and he teased us back. He called Luke “The Seducer Child,” because he claimed that
Luke was the kind of kid who seduced you into wanting one of your own. College claimed, “If
you don't want to have a baby, don't bring your girlfriend around Luke, because he's the kind
who makes you think every kid is great. He grabs you by the hand, wants you to play with him
or read him a book. And pretty soon the girl says, 'Honey, why don't we have one of those?'
That Luke's a trouble kid. Keep your girlfriend away from that kid.”
The smell of the food made Kik starving, because she wasn't allowed to eat anything all day to
prepare for the birth. She said, “Come on, College, give me five chips.Just five.” Finally he
relented and dealt her out five chips.
Then a nurse came in, and told Kik to turn over. It was time for her epidural. The nurse prepared
the long needle, and College didn't even know what it was. Kik said, laughing, “Hey, College,
can you excuse me while I get this shot?” College jumped up like he'd been electrocuted and
lunged into the hallway.
Then it was time to go to the delivery room, and I stayed next to Kik as we waited for our girls.
The process of delivering twins was more involved and complicated than a single delivery, and
there were lots of staff in the room–doctors, nurses, and neonatal specialists. This was more
formal, more intense, and scarier, but in the end everything went smoothly, actually more
smoothly than when Luke was born, in part because Kik was so brave and self-assured. She
seemed to just push twice, and here they came, Grace Elizabeth at8:54P.M., and Isabelle Rose
at8:57.
Nothing has ever made me feel more alive than watching those children come into existence;
the appearance of each of them was utterly momentous. Like Luke, they were true miracle
babies, possible only through the marvel of IVF. I didn't care if they were girls or boys, large or
small, blue-eyed or brown. All I cared about, and all I care about to this day, was that they
existed, and were healthy.
I cut the umbilical cords, and cleaned them up, and we looked them over, beaming. Grace and
Isabelle were instantly distinct to me, two very different little souls, though equally gorgeous.
Later, it would puzzle me when other people had trouble telling them apart. How could anyone
ever confuse the two? I wondered. Grace was slightly smaller and amazingly calm for a baby,
and she seemed to accept kisses and adoration complacently, as if they were her due. Isabelle
was the image of me, down to personality, just a tiny, wriggly version. She had small features
and a kind of brightness in her eyes, and as she grew she would become a comical, almost antic
baby. Right from the start we hardly ever called them by their full names. Grace was “Gee” or
“Gracie” and Isabelle was “Izzy,” or as Luke called her, “Isabo.”
The next day was Thanksgiving, and we had dinner at the hospital, and it was awful–bad
coffee, and warmed-up food, even recirculated air–but we didn't care because we were so tired
and happy. A day later, we brought the girls home and settled in, trying to adjust to a new
schedule of dual feedings. Luke was instantly the warm, protective brother and wanted to play
with the babies. I hired a night nurse to help Kik so she wouldn't be exhausted. The nurse
brought the girls to her for middle-of-the-night feedings, and then took them back to the nursery
while Kik grabbed some sleep.
One morning about a week after they were born, Kik and I were luxuriating in a quiet breakfast
together when there was a knock on the door. We looked at each other, frustrated; it was
onlysevenA.M., and all the babies were asleep, and we were drinking coffee in our bathrobes.
There was another knock on the door, and the dog started barking. Kik and I were almost never
alone. We both wanted to kill whoever was out there.
Kik opened the door.

Please Click Here To Read More