Shining Sea

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A CROWD OF SPARROWS flies up, peppering the California sky overhead. His heart constricts, and Michael Gannon thinks: Today is the day I am going to die.

“Look at that cloud,” Luke says, lowering his paintbrush. “It’s going to rain.”

“It’s not going to rain,” he tells his middle son, struggling to catch his breath. “Don’t give up in the home stretch, Luke. Another hour, and the house will be done.”

His heart squeezes; his fingers and jaw stiffen. You’ll be all right, corpsman, the doctor at Letterman told him, signing his release sixteen years ago. There were more than seventy thousand of them moving through Letterman Army Hospital in Frisco that year. If you could make it through the Bataan march and three years in the hands of the Japs, you can make it now. You’ll be all right.

But heart failure can be a sneaky enemy, quietly waiting to strike the fatal blow. He had plenty of opportunities to see its tricks, barely out of medical school, trying to keep his fellow prisoners alive in the Pacific. People say it’s the brain that keeps you alive—Give up, and you are done for—but who is to say that the will doesn’t have its home in the heart? And if that heart just won’t function?

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