‘The Longest Ride’ Chapters 19-21

It was also, in Ruth’s opinion, the first year in which students really began to differentiate academically. Some students began to excel while others fell behind; although there were countless reasons for this, in that particular school, in that era, many of her students—and their parents—simply didn’t care. The students would attend school until the eighth or ninth grade, then drop out to work on the farm full-time. Even for Ruth, this was a challenge that was difficult to overcome. These were the kids that kept Ruth awake at night, the ones she worried endlessly about, and she tinkered with her lesson plan for years, searching for ways to get through to them and their parents. She would have them plant seeds in Dixie cups and label them in an effort to encourage them to read; she would have the students catch bugs and name those as well, hoping to spark intellectual curiosity about the natural world. Tests in mathematics always included something about the farm or money: If Joe gathered four baskets of peaches from each tree, and there were five trees in each of the six rows, how many baskets of peaches will Joe be able to sell? Or: If you have $200 and you buy seed that costs $120, how much money do you have left? This was a world the students understood to be important—and more often than not, she got through to them. While some still ended up dropping out, they would sometimes come to visit her in later years, to thank her for teaching them how to read and write and perform the basic math necessary to figure out their purchases at the store.

She was proud of this—and proud of the students who eventually ended up graduating and going to college, of course. But every now and then, she had a student who made her realize again why she’d wanted to be a teacher in the first place. And that brings me to the painting above the fireplace.

+++

“You are thinking about Daniel McCallum,” she says to me.

“Yes,” I say. “Your favorite student.”

Her expression is animated, and I know her image of him is as vivid as the day she first met him. At the time, she’d been teaching for fifteen years. “He was very difficult.”

“That’s what you told me.”

“He was very wild when he first arrived. His overalls were dirty all the time and he could never sit still. I scolded him every day.”

“But you taught him to read.”

“I taught them all to read.”

“He was different, though.”

“Yes,” she says. “He was bigger than the other boys and he would punch the other students in the arm at recess, leaving bruises. It is because of Daniel McCallum that my hair began to turn gray.”

To this day, I can remember her complaints about him, but her words, as they are now, had always been tinged with affection.

“He’d never been to school before. He didn’t understand the rules.”

“He knew the rules. But at first, he did not care. He sat behind a pretty young girl named Abigail, and would constantly pull her hair. I would say to him, ‘You must not do this,’ but he would do it anyway. I finally had to seat him in the front row where I could keep my eye on him.”

“And it was then that you learned he couldn’t read or write.”

“Yes.” Even now, her voice is grim.

“And when you went to talk to his parents, you discovered they’d passed away. It turned out that Daniel was being raised by an older stepbrother and his wife, neither of whom wanted him to attend school at all. And you saw that the three of them were living in what was essentially a shack.”

“You know this because you went with me that day to the place he lived.”

I nod. “You were so quiet on the drive home.”

“It bothered me to think that in this rich country, there were people who still lived as they did. And it bothered me that he had no one in his life who seemed to care about him.”

“So you decided not only to teach him, but to tutor him as well. Both before and after school.”

“He sat in the front row,” she says. “I would not be a good teacher if he learned nothing at all.”

“But you also felt sorry for him.”

“How could I not? His life was not easy. And yet, I eventually learned that there were many children like Daniel.”

“No,” I say. “For both of us, there was only one.”

+++

It was early October when Daniel first entered our home, a gangly, towheaded boy with rough country mannerisms and a shyness I hadn’t anticipated. He did not shake my hand on that first visit, nor did he meet my eyes. Instead, he stood with his hands in his pockets, his gaze fixed on the floor. Though Ruth had tutored him after school, she worked with him again that evening at the kitchen table while I sat in the living room, listening to the radio. Afterward, she insisted he stay for dinner.

Daniel wasn’t the first student she’d invited to our home for dinner, but he was the only one who ever came regularly. It was due partly to the family’s situation, Ruth explained. Daniel’s stepbrother and his wife could barely keep the farm afloat and were resentful that the sheriff had ordered them to send Daniel to school at all. All the same, it didn’t seem as though they wanted him around the farm, either. On the day Ruth visited, they sat on the porch smoking cigarettes and responded to Ruth’s questions with indifferent, single-syllable answers. The next morning, Daniel came to school with bruises on his cheek and one eye as red as a ruby. The sight of his face nearly broke Ruth’s heart, making her all the more determined to help him.

But it wasn’t simply the obvious signs of abuse that upset her. When tutoring him after school, she often heard his stomach rumble, though when asked, he denied that he was hungry. When Daniel finally admitted that he sometimes went days without eating, her first instinct was to call the sheriff. Daniel begged her not to, if only because he had nowhere else to go. Instead, she ended up inviting him to dinner.

After that initial visit to our home, Daniel began to eat with us two or three times a week. As he grew more comfortable with us, the shyness evaporated, replaced by an almost formal politeness. He shook my hand and addressed me as Mr. Levinson, always making a point of asking how my day had been. The seriousness of his demeanor both saddened and impressed me, perhaps because it seemed a product of his prematurely hard life. But I liked him from the beginning and grew more fond of him as the year progressed. For her part, Ruth would eventually come to love him like a son.

I know that in this day and age, it’s considered inappropriate to use such a word when describing a teacher’s feeling for a student, and perhaps it was inappropriate even then. But hers was a motherly love, a love born of affection and concern, and Daniel blossomed under Ruth’s care. Over and over, I would hear her tell him that she believed in him and that he could be anything he wanted to be when he grew up. She emphasized that he could change the world if he wanted, make it a better place for himself and others, and he seemed to believe her. More than anything, he seemed to want to please her and he stopped acting up in class. He worked hard to become a better student, surprising Ruth with the ease with which he learned. Though uneducated, he was highly intelligent, and by January, he was reading as well as his classmates. By May, he was nearly two years ahead, not only in reading, but in all the other subjects as well. His memory was remarkable; he was a veritable sponge, soaking up everything that Ruth or I ever told him.

As if keen to know Ruth’s heart, he showed an interest in the art that hung on our walls, and after dinner, Ruth often walked him through the house to show him the paintings we’d collected. He would hold Ruth’s hand and listen as she described them, his eyes flickering from the paintings to her face and back again. He eventually came to know the names of all the artists, as well as their styles, and in this fashion I knew that he had come to care for Ruth as much as she cared for him. Once, Ruth asked me to take a photograph of them together. After she presented it to him, he clung to it for the rest of the afternoon and I saw him staring at it sometime later, his face etched with wonder. Whenever Ruth dropped him off back at home, he never once forgot to thank her for the time she spent with him. And on the last day of school, before he ran off to play with his friends, he told her that he loved her.

By then, the idea had taken root in her mind to ask Daniel if he wanted to live with us permanently. We talked about this, and in truth, I wouldn’t have minded. Daniel was a pleasure to have around our home and I told her as much. But by the end of the school year, Ruth still wasn’t sure how to broach the subject to him. She wasn’t sure whether Daniel would agree or even if he desired such a thing, nor did she know how to suggest this to his stepbrother. There was no guarantee that such a thing would even be legally allowed, so for all these reasons, she said nothing on that final day. Instead, she decided to postpone the matter until after we returned from our summer trip. But during our travels, Ruth and I spoke of Daniel frequently. We resolved to do whatever we could to make such an arrangement possible. When we finally returned to Greensboro, however, the shack stood empty, apparently abandoned for weeks. Daniel didn’t return to school in August, nor were there any requests for his records to be forwarded. No one seemed to know where he’d gone or what had happened to the family. Students and other teachers soon forgot about him, but for Ruth, it was different. She cried for weeks when she realized not only that he was gone, but that he might be gone forever. She made a point of visiting the neighboring farms, hoping that someone could tell her where the family had gone. At home, she would eagerly sort through the mail, hoping to find a letter from him, and she could never hide her disappointment when, day after day, none arrived. Daniel had filled a hole in Ruth that I could not, something that had been missing in our marriage. In that year, he’d become the child she’d always wanted, the child I could never give her.

I would love to tell you that Ruth and Daniel reconnected; that later in life, he contacted her, if only to let her know how he was doing. She worried about him for years, but with the passage of time, Ruth began to mention his name less frequently, until finally she stopped mentioning him at all. Yet I knew she never forgot about him and that part of her never stopped looking for him. It was Daniel she was looking for as we drove the quiet country roads, passing run-down farms; it was Daniel she hoped to see whenever she returned to school after a summer spent in distant studios and galleries. Once, she thought she spotted him on the streets of Greensboro during a Veterans Day parade, but by the time we were able to make our way through the crowds, he was already gone, if he’d ever really been there at all.

After Daniel, we never again had a student in our home.

+++

There is a bone-chilling cold in the car, the aftereffect of the window I opened earlier. Frost glitters on the dashboard now, and every time I breathe, a cloud forms beyond my lips. Though I’m no longer thirsty, my throat and stomach remain chilled from the snow. The cold is inside and outside, everywhere, and I can’t stop shivering.

Beside me, Ruth stares out the window and I realize that I can see starlight beyond the pane. It is not yet light, but the moonlight makes the snow on the trees glow silver, and I can tell that the worst of the weather has passed. Tonight, the snow on the car will crust as it continues to freeze, but sometime tomorrow or the next day, the temperature will rise and the world will shake off the white embrace of winter as the snow begins to melt.

This is both good and bad. My car may become visible from the road, which is good, but I need the snow to live, and within a day or two, it might be gone completely.

“You are doing fine for now,” Ruth tells me. “Do not worry about tomorrow until you have to.”

“Easy for you to say,” I reply, sulking. “I’m the one in trouble here.”

“Yes,” she says matter-of-factly. “But it is your fault. You should not have been driving.”

“We’re back to this again?”

She turns to me with a wry grin. She is in her forties now and wears her hair short. Her dress is cut in simple lines, in the bright red hues she preferred, with oversize buttons and elegant pockets. Like every other woman in the 1960s, Ruth was a fan of Jacqueline Kennedy.

“You brought it up.”

“I was looking for sympathy.”

“You are complaining. You do this more now that you are older. Like with the neighbor who cut down the tree. And the girl at the gas station who thought you were invisible.”

“I wasn’t complaining. I was observing. There’s a difference.”

“You should not complain. It is not attractive.”

“I’m many years removed from being attractive.”

“No,” she counters. “In this you are wrong. Your heart is still beautiful. Your eyes are still kind, and you are a good and honest man. This is enough to keep you beautiful forever.”

“Are you flirting with me?”

She raises an eyebrow. “I do not know. Am I?”

She is, I think. And for the first time since the accident, if only for a moment, I actually feel warm.

+++

It’s strange, I think, the way our lives turn out. Moments of circumstance, when later combined with conscious decisions and actions and a boatload of hope, can eventually forge a future that seems predestined. Such a moment occurred when I first met Ruth. I wasn’t lying when I told Ruth that I knew in that instant we would one day be married.

Yet experience has taught me that fate is sometimes cruel and that even a boatload of hope is sometimes not enough. For Ruth, this became clear when Daniel entered our lives. By then, she was over forty and I was even older. It was another reason she couldn’t stop crying after Daniel left. Back then, social expectations were different, and both of us knew that we were too old to adopt a child. When Daniel disappeared from our lives, I couldn’t escape the conclusion that fate had conspired against her for the last and final time.

Though she knew about the mumps and had married me anyway, I knew that Ruth had always clung to a secret hope that the doctor had somehow been mistaken. There was no definite proof, after all, and I admit that I nurtured a slim hope as well. But because I was so deeply in love with my wife, it was seldom at the forefront of my thoughts. We made love frequently in our first years of marriage, and though Ruth was reminded every month of the sacrifice she had made by marrying me, she wasn’t initially bothered by it. I think she believed that will alone, that her profound desire for a child, would somehow make it happen. Her unspoken belief was that our time would come, and this, I think, was the reason we never discussed adoption.

It was a mistake. I know that now, but I didn’t know it then. The 1950s came and went and our house slowly filled with art. Ruth taught school and I ran the store, and even though she was growing older, part of her still held out hope. And then, like the long-awaited answer to a prayer, Daniel arrived. He became first her student and then the son she had always longed for. But when the illusion suddenly ended, only I remained. And it wasn’t quite enough.

The next few years were hard for us. She blamed me, and I blamed myself as well. The blue skies of our marriage turned gray and stormy, then bleak and cold. Conversations became stilted, and we began to argue for the first time. Sometimes it seemed to be a struggle for her to sit in the same room with me. She spent many weekends at her parents’ house in Durham—her father’s health was declining—and there were times when we didn’t speak for days. At night, the space between us in the bed felt like the Pacific, an ocean impossible for either of us to swim across. She did not want to and I was too afraid to try, and we continued to drift further apart. There was even a period when she wondered whether she wanted to remain married to me, and in the evenings, after she’d gone to bed, I would sit in the living room, wishing that I were someone else, the kind of man who’d been able to give her what she wanted.

But I couldn’t. I was broken. The war had taken from me the only thing she’d ever wanted. I was sad for her and angry with myself, and I hated what was happening to us. I would have traded my life to make her happy again, but I didn’t know how; and as crickets sounded on warm autumn nights, I’d bring my hands to my face and I would cry and cry and cry.

+++

“I would never have left you,” Ruth assures me. “I am sorry I made you think such things.” Her words are leaden with regret.

“But you thought about it.”

“Yes,” she said, “but not in the way you think. It was not a serious idea. All married women think such things at times. Men too.”

“I never did.”

“I know,” she says. “But you are different.” She smiles, her hand reaching out for mine. She takes it, caressing the knots and bones. “I saw you once,” she says to me. “In the living room.”

“I know,” I say.

“Do you remember what happened next?”

“You came over and held me.”

“It was the first time I had seen you cry since that night in the park, after the war,” she says. “It scared me very much. I did not know what was wrong.”

“It was us,” I say. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to make you happy anymore.”

“There was nothing you could do,” she says. “You were so angry with me.”

“I was sad,” she says. “There is a difference.”

“Does it matter? Either way, you weren’t happy with me.”

She squeezes my hand, her skin soft against my own. “You are a smart man, Ira, but sometimes, I think you do not understand women very well.”

In this, I know she is right.

“I was devastated when Daniel went away. I would have loved for him to become part of our lives. And yes, I was sad that we never had children. But I was also sad because I was in my forties, even though that might not make sense to you. I did not mind my thirties. That was when I felt for the first time in my life that I was actually an adult. But for women, older than forty is not always so easy. On my birthday, I couldn’t help but think that I had already lived half my life, and when I looked in the mirror, a young woman no longer stared back at me. It was vain, I know, but it bothered me. And my parents were getting older, too. That was why I went to visit them so often. By then, my father had retired, but he was not well, as you know. It was difficult for my mother to take care of him. In other words, there was no simple way to make things better for me back then. Even if Daniel had stayed with us, those still would have been hard years.”

I wonder about this. She has said as much to me before, but I sometimes question whether she is being completely truthful.

“It meant a lot to me when you held me that night.”

“What else could I do?”

“You could have turned and walked back to the bedroom.”

“I could not do such a thing. It hurt me to see you like that.”

“You kissed my tears away,” I said.

“Yes,” she says.

“And later, we held each other as we lay in bed. It was the first time in a long time.”

“Yes,” she says again.

“And things started to get better again.”

“It was time,” she said. “I was tired of being sad.”

“And you knew how much I still loved you.”

“Yes,” she says. “I always knew that.”

+++

In 1964, on our trip to New York, Ruth and I experienced a second honeymoon of sorts. It wasn’t planned, nor did we do anything extraordinary; it was more akin to a daily celebration that we had somehow put the worst of the past behind us. We held hands as we toured the galleries and began to laugh again. Her smile, I still believe, had never been more contagious in its joy than it was that summer. It was also the summer of Andy Warhol.

His art, so commercial and yet unique, didn’t appeal to me. I found little interest in paintings of soup cans. Nor did Ruth, but she was taken with Andy Warhol at their initial meeting. I think this was the only instance in which she bought something simply due to the force of the artist’s personality. She knew intuitively that he would somehow be an artist who would define the 1960s, and we purchased four original prints. By then, his work had already become expensive—it’s all relative, of course, especially when considering their value now—and afterward, we had no money left. After only a week up north, we returned to North Carolina and went to the Outer Banks, where we rented a cottage at the beach. Ruth wore a bikini that summer for the very first time, though she refused to wear it anywhere except on the back veranda, with towels draped over the railing to block others’ sight lines. After our trip to the beach, we journeyed to Asheville, as always. I read her the letter I’d written as we stood by the lake, and the years continued to roll along. Lyndon Johnson was elected president and the civil rights law was passed. The war in Vietnam picked up steam, while at home we heard much about the War on Poverty. The Beatles were all the rage, and women entered the workforce in droves. Ruth and I were aware of all of it, but it was life inside our home that mattered most to us. We led our lives as we always had, both of us working and collecting art in the summers, having breakfast in the kitchen, and sharing stories over dinner. We bought paintings by Victor Vasarely and Arnold Schmidt, Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly. We appreciated the work of Julian Stanczak and Richard Anuszkiewicz and bought paintings by them as well. And I will never forget Ruth’s expression as she picked out every one.

It was around that time that we began to make use of our camera. Until that point, strangely, it had never been a priority for us, and in the long span of our lives, we filled only four albums. But it is enough for me to turn the pages and watch as Ruth and I slowly grow older. There is a photo Ruth took of me on my fiftieth birthday in 1970, and another of her in 1972, when she celebrated the same milestone. In 1973, we rented the first of the storage units to house part of our collection, and in 1975, Ruth and I boarded the QE2 and sailed to England. Even then, I couldn’t imagine flying. We spent three days in London and another two days in Paris before boarding a train to Vienna, where we spent the next two weeks. For Ruth, it was both nostalgic and painful to return to the city she had once called home; though I could usually discern what she was feeling, I spent much of that time wondering what to say.

In 1976, Jimmy Carter was elected president over Gerald Ford, who’d replaced Richard Nixon. The economy was in the dumps and there were long lines at the gas stations. Yet Ruth and I hardly heeded these developments as we fell in love with a new movement in art called Lyrical Abstractionism, which had its roots in both Pollock and Rothko. In that year—it was the year Ruth finally stopped coloring her hair—we celebrated our thirtieth anniversary. Though it cost a small fortune and I had to take out a loan to do so, I presented her with the only paintings I ever bought on my own: two small Picassos, one from the Blue Period and another from the Rose. That night, she hung them in the bedroom, and after making love, we lay in the bed staring at them for hours.

In 1977, with business at the shop nearly at a standstill, I began to build birdhouses in my spare time from kits I purchased at the hobby shop. This phase did not last long, maybe three or four years, but my hands remained clumsy and I eventually gave it up, just as the Reagan era began. Though the news informed me that debt wasn’t a problem, I paid off the loan I’d used to buy the Picassos anyway. Ruth sprained her ankle and spent a month on crutches. In 1985, I sold the shop and started collecting Social Security; in 1987, after forty years in the classroom, Ruth did the same. The school and the district threw a party in her honor. During her career, she had been named “Teacher of the Year” three times. And in that time, my hair went from black to gray and then to white, thinning with every passing year. The lines on our faces grew deeper, and both of us realized that we could no longer see near or far without glasses. In 1990, I turned seventy, and in 1996, on our fiftieth anniversary, I presented Ruth with the longest letter I’d ever written. She read it aloud, and when she did, I realized I could barely hear her. Two weeks later, I would be fitted with a hearing aid. But I accepted this with equanimity.

It was time. I was growing old. Though Ruth and I never again experienced darkness in our marriage the way we had after Daniel disappeared, things were not always easy. Her father died in 1966, and two years later, her mother died from a stroke. In the 1970s, Ruth found a lump in her breast, and until it was biopsied and found negative, she thought she might have cancer. My parents passed away within a year of each other in the late 1980s, and Ruth and I stood over each of their graves, sobered by the realization that we were the last survivors in either of our families.

I could not foresee the future, but who can do such things? I do not know what I expected in the years we still had left together. I assumed we would continue just as we always had, for it was the only life I’d ever known. Maybe less travel—the trips and the walking were getting hard for us—but other than that, no difference at all. We had no kids or grandkids we needed to visit, no urge to travel abroad again. Instead, Ruth devoted more time to the garden and I began to feed the pigeons. We began to take vitamins, and neither of us had much of an appetite. Looking back, I suppose I should have given more thought to the fact that by our golden anniversary, Ruth had already outlived both her parents, but I was too afraid to consider the implications. I couldn’t imagine a life without her, nor did I want one, but God had other plans. In 1998, like her mother, Ruth had a stroke, one that weakened the left side of her body. Though she was still able to get around the house, our collecting days were at an end and we never again purchased another piece of art. Two years later, on a cold spring morning as we sat in the kitchen, she trailed off in midsentence, unable to complete her thought, and I knew she’d had another stroke. She spent three days in the hospital undergoing tests, and though she came back home, we would never again have a conversation in which the words flowed freely.

The left side of her face lost even more movement, and she began to forget the most common of words. This upset Ruth more than it did me; to my eyes, she remained as beautiful as she’d been on the day I’d first seen her. I was certainly no longer the man I once had been. My face had become wrinkled and thin, and whenever I looked in the mirror, the size of my ears never ceased to astonish me. Our routines become even simpler, one day simply drifting to the next. I would make her breakfast in the morning and we would eat together as we browsed the newspaper; after breakfast, we would sit in the yard and feed the pigeons. We napped in the late morning and would spend the rest of the day reading or listening to music or going to the grocery store. Once a week, I would drive her to the beauty salon, where a hairdresser would wash and style her hair, something that I knew would make her happy. And then, when August came around, I would spend hours at my desk crafting a letter for my wife, and I’d drive the two of us to Black Mountain on our anniversary, where we’d stand by the lake, just as we always had, while she read the words I’d written.

By that point, our adventures were long behind us, but for me it was more than enough, for the longest ride continued. Even then, as we lay in bed, I would hold Ruth close, grateful for the blessing of this life, this woman. In those moments, I would selfishly pray that I would die first, for even then I could sense the inevitable.

In the spring of 2002, a week after the azaleas in the yard had begun to bloom in full, we spent our morning as we always had, and in the afternoon, we made plans to go out to dinner. It was something we seldom did, but both of us were in the mood, and I remember calling the restaurant to make an early reservation. In the afternoon, we went for a walk. Not long, just to the end of the block and back. Though there was a brisk edge to the air, Ruth did not seem to notice. We spoke briefly to one of our neighbors—not the angry man who cut down the tree—and after we returned home, we settled into what was until that point a relatively ordinary day. Ruth said nothing to me about having a headache, but in the early evening, before we’d made dinner, she slowly made her way to the bedroom. I thought nothing of it at the time—I was reading in the easy chair and must have dozed off for a few minutes. When I woke, Ruth still had not come back, and I called for her. She did not answer, and I rose from my chair. I called for her again as I made my way down the hallway. When I saw her crumpled near the bed, I felt my heart jump in my chest. She’d had another stroke, I immediately thought. But it was worse, and as I tried to breathe life back into her, I could feel my soul begin to wither.

The paramedics arrived a few minutes later. I heard them first knocking and then pounding at the door. By then, I was holding Ruth in my arms and I did not want to let go. I heard them enter and call out; I called back and they rushed to the bedroom, where they found an old man holding the woman he’d always loved.

They were kind and soft-spoken as one of them helped me to my feet while the other began to administer to Ruth. I begged them to help her, trying to elicit promises that she was going to be all right. They put her on oxygen and loaded her onto the stretcher, allowing me to sit in the ambulance as Ruth was rushed to the hospital.

When the doctor came out to speak with me in the waiting room, he was gentle. He held my arm as we walked down the corridor. The tiles were gray and the fluorescent lights made my eyes hurt. I asked if my wife was all right; I asked when I would be allowed to see her. But he didn’t answer. Instead, he led me to an empty patient room and closed the door behind him. His expression was serious, and when he cast his eyes toward the floor, I knew exactly what he was going to say.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Mr. Levinson, but there was nothing we could do . . .”

At these words, I gripped a nearby bed rail to keep from falling. The room seemed to close in as the doctor went on, my vision telescoping until I could see nothing but his face. His words sounded tinny and made no sense, but it did not matter. His expression was plain—I’d been too late. Ruth, my sweet Ruth, had died on the floor while I dozed in the other room.

I do not remember leaving the hospital, and the next few days are hazy. My attorney, Howie Sanders, a dear friend to both Ruth and me, helped with the funeral arrangements, a small, private service. Afterward, the candles were lit, cushions were spread through the house, and I sat shiva for a week. People came and went, people we had known over the years. Neighbors, including the man who’d cut down the maple tree. Customers from the shop. Three gallery owners from New York. Half a dozen artists. Women from the synagogue came every day to cook and clean. And on each of those days, I found myself wishing that I would wake from the nightmare that my life had just become.

But gradually the people drifted away, until no one was left at all. There was no one to call, no one to talk to, and the house descended into silence. I did not know how to live that kind of life, and time became merciless. Days crept by slowly. I could not concentrate. I would read the newspaper and remember nothing at all. I would sit for hours before realizing that I’d left the radio on in the back- ground. Even the birds did nothing to cheer me; I would stare at them and think to myself that Ruth should have been sitting beside me, our hands brushing as we reached into the bag for birdseed.

Nothing made any sense, nor did I want to make sense of it. My days were spent in the quiet agony of heartbreak. Evenings were no better. Late at night, as I lay in the half-empty bed unable to sleep, I would feel the dampness trickling off my cheeks. I’d wipe my eyes and be struck anew by the finality of Ruth’s absence.

 

Chapter 21

Luke

It all went back to the ride on Big Ugly Critter.

The one he’d had nightmares about, the one that had kept him away from the arena for eighteen months. He’d told Sophia about the ride and a bit about the injuries he’d suffered.

But he hadn’t told her everything. As he stood in the barn after his mother had left, Luke leaned against the mechanical bull, reliving the past he’d tried hard to forget.

It was eight days before he’d even known what had happened. Although he knew he had been hurt and, after some prompting, could vaguely remember the ride, he’d had no idea how close he’d come to dying. He’d had no idea that in addition to fracturing his skull, the bull had cracked his C1 vertebra and that his brain had swelled with blood.

He hadn’t told Sophia that they didn’t reset the bones in his face for almost a month, for fear of causing additional trauma. Nor had he mentioned that the doctors had returned to his bedside to tell him that he’d never completely recover from the head injury—and that in a section of his skull, there was now a small titanium plate. The doctors told him that another similar impact to his head, with or without a helmet, would most likely be enough to kill him. The plate they had grafted onto his shattered skull was too close to the brain stem to adequately protect him.

After that first meeting with the doctors, he’d had fewer questions than anyone anticipated. He’d decided right then to give up bull riding, and he’d told everyone as much. He knew he’d miss the rodeo and that he’d probably wonder forever what it would have felt like to win the championship. But he’d never entertained a death wish, and at the time, he’d thought he still had plenty of money in the bank.

And he had, but it wasn’t enough. His mom had offered up the ranch as collateral for the loan she’d taken out to cover his monstrous medical bills. Though she’d told him repeatedly that she didn’t care about the fate of the ranch, he knew that deep down, she did. The ranch was her life, it was all she knew, and everything she’d done since the accident had confirmed her feelings. In the past year, she’d worked herself to the point of exhaustion in an attempt to forestall the inevitable. She could say whatever she wanted, but he knew the truth . . .

He could save the ranch. No, he couldn’t earn enough in the next year—or even three years—to pay off the loan, but he was a good enough rider to earn enough to meet the payments and then some, even if he rode only on the little tour. He admired his mom’s efforts with the Christmas trees and the pumpkins and expanding the herd, but both of them knew it wasn’t going to be enough. He’d heard enough about the cost of fixing this or that to know that things were tight even in the best of times.

So what was he supposed to do? He had to either pretend that everything was going to work out—which wasn’t possible—or find a way to fix the problem. And he knew exactly how to fix the problem. All he had to do was ride well.

But even if he rode well, he still might die.

Luke understood the risks. That was the reason his hands shook every time he prepared to ride. It wasn’t that he was rusty or that he was plagued with ordinary nerves. It was the fact that when he used the suicide wrap to hold on, a part of him wondered if this would be his last ride.

It wasn’t possible to ride successfully with that kind of fear. Unless, of course, there was something greater at stake, and for him, it came down to the ranch. And his mom. She wasn’t going to lose the ranch because of him.

He shook his head. He didn’t want to think about these things. It was hard enough to find the confidence he knew he needed to last—and win—over the course of a season. The one thing that you didn’t want to think about was not being able to ride.

Or dying in the process . . .

He hadn’t been lying to the doctor when he said that he was ready to quit. He knew what a life of riding could do to a man; he’d watched his father wince and struggle in the mornings, and he’d felt the same pains himself. He’d lived through all the training and he’d given it his best, but it hadn’t worked out. And eighteen months ago, he’d been okay with that.

But right now, standing beside the mechanical bull, he knew that he had no choice. He pulled on his glove, then he took a deep breath and climbed onto the bull. Hanging off the horn was the control, and he took it in his free hand. But maybe because the season was getting close, or maybe because he hadn’t told the complete truth to Sophia, he couldn’t press the button. Not yet, anyway.

He reminded himself that he knew what might happen, and he tried to convince himself he was ready. He was ready to ride, he was preparing to ride, no matter what might happen. He was a bull rider. He’d done it for as long as he could remember, and he would do it again. He’d ride, because he was good at riding, and then all their problems would be solved . . .

Except that if he landed wrong, he might die.

All at once, his hands began to tremble. But, steeling himself, he finally pressed the button anyway.

+++

On her way back from New Jersey, Sophia made a detour to the ranch before returning to campus. Luke was expecting her and had tidied up both the house and the porch in anticipation.

It was dark when her car pulled to a stop in front of his house. He bounded down the porch steps to meet her, wondering if anything had changed since he’d last seen her. Those worries evaporated as soon as she stepped out of her car and rushed toward him.

He caught her as she jumped, feeling her legs wrap around him. As they held each other, he reveled in how good she felt, certain again of how much she meant to him, wondering what the future would hold.

+++

They made love that evening, but Sophia couldn’t stay the night. The new semester was beginning and she had an early class. Once her taillights vanished up the drive, Luke turned and walked toward the barn for yet another practice session. He wasn’t in the mood, but with the first event in less than two weeks, he reminded himself of how much more he had to do.

On his way to the barn, he made the decision to keep the practice shorter than usual, no more than an hour. He was tired and it was cold and he missed Sophia’s presence already.

Inside the barn, he went through a quick warm-up to get the blood flowing, then hopped on the bull. While rebuilding the bull, his dad had modified it to make the ride more intense at top speeds and had rigged the control switch so that Luke could hold it in his free hand. Out of habit, he kept his hand clenched in a half fist even when riding live bulls, though to this point no one had ever asked why or probably even noticed.

When he was ready, he started the machine at a low-medium speed, again just enough to loosen up. He then rode once on medium and once on medium-high. In his practice sessions, he rode in sixteen-second increments, exactly double the time he’d need to ride in the arena. His dad had calibrated the machine for these longer rides, saying that it would make the live rides easier by comparison. And maybe it did. But it was twice as hard on the body.

After each ride, he’d take a break to recover, and he took a longer break after every three. Usually, in those moments his mind was blank, but tonight he found himself flashing back to his ride on Big Ugly Critter. He wasn’t sure why the images kept flooding his mind, but he couldn’t stop them, and he felt his nerves jangle when his gaze fell on the mechanical bull. It was time for the real rides, the ones on high speed. His dad had calibrated fifty different rides to occur in a random sequence, so Luke would never know what to expect. Over the years it had served him well, but right now he wished he knew exactly what was coming.

When the muscles in his hand and forearm had recovered, he trudged back to the mechanical bull and climbed up. He rode three times, then three more. And three more after that. Of those nine, he made it to the end of the cycle seven times. Counting the recovery time, he’d been practicing for more than forty-five minutes. He decided then to do three more sets of three and call it a night.

He didn’t make it.

In the second ride of the second set, he felt the ride getting away from him. In that instant, he wasn’t unduly alarmed. He’d been thrown a million times, and unlike the arena, the area surrounding the bull was lined with foam padding. Even while in the air, he hadn’t been afraid, and he shifted, trying to land the way he wanted to in the arena: either on his feet or on all fours.

He managed to land on his feet, and the foam absorbed the impact as it usually did, but for some reason the landing left him off balance and he found himself stumbling, instinctively trying to stay upright instead of simply falling. He took three quick steps as he fell forward, his upper body stretching past the foam flooring, and slammed his forehead against the hard-packed ground.

His brain chimed like a thumbed guitar string; slices of golden light shimmered as he tried to focus. The room began to spin, blotting to darkness and then brightening again. The pain started, sharp at first and then sharper. Fuller. Slowly rounding into agony. It took him a minute to summon the strength to stagger to his feet, holding on to the old tractor to stay upright. Fear raced through his system as he carefully examined the bump on his forehead with his fingers.

It was swollen and tender, but as he felt around, he convinced himself that there was no further damage. He hadn’t cracked anything; he was sure of it. The other parts of his head were fine as far as he could tell. Standing straight, he took a deep breath and started gingerly for the doors.

Outside the door, his stomach abruptly turned and he doubled over. The dizziness came back and he vomited into the dirt. Only once, but it was enough to concern him. He’d vomited after receiving previous concussions, and he figured he had one again. He didn’t need to go to the doctor to know that he would be told not to practice for a week, maybe longer.

Or, more accurately, he would be warned never to ride again.

He was okay, though. It was a close call—too close—but he’d survived. He’d take a few days off regardless of the approaching season, and as he limped back to his house, he tried to put a positive spin on it. He’d been practicing hard, and a break might do him good. When he came back, he’d probably be stronger than ever. But despite his attempts to reassure himself, he couldn’t shake the feeling of dread that dogged his every step.

And what was he going to tell Sophia?

+++

Two days later, he still wasn’t sure. He went to visit her at Wake, and as they walked the campus byways in the late hours of the night, Luke kept his hat on to hide the bruising on his forehead. He considered telling her about the accident but was afraid of the questions she would ask and where they would lead. Questions he had no answers to. Finally, when she asked him why he was so quiet, he pleaded exhaustion over the long hours at the ranch—truthfully enough, as his mother had decided to bring the cattle to market in advance of bull-riding season, and they’d spent a couple of grueling days roping and herding the cattle onto trucks.

But by then, he suspected that Sophia knew him well enough to sense that he wasn’t himself. When she showed up at the ranch the following weekend wearing the hat he’d bought her and a thick down jacket, she seemed to be evaluating him as they readied the horses, though she said nothing at the time. Instead, they made the same ride they had on their first day together, through the stands of trees, toward the river. Finally, she turned toward him. “Okay, enough of this,” she announced. “I want to know what’s bothering you. You’ve been . . . off all week long.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m still a little tired.” The bright sunlight drove knife blades into his skull, aggravating the constant headache he’d had since he’d been thrown.

“I’ve seen you tired before. It’s something else, but I can’t help if I don’t know what it is.”

“I’m just thinking about next weekend. You know, first event of the year and all.”

“In Florida?”

He nodded. “Pensacola.”

“I’ve heard it’s pretty there. White sand beaches.”

“Probably. Not that I’ll see any of them. I’ll drive back after the event on Saturday.” He thought back to his practice yesterday, his first since the accident. It had gone pretty well—his balance seemed unaffected—but the pounding in his head forced him to quit after forty minutes.

“It’ll be late.”

“This one’s in the afternoon. I should be back around two or so.”

“So . . . I can see you on Sunday, then?”

He tapped his hand against his thigh. “If you come out here. But I’ll probably be wiped out.”

She squinted at him from under the brim of her hat. “Gee, don’t sound so excited about it.”

“I want to see you. I just don’t want you to feel like you have to come over.”

“Are you going to come to campus instead? Do you want to hang out at the sorority house?”

“Not particularly.”

“Then would you like to meet somewhere else?”

“Dinner with my mom, remember?”

“Then I’ll come here.” She waited for a response, growing frustrated when he said nothing at all. In time, she turned in her saddle to face him. “What’s gotten into you? It’s like you’re mad at me.”

It was the perfect opportunity to tell her everything. He tried to find the words, but he didn’t know how to begin. I’ve been meaning to tell you that I could die if I keep riding.

“I’m not mad at you,” he hedged. “I’m just thinking about the season ahead and what I have to do.”

“Right now?” She sounded doubtful.

“I think about it all the time. And I’ll be thinking about it through the whole season. And just so you know, I’ll be traveling a lot starting next weekend.”

“I know,” she said with unusual sharpness. “You told me.”

“When the tour heads west, I might not even make it home most weeks until late Sunday night.”

“So what you’re saying is that you’re not going to be seeing me as often, and when we are together, you’ll be distracted?”

“Maybe.” He shrugged. “Probably.”

“That’s no fun.”

“What else can I do?”

“How about this? Try not to think about your event next weekend right now. Let’s just try to enjoy ourselves today, okay? Since you’re going to be traveling? Since I’m not going to see you as much? It might be our last full day together for a while.”

He shook his head. “It’s not like that.”

“What’s not like that?”

“I can’t just ignore what’s coming,” he said, his voice rising. “My life isn’t like yours. It’s not about going to classes and hanging out on the quad and gossiping with Marcia. I live in the real world. I have responsibilities.” He heard her gasp but pressed on, growing more righteous with every word. “My job is dangerous. I’m rusty, and I know I should have practiced more this past week. But I have to do well starting next weekend, no matter what, or my mom and I are going to lose everything. So of course I’m going to think about it—and yes, I’m going to be distracted.”

She blinked, taken aback by his tirade. “Wow. Someone’s in a bad mood today.”

“I’m not in a bad mood,” he snapped.

“You could have fooled me.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

For the first time, her expression hardened and he heard her struggling to keep her voice steady. “You could have said that you wanted to see me on Sunday, even if you were tired. You could have said that even though you might be distracted, that I shouldn’t take it personally. You could have apologized and said, ‘You’re right, Sophia. Let’s just enjoy today.’ But instead, you tell me that what you do—in the real world—isn’t like going to college.”

“College isn’t the real world.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” she cried.

“Then why are you so mad that I said it?” he countered.

She tugged the reins, forcing Demon to a halt. “Are you kidding?” she demanded. “Because you’re acting like a jerk! Because you’re implying that you have responsibilities, but I don’t. Can you even hear yourself?”

“I was just trying to answer your question.”

“By insulting me?”

“I wasn’t insulting you.”

“But you still think that what you do is more important than what I do?”

“It is more important.”

“To you and your mom!” she shouted. “Believe it or not, my family is important to me, too! My parents are important! Getting an education is important! And yes, I do have responsibilities. And I feel pressure to be successful, just like you do. I have dreams, too!”

“Sophia . . .”

“What? Now you’re ready to be civil? Well, you know what? Don’t bother. Because the reality is that I drove up here to spend time with you, and all you’re doing is trying to pick a fight!”

“I’m not trying to pick a fight,” he mumbled.

But she wasn’t hearing him. “Why are you doing this?” she demanded. “Why are you acting like this? What’s going on with you?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say, and Sophia watched him, waiting, before shaking her head in disappointment. With that, she jerked the reins and turned Demon, prodding him into a canter. As she disappeared in the direction of the stables, Luke sat alone amid the trees, wondering why he couldn’t find the courage to tell her the truth.

 

From The Longest Ride by Nicholas Sparks. Copyright © 2013 by Willow Holdings, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc., New York, NY, U.S.A. All rights reserved.