by Ruthie Knox
It was Lexie sleeping in her own tent.
After the Big Tree, they’d ridden almost until dusk, neither of them wanting to have to stop and face the other. When they finally settled into bed that night, he’d plucked up the courage to gather her close and kiss her, hoping she’d let him take it further. Knowing his body was the only thing he had to give her. And he’d craved her, needed the assurance she would respond to him as she always did, the oblivion he found when he was deep inside her. She’d met him kiss for kiss, caress for caress. For as long as it lasted, everything had been right between them. But afterward, when she’d looked up at him with flushed cheeks—so damn beautiful it hurt—her eyes had filled with tears. “I can’t do this,” she’d said. And then she’d pulled on her clothes, packed up her things, and left.
Every afternoon now, she set up her little red tent next to his, and every afternoon he resisted the urge to kick it down. The one time he’d tried to wrap his arms around her in the light of day, she’d gone rigid and pushed him away. She took long walks around the campgrounds, lingered in conversation with strangers, sat on a bench by the side of a lake and stared off into the distance. She wouldn’t talk to him. She hardly even looked at him.
He’d always counted on her eyes to tell him what she was feeling. They’d told him she loved him before she’d ever said the words. He’d refused to see it, but it had been there behind the amber glass of her irises, welcoming him every time he slid inside her body, every time he made her come, every time he teased her over dinner or playfully pinched her ass by the side of the road. He’d have sworn Lexie couldn’t hide a thing from him, even if she wanted to. But now she’d retreated deep inside herself, and her eyes had emptied out. He’d done that to her. It made him physically sick to think about it.
Without her beside him at night, he hardly slept. He thought back to when Haylie had left, just before the trial had taken over everything. He’d been furious at her betrayal, and his pride had taken a serious blow. At the time, he’d thought his heart was bruised, if not broken, but he’d learned otherwise. Losing his family had hurt a lot more than losing Haylie. That first year after the trial was over, he’d lain awake a lot of nights. It had taken him months to figure out how to box up the memories and stow them away, how to keep his hands busy and his mind blank, to watch and listen to other people’s lives instead of getting on with his own. He’d done it because he had to in order to live with himself. In time, it had become second nature.
None of these strategies turned out to be the least bit helpful when it came to losing Lexie. Losing Lexie was already the worst thing he’d ever had to live through, and she wasn’t even gone yet.
In fact, she was right there, popping into sight as he pedaled over the top of the hill. Crouched over her handlebars, probably topping thirty miles an hour on a rare straight downhill stretch, she took up half the lane of the narrow road. He hated to see her out in the middle like that. Sometimes he thought she did it on purpose to provoke him. This wasn’t a main artery by any means, but it had enough traffic to keep them on their toes.
As if cued up by his thoughts, an RV that had been tailing him for five minutes finally found the break it had been anticipating and rolled slowly past, leaving less than two feet between its side and his handlebars. Christ. He watched it inch up on Lexie. She waited for the oncoming traffic to clear and waved it by. Totally capable of handling herself.
He got it. She didn’t need him. She’d been right to accuse him of trying to turn her into a project. He was an idiot. Every protective, possessive thought he’d ever had about her had been a sign he was falling in love, not a manifestation of his hero complex. The voice in his head that sounded like Taryn said, Duh. This wasn’t rocket science.
But he wanted her to need him, because then he’d have some claim on her, something other than his love to make him worthy of her. She loved him, but he wasn’t good enough. Hell, she’d said so herself. Who in her right mind would pick you? He was a melancholy hermit, deliberately cut off from the world, and she was the most vibrant, exciting, engaging woman he’d ever known. What kind of future could he offer her?
You could make her happy.
Taryn again. Maybe he could, for a little while. Maybe not. He’d dumped the weight of his past on her, and they were both pretty far from happy now. He knew he had his good points—he hadn’t been a bad husband to Haylie, not by a long shot—but Lexie deserved someone whole. He’d be a shoddy substitute.
She was doing the right thing by distancing herself from him now. By the time they got to the coast, they’d both be so miserable, they’d welcome the end.
The road narrowed even further as he passed through a section that had been dynamited out of the hillside. The shoulder was practically nonexistent, a few inches of pavement squeezed between the white lane boundary and the jagged stone. A semi with a full load of logs rattled by going way too fast, so close to knocking him against the rocks he had to slam on his brakes and put both feet on the ground to restore his balance. His back tire lifted high into the air at the abrupt stop, then slammed back down. Tom looked up automatically to make sure Lexie was okay, but she was already out of sight around a sharp corner. Then he heard the screech of air brakes and the mournful cry of the truck’s horn, and he split in two.
One part of him got his feet back on the pedals and started riding as hard as he could uphill, his legs screaming and his chest tight with the effort of fighting physics and gravity. The other part showed him, in Technicolor detail, exactly what that truck had done to Lexie when it hit her. Her broken body. Dark blood staining her hair. Gruesome, horrible images. His legs worked furiously, his stomach churned, and he lost her over and over again.
When he came around the corner, he saw her bike first. The rear reflector caught the sunlight and flashed scarlet, and then the rest of it hit him in one ugly rush—Lexie’s bike and trailer in a chaotic pile next to the rock, and the woman he loved facedown in a heap on the asphalt.
Dead, he thought, and the pavement rushed up at him. Dizzy and clumsy, he lost his footing on one pedal and gouged his shin deeply on the jagged metal edge before he managed to bring his body and his bike back under control.
He hardly felt it. Didn’t care. He was pushing back with all his might against that word—dead—trying to banish the thought and the possibility as he drew on adrenaline and previously unknown reserves of strength to pump harder and faster up the steep incline. Every scrap of him that was good—every piece of faith he had left, every ghostly remnant of hope—was fixed on Lexie, willing her to be fine. Willing her to be as invincible, as permanent, as he needed her to be.
Twenty feet away, he came to such an abrupt stop that the metal rims of his tires screeched in protest, and then he flung the bike down and ran.
She was already moving when he got to her, her hands finding the asphalt and levering her torso off the ground.
Not dead.
The relief made his knees weak, and he sank down beside her.
“Jesus, Lexie, are you hurt?” He looked for blood or breaks, thinking of abdominal bleeding, of head and spinal injuries. His fingers twitched as though he could heal her himself if he only knew what part to treat—which was absurd, because he knew nothing. He had nothing to offer her but fear and rage. “That truck—that fucking reckless asshole—don’t move too fast, okay?”
She ignored him, unbuckling her helmet as she rose to her feet. “I’m fine,” she said dully.
“You’re not fine! Christ, Lex, he hit you! He must have winged you, or you’d be—” He couldn’t complete this thought. “What was it, did he get you with the side mirror or something? Did you—”
She stuck her hand up, a stop sign presented directly to his face in order to halt the questions. “He just crowded me. I grazed the rocks and lost my balance.” She did a quick inventory of her limbs, touched a bleeding scrape on one elbow with her index finger, picked up her bike, and started rummaging through her handlebar bag for so
mething.
“Your knee’s bleeding, too.” Tom came up behind her and settled both hands at her waist, wanting to reassure himself that she was solid and alive. If he could have, he’d have stripped off her shirt and laid his head against the center of her back to listen to her heartbeat. “You need to sit down. Drink some water. We’ve got to find you some shade.”
She pulled a bandana out of the bag, twisted herself free of his grip, and began the awkward job of tying the cloth around her elbow one-handed. “I’m fine. It’s just a few scrapes. Back off.”
There was a warning in her tone, but he ignored it. “At least let me do that,” he said, reaching for her arm.
“Back off, Geiger,” she said, smacking his hand away. “I can do this myself. Every single fucking thing you want to help me with, I can do myself.”
In the end, she held the bandana in place with her chin, glaring at him as she defiantly tended to her own wounds. He saw no trace of love in her eyes—only anger. He wanted to pull her into his arms and clean her scrapes, and then he wanted to find a campsite and get her inside his tent and make love to her until she lost all will to leave him.
But that wasn’t what Lexie wanted. Not anymore. She’d taken what he had to give her, weighed it out, and seen it for what it was.
Too little. He was so much less than she needed him to be.
She glanced down at her knee and apparently decided the scrape wasn’t worth bothering with. The plastic click of her helmet buckle slotting into place hit him with all the force of an insult.
Lexie did a quick inspection of the drive train and trailer hookup, threw one leg over her bike, and rode away without so much as a glance in his direction.
Tom stood perfectly still and watched her go, too shocked and broken to do anything about it.
Once she’d disappeared from view, he dropped down into a squat, one hand braced against the rock face. He pressed his fingertips into the space between his eyebrows and willed the images away, but they wouldn’t go.
Lexie, bleeding. Lexie, broken. Lexie, dead.
He could lose her, really lose her, and the bone-deep knowledge knocked loose some essential stubbornness he’d been clinging to. Squatting there by the side of the road, paralyzed with fear, he understood he couldn’t let go of her. He simply couldn’t. If he said goodbye when they got to Yorktown, he wouldn’t be able to watch out for her. He’d never know where she was or what she was doing, who she was with. She’d sleep in a bed he’d never seen, have lunch with a brother he’d never met, ride her bike alone, make love to another man. He couldn’t endure that.
He couldn’t go on without Lexie in his life every day, beside him in his bed every night.
Maybe she didn’t need him, but he needed her. Not having her was no longer an option.
He would just have to figure out how to become the man she wanted him to be. The man she deserved.
Sitting sideways on a wooden bench in Hindman, Kentucky, Tom thumbed listlessly through Walden and sneaked glances at Lexie inside the Laundromat every few minutes. She’d more or less forbidden him to come inside. Maybe she was afraid to be alone with him in such a small space. Who knew what he might do?
He’d tried speaking to her a few times since the accident, but she’d shut him down. The last time, as soon as he’d opened his lips, she’d simply said, “I can’t,” and walked away. He could’ve pressed, but he didn’t even know what he was going to say to her once he got her talking. It seemed important to keep trying anyway.
They’d put in almost five hundred miles since their fight, riding harder and longer every day than had been their pattern before. Lexie wanted to get the ride over with, he figured.
He still couldn’t sleep. He’d had no idea it was possible to feel so keyed-up and desperate for such an extended period of time. Eventually, he knew, his body was going to crash. They were nearly to Virginia, but Virginia was a big state. He wondered if he’d make it to Yorktown before he fell apart.
Walden lay open in his lap to the second chapter, and he let his eyes drift over the page again. This part of the book had Lexie’s favorite line, the one about how Thoreau had wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life. Tom reread the paragraph, struck by how different the text seemed now. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Interesting how getting your ass kicked by love could change your perspective. What had ever made him think his isolation was similar to Thoreau’s? He’d been trying to escape life for five years, and Thoreau had been on a quest to find out what it was all about. Lexie had it right—this was a book about how to be alive. Maybe it was just what he needed.
He let his eyes wander over the page, hoping more wisdom would pop out at him. “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep,” he read. “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.”
Well, that was a hopeful thought. The words bounced around in his head. The infinite expectation of the dawn. The unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. The certainty of it appealed to him. Thoreau, at least, had confidence that it was possible to will yourself into a better life. Now what he needed to do was figure out how it was possible.
He got up abruptly and went to stand in the doorway of the Laundromat. Lexie was putting their damp clothes into the dryer, and he watched her until she realized he was there and turned around. She didn’t quite meet his eyes.
“Can I ask you something?” When she looked like she was going to say no, he interrupted, “It’s about the book, I promise.”
“You want to talk about books?” she asked. An echo of their first civil conversation. She wasn’t smiling, but there was a hint of a smile in her voice.
He nodded, filing away the shape of her neck, the strand of hair she’d missed when she made her ponytail that morning. She had dark circles under her eyes. She hadn’t been eating enough lately. He wanted to step closer and breathe in the clean scent of her skin. He wanted to hold her and kiss her until neither one of them could remember what had put all this distance between them. But he knew better than to push it.
“How do you do it?” he asked, waggling the book at her.
“Do what?”
“How do you live deep and suck out all the marrow of life?”
She frowned. “Maybe I’m not the best person to ask.” In her green T-shirt and shorts, she looked small-boned, delicate. It was funny—in all the time he’d known her, he’d never once thought of her as small. She had so much personality.
“Come on, Marshall, you’re the best marrow-sucker I ever met.” She smiled a little at that, clearly against her will. Lexie never could resist a bawdy joke. “If you can’t answer the question, nobody can. Give it a shot,” he coaxed. She was warming up. This was the closest thing to a real conversation they’d had in more than a week.
She turned her back on him and put a few coins in the dryer, starting it up with the push of a button. Then she levered herself up to sit on top of a bank of washing machines, legs dangling over the side. She kept her eyes on her knees. “You know my dad’s the one who tells most of the Bikecentennial stories? My mom doesn’t talk about it much. I asked her once, and she said she and my dad had very different definitions of ‘adventure.’ ”
She was silent for a minute, and he wondered what any of this had to do with his question. He hadn’t expected a Bikecentennial answer to an inquiry about Walden.
“She told me a story I’d never heard from Dad. They rode east to west, right? And they met in Kansas. But Dad never mentioned they had a fight in Wyoming, and he started sharing a tent with some woman named Jill. Mom took off with a different group, figuring she’d nev
er see him again. Then one day she had a flat, I think in Idaho, and no spare tube. She was sitting by the side of the road waiting for somebody to come along and give her a lift when up rides my dad, alone. He told her he was sorry. He’d been scared things were moving too fast, and he’d panicked. It was a stupid mistake, and he wished he could take it back.”
She hopped down and walked over to the window. There wasn’t much to see out there. No traffic to speak of.
“So what did your mom do?” he asked, knowing this was the important part.
Lexie turned around and met his eyes, and she was there again. Wary, uncertain, but there. “She forgave him.”
“Why?”
Tunneling her hands into her pockets, she lifted her shoulders to her ears in a full-body shrug. “People make mistakes. She was in love with him, and she wanted to be happy more than she wanted to be angry. She made him buy her pie for breakfast all the way to Oregon.”
Tom nodded. He still needed to think about what she was saying, but he knew already it was the best Bikecentennial story he’d ever heard Lexie tell.
When he took a step closer, she tensed up, so he stopped. He wasn’t going to push her. Yet.
She met his eyes again. “There’s a middle ground,” she said softly. “Between too much guilt and not enough. If you look around for it, you can find it.”
Tom returned to the doorway. “Thanks, Marshall.”
Her parting comment came to him over his shoulder as he walked out. “Sometimes penance helps. My dad had the pie.”
Back on the bench again, he thought about the story. Was it really that straightforward? Could you decide I want to be happy more than I want to carry this around with me? Lexie seemed to think so. Thoreau did, too, with his comment about elevating your life by conscious endeavor. Maybe you could decide to be different. Maybe it really was that simple.
Over the past five years, he’d given a lot of thought to what he’d done wrong, but he hadn’t often wondered whether he could leave it behind, or what, if anything, there remained to fix. He hadn’t been looking for the middle ground. But he wanted to find it now. He wanted the infinite expectation of the dawn, and he wanted to share it with Lexie. He’d buy her all the damn pie she could eat.