Ride with Me

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.