Chapter 5 #2
I look at him for a second.
"Yeah," I say. "It's yours too."
Cash loses five dollars to Ramsey on a side bet about whether EJ would claim the bike before noon. He pays up grinning.
I'm not going to tell Cash and Ramsey, but I think Ramsey's going to win the big bet too.
The Annual Ride
6 Years Later
I don't tell anyone where I go.
Every year on the same date I get on the bike before the sun's up and I ride out of town and I don't come back until I'm ready.
I take the highway east until the town is gone and then I open it up and I ride until the speedometer hits something that would get me arrested and I hold it there until my head goes quiet. Then I come back.
It's not healthy. I know that. I'm not doing it because it's healthy.
The brothers have noticed over the years that I disappear on the same date every autumn.
Nobody asks. That's one of the things about this club, there are questions that don't get asked because the asking would cost more than the answer is worth.
Brick knows what day it is. I've never told him but he knows the way he knows most things about me, without me saying them, because he was there at the beginning and he remembers.
He never says a word about it.
The year EJ turns six, I almost don't come back.
I don't mean that in any dark way. I just mean I sit down on the side of the highway about forty miles out of town with the bike ticking beside me as it cools and I can't find the thing that normally pulls me back.
The urgency of it. The forward momentum.
I sit on the hard shoulder in the cold and the trucks go past and I think about ten years.
Ten years since she walked out of the compound and I let her go.
She'll be a doctor by now. A real one, fully qualified, the thing she always said she was going to be. She'll have a practice somewhere, or a hospital post, and she'll have the life I made sure she had room to build. That was the deal I made with myself. That was the point of all of it.
I think about calling her.
I don't have her number. I haven't had it since she got a new phone the first year she was at college and I wasn't the kind of person she'd have given the new one to.
I could probably find it if I tried. Shadow would know someone who could track it down and he'd do it without asking why if I asked him to.
I could have her number in twenty-four hours.
I sit on the side of the highway and I think about that for a long time.
Then I think about what I'd say.
Hey, Savannah. It's Austin. I know it's been ten years.
I know I did the worst thing I've ever done to make you leave.
I know you probably hate me and you have every right to.
But I've got a son and a patch and I'm somebody now, or trying to be, and I think about you on this date every year and I just wondered if you ever…
If you ever what?
I don't finish that thought. I sit with the unfinished thought on the side of the highway until a truck goes past close enough to move the air around me, and then I get up. I get back on the bike and I ride home.
I think about Cam's words from that first year, her quiet observation that Savannah wasn't coming back and that was the point.
She was right then. She's still right now.
I made a choice and the choice had a cost and the cost was always going to be this, sitting on a highway shoulder once a year wondering about a woman who built her life without me in it exactly the way I intended.
The thing about doing the right thing is that it doesn't stop hurting.
You think it will. You think at some point the rightness of it will outweigh the hurt of it and the scales will tip and you'll be fine.
What actually happens is you get good at carrying it.
You get so good at carrying it that most days you don't notice the weight anymore, and then one day a year you sit on a cold verge and feel every ounce of it.
That's the deal. I made it with my eyes open.
I get back on the bike and I ride home.
EJ is awake when I get in, which he shouldn't be at nine o'clock on a school night, but Rosie is sitting on the sofa with him watching something on TV and she gives me the look that means he wouldn't settle. I mouth thank you at her and she shrugs like it's nothing.
I carry him up to bed. He's heavy now, not the solid compact weight of a toddler but a nine-year-old's gangly sprawling weight, arms and legs going everywhere. I put him down and he burrows into his pillow and I sit on the edge of his bed in the dark.
"Dad," he says, eyes still closed.
"Yeah."
"You were gone."
"I know. I'm back."
He thinks about this. "Story," he says.
I reach for the book on his nightstand. It's one we've read before, a knight who travels to find a kingdom that's rightfully his and keeps getting it wrong because he won't ask anyone for directions. EJ thinks it's funny. I've always found it a little close to home.
I read until his breathing slows and evens out, which takes about ten minutes, and he's gone before the knight figures out that the kingdom he's been looking for is the one he already built while he was looking.
I read the ending anyway, in the quiet of his room, just me and the lamp and the sound of him sleeping.
The knight gets home. He's been gone so long things have changed. The people who were waiting for him have built a life around his absence and it's a good life and he has to decide whether to step back into it or watch it from the outside.
He steps back in. The ending's happy.
I close the book and sit there for another minute.
One day, I think. Maybe.
I turn off the lamp and go downstairs and Rosie is still on the sofa and she hands me a beer without looking up from the TV. I sit down and I don't think about Savannah for the rest of the night.
Much.