The Longest Ride

memories, yet the war stayed with me. For the rest of my life, I carried wounds that no man could see but were impossible to leave behind. Joe Torrey and Bud Ramsey were the best kind of men, yet they had died while I had survived, and the guilt never quite left me. The flak that tore through my body made it a struggle to walk on cold winter mornings, and my stomach has never been the same. I can’t drink milk or eat spicy food, and I was never able to regain all the weight I lost. I have not been in an airplane since 1945, and I found it impossible to sit through movies that dealt with war. I do not like hospitals. For me, after all, the war – and my time in the hospital – had changed everything.
     

     
    “You are crying,” Ruth says to me.

In another place, at another time, I would wipe the tears from my face with the back of my hand. But here and now, the task seems impossible.

“I didn’t realize it,” I say.

“You often cried in your sleep,” Ruth says to me. “When we were first married. I would hear you at night and the sound would break my heart. I would rub your back and hush you and sometimes you would roll over and become silent. But other times, it would continue through the night, and in the mornings, you would tell me that you could not remember the reason.”

“Sometimes I didn’t.”

She stares at me. “But sometimes you did,” she finishes.

I squint at her, thinking her form is almost like liquid, as if I’m staring at her through shimmering heat waves that rise from the asphalt in summer. She wears a navy dress and a white hair band, and her voice sounds older. It takes a moment, but I realize she is twenty-three, her age when I returned from the war.

“I was thinking about Joe Torrey,” I said.

“Your friend” – she nods – “the one who ate five hot dogs in San Francisco. The one who bought you your first beer.”

I never told her about the cigarettes, for I know she would have disapproved. Ruth always hated their smell. It is a lie of omission, but I long ago convinced myself that it was the right thing to do. “Yes,” I say.

The morning light surrounds Ruth in a halo.

“I wish I could have met him,” she says.

“You would have liked him.”

Ruth clears her throat, considering this, before turning away. She faces the snow-caked window, her thoughts her own. This car, I think, has become my tomb.

“You were also thinking about the hospital,” she murmurs.

When I nod, she emits a weary sigh.

“Did you not hear what I told you?” she says, turning to me again. “That it did not matter to me? I would not lie to you about this.”

“Not on purpose,” I answer. “But I think that maybe, you sometimes lied to yourself.”

She is surprised by my words, if only because I have never spoken so directly on this matter. But I know I am right.

“This is why you stopped writing me,” she observes. “After you had been sent back to California, your letters became less frequent until they finally stopped coming at all. I did not hear from you for six months.”

“I stopped writing because I remembered what you’d told me.”

“Because you wanted to end it between us.” There is an undercurrent of anger in her voice, and I can’t meet her eyes.

“I wanted you to be happy.”

“I was not happy,” she snaps. “I was confused and heartbroken and I did not understand what had happened. And I prayed for you every day, hoping you would let me help you. But instead, I would go to the mailbox and find it empty, no matter how many letters I sent.”

“I’m sorry. It was wrong of me to do that.”

“Did you even read my letters?”

“Every one. I read them over and over, and more than once, I tried to write so you could know what happened. But I could never find the right words.”

She shakes her head. “You did not even tell me when you were to arrive home. It was your mother who told me, and I thought about meeting you at the station, like you used to do when I came home.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I wanted to see if you would come to me. But days passed and then a week, and when I did not see you at the synagogue, I understood that you were trying to avoid me. So I finally marched over to your shop and told you that I needed to speak to you. And do you remember what you said to me?”

Of all the things I’ve said in my life, these are the words I regret the most. But Ruth is waiting, her tense expression fixed on my face. There is