The Longest Ride

someone finds me.
     

     
    “Ira.”

I hear it first in my dream, slurry and unformed, an underwater sound. It takes a moment before I realize someone is saying my name. But that is not possible.

“You must wake up, Ira.”

My eyes flutter open. In the seat beside me, I see Ruth, my wife.

“I’m awake,” I say, my head still against the steering wheel. Without my glasses, which were lost in the crash, her image lacks definition, like a ghost.

“You drove off the highway.”

I blink. “A maniac forced me off the road. I hit a patch of ice. Without my catlike reflexes, it would have been worse.”

“You drove off the road because you are blind as a bat and too old to be driving. How many times have I told you that you are a menace behind the wheel?”

“You’ve never said that to me.”

“I should have. You didn’t even notice the curve.” She pauses. “You are bleeding.”

Lifting my head, I wipe my forehead with my good hand and it comes back red. There is blood on the steering wheel and the dash, smears of red everywhere. I wonder how much blood I’ve lost. “I know.”

“Your arm is broken. And your collarbone, too. And there is something wrong with your shoulder.”

“I know,” I say again. As I blink, Ruth fades in and out.

“You need to get to the hospital.”

“No argument there,” I say.

“I am worried about you.”

I breathe in and out before I respond. Long breaths. “I’m worried about me, too,” I finally say.

My wife, Ruth, is not really in the car. I realize this. She died nine years ago, the day I felt my life come to a full stop. I had called to her from the living room, and when she didn’t answer, I rose from my chair. I could move without a walker back then, though it was still slow going, and after reaching the bedroom, I saw her on the floor, near the bed, lying on her right side. I called for an ambulance and knelt beside her. I rolled her onto her back and felt her neck, detecting nothing at all. I put my mouth to hers, breathing in and out, the way I had seen on television. Her chest went up and down and I breathed until the world went black at the edges, but there was no response. I kissed her lips and her cheeks, and I held her close against me until the ambulance arrived. Ruth, my wife of more than fifty-five years, had died, and in the blink of an eye, all that I’d loved was gone as well.

“Why are you here?” I ask her.

“What kind of question is that? I am here because of you.”

Of course. “How long was I asleep?”

“I do not know,” she answers. “It is dark, though. I think you are cold.”

“I’m always cold.”

“Not like this.”

“No,” I agree, “not like this.”

“Why were you driving on this road? Where were you going?”

I think about trying to move, but the memory of the lightning bolt stops me. “You know.”

“Yes,” she says. “You were driving to Black Mountain. Where we spent our honeymoon.”

“I wanted to go one last time. It’s our anniversary tomorrow.”

She takes a moment to respond. “I think you are going soft in your head. We were married in August, not February.”

“Not that anniversary,” I say. I don’t tell her that according to the doctor, I will not last until August. “Our other anniversary,” I say instead.

“What are you talking about? There is no other anniversary. There is only one.”

“The day my life changed forever,” I say. “The day I first saw you.”

For a moment, Ruth says nothing. She knows I mean it, but unlike me, she has a hard time saying such things. She loved me with a passion, but I felt it in her expressions, in her touch, in the tender brush of her lips. And, when I needed it most, she loved me with the written word as well.

“It was February sixth, 1939,” I say. “You were shopping downtown with your mother, Elisabeth, when the two of you came into the shop. Your mother wanted to buy a hat for your father.”

She leans back in the seat, her eyes still on me. “You came out of the back room,” she says. “And a moment later, your mother followed you.”

Yes, I suddenly recall, my mother did follow. Ruth has always had an extraordinary memory.

Like my mother’s family, Ruth’s family was from Vienna, but they’d immigrated to North Carolina only two months earlier. They’d fled Vienna after the Anschluss of Austria, when Hitler and the Nazis absorbed Austria into the Reich. Ruth’s father, Jakob Pfeffer, a professor of art