And he remembered his answer.I think about the ride, Lena. I think about getting out.
He had told the mother of his child that his only ambition was to leave her.
He looked at the baby in the photo. The red, squalling face.
He had been in Nevada when this baby was born. He had been winning his first buckle. He had been drinking champagne and sleeping with a buckle bunny in Reno while Elena was pushing a human being out of her body, alone, in a hospital room in Billings.
The nausea hit him hard. He staggered, grabbing the edge of the dresser to keep from falling. His broken leg throbbed, a distant drumbeat, but the pain in his chest was sharper. It was the sensation of his heart breaking, not for himself, but for her.
She hadn't told him.
Why?
Because he hadn't answered the phone.
You never answered my calls,she had said.
He remembered the missed calls that first month. Five. Ten. Twenty. He had deleted them. He thought she was calling to beg him to come back. He thought she was calling to guilt him.
She was calling to tell him he was a father.
"Ryder?"
The footsteps stopped at the doorway.
Ryder didn't turn around. He couldn't. He stared at the photo, his thumb tracing the date stamp.
"Get out of there," Elena’s voice whispered. It wasn't angry. It was terrified.
Ryder slowly turned.
Elena stood in the doorframe. She was wearing her white coat, still clutching her car keys. Her face was drained of blood, leaving her skin the color of old paper. She looked at the photo in his hand. Then she looked at his face.
She saw that he knew.
The air in the room vanished.
"September 14th," Ryder said. His voice was a stranger's voice. Hollow. Dead.
Elena didn't speak. She leaned against the doorframe, as if her legs had suddenly given out.
"I left on January 15th," Ryder continued, the math spilling out of him like blood from a wound. "That’s eight months. Which means..."
He looked at her stomach. He remembered how thin she had been when he left.
"You knew," he whispered. "When I got on the bus. You knew."
Elena closed her eyes. A single tear leaked out, tracking through the dust on her cheek.
"I suspected," she whispered. "I took the test the morning you left. The stick turned blue while I was watching your taillights disappear down the driveway."
Ryder felt his knees give way. He sank onto the edge of the twin bed—his son's bed. The mattress springs creaked.
He looked around the room. The cowboys. The bulls. The red boots.
It wasn't a shrine to a fan. It was a shrine to a ghost.
"He's mine," Ryder said.
