Three nights later, the waters receded from the bike path.
I hadn't been riding to and from work.
Doreen had called, actually. Just to talk.
I told her to swing by the restaurant soon, that I'd make her favorite, like old times. Her breath hitched a bit over that.
Four years, that's a long time. For me too.
"And you need to be careful," she said, when we were both signing off awkwardly—awkward because we'd been saying the same thing at the end of every call for so long. What were we supposed to say now?
"Careful?" I said.
"Those two kids who died," she said.
"They weren't riding," I told her.
"Just be careful."
I promised her I would and we somehow broke the connection.
It was my night off.
What she'd said, though. It was a challenge, wasn't it?
You only have to be careful when you think something can really happen to you. When you're twenty, twenty-five, nothing in the world can touch you.
To prove that still applied to me, I unclamped my bike from the rack, checked the tire pressure front and back, then nodded to myself about this, trucked us downstairs, to the sidewalk that led to the path that ran alongside the creek, up the canyon if I followed that far.
It was one, two in the morning. Late enough that the hand-in-hand lovers would be bedded down someplace secret. Late enough that all the smokers who'd promised they'd quit weren't out for one last drag.
Just me and the creatures of the night.
My headlight only stabbed fifteen, twenty feet into the darkness.
To show I could, that I still had those legs, I pumped hard for the black space of the mountains. I knew better than to try to make the whole climb. But even a little would prove something.
I made it the same two miles, not pushing hard, just steady climbing, before I wheeled around, rode gravity back to town.
Two homeless men, tuned to nature better than the usual baby stroller crowd, stepped away from each other to let me slip between them at thirty miles per hour. I nodded thanks, but it's always an empty gesture. You're going too fast for it to register, and you can't ever check back to see if they even saw your gratitude.
Empty gestures are what make the world go round, though.
I swooped under two, three bridges, pedaling though I didn't really need to. There was still silt on the concrete. It crunched under my tires like sugar granules.
"Careful," I said again, to myself. Just retasting the word. Mining into it for what Doreen had really been trying to get across.
I looked down, shut my eyes—I was on a straightaway, the one that tunneled through the next quarter mile or so of trees—watching my top tube coast back and forth instead of doing the first thing Coach always said: keeping my eyes on the line I was taking.
My headlight was what saved me from myself.
A piece of driftwood, obviously dragged up onto the path.
Doing it without thinking—it was years too late to stop—I bunny hopped the wood. When you're clipped in and your bike goes eleven pounds, you can do this.
I came down with both tires at once, like's proper if you want to keep control, and had to skid immediately, as clearing the next chunk of driftwood would only land me on a third piece. This wasn't just a symbolic attempt to sabotage the trail. This was set up to hurt any rider who came at it with a head of speed.
I didn't wipe out, though. It was close, but I knew to cantilever out, ahead, and keep hold of the bike so it didn't crash into me, send us both spinning into the darkness. It was a once-in-fifty tries dismount, but I landed it.
Breathing hard from the close call, all the profanity I knew welling up in me, I looked back at what almost was, what should have been if I hadn't just cashed in all my luck for the next ten years, and then I directed my headlight ahead, into the turn, to what other obstacles awaited.
The night cyclists's white face looked back to me.
His white face and his red mouth and chin. His deep black eyes.
I flinched, but then realized why he wasn't already at my throat: He was impaled on the seat post of his own bike. He was impaled just like I would be, if I hadn't reeled all my speed in. But my speed, it had probably only been half of his.