We’re both smiling at each other as he finishes.
Needing another distraction, I say, “Do one more. Then I’ll stop nagging you for tonight.”
He’s silent, staring at the fire. His face sobers in the flickering, orange light. So much so that my chest is already tightening when he starts to sing.
“Peace in the Valley.”
He tries to play it up the way he did the other two, giving the first verse some Elvis trills, but the poignancy of the words and music drag him away from the lighter mood pretty quick.
The world stills to complete silence. Even Molly, lying beside me and cleaning her paws, lifts her head and stares at him. My eyes are burning, and I can barely breathe around the lump in my throat as he gets toward the end.
He’s not meeting my eyes. He’s gazing into the dark, dying forest as he sings the vision of a world without violence or conflict, a world where everything bad and broken has been transformed.
It’s eerie. Haunting. Encapsulates a truth I’ve been ignoring in order to survive.
So much that was good and beautiful in the world has been lost. Forever lost—not only because of the devastationof the planet but from all the violence and chaos that followed.
And the life that’s left for us who survived this long is so much harder and uglier and emptier.
What’s good that still remains is like the flickering light of the fire, flaming out only briefly before it withdraws. Glancing and reshaping itself each moment so it’s nearly impossible to capture.
And Micah’s song—his beautiful, aching voice—has become the symbol for all that we’ve lost. That and the small, bittersweet hope that this brokenness won’t last forever.
It hangs in the air for only a moment. Lovely. Heartbreaking. Ephemeral. Then fades into silence.
And the song is lost. As lost as the hope it embodied.
There are tears in my eyes when he finishes, and I have to pretend to scratch my face in order to surreptitiously wipe them away.
Micah doesn’t look at me.
“Okay,” I say when the heaviness of the silence gets to me. “Thank you for singing for me. Why don’t we get things ready for the night. I’m tired.”
“Yeah,” he says thickly. “Me too.”
We gothrough the evening routines without conversation, and soon we’re in bed.
I’m tired and emotional and my arm is both sore and itching. But none of that matters nearly as much as what I’m sensing in Micah.
He’s stiff and wordless in a way he never is. Something’s wrong, but he’s pretending that it’s not.
I can feel it in the air. Sense it in his presence on the other side of the camper. I don’t say anything because I have no idea what to say, but I want to comfort him somehow.
I’ve never been good at that. I’ve never been a soft, reassuring person. I’ve never been good with emotion the way a lot of women I knew always were.
I’ve always wanted to hide from it. Pretend it wasn’t happening.
But this is happening. It’s happening to Micah. He’s lying on his side with his back toward me, but his posture is oddly defensive. Like he’s trying to curl in on himself to protect what’s wounded inside him.
After a long time—I have no idea how long—I hear something from his side. A shaky, breathless sound.
I make a choked exclamation and get up. I can’t stand this. I simply can’t stand it.
I can’t leave him over there hurting all by himself.
Without a word, I climb into bed with him and curl around his tense form, trying to spoon him.
“No, no, baby,” he says rough and stretched. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
