“You can be grateful, and it can still be hard,” Priya said, filling her own. “But on a happier note, Neel and I have a babysitter booked for your show. He’s flipping out that we got VIP passes.”
Emily laughed, happy to focus on the show instead of on pregnancy. “Well, you’re my Very Important People,” she said.
Priya shook her head. “It really is incredible. Your life from a few months ago to now is a hundred percent different. How does Ezra feel, now that the show is getting closer?”
Emily thought about her answer. “He’s happy for me. But I think he’s worried, too, that all this work we’ve done won’t last. Our relationship is so different than it was when we got married, but I think I like this version of us better. It’s messier, but it feels stronger.”
“And you and Rob?” Priya asked.
Emily leaned against the arm of the couch. “He’s been a really good friend. And a huge champion. He made all of this possible. Ari thinks he has an ulterior motive, but I’d like to think that he doesn’t. That he was being honest in Mexico when he agreed to be friends, nothing more.”
Priya nodded as she added milk to her tea from the pitcher Emily had left on the coffee table. “I’d like to think that, too.”
Both women were quiet for a moment.
Emily was so glad that she and Priya had crossed from work friends to actual friends who would hang out together regardless of who worked where.
“How are my kids doing?” Emily asked. Priya had taken on a lot of Emily’s patients when she left. She hadn’t realized how hard it would be to leave them, and she still thought about them all the time.
“All trucking along,” Priya said, taking a sip of tea. “Have you heard from Tessa?”
Now that Tessa wasn’t her patient anymore, she sent Emily an email from time to time.
“Last I heard, doing well in Ohio. She and Zoe are living with her mom and she’s taking classes at Cleveland State. Still working toward law school one day.” Emily thought about Rob and his mom’s saying, Everything is always okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, it just means it isn’t the end. She didn’t believe it, not one hundred percent, but she understood what his mom meant by it. Things happen, and usually people can work through them; usually they can find a semblance of normal, a way to keep going, in spite of the pain. If they’re lucky, they’ll even find a way to thrive.
63
The next Sunday Emily and Ezra were walking through the city, bundled up against the December cold, when Ezra spotted a piano in the park.
“Is that one of the Sing for Hope pianos?” he asked. “I thought they were supposed to go to schools in September. What happened to this one?”
Emily walked over, too. The piano had been placed in a gazebo, safe from rain or snow. The change in temperature couldn’t have been good for it. “Maybe they forgot this one,” Emily said.
“More likely they left it here on purpose,” Ezra answered, lifting up the cover on the keys to play a few notes.
Emily prepared herself to wince, but it wasn’t as out of tune as she’d feared. She walked closer, running her fingers up the keys in a scale. “Not bad,” she said.
“Any requests?” she asked him, sitting down on the bench, taking off her gloves.
Ezra leaned against the piano and looked at her. “How about one of your songs?”
Emily had been working on something new. Something about her and Ezra that she was calling “Dark Night of My Soul.” She started to play and sing softly to her husband.
Lost in the blackness
When my soul felt bleak
When my heart felt broken
My body weak
My love for you
Reached its peak
It was the dark night of my soul
Ezra sat down next to her on the bench. “I think that one’s a duet,” he said.
She looked at him, her eyebrows raised in question.
“Will you teach it to me?” he asked. The vulnerability in his eyes touched her. Over the last couple of months their hearts had been slowly opening to each other again, and she saw his now, wide open, every door unlocked.
So she taught her husband the melody. And once he was able to sing it, she harmonized behind him. And then changed the words at the end of the chorus: It was the dark night of our souls.
He was right. The song worked fine as a solo, but it had an even deeper meaning as a duet. With the bare trees around them, sheltering them from the wind, it felt like they were in a bubble of their own in the middle of Central Park, the two of them, singing to each other, a healing of wounds they’d both inflicted. She felt her voice melding with his, her heart melding with his—it was a specific closeness that she’d only ever felt before with Rob. Emily’s and Ezra’s voices meshed perfectly together, and she poured her love for him, for the baby they had lost, and her hopes for a future together, into the music. Emily was grateful for the choices she had made, for her decision to be with Ezra. And for his decision to be with her, to stay. For the work they had done to come back from the dark night of their souls. They had been tested and they had survived.