Page 73 of Night Songs

Martha and I worked on a few ideas with me singing and her on piano. It still felt a little strange to make music in such an effortful way, instead of just listening to the music that drifted into my head. But I’d learned so much about music, and there was still so much to discover. I was trying to make peace with the fact that it wasn’t coming back. I’d found other ways to be with God, and that would have to be enough.

We worked until her keys fuzzed and grayed, and we realized we’d forgotten to turn on the lights as the sun fell. That was my cue to head home.

Every evening Tate and I made dinner together, and then we put on a new record, or he read out loud to me from one of his college books. He’d introduced me to writers like Mary Shelley, Flannery O’Connor, and Sylvia Plath. “My freaks,” he liked to call them. They were my people.

I drove home in my Gran Torino with the windows down. We were right on the edge of fall, and the maples were just starting to turn. Wood smoke curled in on the breeze, and I had this good, clean feeling that maybe I was finally figuring out how to live this brief life.

When I got in, the table was already laid with a feast. Emmylou Harris’s “Boulder to Birmingham” was playing on the record player with its mournful beauty. It was bluer than we’d been leaning since we got sober.

I found him in the bedroom with his bicep tied off with a belt and a needle still in his arm. He must have injected seconds prior, because his lashes were fluttering like he was launching up and away. As if the whole world was passing behind his eyes.

I pulled the needle out and ripped off the belt. I held him in my lap andsaid his name. He opened his eyes, and they were glazed like donuts. He smiled dreamily and reached up to touch my jaw as if testing its solidity.

“I waited for you. I was going to show you, and then we were going to decide. To be or not to be. To be or not to be…”

I told him I was sorry. I told him this was just one slipup. He would ride this one out, and I’d flush the rest of it, and we’d just pick up where we left off. As I said this, I eyed the half-full baggie that sat forlornly on the nightstand.

His hand released my jaw and fell limply against the bed. His eyes rolled to the back of his head, and his throat made this horrific gurgling sound.

“No, no, no,” I pleaded, trying to prop him up, as if erect posture would bring him back to consciousness, but he was like a scarecrow in my arms. I turned him on his side so he wouldn’t choke on his vomit, but nothing came out. I held my finger under his nose and felt his chest, but there was no movement. He wasn’t breathing.

I put my mouth around his and tried to give him my air. I’d give him everything I had—my lungs, my heart, my brain. Anything he needed to start living again.

But he only turned cold and blue in my arms, the warmth fading from him like the end of summer out on the road.

As I called for an ambulance, I felt this stark loneliness sweep into the room, and I looked down and saw that he was gone.

Since the night I met him, we’d been on this journey together. Even when he was off on his solo adventures, we were still linked, traveling like two connected particles through the universe.

But now I was utterly alone.

A lone traveler.

Hurtling through time and space toward my inevitable death with nothing but emptiness before me.

25rhea

2002

When we first arrived in Phoenix, it felt like we’d crash-landed on an alien planet, with the red Mars soil and rock formations, the agave with their spiked tentacles, the shops selling crystals glinting with energy.

And it was this strange backdrop, this separation from everything we’d known before, that had allowed us to build a new life together over the past six years.

That afternoon, Micah and I sat at our kitchen island while I showed him the teaser my partner had cut for our latest documentary. Micah paused it on a clip of a woman walking rows of heirloom corn, her dexterous fingers smoothing back the silks and running over the purple kernels.

“I like this, but I think we need a better sense of the setting—this is agriculture in the middle of the desert. Life in a place thought to be lifeless,” he said, tucking a piece of hair behind my ear.

I let the rest of the video play through, nodding. “You’re totally right. I’ll let Mike know.”

After a few years exploring in college, I’d finally declared history as my major. Not because of an inherent love for the subject, but for the courses that blew everything I thought I knew about a topic apart, that challengedme to scrape beneath the surface and find the truth. I was addicted to that kind of obliteration.

It was in my final year that I met Mike, a film major, and we put together our first documentary as a joint thesis project. After graduation, instead of taking a low-paying job, hoping one day someone would let me do what I actually loved, I started a production company with my mother’s money and began doing what I wanted right away, no permission required. Mike and I had made a handful of documentaries on subjects that interested us, getting better each time, and this latest was set to be something special—a profile on a chef in Arizona who was using local indigenous ingredients to return us to a lost way of life.

Micah was showing me his latest blown-glass piece—from a series of creatures inspired by the desert vegetation—when my phone rang. It was Hess.

Without saying hello, as if all she could muster were three words, she whispered, “Martha is gone.”

Martha had recently been diagnosed with lung cancer. It took her quick, and in some ways it seemed like a kindness. Once her ability to play music went, life wasn’t worth living for her.