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.