The Song of David

I TRADED ONE room for another, holing up in different parts of my best friend’s house. But this time, I wasn’t hiding. I was healing. Or hoping. Maybe that was it. Maybe I was allowing myself to hope.

No one came knocking. No one brought food or slid notes under the door. Even Henry. He was taken care of, and Millie and I both knew it. So we stayed locked away, together.

Darkness descended outside, and the stars came out. Millie couldn’t see them, but I told her they were there, fat and bright in the sky outside the big bay window in the guest room. I told her how I’d lain beneath those stars as a boy, sleeping out on the trampoline in my backyard in Dallas. I told her how, ten years later, Moses and I had stretched out on the deck of a boat going down the Nile River in Africa. I’d looked up at that never-ending expanse, and I’d recognized that old feeling. The very same feeling I’d had as a kid. I didn’t feel insignificant under the stars. I felt huge, like the heavens revolved around me. I was bigger than the stars. I was bigger and brighter, and the world was mine. I was so enormous I could hold up my thumb and completely blot one out, hold up my hand and obliterate a whole section of the sky. Such power. Such size. I wasn’t David, I was Goliath.

As I laid in that bed with Millie, the drapes pushed aside, staring out at the winking stars over a tiny town I’d never called home, that feeling surged inside me once again. I was relevant. I was significant. I had wanted to disappear, if only so the cancer could disappear with me. But the stars whispered that there was no such thing. You don’t ever disappear. You just change. You leave. You move on. But you never disappear. Even when you think you want to.

Millie didn’t laugh. She didn’t tease me about feeling God-like. She just listened to me talk, my fingers climbing up and down the smooth skin of her back, tracing the curve of her hip and the length of her leg that was thrown across mine. And then I pulled her into me, my hand at the base of her spine, and she caught her breath and said my name, and I felt God-like all over again.





I DON’T KNOW what time it was when we finally spoke again. We had slept for hours and awoke with growling bellies and dry throats, but stuck our faces beneath the bathroom tap and guzzled water to ease our thirst, just so we wouldn’t have to leave the room. Then Millie’s mouth found mine, her lips wet and cold, water clinging to her chin and sliding down her breasts, and we began again. Sometime before dawn, I attempted to slide out of bed, untangling myself from my sleeping beauty only to have her come fully awake and sit up, reaching for me, panicked.

Her fear made me sad because I had created it.

“Shhh, Millie. I’m not going anywhere. I promise. I’ll be right back,” I whispered, kissing her forehead and smoothing her hair. “Lay back down. I promise you I won’t leave again. Not on purpose. Not ever again.”

She nodded and sank back against the pillows as I pulled on my jeans, but when I came back several minutes later, her eyes were open and she was waiting, listening for me, the sheets pulled up over her body, one arm curled under her head.

“Where’d you go?” she asked.

“Your mighty hunter has brought meat. And bread. And cheese,” I grunted in my best caveman voice.

“And Miracle Whip?” she interrupted.

“Gross.”

“You know I like Miracle Whip.”

“And Miracle Whip,” I said, handing her a sandwich on a plate, complete with Miracle Whip, just the way she liked it.

I scarfed down three sandwiches in the time it took her to eat one and cracked the top on a can of soda, listening to the bubbles for just a second in quiet appreciation of Millie’s favorite sounds.

When we were done, I padded back to the kitchen and set our plates in the sink, put the sandwich fixings back in the fridge, and closed the tie on the bread bag. That’s when I spied the keys to my truck on the counter and paused, considering. I swept them up and was out the front door, inside my truck, and then back in the house in less than a minute, grateful that the house was still quiet and Millie hadn’t chased me down.

Millie was brushing her teeth and her hair at the same time, wearing my discarded T-shirt and looking like salvation, even in the dark. I sat on the bed and watched her, enjoying her, but she’d heard me come in, even over the running water. She knew I was there.

She climbed back into bed, snuggling down, and I thought about tugging my T-shirt over her head and kicking off my jeans, but some things required pants and I kind of felt like this was one of them. I crawled up behind her and wrapped myself around her, pulling her back against my chest. Then I whispered into her hair.

“Will you marry me, Millie?”