The Sky Beneath My Feet - By Lisa Samson Page 0,13

go out and check. Rick’s never disappeared in the middle of the night. Then again, this has been an exceptional day. There’s no way of predicting how it might end up. I left my slippers upstairs, but a pair of Rick’s boots stands in the mudroom beside the back door. I step into them and let myself out.

Walking outside under the moonlight in nothing but a terrycloth robe and a pair of oversized boots is a magically illicit experience. Half fairyland elf, half little girl playing dress-up. The shed gives off a faint orange glow, last traces of a dwindling fire. Instead of the door, I go to the window, pressing myself close to the windowpane.

For such a small space, Rick has managed to pack it full of creature comforts. A little couch and chair, a bookshelf, a cast-off rug, a locking rolltop desk where he keeps his computer. All of this is lit by the flickering fire, which casts as much shadow as it does light. At first, there’s no sign of my husband.

Then I see him. In only his boxers, lying facedown on the floor, his arms thrown wide. My heart jumps and I recoil from the window. He’s dead, his body cooling on the floor, victim of a tragic post-coital heart attack. But no. I look again. I smile at my fright. He’s not dead, he’s . . .

Praying.

That thing happens in my chest again, the fluttering, heaving thing where the space that seemed so compact, so full, suddenly expands on you. This whole new capacity in your heart to love. And you feel warm and vulnerable and alive.

I pick my way around the side of the shed, the door latch cold in my hand. The door opens without a creak. I step inside, feeling the heat, the sniff of woodsmoke. I pause at his uncovered feet, then lower myself down, getting almost to my knees, touching the couch to steady myself, unaccustomed to the motion.

I want to touch him, but I don’t. I want to say something, but I keep silent.

I wait.

This is a vigil he’s keeping. He read it somewhere or saw it in a movie—a young knight on the evening before he was to be dubbed kept vigil all night in the church, his face to the floor, his arms spread like Christ on the cross.

“Rick,” I say, exhaling his name, the slightest of whispers. I wait, listening for an answer.

My husband takes a breath, a deep breath, then lets it out in a long and tremulous snore. He is not praying. He is asleep.

So what, right? Even Peter couldn’t keep watch for an hour without nodding off. This is natural, I tell myself. Absolutely normal. Whatever it is, Beth, it’s not a metaphor summing up the nature of the man. Don’t let yourself start thinking that way.

You’re not thinking at all. You’re feeling. And what you’re feeling is the ground dropping from beneath your feet, leaving you to kick through thin air, falling. It makes no sense, but it doesn’t have to. When did the heart start having to make sense?

I get up quietly, straighten the front of my robe, and trudge back across the yard to the house. Up above, the moonlight shines down on me like a dull throb, like a painful keening only my ears can detect.

chapter 3

Full Retreat

I want to share something with you,” Rick says over breakfast.

It’s a funny word, share. It doesn’t mean what you think it means. Ordinarily if somebody tells you they want to share with you, it means they have something nice and want you to have some too. In the Christian vernacular, it’s almost the opposite. To share means I’m going to impose on you, but it’s not me doing the imposing, really, it’s God. Therefore you have to sit there and take it. You have to go along with whatever I share.

The boys have gone to school and it’s just the two of us. Eli hitched a ride to school with Damon after extracting a promise from Rick to drop off his twisted tire at the bike shop. Now it sits in the mudroom, waiting.

During the night, Rick slipped back into bed, never mentioning that he’d been gone. But there is clearly a difference from the night before. The fraught sense of intimacy is gone. And he hasn’t said a word about Jim’s proposal. We’re at the table, bathed in morning light, staring into the dregs of our coffee. And now Rick