It happened on the fourth day, on a highway in the late afternoon when the traffic had thinned and the sky was doing everything it had.
Jonnis had been quieter that day. The coughing was more frequent, her face carrying a careful stillness that the others responded to by talking more, filling the space around her with warmth the way you fill a room with light when someone is cold. She had her quilt and her window and her closed eyes, and when she opened them she looked at the sky with an expression Holder had come to think of as her looking-at-God face, though he wouldn't have said that out loud.
And then, without announcement, she began to sing.
Not humming. Singing. Full voice — a voice that was nothing like what her body suggested, rich and certain and huge, filling every corner of the van and going out through the windows into the open air.
It was an old song. Holder didn't know it. Something about a river, and crossing over, and the words "I won't have to cross Jordan alone" repeating in a way that wasn't about defeat but about the exact opposite of defeat — the absolute confidence that the crossing would be made, that something would be on the other side, that the water was not the end.
Jazzy stopped talking. Lillian set her Bible down.
Holder watched the road and listened.
The sky ahead was doing something extraordinary — orange and gold and that particular shade of late-day blue that has no name but that everyone recognizes as the color of a day becoming something else. The highway was empty in both directions. The van felt, briefly, like a thing outside of time.
Jonnis sang.
Holder did not know when his eyes went wet. He noticed it only when he had to blink hard to see the road, and by then it had been going on for a while. He did not wipe his face. He just drove and let it happen, because something in the song had found the place in him where everything he'd been keeping had been kept, and he did not have the strength to close it back up.
Jonnis finished. The van was quiet.
Nobody said anything. Nobody needed to. Some things that happen in a moving vehicle on a long highway at sunset are complete in themselves, and you don't add to them. You just carry them.
Jonnis coughed. She covered her mouth. She looked out the window and said, to no one and everyone: "I'm all right. I just needed to sing it."
"I know," Holder said. His voice was not steady. He didn't pretend it was.
She looked at him in the rearview mirror and gave him something he couldn't name — not a smile exactly, something older than a smile. The look of a woman who sees you clearly and is not troubled by what she sees.
He drove into the sunset.
He did not feel empty. For the first time in years, he did not feel empty.