We stood near the back, since the pews were too uncomfortable for us to sit on—the hard wood dug into our sitz bones. We still hadn’t gotten over Adam, and we were feeling pretty morose. Nobody even spoke about him—as if he’d shamed us by getting ill enough to die. I looked at the backs of all the heads of the people sitting in the church, and realized a lot of them might not even know that Adam could have been saved. And that somehow made his death even sadder.

Adam’s death was the first thing that made us really think about leaving. Strange, isn’t it? We’d willingly let ourselves be mentally tortured, but that wasn’t what made us want to run. It was a boy dying who could have been saved.

Mana-ma was up on the pew at the front of the church. She was the minister, the wife of God, the mayor, everything. She always wore a plain black robe, as if she were mourning all the sin we were surrounded with in the outside world. Everyone in the audience was wearing white with just a little bit of color. Summer was the season of prosperity and warmth—yes, I know, not that it ever really got that cold in winter, compared to, say, Minnesota—and it was a reason to celebrate. The mushroom crops were growing well in the greenhouse and the fields were lush; aside from the small issue of Adam, health was pretty good. No drama. If there ever was anything, it was swept under the rug to be whispered about after lights out.

So we celebrated summer. We sang the old songs, like “Let’s Live for Today,” “Everlasting Love” and “Wonderful World, Beautiful People.”

None of you reading this will probably have heard of these songs, but I still love them, despite everything. They remind me of the good parts of the Hearth. The bees buzzing, the scent of flowers in the warm breeze, the feel of the water and sand from the lake between my toes. We had a bunch of vinyl, and a record player that they must have replaced part by part over the years. Taema and I sat in our room and listened to the music a lot. I miss music, here in this cold, dark cell.

When we moved to San Francisco, we tracked down a lot of it with some of our early wages, going pale at how much it cost on the original vinyl. So we bought the songs on the modern players, but they didn’t sound the same. We still listen to “The Sound of Silence” together, remembering all we’ve lost.

On the day we celebrated summer, we sang loud and clear, our voices lifting to the rafters, and Mana-ma read from the Good Book.