I had to sit down on the edge of the bed, because the flat thing folded into that hidden space was a photograph of the two of us, young, impossibly young, and behind it a slip of paper in Carol hand, and on that slip she had written the name of the song, and under the name she had written, The tune you hummed the night you asked me to marry you.
I sat there and I could not breathe for a moment. Because I did not remember humming any tune. Thirty years, and I never once recognized that song, and now I understood why. It was mine. It had come out of me, some melody I made up or half remembered, on the night I got down on one knee, and I had forgotten it by morning the way you forget the small things. Carol never forgot it. Not one note.
The song I could never name was a song I had sung, and forgotten, and she had kept it playing for thirty years.
She must have gone to some trouble. The note explained a little of it. She had hummed that tune to a man who tuned music boxes, years and years ago, and had one made to play it, so she would always have the sound of the happiest night of her life. And every so often, late in the evening, she would wind it and listen and close the lid, and I would ask what the song was, and she would just smile, because I think she loved that I did not know. She loved that she was keeping something of ours that I had lost, safe on her dresser, wound up and waiting.
All those evenings I heard that tune and did not recognize the sound of my own young voice, my own young love, played back to me. Carol carried it for both of us. She held onto the exact moment I asked her to spend her life with me, long after I had let the details slip, and she never told me, because keeping it was her private joy.
The music box sits on my dresser now, and I wind it in the evenings the way she did, and now I know the name of the song, and now I know it is mine, and I listen to it play all the way down before I close the lid. I hum along now. I remembered how, once I knew.
Thirty years of marriage, and I never asked what the song was. It turned out the song was the sound of me loving her, from the very beginning, kept alive by the only one of us who never let it go. I wish I had asked while she was here to smile at me and say, You still do not remember, do you. But she left me the answer, folded under the music, cut to fit exactly, waiting for the day I finally opened the box.