A Song for the Road

by Kathleen Basi

  “Walgreen’s.” Then he scowled. “You don’t have a phone out here, do you?”

  She tensed again. “I left it in the car, I swear.”

  He relaxed. “Sorry, ma’am. Some people think the law don’t apply to them. We’re always having to drive around and figure out where the interference is coming from. The telescope picks it all up, you know. Wi-Fi, microwave … seems like everything puts out radio signals these days. And this monster”—he gestured beyond the fence with an affectionate smile—“measures radio waves from space. Very, very faint ones.”

  “Like really distant stars?”

  “More like the gas and dust clouds between them.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Didn’t you look around the visitor’s center?”

  “No, I missed the last tour. The guy gave me a map to walk out here on my own.”

  “So …” The man dragged the word out, his lips twitching as he ticked the points off on his fingers. “You didn’t check the schedule before coming; you didn’t know this was a cell-free zone; and you weren’t even interested enough in astronomy to poke around the visitors’ center before coming out. Which begs the question: Why are you here?”

  Miriam managed a crooked smile. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  His eyebrows skyrocketed. “Try me.”

  All right, then. “My kids sent me on a flip-a-coin road trip across the country. This is the first stop.”

  “No kidding!”

  Not the reaction she’d expected. Although what she had expected, she couldn’t say.

  “Well, if that don’t beat all.” He raised the camera to his eye. “We do have pay phones, so you can use a card to call them. Let them know you haven’t fallen into some man trap in backwater West Virginia.”

  She didn’t have to tell him. A simple thank-you would suffice. But something inside her craved hearing the truth aloud, here in the shadow of this great white monster Blaise had wanted her to see. “Actually, they passed away.”

  He lowered the camera again. Now he’d get all weird and figure out some awkward way to extricate himself from the conversation. Loss seemed to turn a person into an allergen.

  But to Miriam’s surprise, he stepped toward her instead of away. “I’m so sorry,” he said, touching her elbow. Just like she would have once done when a family came to plan a funeral. “I lost my wife three years ago. I know you probably hate for people to say they understand, but … I understand. And I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry too.” Damn it, this trip was supposed to be about her. Her family, her demons, her chance to grieve—alone. She hadn’t come out here to sympathize with a random stranger’s personal tragedy.

  But she’d lived long enough in Georgia to know the demands of Southern hospitality. “How did she die?”

  “Cancer. Long, drawn out. Horrible. With just enough hope to keep you from letting go. You know?”

  No, she didn’t know. She hadn’t had the luxury. Only a knife to the gut, and the long, slow bleed ever since.

  The technician went on. “I always pictured the two of us at eighty years old, sitting in rocking chairs on a porch, holding hands. And instead, … you know, by the time it was over, I wouldn’t have recognized her as the woman I married.” He turned the green camera over and over in his hands. “But I’m grateful for that time too. In those last few months, I was able to love her in a way I’d never imagined was possible. It was intense. I thought sometimes it was going to about kill me. It was a long, hard goodbye, but it was a gift too.”

  Miriam tried to imagine sitting by Teo’s deathbed. Or, for that matter, sitting in twin rockers, holding hands. She couldn’t do it. She’d never been able to sit still for long. She wanted to be doing—making lists and checking things off them. Just like her mother.

  “Come sit, Sassafras. The work will wait.”

  Of course, the work could have waited. It was just dishes and balancing checkbooks and cleaning the bathroom … and fixing the toilet. It all would have waited. But it hadn’t felt that way all those times when Teo stretched out a hand and asked her to come cuddle on the couch. How many times had she turned her back on him and resented the hell out of him the rest of the night? Resented them all, actually, for watching reruns of Knight Rider when they’d all seen the to-do list stuck to the refrigerator.

  Was this how Mom had felt, all those years: drowning under the weight of too much to do and too many unfulfilled dreams? Had Dad ever asked her to stop and just spend time with him?

  Maybe it was better that Teo was gone. Otherwise, there might have come a day when, like Miriam’s parents, she and Teo started throwing around the word divorce—a word that could never be taken back. Even if, in the end, like her parents, they stuck it out.

  The technician stood silently, his gaze fixed on something only he could see. She ought to reach out—offer a warm hand clasp or a gentle hand on his shoulder. One thing she’d learned from doing pastoral work: for life’s toughest moments, words were useless. But here, on the far side of her own loss, helplessness walked in lockstep with her stifled, guilt-ridden grief.

  The technician shook himself back to reality. “What am I doing, standing here all afternoon? Here, let’s take your picture.”

  He snapped the photo, handed the camera back, and walked toward the gate, whistling and jingling his keys. Miriam headed back the way she’d come, turning to walk backward for a few steps, staring up at the first landmark of her journey.

  Maybe her life wasn’t so different from this telescope: ponderously heavy, fixed on a given point in time and space. Maybe it took something massive and powerful to shift the trajectory of her life too. Something like a flip-a-coin road trip.

  As frightening as this vast emptiness felt, it belonged to her alone. Out here, she had a chance to discover what she needed, with no one else offering opinions on whether it was right or wrong. To dig deep for the strength to become whole again.

  Her hand crept to her locket. She traced the engravings on the antique silver and fingered the latch. It would be so easy to give up and go back home to the comfortable misery of the familiar. But the wind in the pine trees seemed to whisper, “Be bold, Sassafras.”

  Letting the locket fall, Miriam squared her shoulders and strode back along the road toward the highway.

  7

  April, one year earlier

  Atlanta, Georgia

  ON THE LAST DAY Miriam ever spent with Teo, he brought her flowers.

  She hadn’t slept well the night before. Not with Talia’s words rattling in her brain: “Are you cheating on Dad?”

  It wasn’t the accusation; Miriam knew her own innocence. It was the fact that Talia even thought it possible.

  Teo, of course, had slept fine. Teenage drama always slid off his back; he’d been singing Argentine folk songs all morning. They’d set aside this day for home improvements: touching up the paint on the wraparound porch, nailing down a board that had sprung free over the winter, and installing landscaping stones.

  It was a lot to accomplish before Teo and the kids caught a late-afternoon flight to San Francisco. Tomorrow the twins would rehearse with their competition accompanists, and on Sunday they would compete for ten-thousand-dollar scholarships—the final round of a competition they’d been working their way through all school year.

  Miriam had her own list of things to do. Practicing the concerto she was to perform with the local symphony this weekend, for starters. Double-checking the kids’ suitcases, to make sure they hadn’t forgotten anything. And squeezing in as much of the camping gear as possible, so that when she joined them on Monday for their low-budget vacation, they wouldn’t have to rent too much equipment.

  When she got inside, she found the breakfast dishes piled haphazardly by the sink. “Teenagers,” Miriam muttered. She opened the dishwasher only to discover it hadn’t been emptied. She washed her hands and started putting plates in the cabinet.

  She felt Teo’s presence behind her before he touched her—the wa
rmth, the smell of dirt and sweat. He pressed his body into her back and put his arms around her. “Hey, beautiful.”

  “Stop it, Teo. I’m gross. And you’re dropping dirt clods all over the floor.”

  “I’ll clean it up.” He lifted her ponytail and kissed the juncture of her neck and shoulder. “Come on, Mira. How often do we get a day off work together without the kids around?”

  Her body wanted to respond, but she really wasn’t in the mood. Even so, her lips curved upward. “It’s the wrong time of the month for that, unless you want another kid.”

  He chuckled. “I know. Doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun.” His hands went exploring, and Miriam’s knees went weak.

  She maneuvered her shoulder up and shoved him away. “Cut it out, Teo. I still have work to do. And so do you.”

  But she couldn’t mask her smile, and as he retreated, she heard him chuckling. Miriam wanted to be annoyed, but it seemed stupid to cling to negativity if she had the choice.

  When Teo came home a couple hours later, after picking up Talia and Blaise, he brought with him a bunch of wildflowers he’d picked from the ditch in front of the school. He presented them to Miriam, wrapped gently in his coat, like Juan Diego before the bishop.

  It wasn’t eagerness Miriam saw in his eyes—they were far beyond that; he no longer expected her to respond like a woman being wooed. It was simply devotion, devoid of expectation.

  And as she’d stood there, her lips forming a tolerant query about how many bugs he’d just brought into the house, she caught Talia’s eye. Her daughter stood at the sink, running a glass of water and glaring at her. The air between them thrummed with the previous night’s parting shot. “You can’t fight with someone who has no heart.”

  Talia was right. The thought came like a sucker punch to the gut. Miriam had fallen into a pattern of negativity, and no matter what Teo did, he couldn’t break it.

  But there was barely time to have the thought, let alone ponder it.

  “Talia, you left your backpack on the piano bench again!” Blaise called from the front room, and Talia dropped her cup in the sink and tore from the room, screaming: “Don’t you dare throw it on the floor—it has my iPad in it!” Followed soon thereafter by “Where’s my charger?” and “Who took my purse! I need my license for airport security!” And then even Blaise was showing his nerves, his normally placid demeanor dissolving into a cutting remark that caused his sister to burst into tears. Miriam snapped at her son, and he flung himself onto the piano bench and launched into Beethoven’s Tempest sonata with the fury only a persecuted seventeen-year-old could summon.

  And then Talia was dragging her to the piano for one last run-through of Grieg, and snapping at her about tempos. “I’m doing that on purpose,” Miriam said. “You don’t know what your competition accompanist might do. You have to be ready.” Talia mumbled something Miriam chose not to hear. And Teo was shoving microwaved burritos at them and interrupting half a dozen times to ask about things she’d packed hours ago.

  By the time Teo got the suitcases and the music satchels and Talia’s computer bag and the cello loaded in the van, Miriam was ready to wash her hands of them. Let Teo deal with the teenage hormones for a couple of days.

  “Let’s go! We’ve got a flight to catch!” he bellowed from the doorway, and a minor stampede ensued.

  Miriam walked them to the security gate at the airport. Blaise went first, his flighty kiss burning her cheek. Talia rushed past with barely a glance, only to be stopped by Teo. “Hey,” he said. “What do you think you’re doing, leaving without giving your mother a kiss?”

  Talia’s eyes flashed, but she never argued with Teo. She turned back and gave Miriam the most thin-lipped, least satisfying peck on the cheek ever.

  Teo sighed as Talia glided forward, nose in the air, all poise and grace, and handed her boarding pass and driver’s license to the TSA agent. “I’m sorry, Mira,” he said. “It’s just nerves. It’ll be better after the competition.”

  It wasn’t, and it wouldn’t, and they both knew it. She summoned a wan smile. “Have fun.”

  “We’ll miss you, but it’ll be good for you to have this time to yourself. Good luck with the concerto. I know you’ll do great.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I love you.” He kissed her, shouldered his duffel bag, and headed into the line himself. He caught up with Blaise and said something to him. Blaise turned back and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Play pretty!” he called, echoing the words Miriam had said to them before every one of their performances. “We’ll see you on Monday!”

  When Miriam got home, an hour later, the flowers were still waiting, spread on Teo’s jacket on the old, metal-legged kitchen table, a relic of the 1970s. Tiny blue irises and a pale yellow bulb-shaped flower, violets and something feathery white whose name she didn’t know. They’d already started to wilt. She fingered the stems as she put them in water. She should have done this before they left for the airport. Teo probably thought she didn’t like them. Like all her responses to him, this one had been half-assed.

  I need to do better by him. The thought had the familiarity of knowledge that had lain dormant for months—years, perhaps, waiting for her to take notice. It was time. Past time. Once her performance was out of the way—on Monday, when she flew out to join them in California—she would turn over a new leaf.

  Two days later, when she saw Simeon get out of the police car in front of the house, she didn’t at first connect what it must mean.

  Unlike the weeks that followed, almost everything about that moment remained crystal clear in Miriam’s memory. The unusually cool April day. The boards from the porch swing striping her jeans. The warm fatigue in her fingers following an hour of practicing. The cardinal that cut a slash of crimson across her vision as Father Simeon and the policeman came up the walkway, stirring up the pungent smell of the chocolate mint growing on either side. The car that backfired on the next street, and farther away the high whine of a circular saw punctuated by hammer blows. The way the setting sun gleamed on Simeon’s bald black head as he sat down beside her.

  She remembered it all except the words. The words were gone long before their meaning sank in. The look on Simeon’s face told her everything that really mattered, anyway.

  She had waited too long to love Teo, and now it was too late.

  8

  Friday, April 29

  Green Bank, West Virginia

  BY MORNING, MIRIAM WASN’T feeling bold so much as battered. Spring came late to the mountains; when she finally got settled in her tent with an arrangement of blankets and a sleeping bag that kept her warm enough to drop off, the parade of memories started up, yanking her back from the edge of consciousness, with her heart pounding.

  It had been quite a while since she’d experienced a night like this. Right after the accident, it had happened regularly: she’d lie awake, playing God, trying to rearrange the sequence of events of the last few days before her family died, to see if she could change the outcome. If she’d been with them on the trip; if she’d gotten them moving sooner, so they were already on the beach before the man, drunk from a business lunch, crossed the center line as they drove down the highway toward it. If she’d said no to the concerto performance. If she’d never tried to start a performance career at all.

  It always seemed like she had to go further back, further and further into the past. Back to the beginning, even, to college and choices she’d never realized could have such earth-shattering consequences.

  Tonight, the exercise in futility did a tarantella in her brain opposite Teo’s invitations and Talia’s accusations. And always, the niggling thought of the e-mail tucked into Blaise’s manuscript notebook. Out of sight, but not out of mind, like a scratchy clothing tag that kept rubbing: half itch, half pain, all aggravation.

  And then, just for fun, a gut-hollowing tune—more motif than melody, really—emerged from the darkness, sinuous and haunting. She couldn’t identify i
t, no matter how many times she hummed it through, trying to wrap it around to its beginning. Two measures, circling in her head all night long. It was the earworm from hell.

  The sun hadn’t yet risen when Miriam decided enough was enough. She gathered her toiletries and headed for the campground shower house.

  The water stayed stubbornly tepid. Shivering, Miriam showered in record time and slipped into a pair of Talia’s leggings and a tan, cable-knit sweater with lace sewed to the bottom. She liked the look, but the longer she wore these clothes, the harder it became to shake off her daughter’s ghost.

  Miriam hadn’t thought about that when she’d packed the suitcase full of them.

  Or maybe, somewhere in her subconscious mind, she’d planned it this way.

  She wiped down the tent with her towel, the locket like a drumbeat against her chest. She couldn’t wait to rejoin a world that had Wi-Fi and cell signal and plenty of distraction.

  Shortly after eight, she pulled out and headed back south, retracing yesterday’s route. She couldn’t handle the energy of the Argentine music this morning. Until she got back within range of an NPR station, which could occupy her brain with discussions of other people’s problems, her own memories would have to do. Mom wasn’t here to scold her for wallowing, after all. Besides, she’d spent all night self-flagellating. There were no memories left except good ones.

  There was Talia, six years old, presiding over a birthday tea party at the kitchen table. Miriam had filched the gauzy royal purple drapings they used for Advent decoration at St. Greg’s and camouflaged the cracked, dingy walls. Everything was purple that year, from the girls’ pipe-cleaner crowns to the cupcakes. She remembered feeling like a real grown-up, doing a lot with very little, like her mother before her.

  There was the impossible softness of Blaise’s cheeks, the little-boy kisses she mourned to this day. The evening she kissed him good night and realized his cheek was stubbly. And the day he folded himself into the space between the top step of the kitchen stool and the carrying handle. He was all arms and legs, still skinny enough, but too tall to really fit. It must have been so uncomfortable, yet he sat there for fifteen minutes while she cooked dinner, because he needed to talk through a situation at school.