A Song for the Road

by Kathleen Basi

  “I know. My husband posted it on Facebook.” Miriam laughed too. “They were quite a pair, weren’t they?”

  “I have never wanted any student in my studio as much as I wanted him.” Gus’s voice settled into something more appropriately somber. “I—I know I’m talking too much, but I wanted you to know my interest is entirely sincere.”

  Interest in what? Miriam wondered. Behind the muted hip-hop strains, she could hear Dicey packing up. She didn’t have much longer. “I believe you’re sincere,” she said carefully.

  He exhaled softly. “I’m glad. You see, I … a few years ago, when I turned thirty-five, I realized I’d already achieved so many of the goals I’d set for my life. And it was amazing, reaching the top of that mountain, but once I got there, I just felt … alone.”

  Again, the hint of vulnerability. Brokenness, even. Miriam tucked her elbows against her ribs.

  “I woke up one day going, ‘Now what? I have everything, and I have no one.’ Eventually I got married, and … well.” He cleared his throat. “Meeting Blaise gave me a purpose. I realized this is what I want to do with the rest of my life. Help kids who don’t have the advantages I grew up with—kids with potential. But when he died … I know it makes no sense, but I felt like my dream died too. Until a few days ago. I was in Atlanta to meet with a movie director about a soundtrack, and I heard a PSA about the concert coming up, and they mentioned Blaise’s sonata. I realized I probably had your phone number, so when I got home today, I went looking.” His energy was returning. “I have sponsors lined up. My friends in the film industry love the idea. We’re starting a foundation. We’re putting on a big concert gala in a couple months to kick things off, and I’d like to use Blaise’s sonata.”

  Of course he wanted something. This vague disappointment was irrational. “Why not use some of your own music?”

  “Oh, you know my music?” He sounded unreasonably pleased.

  “Everyone knows your music.”

  He laughed. “Well, not everyone knows who wrote it. But then, I shouldn’t be surprised you do. I understand you’re involved in music yourself.”

  Nothing stung like damnation by faint praise. “I’m a church musician.”

  “But you write music—I read online somewhere that you were going to finish the sonata. A blog—Atlanta Attaché, I think it was called.”

  So. He’d seen a picture of her, and he still didn’t know who she was. Maybe she shouldn’t be surprised. But it was humiliating.

  “Is it finished?” he asked now. “The sonata, I mean? Because—I mean, I’m sure you want to premiere the sonata at your own concert, but afterward, if it turns out well, will you let me use it for mine? We’ll publish it, distribute it, under his name or yours—whatever you want. I have the contacts. I’m not worried about the money. It’s yours. You do whatever you want with it. My lawyer can set up a fund, a scholarship fund for young artists—I just want to record it.”

  It was a stunningly generous offer, characteristically grandiose, yet his casual stipulation—if it turns out well—made her writhe. Her mediocre accomplishments stood in the wings, laughing at her. “Well, I don’t really feel comfortable talking about that until it’s finished …”

  “So it’s not done.” He sounded disappointed. “But your concert is soon, isn’t it? So you must be close. The second movement was just lacking a recapitulation, and then it just needed a third movement. It wouldn’t take much.”

  Just another movement. Her work, these past years, had impacted a lot of lives, but it paled beside Gus’s achievements. She felt her old competitive instincts heating up again. Now she had another reason to finish Blaise’s sonata. “I’ll get it done,” she said.

  “Wonderful! I’m glad to hear it.” In the background, Miriam heard a feminine voice. “Oh, that’s my wife calling. I’ll be looking forward to hearing from you.”

  “Sure—”

  “Good night, then.”

  Miriam pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at the call ended screen. He’d changed in some ways, but the man still thought he was the center of the universe.

  And she was like a moth; even knowing what happened when one got too close to Gus von Rickenbach, she craved his notice.

  If it turns out well? She’d show him. She’d write something worthy of Blaise if it killed her.

  No time like the present. She’d seen a piano in the lounge downstairs. Maybe she could sweet-talk her way into using it until the late-night crowd came in.

  Miriam leaped up and heaved her suitcase onto the bed, digging to the bottom for Blaise’s music. She shoved aside scarves and artfully wrinkled blouses until she saw the edge of the file folder peeking from beneath a swatch of crinkled black fabric splashed with red flowers. Even the contents of her suitcase were determined to underscore her failings.

  Miriam yanked the music out and slammed the suitcase shut. She stalked out the door, sending Dicey a text on her way downstairs.

  * * *

  The lounge was quiet, and the manager gave her permission to play. But Miriam felt more stuck than ever. Derivative, Gus had said of two measures on the second page, but she loved them just as they were. She’d keep every note her son had written. Take that, Gus von condescending Rickenbach!

  Except something about the seam between Blaise’s clean, deliberate script and the few measures she’d written in her messy scrawl caused her to freeze up.

  He’d had problems with that spot too. The paper was worn by multiple erasings, the layers of pencil marks still faintly visible. In its current form, the music charged over a cliff and stopped. Blaise had left half a page blank and gone on to the recapitulation. But he hadn’t gotten far there either.

  She played it again. Maybe it was just because she’d been thinking of Gus, but tonight she thought she heard something of Gus’s compositional style in these measures.

  Miriam tried another variation. It should be so simple: restate the original themes, except without changing keys. Maybe it was simple for Gus, but in her current emotional state, Miriam found it baffling.

  “If it turns out well.”

  “… remember those two fairies at science camp?”

  “Can’t fight with someone who has no heart.”

  Amazing sounds were coming from the piano, melodies that riffed quite nicely on Blaise’s themes. But the moment she focused on them, the path forward, which a moment ago had seemed inevitable, disappeared.

  She chased it backward, but like a dream, it evaporated too quickly to catch hold of, despite her hands suspended above the piano, poised to hitch a ride on the slightest inspiration.

  “Excuse me, young lady.”

  Miriam glanced up to see an elderly man in a suit. “Hi?”

  “Are you taking requests? It’s my anniversary, you see. I’m wondering if you could play ‘Someone To Watch Over Me’ for us. It’s my wife’s favorite song.”

  “Um … sure.”

  The small crowd applauded politely when she finished. More people were arriving. She should go, but now she was wound up. She’d never sleep until she bled off some energy. She embarked on a set of improvisations on simple folk tunes. “Shenandoah.” “Simple Gifts.” “Suwanee River.”

  When she looked up again, the lounge was full. She saw Dicey, casual in a flowing sweater and sweats, sitting at the nearest table with a tumbler full of what looked like cranberry juice and a bowl of peanuts. She had her phone trained on the piano. Keep going, she gestured.

  Miriam obeyed. The requests kept coming; she got sucked into a stint of 1980s pseudo-karaoke with a crowd of tipsy women on a girls’ weekend.

  But after an hour and a half, her brain was shutting down. Dicey came up as she started stacking her music to put back in Blaise’s satchel. “Bedtime already, Lounge Lizard?”

  “More than,” Miriam said, yawning. “I’m two hours past.”

  “That is lame,” Dicey said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “Says the woman who s
lept half the day in the car.” But her mouth quirked. Dicey made her feel like she was with Talia again: the irrepressible spirit, the need to stay on her toes.

  “I don’t suppose I could interest you in a regular gig?” asked the lounge manager, a trim woman in a blue suit.

  “Sorry,” Miriam said. “One engagement only. I’m just passing through.”

  “Too bad. Where ya headed?”

  “Oh … just a road trip.”

  Dicey peered at the woman’s name tag. “Athena. That’s great. Named after the goddess of wisdom.”

  “And war,” Miriam added. Dicey frowned at her.

  “The wisdom is knowing when not to make war,” said Athena. “What’s the reason for the road trip?”

  It was too late at night for that conversation. Miriam said, “Who needs a reason?” at the same moment Dicey said, “She’s honoring her husband and teenagers who died.”

  Miriam’s muscles locked up; Dicey’s eyes widened as she realized her error.

  “Wow.” Athena shook her head. “Teenagers? That’s so sad. But at least you had them for a long time. My cousin miscarried at thirty-five weeks a while back. She was a real mess.”

  Dead silence in the lounge. Miriam sucked in a slow, deep breath, focusing on the weight of the locket against her breastbone. Teo wouldn’t want her to lash out. No matter what kind of asshat thing was said to her.

  She pasted on a smile. “I’m turning in,” she said, grabbing Blaise’s music satchel.

  Dicey caught up with her in front of the elevator. She wrapped her arms around Miriam from behind. “I’m so sorry, Miriam.”

  “Sorry about that woman being clueless and insensitive? Or sorry for presuming you had any right to tell my story for me?”

  “Both,” Dicey said quietly.

  Miriam sagged. She hadn’t realized just how starved she was for human contact. She could feel the younger woman’s embrace in her calves and her toes and the center of her brain. Lonely, her body cried out as they stood there, rocking. I’m so lonely.

  “I don’t think she meant it like that,” Dicey whispered into her shoulder. “Most people are just too caught up in their own tragedies to realize when they’re making other people’s worse.”

  Miriam stiffened and shook her off. “What do you know about tragedy?”

  It was grossly unfair, perhaps even cruel. Nobody hitchhiked at thirty-two weeks pregnant, let alone slept outside with nothing but leaves to keep her warm, unless she had tragedy to spare. And Dicey had just as much reason to be angry at Athena’s tactlessness as Miriam did. Talking about miscarrying at thirty-five weeks, in front of a pregnant woman? Who did that?

  But Miriam was too sore on her own behalf to sympathize much. She was sick of pretending she wasn’t angry and bitter, and Dicey was not her daughter. Not her responsibility.

  Dicey took the verbal blow with her arms hung at her sides, but the brown eyes stared back with a quiet certainty beyond reproach. “Everybody’s got tragedies,” she said softly.

  The elevator dinged, the doors whooshing open to the sound of Muzak, the pathetic approximation of music meant to offend no one, which therefore offended everyone.

  Just as Miriam had offended Dicey. She ought to apologize, but her nerve endings reeled from the sudden loss of human contact. She could still feel the younger woman’s hug warming her back. She craved that touch more than she wanted to admit. It was hard not to be charmed by this girl who had Talia’s vibrance, Talia’s zest for life, with none of the baggage.

  “No heart,” Talia had accused her.

  Miriam shuddered. Had Talia thought about that fight in the last moments of her life? Regretted it?

  How she longed to slip these new memories she was making with Dicey over her memory of Talia. To bury the misunderstanding that must now remain forever unresolved, and pretend she had never lost her daughter at all.

  No. No! Why invest in this trip at all, if that was to be the outcome? She needed to put Dicey on a bus. Tomorrow morning, Miriam would refocus on the reason she’d embarked on this trip in the first place. Alone.

  “Come on,” she said wearily. “Let’s just get some sleep.”

  15

  Saturday, April 30

  Cincinnati, Ohio

  SHORTLY BEFORE NOON THE next day, Miriam found herself on a shaded metal swing, looking across the Ohio River at the south side of the Mason–Dixon line while Dicey bustled around her. Miriam still wasn’t sure how it had happened. She’d gone to sleep intending to put the pregnant woman on the first bus headed west this morning, with or without apologizing for last night. Preferably without.

  But by the time she woke up, Dicey had the whole day laid out: the best time for a video shoot, where to put Miriam, how to set up the shot. Dicey was like a freight train when she got going. It didn’t even occur to Miriam to ask when they’d decided to start making videos.

  Besides, her conscience seemed more verbal when well rested. Maybe by the time the afternoon bus left, she’d manage to apologize.

  The crowds on the riverfront streamed by, a sea of red headed toward the Great American Ball Park. Miriam laid Blaise’s notebook and a pencil on the swing beside her and removed Teo’s guitar from its case. Behind her, the city roared; in front of her, a steamboat chugged beneath a bridge, its decorative wheel chopping the water.

  But the slow, languid movement of the swing resisted the chaos. It felt good to sit here and just be.

  “I need your phone,” Dicey said.

  Miriam unlocked it. She’d missed quite a few notifications, including an Amber Alert. Something about a kid in a stolen car. Poor parents.

  She cleared the screen and handed it over. “I hope it’s legal to play music down here.”

  “You worry too much.”

  She slid the guitar strap over her shoulder and adjusted Talia’s straw hat. While she tuned, Dicey rigged the phone on a stone planter behind her shoulder. “Don’t look at me,” the younger woman said.

  Miriam fingered the wireless mic clipped to her lapel, which Dicey had materialized this morning. “I’m not sure about this, Dicey …”

  “It’ll be great, I promise. Film studies, remember?”

  Miriam sighed. “What do you want me to do?” she asked meekly.

  “I don’t know, play something. Didn’t you say you wanted to … what was it you said?”

  “Work on chord progressions.”

  “Yeah, that. Do that. Whatever it is.”

  “It’s the structure of—”

  “Yeah, yeah. I don’t care, just do your thing.”

  Miriam smoothed the notebook open in front of her and started analyzing chords. If she could get a sense of the big picture instead of getting lost in the interplay of melodic themes, maybe she could sketch out a road map.

  She stuck the pencil between her lips and strummed the chords. She wished she could recall the snatches of brilliance that fell from her fingers last night. If only Dicey had been recording that.

  “One of these days, we really should do a livestream,” Dicey said.

  We. Not you. Miriam cursed her heart for the way it leaped at the idea of keeping Dicey with her. She should have done this with Talia while she was alive. Not now, with a near-stranger.

  She’d forgotten what soul-killing work analyzing chords could be. Maybe a few of Teo’s Argentine folk tunes could help get the creative juices flowing.

  On those sticky summer nights, Teo and his jam buddies used to go through five gallons of sweet tea and a cooler full of beer. She’d been so focused on hosting, she’d never realized how relaxing it could be just to sit with the music. She closed her eyes to summon the melodies she’d never seen written, but had only absorbed, the music seeping in as perspiration seeped out.

  Miriam couldn’t match the flair and style of Teo and his band of Argentine expats. But she heard the ghost of their presence in the vibration beneath her fingers. One night, when Talia was about eight, she’d suddenly started singing harmony
on this song.

  Blaise never sang. He had a lovely voice, but it made him self-conscious to use it. He just …

  Wait a minute. That chord progression resembled a spot on the second page of the sonata. How had she never noticed it before? Of course; it made sense that Blaise had absorbed the Argentine music, just as she had.

  The mystery melody bubbled up again. She began to hum, playing with chord variations. It worked for the sonata, but it cried out for voices. She could almost hear the words. Almost. And she really could hear a voice singing it back to her as she paused to scribble ideas.

  She looked up. A small child, three or so, stood nearby, dressed in a Superman shirt, mimicking her. Perfectly on pitch. Uncannily so.

  She took the guitar pick out of her mouth. “Hello there. Where did you come from?” She was startled to realize she’d attracted a handful of listeners. But their body language didn’t indicate that he belonged to any of them.

  Dicey, who had left Miriam’s phone to record, circled the perimeter with her own in hand. She motioned to keep going.

  The boy stared at the guitar, rocking gently. Miriam started another Argentine folk song, and the rocking stopped. The moment she finished singing, he sang it back, note for note, but without words.

  Amazing. What about opera? She hummed a snippet of Puccini. Again, perfect. She’d never seen anything like it.

  The crowd was growing, people stopping to watch and listen. They seemed appreciative—all except one woman. She held a plastic cup in her hand, and she kept looking at her phone, scowling at Miriam, and looking again. It made Miriam nervous.

  But the boy had started rocking again. She hesitated. He didn’t seem verbal. Was he autistic? Had he wandered away? There had to be a panicked parent somewhere on the waterfront.

  But at least he was safe while he was with her, and as long as he remained riveted to the music, he wouldn’t wander elsewhere. A child in one place would be easier to find.

  Besides, she was curious. Just how good was he? She knew how to find out: Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria. She couldn’t sing it—she’d always thought it sounded like Mariah Carey hopping mushrooms in some video game—but she picked the notes from the strings.