A Song for the Road

by Kathleen Basi

  Teo had known. Don’t you think he deserves …?

  No, she’d said. But she’d been wrong. The time had come to let the truth into the light.

  Through many dangers, toils and snares

  I have already come

  ’Tis grace has brought me safe thus far,

  And grace will lead me home.

  The open road was calling. Only this time, she didn’t need to flip a coin to know where she was headed.

  Part 10

  San Francisco, California

  Forgiveness is the final form of love.

  —Reinhold Niebuhr

  Text message conversation with Brad Lewis:

  Miriam: Headed to SF. Wish me luck.

  Brad: I have tomorrow off. I’ll meet you.

  Miriam: I would love to see you but after. I need to do this on my own.

  Brad: You sure?

  Miriam: Yes.

  Brad:

  Miriam:

  45

  Friday, May 13

  San Francisco Conservatory of Music

  11:43 AM

  WHEN MIRIAM WALKED INTO the San Francisco Conservatory on Friday morning, she didn’t know what to feel. The students walking around, chatting and sipping coffee in the lower atrium, represented everything she’d once wanted. But the memory of Dicey trying to sing along with “Amazing Grace” around the edge of the BiPAP mask put it all in perspective: how small her regrets really were in the grand scheme of things.

  She missed Dicey. Missed her company, her no-b.s. attitude, her strength. Above all, her strength. She could use some of that for the meeting to come.

  Miriam framed the atrium in her screen and captured the image, then sent it in a text. Wish you were here.

  Miriam tightened her elbow against Blaise’s music bag as she looked over the railing, taking in the building of glass and pale stone stretching above and below, the staircases circling the enormous atrium. The smell of coffee drifted up from the cafe below; hallways and doorways on every level beckoned, offering tantalizing snatches of sound: vocalizations, scales, shouts of laughter. If things had been different, she might have been here today with Blaise, visiting his new school.

  But the sound of a piano overwhelmed all: fluid, impassioned—Beethoven’s Tempest sonata. One of Blaise’s competition pieces. The music tugged her forward, around the perimeter, to the open door of the concert hall.

  Miriam recognized the towering walls, the recessed blocks on the ceiling, and the pillars on the side walls marching toward the low stage, which was bathed in warm light. The hall looked just as it had on Teo’s sketchy iPhone video—right down to the single grand piano in the center of the stage.

  She could see them in her mind’s eye. Blaise and Talia played off each other perfectly, their comic timing impeccable. She could see herself on that stage too—the performer she might have been. For the first time, it all seemed real. And disquieting. Foreign.

  The music stopped. Miriam focused on the pair on the stage: two men, one at the piano, the other carrying a bag of tools.

  “So far, so good,” Gus said. “Let me check something more melodic.” He touched the keys again.

  Miriam rested a hand on the seat back nearest her. Somehow she’d expected to find him rough and unshaven, with circles under his eyes. She should have known Gus wouldn’t do soul torment the way everyone else did.

  In the shock of seeing him so unexpectedly back in Colorado, she hadn’t taken the time to really examine him. Here, in his element, it was clear that he was everything she’d imagined him to be all these years: handsome, debonair even in polo and khakis, his dark hair gleaming in the glow of the stage lights, his fingers impossibly fluid on the keys. Older, but only more appealing for the passage of years.

  And yet, looking at him, Miriam felt curiously detached. Of the passion that once consumed her, nothing remained. It was a shell, fragile as spun sugar, its empty calories long since consumed. The only thing that ever really bound them together was the one thing she’d withheld from him: his children.

  Gus lifted his fingers, and the scowl of concentration melted into the brilliance of that fabulous smile—the one that fooled a person into thinking no one else in the world mattered to him. “Sounds great!” he told the piano tech. “But can you tighten up the action on A3?”

  “Sure thing.”

  Gus shot off the bench and began pacing as the technician stepped in. He never was any good at standing still. His passion, his quicksilver changeability, the intensity of his charisma—it was all the same as on the day she’d last seen him.

  Miriam took a deep breath and started toward the stage.

  Gus turned toward the movement, shading his eyes against the stage lights. “Good morning … can I help you?”

  She stepped into the light. “Hi, Gus.”

  His eyes widened. “Miriam Tedesco,” he said. He jogged down the stage stairs to meet her. “Or should I say … Mira Lewis.”

  He stopped, and they studied each other in silence for a few moments while the knock of the technician’s tools against the wood echoed in the hall. Then he gave a half smile. “You looked so familiar, but your personality is so different—you’re so much more confident than you were then. And—and the clothes. But you called me Gus,” he said. “I should have known right then. Nobody’s called me Gus in years. Not even my wife. I can’t believe it didn’t register right away. But when it did …” He shook his head. “You should have told me, Mira.”

  “I should have done a lot of things.”

  A furrow appeared between his eyebrows. “Your husband said you were sick. Last year, the day of the competition.” The words sounded vaguely accusatory.

  “We didn’t think it was the right time for that discussion—for any of us. You included. Not on a competition weekend.”

  He folded his arms, perching a hip on the back of an auditorium seat, his mouth tightening. “Just to be clear what we’re talking about …”

  “Yes,” Miriam said. “I was pregnant when I left Curtis.”

  “Blaise was mine.”

  “And Talia.”

  A muscle in his jaw twitched repeatedly. One hand ran through his thick, dark hair, a sign that he was rattled. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I came to tell you. The night before I left Curtis. I found you with Kaye, in the recital hall. Against the wall.”

  The piano technician rearranged his tools noisily. They both looked up at the stage. Then Gus grabbed her elbow and dragged her to the back of the hall, where the darkness and the distance offered some semblance of privacy. All the color in his face had compressed into two bright spots on his cheeks. “I was an ass in college,” he said. “We’re all stupid and self-absorbed at that age. Me more than most. I can admit that. But you had such a gift, Mira—Miriam. Why would you throw it away over some dipshit college guy? Even me?”

  Miriam could imagine Dicey’s reaction; the thought made her smile. “Even you.”

  Gus had the good grace to look ashamed. “I’m just saying you could have told me.”

  “I could have told you a lot of things. Like what a big deal it was for me to be competitive at Curtis. Where I came from, what I had to do to get there in the first place. I could have told you what you meant to me. But none of it would have made any difference. I was just the next girl.” She shook her head. “I was stupid, but I wasn’t that stupid.”

  He swallowed several times in quick succession. “But all these years.”

  The bitterness she’d clung to for so long wanted to beat its way out and bludgeon him. She took a deep breath. “You didn’t want children. Don’t you remember? We all went out to dinner, and you complained about the kid at the next table. You were never gonna have kids, you were going to do your part to control world population. Everybody thought it was so funny.”

  He sat down on the arm of a seat, weaving his long fingers through his thick black hair. “That was twenty years ago.”

  The despair in hi
s voice undid her. All these years, she’d justified keeping the secret by pointing to his antipathy toward children. Why had it never occurred to her that he might feel differently at thirty or forty than he had at twenty-two?

  A door opened and closed. Miriam glanced toward the stage to find it empty. That poor piano tech hadn’t bargained for overhearing all this.

  “I had children,” Gus said, as if trying out the words. “I had children.” A pause. Then he slumped over. “Kaye and I can’t have children. And you never gave me the chance.”

  Her legs gave out. She sat down hard on the armrest opposite him. That note in his voice was agony. An agony not so different from hers: the deep grief over a reality that could never be altered.

  In the face of his pain, her bitterness seemed petty. “I know,” she said softly. “I was wrong.”

  I’m sorry, she told Teo silently. Teo, who grinned at her in her mind’s eye, his eyes full of mischief beneath the thinning black hair—curly, not straight—sprinkled with white. That big nose. Those glasses.

  The images hit her all at once, then: The front porch, crowded with people on hot, sticky summer nights. Kamikaze June bugs dive-bombing the lights. The smell of mosquito repellent and grilled provoleta. Beat-up instruments, potluck catering, and the most stirring music she’d ever heard.

  Teo playing tickle monster with the twins on the living room floor.

  Teo nibbling on her neck in the kitchen while Blaise and Talia, giggling, tried to knock them apart.

  And the way her insides always relaxed when she walked in the door of that beat-up old bungalow.

  Of course she had loved him. She’d worn herself out, taking care of him, because it was the only way she’d dared show him how much. She could not have loved her children any better than she had, and they could not have had a better father. She could not have had a better life partner, for that matter.

  In fact, the only person who’d been harmed in this whole scenario was the man sitting before her. The man who, for the first time in her memory, had nothing at all to say.

  Miriam reached across the aisle. “I’m so sorry, Gus,” she said. “I know I can’t fix this. I just want you to know how sorry I am.”

  He stood, his face a hard, angry mask. “Don’t touch me,” he said. “Don’t you dare.”

  He slammed the heel of his hand against the door on his way out of the hall.

  46

  MIRIAM SAT ON THE armrest, her hands on her thighs, struggling to breathe through the weight of her shame. In all the years she’d imagined this meeting, this was one scenario she hadn’t considered: Gus, justly outraged, and she, blistered by the certainty of her own guilt.

  It couldn’t end like this. She couldn’t be powerless. That was the old Miriam, the one who played victim and refused redemption. Here, now, she had to do something. Find some way to make amends.

  Blaise’s music satchel lay on the floor beside her. She didn’t know why she’d brought it—some fleeting delusion that perhaps she and Gus could, in fact, collaborate after all. Foolish. It lay there, accusing her. All her botched attempts to finish Blaise’s music, mirroring her botched attempt to tell what should never have been hidden.

  Could the music be her way to make restitution?

  It hadn’t helped her solve the mystery of her son, after all. All her plans had gone off the rails; it had been days since she’d thought about Blaise and what had, or hadn’t, happened at camp. Was her son gay or not?

  Suddenly, she could hear Teo’s voice as clearly as if he stood beside her, saying: “It doesn’t matter.”

  And he was right.

  If Blaise were gay, if he’d come and told her so, Miriam would have loved him no less and no more. Either way, he was the same beautiful boy he’d always been. There would have been difficult and painful realities to face—religious conflicts to untangle—but she would have spent the rest of her life wrestling them by her son’s side. Because that was what love did.

  She didn’t need to finish the sonata. She knew everything she needed to know about her son. And she couldn’t do justice to what he had begun.

  But Gus could.

  Miriam grabbed the satchel and left the concert hall at a run.

  The atrium was crowded now, but through the passing bodies she glimpsed a tall form with a distinctive walk. “Excuse me, pardon me,” she said breathlessly as she wove through them. By the time she reached the spot where she’d seen Gus, he’d disappeared.

  Outside, she planted herself on the sidewalk amid the crowds of people on lunch hour, shading her eyes as she scanned the area. There. Half a block away. He had his hands in his pockets and his head down into the wind. “Gus!” she shouted. “Gus! Wait!”

  She took off after him, the satchel bumping her hip and Talia’s skirt swirling around her ankles. She finally got within earshot on a wide brick sidewalk shaded by tall trees, newly leafed out, their branches waving in the chilly wind. “Gus!”

  A street car rumbled past, its bell dinging. Either he didn’t hear her, or he didn’t want to.

  She put on one last burst of speed and grabbed his arm. “Stop. Please, listen.”

  He stared down at her. His face gleamed. “You deprived me of my son, Mira.”

  “And your daughter.” She couldn’t let him set Talia aside, no matter how enamored he’d been of Blaise.

  “I had a right to know.”

  If Miriam had walked into that recital hall nineteen years ago and interrupted his tryst, she felt certain the outcome would have been the same because Gus didn’t value then what he did now.

  And because she was meant to be with Teo.

  But there would have been closure, and with it, a chance for them both to live in truth, without regret. “I know,” she said. “I was wrong. I wish I could fix it, but I can’t.”

  A muscle in his jaw twitched. “Why are you following me, Miriam?”

  She pulled Blaise’s notebook from the satchel. “I want you to have this.”

  The crowds flowed around them, but they stood frozen in time. He took the notebook. Opened it. Flipped from page to page to see Blaise’s scribbled Star Wars doodles, the half-developed melodic ideas, and all her own cross-outs. He met her gaze and held the book out to her. “I can’t take this.”

  “Yes, you can. I can’t write that music. I wasn’t meant to write it. But maybe you were.” Her throat constricted. “He was my heart,” she said softly, pressing her palm against her chest. “I don’t need it to remember him. You have a right to have this piece of him. Finish it. Do whatever you want with it. It’s yours.”

  He stood silently for a moment. “What about your benefit concert?”

  She shrugged. “I’ll figure something out.”

  He cradled the notebook against his chest. “Thank you.” He hesitated. “I’ll … I’ll come to Atlanta to play it. At your concert. If you want.”

  The words got stuck in Miriam’s throat. Giving this task over to Gus would raise questions. If he came to Atlanta, those questions would only have to be answered more publicly.

  It would mean telling everyone what she’d kept secret for so long.

  Gus watched her, the tiny twitch at the corner of his eyes betraying how much he wanted her to say yes. She’d taken a lifetime of parenthood away from him. Surely she could shoulder the personal cost of giving him this gift.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, that would be … yes.”

  The wind swept up the street, swirling the brown skirt around her calves, and Miriam could swear she heard a whisper on it: Thank you, Mom.

  She dipped her head, pressing her hand against her chest, as if she could stop her heart from spreading into infinity, because here—in this distant, windswept city—Blaise’s memory spoke at last.

  She tipped her head back and tried to memorize the feel of this moment, the sunlight on her face and the screech of brakes on the street and the hard pavement beneath her feet and the wind tugging her hair out of her headband and pushing it in
to her face, wrapping her up in the certainty of loving and of being loved.

  She almost forgot Gus was there until he spoke again. “Can you come for dinner tonight? I’d like to talk some more. I’d like to know … everything about Blaise. And Talia.”

  She hesitated. She owed him so much. Yet this fragile peace hung on a wisp of a thread. What about Kaye? Gus, being Gus, hadn’t stopped to consider the ramifications: namely, asking his wife to accept this bombshell with Miriam standing right in the room.

  She shook her head. “We do need to talk,” she said, “but I think you should give your wife some time to come to terms with all this first. You guys can stay with me in Atlanta when you come. If you want.”

  He didn’t like it—the tension in his face told her that—but he nodded. “So then, what now? Are you going home?”

  She could. She’d confronted her ghosts, made peace with them. She didn’t have to keep going. She could go home. Or to her goddaughter.

  Yet she could feel them all around her, those who loved her, those she loved: Blaise, Talia, and Teo. Most of all, Teo. All of them beckoning her onward.

  “No,” she said quietly. “No, I have one stop left to make.”

  47

  Friday, May 13

  Carmel-by-the-Sea, California

  MIRIAM STOOD IN FRONT of the mirror inside the Starbucks bathroom, applying a hint of eyeliner and some blush and eye shadow. Teo had never been one of those guys who insisted makeup wasn’t necessary, but he’d always liked a light touch. She let her arms fall and surveyed her reflection up close.

  She’d aged in the past year. No doubt about it. She could see three gray hairs in her ponytail, and that fourth one she’d call blond. But she liked the new slimness in her face. She hadn’t realized all those years she’d spent thrashing around, thinking she was barely keeping her head above water, were transforming her into a real live adult.

  She stepped back, smoothing her hands over the dress Teo and Talia had given her. The one that, until today, she’d never worn. It seemed fitting to wear it for this, her own personal memorial. She brushed at the skirt. It had picked up some lint the past couple of weeks, sitting in the bottom of her suitcase, but all things considered, the crinkly black fabric splashed with crimson flowers had weathered the trip well. Miriam wondered what Talia would say if she were here.