A Song for the Road

by Kathleen Basi

  5

  Thursday, April 28

  Rural West Virginia

  SIX HOURS INTO THE Great American Adventure, Miriam had learned one thing and one thing only: she hated that damn headrest.

  Up, down, lean the seat forward, lean the seat back, angle her body like the Leaning Tower of Pisa to avoid it altogether—nothing worked. It was made to coddle people with bad posture. By the time she left the interstate for the two-lane roads of West Virginia, she had a headache.

  The scenery was fabulous, though. At the top of a mountain, she pulled off at an overlook to stretch, squat, and generally bring her butt back to life. The wind whispered in the pines. Before her, the ridges lined up, marching across the landscape in neat rows, each one bluer and hazier than the one in front of it.

  Miriam massaged her neck and pulled out her phone to snap a picture, then uploaded it to the app. Alleghenies, she typed. Like folds of cake batter. #Gr8AmAdven.

  The photo took forever to upload. At last, she got back on the road and pressed on with only the radio for company. If you could call it “company” when it kept dipping into bursts of static. Anyway, it kept her mind occupied. And right now, that was a very good thing. She could feel panic nosing around back there, looking for an entry point.

  The next static break went on and on. Miriam’s breaths shortened. The worst thing about anxiety was the way it made a person feel claustrophobic inside her own body.

  She punched the Bluetooth. “Call work,” she said, and the static flipped over to her cell connection.

  “St. Gregory the Great, this is Becky. May I help you?”

  “Becky, it’s Miriam.” Already the pressure behind her eyes had eased.

  “Hi! How’s it going? I saw your post. Pretty picture.”

  “Yeah, it’s beautiful.” Miriam glanced at the sunlight flashing between the trees—still mostly bare at this elevation—that crowded either side of the road. “Very remote too. I don’t think I’ve passed more than a dozen cars since I got off the interstate.”

  “Aren’t you glad I made you take my car now?”

  Except for the headrest. “Yes, thank you.” There, that was an appropriate response. She wasn’t a complete sociopath. “So how are things at work?”

  “Oh, the usual. Overflowing toilet. Complaints about Father’s homily.”

  Miriam chuckled. “I won’t miss that. Have fun.”

  Silence.

  “Becky?”

  Miriam picked up her phone and punched the screen. Call failed. She redialed before she saw the words No signal in the corner. Well, crap.

  She dropped the phone, and the speakers reverted to the static on the radio dial.

  She glanced at the string of beads hanging from the rearview mirror. She could always say a rosary, but she suspected the lulling rhythm of prayers would either put her to sleep or enable the panic. She needed distraction, not meditation.

  She hit the “Scan” button on the radio. The screen flew through the numbers. When it rounded the dial and started over, Miriam grabbed the top CD on the stack she’d brought.

  The static disappeared into the jaunty sound of Teo’s favorite Argentine folk recording. Miriam’s heart expanded and contracted at the same time, which mostly meant it hurt. So much in her life had become foreign territory since her family died, it seemed almost criminal to feel such a pang of loss for the Friday night jam sessions. Teo and his group of expat Argentine musicians had packed themselves onto the front porch till there was barely room to squeeze through. Women sat in fold-up chairs on the lawn, chatting while their kids ran around the yard with Popsicle-stained T-shirts. The folding table bowed in the middle with the weight of the potluck, and the smell of beer and liquor flavored the hot air.

  Talia would squeeze in beside Teo on the porch swing and sing while he strummed. Blaise claimed a tenuous perch on the railing, where he’d use his thighs, or even the spindles, as drums.

  Miriam spent those nights running in and out the door, ferrying ice and refilling glasses. Like her mother before her, she’d been driven to do, do, do. And yet while she was pretending to be the perfect hostess, the music had seeped into her bones.

  “Come sit a spell, Sassafras,” Teo used to say. Why had she never done it? It would have meant so much to him.

  Miriam twisted the volume knob until the rhythmic melodic energy almost overwhelmed her. She’d never hear her GPS over it.

  Come to think of it, the GPS hadn’t spoken for quite a while. She glanced down. The satellite image had reverted to the green and tan of a traditional map. The dot indicating her location moved slowly along the blue line.

  By the time Miriam drove into Green Bank—little more than a handful of buildings strung along the highway—she was famished. She pulled off at what looked like the only convenience store in town. On the curb in front sat a young biracial woman, her wiry hair corralled into dozens of short pigtails. She was flanked by a ridiculously large green backpack and a roll-around suitcase plastered with travel stickers. Waiting for a bus, maybe.

  Miriam went inside and grabbed a prewrapped sandwich and a Pepsi. The clerk seemed too caught up in his conversation with another customer—a conversation about the state of one marriage or the other; Miriam couldn’t tell whose—to notice that Miriam wanted to ask a question. So she went back outside.

  “Excuse me,” she said to the young woman with the suitcase.

  The girl raised her head. Only then did Miriam notice the bump around her middle, big enough to force her knees apart. And the bleak expression in her dark eyes.

  Miriam knew exactly how it felt at the intersection of those two particular qualities.

  She locked her knees to keep from bolting. “Sorry to bother you, but they seemed kind of busy in there.” Amazing. She sounded cool and calm and totally put together. “I’m trying to get to the telescope, but I lost my cell signal.” She held up her phone and quirked a smile. “Guess I’ll have to have a talk with my provider.”

  The girl’s expression did not change. “Nobody has cell service here. This is the radio quiet zone.”

  “Oh.” Miriam wondered what precisely a radio quiet zone was, but she didn’t really want to extend the conversation. That lost look scared her. “Well,” she said, gesturing with her phone, “Google doesn’t seem to have lost me yet, at least.”

  The girl shook her head. “You better turn that off. It’s illegal to use them here. It screws with the telescope signals. Anyway, you don’t need it. The center’s on up the road a couple miles. You can’t miss it.” She waved a hand.

  “Okay. Thanks.” Miriam hesitated, torn. Maybe she should offer the girl a ride. Buy her a bottle of water … well, not a bottle of water; the side pockets of the green backpack both had bottles sticking out the top already. Maybe a snack. Or dinner. Or just ask if she needed help. That’s what Teo would have done.

  But Miriam couldn’t even deal with her own problems, let alone take on anybody else’s. “Well, have a nice day.”

  “Yeah, you too.” If the girl noticed Miriam’s happy-clappy tone, she didn’t give any indication. She just hunched back over her knees again.

  Miriam got back in the car. She gripped the steering wheel and closed her eyes for a moment, but she could feel Teo sitting like Jiminy Cricket on her shoulder as she pulled out.

  She’d barely eaten half her sandwich before the trees gave way to a parking lot fronted by a big white sign proclaiming “Green Bank Observatory.” After the long hours spent traversing undeveloped mountain country, the spreading concrete complex came as a bit of a shock. Miriam parked in front of the visitors’ center and got out. A lifetime in Detroit, then Philly, and finally Atlanta had not prepared her for such quiet. The noise of her own chewing felt deafening. She’d never noticed that the background rumble of traffic and air conditioners and human noises exerted a pressure on the eardrums. Not until this moment, when the pressure vanished.

  It was a bit unnerving.

  She finished he
r sandwich and tossed back the Pepsi. Maybe if she ignored the shaky, weak feeling in her fingers, it would go away. She stuffed the trash into the holder in the bottom of the door and squared her shoulders. “Well, here goes nothing,” Miriam said to the stillness, and headed inside.

  * * *

  “Sorry.” The man at the front desk didn’t look sorry so much as tired. “You just missed the last bus tour. If you want, you can walk out there yourself.” He pulled a brochure from a stack and held it out. “Here’s a map. There are several other telescopes along the way. But you’ll need to turn off your cell phone past the gate. Totally off.”

  Miriam blinked. “Really? You can’t even take a picture?”

  “Not out by the telescope.”

  “But—” Miriam stopped; what could she say? I have to have a photo before my dead daughter will tell me where to go next?

  He’d think she was crazy. And he might not be wrong.

  “If you’d like, the gift shop sells disposable film cameras.”

  Miriam bit back a snarky response. It wasn’t his fault, and anyway, she was supposed to be proving she was a functional human being, capable of empathy and appropriate social interaction.

  Had the kids known about this? Probably not; otherwise, they’d have made note of it.

  Unless it was Talia’s idea of a joke.

  Or punishment.

  Miriam closed her eyes, willing away her paranoia. The road trip videos were recorded before the fight. Besides, this place was Blaise’s pick, not Talia’s.

  “Ma’am? You all right?”

  She opened her eyes. The man still held the map in his hand. She took it. “Fine, thanks.”

  Miriam bought a camera and went back to the car to stash her phone in the glove compartment. She grabbed the wide-brimmed straw hat sitting on the passenger seat and paused, fingering the white lining printed with bright flowers. A matching ribbon trailed from the brim. The last person to wear this hat was Talia. Could Miriam really just stick it on her own head, right after she’d practically accused her daughter of trying to punish her from the grave? She might as well invite a haunting.

  Which she didn’t believe in, anyway.

  Don’t be an idiot, Miriam. She was already wearing Talia’s clothes; what difference could a hat make? Miriam shoved it onto her head and slammed the car door harder than necessary.

  Miriam shared the walk out to the telescope with a number of people power walking or jogging. Every so often she passed smaller machines. None of them looked like she’d expected; she’d been picturing, well, telescopes. A domed building with a slide-open hatch. At the very least, something with a long tube and a viewfinder. Instead, they looked like big satellite dishes, bright white against the newly greened grass. One of them reminded her of a sousaphone with a tube wrapped around it.

  There was no mistaking the main attraction, though. The Green Bank Telescope towered over everything in sight, like something out of a James Bond movie—four hundred something feet high, hadn’t Blaise’s video said?—and a reflector dish wide enough to hold two football fields side by side. It rested on an enormous base of white cross-hatched metal webbing, with a matching arm stretching toward the sky. The telescope took up half her peripheral vision, its long shadow enveloping acres of grass and pine. Slanting sunbeams formed a cross behind the white scaffolding. Miriam stopped a few feet shy of the tall chain link fence to snap a couple of photos with the disposable camera.

  Check. Now what?

  The wind whispered low in the pines. In the distance, a car hissed down the highway, its sound quickly swallowed by the stillness. The quiet expanded, hunkering down around her, as if it wanted the space she inhabited. She shivered and pulled Talia’s sweater closed across her chest. But that only pressed her locket hard against her skin. The cold burrowed inward, piercing her breastbone and clamping down on the hard, angry spot at her core.

  Miriam’s eyes were so dry they stung. Had she really driven nine hours to gawk at a telescope? To take a picture, throw it up on social media, and drive nine hours to the next place to do it all again? Weren’t road trips supposed to be a symbol for a journey of the heart, or some such psychobabble?

  Miriam clasped the chain link fence. The emptiness around her, the emptiness within, cried out to be filled, the way she’d filled the endless ticking seconds of the past year. Mom had been right about that, at least.

  Of the days and weeks following her family’s death, she remembered very little. She could rattle off everything they sang at the funeral, every well-meaning but insensitive comment. But the events themselves had vanished from her memory. For weeks, every waking moment had been devoted to the struggle to draw breath, and every sleeping one, to surviving the nightmares. It was like being pinned to a dartboard, never knowing when the next projectile would come squealing out of the mist.

  And truthfully, there wasn’t much of substance to remember. For years, her life had involved a planner tightly packed with school presentations and doctor visits, rehearsals and camps. With informational forms paper clipped onto certain weeks and lists tucked into the cover. Baking breads and meals and desserts, deep cleaning the house, learning accompaniments for solos, and drawing up music lists for church while waiting at cello or piano lessons. Bullying the twins—and sometimes Teo—into helping her grow and weed and harvest and can vegetables, the pressure cooker intensifying the heat of oppressive Georgia summers. Because with only one income, they needed to save every cent they could.

  Madness—always madness—and then suddenly, nothing. No one to talk to, no one who needed her. Nothing to fill the emptiness, nothing to occupy her mind or her hands. Just never-ending nights, waiting for the sun to rise, and never-ending days, waiting for it to set again. Memories. Memories and self-recrimination.

  Getting busy had changed all that. And one morning, when the maple tree outside her window was just beginning to blush, and school-bus brakes were shrieking along the residential streets, Miriam woke to the realization that she’d slept through the night. A few days later, she’d smiled at a video on Facebook. And she’d thought, I might actually survive this.

  For the first time, Miriam recognized the magnitude of what she’d done at the funeral yesterday. The congressman’s widow had only just set sail into the maelstrom of that vast, crushing emptiness when Miriam callously exercised her own musical wit at the expense of the deceased—and those who loved him.

  When had she become capable of such willful, self-indulgent cruelty?

  The breeze settled into stillness. Such a vast, quiet emptiness. She dropped her forehead onto the diamond-hatched fence. Once, she’d been pliable—able to roll with the punches, however inexpertly. Music had helped her connect with the divine, and through it, with others. When even music failed to move her, what hope did she have?

  A cow mooed, the sound muted by distance and echoing faintly off the telescope. If she sang out here, amid this great emptiness, would the silence swallow her voice, or would it, too, echo off that vast white dish and reverberate in her own heart?

  The cool breeze sighed through the pines, causing her gauzy skirt and the ribbon trailing from her hat to flutter. Like the little thing with feathers, perched on her soul and just now pulling its head from beneath its wing.

  Miriam glanced behind her. The road stood empty. She faced the telescope, raised herself into proper singing posture, and let the air vibrate her vocal cords.

  For the beauty of the earth, for the glory of the skies,

  For the love which from our birth over and around us lies …

  It was one of Blaise’s favorite hymns. But in this great, vast emptiness, her voice sounded small. Hesitant. She put a little more muscle behind the sound.

  For the joy of human love, Brother, sister, parent, child—

  Her voice cracked. Silence swallowed the sound as if it had never been. Miriam wove her fingers into the fence again and bowed her head. “Please,” she whispered. It was the best she could come up wi
th.

  Silence. What had she expected? A cosmic event? An angelic visitation? Communing with landmarks couldn’t fix what was wrong with her.

  The little bird in her soul dove for cover. Miriam shoved backward and shook her fist at the telescope. “You’re just a stupid inanimate object! What the hell am I doing singing to you, anyway?”

  Her words bounced off the dish, like a mischievous sprite poking fun at her temper tantrum, and disappeared into the great emptiness.

  And then, with a hum of electricity and the whirring of motors, the white behemoth beyond the fence began to move.

  6

  MIRIAM TOOK TWO STEPS back before her intellect caught up. The telescope couldn’t hear her; it was just responding to instructions from its command center. The wheels beneath the superstructure rolled slowly counterclockwise, and the massive reflection panel tilted its head back, half a degree at a time. Miriam stared, awestruck by the sheer power required to change the trajectory of such an enormous object.

  The sound of a diesel engine crescendoed, replacing the noise of the motors. Miriam turned to see an old white pickup turning in at the gate. The driver killed the engine and got out. “Afternoon, ma’am.”

  Miriam forced her hunched shoulders down. “Am I …?”

  “You’re just fine, ma’am. I’m coming out to do some maintenance.” He gestured to the camera in her hand. “You want me to take a picture for you?”

  “Oh … that’s all right. I don’t really like pictures of myself.”

  “Aw, come on. Come on. Surely you want some proof you were here.” He wiggled his fingers.

  Miriam shrugged and handed it over. “I don’t know where to develop it. I can’t even get a cell signal to look it up.”