A Song for the Road

by Kathleen Basi

  “Well … let’s just say I had a pretty intense childhood. You don’t have a choice but to get close.”

  “Intense in what way?”

  “Health stuff.”

  “She know about the baby?”

  “Yeah.”

  Miriam hesitated. “I don’t want to stick my nose in, but … what’s up with the baby’s father?”

  “Not in the picture, not gonna be.”

  “Okay.”

  Dicey fiddled with her blue bracelet. Miriam wondered about the significance of that piece of jewelry. “I’ll tell you, but you have to promise not to judge, okay, church lady?”

  Miriam blinked. “Um … okay …”

  “I had a work-study job at school, working for a professor in astrophysics, and I was stupid.”

  Miriam nodded once; she got the picture. “Um …” Brilliant, Miriam. “How does one … get involved with a professor?”

  Dicey snorted. “How does anyone ‘get involved’ with anyone?” She put air quotes around the euphemism. “A little too much alcohol, a little too much ego.”

  “I’m assuming he was married?”

  “Naturally.” Dicey made a face. “It never occurred to me I could get pregnant. I shouldn’t have been able to get pregnant.”

  “Everybody thinks that until it happens.”

  Dicey gave her a dirty look. “Anyway, by the time I realized, I was way far along, and he was out at Green Bank for a stint. He didn’t answer my calls for weeks. All I had was a cell number.”

  “And he was in the no-cell-signal zone.” Miriam nodded. “So you had to go there to talk to him. I take it he wasn’t interested?”

  “The asshole wrote me a check and told me to ‘take care of it.’” Dicey blew out a breath. “I’ll use it to start her college fund. And there you have it. My whole sordid history.”

  “I’m sorry.” How would Dicey support herself and her baby? “Will your brothers help you? Like, with taking care of her?”

  “Oh, sure. They’ve got kids already. She’ll have cousins by the dozens.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Yeah … she’s gonna need all the help she can get.”

  Miriam frowned. It couldn’t be easy to be a single parent, but Dicey’s comment seemed to imply something more.

  But Dicey redirected before she could formulate a question. “Anyway, what about you? That was your sister, right?”

  Miriam nodded. “Jo’s nine years older than me, and Brad’s seven years older. Nobody’s ever said it, but I think I was probably an ‘oops’ baby. Dad passed away and Mom moved to Albuquerque a couple years ago.”

  “You see them often?”

  Miriam shrugged. “Holidays.” She felt rather than saw Dicey’s disapproval. “I mean, we talk occasionally. And Mom came and stayed with me a while after … last year.”

  Dicey remained silent. Miriam squirmed. “Teo always said my parents weren’t so different from his. They just wanted the best for us. But Mom is hard to please. She’s like a whirlwind. She never wears down. She comes in with a long list of things to do, and all the while she’s crossing things off it and coming up with new ones.”

  “Use the left two lanes to take the Interstate 55 south Interstate 70 exit toward St. Louis,” Siri interrupted.

  Miriam flipped her turn signal on. “They’re not bad people,” she added quickly. “We’re just different, that’s all. The things I thought were important, my parents never did. When I was little, we’d go to all Jo’s basketball games. Even the away games. But when I had my last middle school choir concert, somebody gave them Pistons tickets. So they went to the game instead. I know it sounds petty, but we only had two performances a year, you know?”

  “That is pretty sucky.”

  “Yeah.” Come to think of it, even after her parents’ relationship soured, they still went to sporting events together. That, and church activities.

  “Did you ever say anything?” Dicey asked.

  Miriam shrugged. “I did what every middle schooler does when their parents hurt their feelings. I was a butthead.”

  Dicey smiled, but two miles of flat fields, dotted with oil wells turning lazily, passed by before she spoke again. “My mom’s a rock star,” she said. “I always knew that, but I wonder if I appreciated it. I remember this one day—it had been rough for a while, and when we got past it, Mom let me skip school to celebrate. She never let me skip school. She said I missed too much as it was, ’cause I was always sick. I got every virus that hit a classroom.”

  Miriam glanced sharply at her, thinking of the cough, but Dicey carried on.

  “Anyway, we went down to the waterfront to celebrate. Did all the tourist things. Rode the street cars. Drove down Lombard Street.” She laughed. “She even let me have ice cream at Ghirardelli’s—for lunch. You have no idea how big a deal that was. She always gave me the healthiest, most tasteless lunches you can imagine.”

  “Is that why you put salt on everything now?” Miriam couldn’t resist the little dig.

  “Ha ha. Anyway, family is a pain, but they’re also, like … everything. I just hate to see you with no one at all.”

  Miriam braced, expecting the pit to appear in front of her, but the siren call of despair sounded muffled. It took a moment to think why that might be. She squeezed Dicey’s hand. “I’m not alone, am I?”

  Dicey smiled and squeezed back. “So tell me about your siblings.”

  “Brad’s a plastic surgeon in California and Jo has a corner office in Manhattan. That’s what my parents wanted for us. It’s what they worked for all those years on an assembly line. They hated that Teo and I lived this life where we were tied to the church community at holidays and not making a whole lot of money.”

  “You said she came to stay after …?”

  “After the funeral.” She made herself say it. “She decided I needed distraction, so she made a to-do list for me. She’s the one who called Ella Evil. Thought it would help me to talk it out.”

  “That sucks,” Dicey said again. She turned her phone end over end. “Grief must be hard enough without a spotlight on you.”

  Grief. Miriam supposed what she’d been suffering through for the past year was grief. Mostly she’d felt buffeted: by regret, self-recrimination, unwanted notoriety, and by the echoes of her husband and daughter—though not her son. Never her son. That was a pain all its own.

  If Mom hadn’t driven her so hard, would she have allowed herself to dip into the well of anguish and deal with it properly? Instead, she’d buried it all, distracting herself with tributes and busy work until she’d almost convinced herself Mom was right, that this whole grief thing could be contained and controlled.

  She knew better now. Grief was messy. It didn’t make sense.

  Beside her, Dicey was humming. Miriam would have loved to have that silky, dusky voice in her choir. But once again, the melody seemed familiar, and yet Miriam couldn’t place it. What was up with her inner ear?

  Then, just like that, it clicked. “How do you know that tune?”

  The humming stopped. “Huh?”

  “The one you were just humming. My son wrote it. How do you know it?”

  Dicey hesitated, frowning. “It’s that thing you played back in West Virginia.”

  Miriam opened her mouth to argue and then closed it again as she heard it. Of course. That was why she couldn’t put a name to her ghost melody. It didn’t have one.

  But it wasn’t quite right, somehow. “Sing it again,” she said.

  Dicey looked a little self-conscious, but she complied. There. That’s where she’d gone wrong: the third note was a step lower than what Blaise had written. A subtle difference, but—

  Without warning, the whole next strain opened up in Miriam’s head. It was like merging onto a freeway—melody, chords, registration, all charging in the same direction.

  She pulled off on the shoulder and punched the hazards. Blaise’s notebook was in her suitcase, in the trunk, but she cou
ldn’t take the time to get it. She could sense the freight train of inspiration rushing by. “Paper,” she said. “Quick. Paper and a pencil.”

  Dicey looked at her like she’d suddenly sprouted a third eye. “I don’t have any paper.”

  Miriam made a disgusted sound as she grabbed a pen and the hotel receipt from Cincinnati. She smoothed it over the steering wheel, slung ten lines across the back, and started scribbling.

  “Um, Miriam?”

  “Shush.” She ran out of room on the first set of lines. Had to draw another one. It angled down the page like a melting ice cream cone. A third set. Her fingers itched to feel keys beneath them, to bring the sound out of her head, off the page, and into the open.

  And then the superhighway made a left turn into a swamp. She could sense the way forward—almost hear it—but it was chaotic, jumbled. A characteristic interval here, a well-placed inversion there. But it wouldn’t come out of her head. She needed a piano.

  Her hands were trembling, her blood blazing, and her heart overflowed. With love, with loss. With life. She felt Blaise’s presence, as if he stood just on the other side of a thin veil—and if she could only get the sun at the right angle, she’d be able to see right through it.

  This was what it meant to be a mother: the sense that not even death could separate them. And for the first time, it occurred to her to wonder how Mom felt about the distance between them. Miriam must have hurt her a thousand times with the wall she’d put between them.

  Much as she felt the bewildered pain of what Blaise had failed to communicate.

  If there’d been anything to communicate.

  Again, she was back to that. Miriam scoured her memory of her last conversation with Blaise—the phone call after he won the competition. If there were clues to his sexual orientation, they were buried deep. All she remembered was Dr. von Rickenbach this and Dr. von Rickenbach that. Thank God, Blaise had been too pumped up to notice the dead silence with which she’d reacted to hearing that name out of her son’s mouth.

  He adored Gus. Had she been wrong all these years? What if she’d chosen differently?

  “‘If’ again. You know better than that, Sassafras.”

  Teo’s voice hit her like a wave: a freezing slap, running away to a limitless ocean. How she wished she could talk through all of this with him. She missed having someone in her corner, someone she could count on to care, to take her side, even if that sometimes meant telling her she was wrong.

  She’d just made music out of her own head, built on the bones of Blaise’s inspiration. How wonderful—and horrible, and beautiful, and sad. And Teo wasn’t here to share it. Every good thing that had happened in her life for the past twenty years, he’d been the first to know. The only time they’d been apart was when he’d taken the kids to Argentina to meet his family. She slept badly the whole time they were gone. When she met them outside Security at the airport, Teo grabbed her around the waist and kissed her in front of God and everyone, and she’d felt complete again. And that night, she’d slept like a log.

  Who could she share this moment with now? Who in her life would understand? Gus, perhaps. But given their history, entertaining the thought felt like the worst sort of betrayal.

  “Miriam?” A warm hand brushed her forearm. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Carefully, she hooked the pen over the page and leaned back against the seat, not even noticing the uncomfortable headrest. She was tired. So tired. And something else she hadn’t felt since before Teo and the kids got on the plane to go to California.

  Starving.

  That felt like a betrayal too.

  18

  Two years earlier

  Atlanta, Georgia

  August von Rickenbach

  MIRIAM’S FINGER HOVERED OVER the “Enter” key. Every time she typed his name into the search bar, guilt grew another root in her soul. Yet Gus was an itch she couldn’t stop scratching. It was a slow torment, seeing his list of accomplishments grow, but as long as his star kept rising—as long as he continued to look happy and healthy—she could reassure herself that she’d made the right choice all those years ago.

  She hit the key and watched the circle on the screen spin. In the living room, Blaise banged out a Mozart concerto while Teo strummed his guitar out on the deck. Momentarily, Talia joined from her bedroom, offering up Bach to the din.

  Miriam had given up everything for this life. The hours she’d spent at the piano instead of making friends, learning wedding music to pay for her lessons. Running scales and arpeggios while the rest of her family yelled insults and encouragement at the helmeted guys crashing into each other on the TV in the basement. It had given her the skills set to be very good at her parish work, but on nights like this, the distance between what was and what could have been loomed large.

  Her parents had tried to get her to focus on something other than music—something that would offer a way out, a ticket to more than a shabby house and a daily struggle for solvency in the Detroit suburbs. They’d never understood: music was her out.

  At least, it was supposed to be. The irony was not lost on Miriam, because both her siblings had made it out. These days, Jo walked around her corner office in Manhattan wearing designer suits and merging international deals. And Brad, with his liposuctions and face-lifts, made more money than God.

  Meanwhile, here she sat, in another cramped bungalow in another fading neighborhood, scrunched between her bed and the corner of the room in the six square feet allotted for an “office,” while beyond the crooked door frame, the cello, guitar, and piano tried to drown each other out.

  Miriam mashed her hands against her ears. One moment, for the love of all things holy. Was one moment of quiet so much to ask?

  The web results finally loaded.

  It was always tricky finding the information she wanted. She was drawn to news of Gus’s accomplishments like a moth to a flame. But what she needed to know required deeper searching. She couldn’t just skim headlines; she had to infer the connections from color details included in unrelated articles.

  The door closed, muffling the noise of her children’s practicing. “Hey, Beautiful,” Teo said. He crossed the tiny room in three steps to engulf her from behind, his lips on her jaw, desire in the feel of his hands running over her breasts.

  Sex was the last thing on her mind. She had to force herself not to shove him away; his advances felt like an onslaught. “The kids,” she protested, trying to reach the mouse to close the browser.

  “They’re occupied.” Teo tipped her head back, kissing her. She couldn’t see the screen.

  “Worship commission.”

  “Doesn’t start for half an hour. C’mon, we’ve got time. How often does it all work out like this?” He reached the tender spot at the juncture of her neck and shoulder, the one that reduced her to jelly.

  Except tonight she was so tense, she just giggled. She hunched her shoulders, and he retreated.

  “Well, it was worth a try,” he said, smiling.

  Miriam reached for the mouse then, but it was too late. Teo braced one hand on the back of the chair and the other on the desk, regarding the face on the screen. He sighed. “Again, Mira?”

  Miriam squeezed her hands between her knees, staring at her feet. “He canceled a tour. Because his mother is sick.” She looked up at her husband. “Breast cancer. It’s got a hereditary link.”

  Teo scratched his head and sat on the edge of the bed, his jaw working. It hurt him, the way she kept picking at this part of her past. They’d come closer to fighting over this than anything else. He looked so vulnerable.

  “Mira …” He swallowed a few times. “Has it ever occurred to you that maybe there’s a reason you feel so compelled to follow Gus’s life?”

  She swiveled toward him. “What do you mean?”

  “This summer, watching the kids with their grandparents and their aunts and uncles and great-aunts and -uncles … all their cousins … it was amazing. They understand
themselves so much better now.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I think it’s time.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you think he deserves—”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Teo fixed her with a piercing gaze. “Don’t you think they deserve to know?”

  Miriam bowed her head, clamping her fingers behind her head. “I’m scared, Teo. What if it changes everything?”

  He leaned forward, his big brown hands warm on hers as he rested his forehead on the crown of her head. “I know. It scares me too.”

  They stayed there for what felt like a long time, the cacophony of cello and piano fading to a distant, indistinct buzz. It felt safe here. If only they could stay in this cocoon forever.

  At last, Teo pulled away. “I have to get over to church.” He kissed her temple as he left.

  Miriam looked back at the screen, but she no longer felt any desire to know the latest news on Gus von Rickenbach. She hated seeing that look on Teo’s face. It made her insides feel like scrambled eggs. Not just because she knew she’d hurt him.

  But because she knew he wasn’t wrong.

  19

  Sunday, May 1

  Benedictine Monastery

  St. Louis, Missouri

  AT FOUR AM, MIRIAM woke abruptly to an onslaught of memories:

  Teo, looking deeply into her eyes, asking, “Don’t you think they deserve to know?”

  “What the hell?” Talia’s voice, shaking with fury in response to a Facebook message Miriam never sent.

  And a photo of teenage boys communicating heart-to-heart.

  Miriam sat up and leaned her head against the wall. The monastery lay quiet, the dim glow from the street light outside her window making a shadowy outline of the crucifix on the wall.

  For years, she’d followed the debates over marriage equality, caught between beliefs she’d accepted without question her entire life and the real suffering of good, faithful men she encountered through her ministerial work. Eventually, she and Teo decided it was up to God to sort it out, anyway, so they opted to treat everyone with dignity and leave the rest alone.