A Song for the Road

by Kathleen Basi

  One thing at a time, she told herself.

  She left Dicey to the enjoyment of the so-called garden and went to retrieve the sleeping bags from the trunk of the car. She could already tell that at this elevation it would be too cold to sit outside in just their jackets. It was going to be another long night.

  * * *

  Miriam made as comfortable a nest as she could on the wire mesh deck while chatting with the Wisconsinites. They swapped travel stories in the falling darkness, hoping for an unexplained light or two to keep them company.

  Although the older couple said they meant to sleep in their RV, they seemed in no hurry to descend. Slowly, quiet fell. The man snored; Dicey buzzed. Miriam thought she was asleep, but then she murmured, “There are so many.”

  “Stars?”

  Dicey nodded. “It gives you a sense of how small we really are.”

  “Mm.”

  Dicey snuggled up against her. “Have a favor to ask.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I want you to be Baby Girl’s godmother.”

  The shock went through her body, freezing her in place. “What?”

  “I mean it.”

  “I—” She swallowed the thickness in her throat. “Dicey, I don’t know what to say.”

  “‘Yes’ would be appropriate.” Dicey sounded amused.

  “I’d be honored. I just … are you sure you want me?”

  “Why wouldn’t I? And don’t give me any crap about not loving your family.”

  Miriam closed her mouth.

  Dicey sat up to look at her head-on by the faint, silvery glow of the stars. “That’s what I figured.” She scowled at Miriam. “I want you to be Baby Girl’s godmother because you’re an awesome human being. But there’s a condition. I don’t want to hear you say anything about not loving your family, ever again. I’ve heard how you talk about them. You loved them just fine.”

  It took Miriam an unreasonably long time to clear the thickness in her throat. “Okay.”

  “Good.” Dicey leaned against her again. Slowly, her buzzing breaths lengthened. Miriam pressed her cheek against Dicey’s head as the younger woman’s weight settled into sleep. She’d always loved the quiet in the middle of the night. The peace of it, the knowledge that everyone under her care was safe and at rest. The journey had bonded the women, but Dicey’s request tied them together in a lasting way. It was surprisingly emotional.

  Out in the scraggly brush, crickets creaked. The wind whispered low, whisking away the day’s heat. Dicey’s body provided welcome warmth.

  Miriam stared up at the sky, her brain fuzzy, yet still vibrating with awareness. The wind died down, and with it all sense of connection to the world. She sat suspended between heaven and earth, anticipating what, she didn’t know. She only knew her whole being was holding its breath—waiting—waiting—waiting.

  There were no dancing lights over the Sangre de Cristo, but every moment, more stars emerged from the darkness. She’d never seen anything like this spangled velvet swath, tinged cream and brown: the Milky Way. How could something so spectacular hide within what had always seemed, to a Motor City child and Atlanta transplant, a threatening darkness?

  Blaise would have loved this. While other preschool boys made lists of dinosaurs, he’d listed constellations. They never could afford a good telescope, and the skies around Atlanta were too washed out anyway, but he’d seemed content to join the astronomy club. “I wish you were here to see this,” Miriam whispered.

  There was no answer, of course. Below the star-slung sky, the highlands lay silent, save for the hypnotic, metronomic pulse of desert insects and the buzz of Dicey’s breaths. Miriam closed her eyes and let herself drift into the space between.

  38

  MIRIAM WOKE TO THE sound of deep, raw gasping, of coughs without recovery time.

  Even before her mind processed the sound, Miriam had both arms around Dicey. In her panic, the younger woman’s arms flailed wildly, contacting Miriam’s eye, and for a moment, Miriam did see dancing lights above the UFO watchtower.

  As soon as she recovered, she maneuvered behind Dicey and pinned her arms to her sides. “Calm down,” she said, pressing her cheek against Dicey’s to limit her range of motion. The girl’s skin radiated heat. “Calm down, Dicey. Just breathe. Breathe.”

  It felt strange, doing this to a grown woman, yet achingly familiar. This had been the only way to get Talia through medical appointments in the early years.

  “You never stop being a mother,” Dicey had told her. The truth in those words pierced the darkness with a light that took Miriam’s breath away.

  She breathed in and out, letting the air pass over her vocal cords. It was Teo’s lullaby, the wordless ditty he’d sung to the twins when nursing couldn’t settle them, when thunder woke them screaming. She hummed in Dicey’s ear until the younger woman began to calm down, her breath still noisy and labored, but less panicked. It was cold, Miriam realized. She hadn’t noticed at first because of the heat of Dicey’s fevered body, but it had to be near freezing. Above them, the snow-capped mountains were bathed in a star glow that seemed otherworldly. It also illuminated the Wisconsinites, sleeping in each other’s arms in the corner of the platform railing. Miriam felt a moment’s loneliness, but only a moment’s. There was work to do. A mother’s work.

  “All right, Dicey,” she said softly. “Whether you like it or not, you’re going to the hospital. Come on. Let’s get you to the car.”

  With effort, Miriam got her down the narrow stairs and into the car. But Dicey wouldn’t let her close the door. “Oh two,” she wheezed.

  It took a minute to process. “Oxygen?”

  Dicey nodded listlessly and waved one limp hand toward her backpack.

  Damn it, Dicey. But Miriam had no time to indulge her anger. She dug in the bag and found a small canister. Sick as she was, Dicey moved like a pro, attaching the plastic tubing of a cannula and looping the ends over her ears. She pressed her hands against the tubing, her head falling back on the seat, and the light from Miriam’s phone illuminated the words engraved on the medical bracelet.

  Dicey Smith, cystic fibrosis.

  The words socked Miriam in the gut. She’d heard of cystic fibrosis, but she knew nothing about it. Only that anything that required a medical ID bracelet and portable oxygen was bad news.

  Miriam stalked to the back of the car and popped the trunk. Unzipping the stickered suitcase revealed more oxygen canisters … and a black vest with tubes protruding from it.

  So it hadn’t been a dream.

  Why didn’t I make her go to the doctor?

  Miriam pulled up her mapping app. The nearest ER was thirty miles away. She spit gravel pulling out of the parking lot.

  It was one of the longest half hours of Miriam’s life. Every shallow, labored breath Dicey took made her chest ache in sympathy. Dicey needed to cough, but she seemed too weak.

  Miriam began singing again. Teo’s melody, and then, flowing effortlessly from it in counterpoint, her own. The one she’d spent an hour fighting with at Hadley’s piano, trying to make it classical. It had found its voice in Teo’s favorite Scripture passage: Be still and know that I am God.

  They arrived in Alamosa, Colorado, at two thirty AM. The ER lay quiet and empty except for one woman reading a magazine in the corner and another behind the desk wearing, improbably, Día de Muertos scrubs. Muertos looked up, her eyes widening at the sight of the pregnant woman putting all her weight on Miriam. “Enrique!” she bellowed, and another nurse came out from the door beside the check in window. He removed Dicey’s weight from Miriam’s arm; Dicey held her wrist up to show him the bracelet. His face turned grave. He turned to Miriam. “Do you have her meds? Her oscillation vest?”

  “The black vest with the tubes? It’s in her suitcase.”

  “We’ll need it. We’ll need everything.”

  Miriam didn’t need to be told twice. She ran out to the car and retrieved all Dicey’s belongings. Inside, she
shoved them into the arms of the waiting nurse, who turned and headed into the back. Miriam started to follow, but the woman behind the desk stopped her. “I’m sorry, are you family?”

  “No, but …”

  “Then you can’t come back. I’m sorry.”

  Miriam stood there as the door swung closed with an electronic click. Damn, damn, damn!

  She sat down in the chair directly in front of the door to wait. Stupid privacy laws!

  The only sounds in the ER waiting room were the piped-in Muzak and the guy in a shiny suit on the Weather Channel, talking about a late-season blizzard.

  “CF?”

  It took a moment to realize the voice was addressing her. Miriam looked over her shoulder. Magazine woman. “I’m sorry?”

  “CF.” The woman nodded toward the closed door. “I recognize the paraphernalia. My cousin died of it when she was nineteen.” Perhaps seeing the look on Miriam’s face, she added, “But I hear the life expectancy’s improved a ton.”

  Miriam gave the woman a stiff smile and sat down, pulling out her phone to look up everything she didn’t know.

  … Mucus that’s too thick or sweat that’s too salty …

  … sticky mucus that clogs the lungs and digestive system …

  … compromised lung function …

  … some people are living into their 40s …

  Suddenly, everything made sense: the videos and photos for her daughter, the scrapbook. The loud music and long showers, cover for breathing treatments Dicey didn’t want Miriam to know about. Her vehemence about living life fully. The cryptic comments about death.

  Miriam clicked her phone off and dropped her head between her knees, hoping the blood would rush to her brain and knock her out. Because the chasm opening in front of her was one she wasn’t sure she could crawl back out of.

  39

  Sunday, May 8

  5:52 AM

  Alamosa, Colorado

  THE TV STAYED ON all night. The Weather Channel guys couldn’t stop salivating over the storm now pounding the hell out of Colorado Springs. Miriam supposed she was lucky she’d even gotten to see the Milky Way in Hooper. From twisters to blizzards in two days: #Gr8AmAdven, indeed.

  Somewhere down deep, she must be hysterical, if she was thinking in sharp signs. Hash tags, she corrected herself.

  “Please,” she said to Día de Muertos woman again. “Please, just tell me what’s going on.”

  “I’m sorry, privacy …”

  “Forget the privacy regulations! Just ask her if she wants me to know! Is that so difficult?”

  “Ma’am, I need you to calm down, or I’ll have to call Security.”

  Miriam gritted her teeth. She’d never felt so powerless.

  “Do you really want to be responsible for her health and safety?” her mother had asked.

  No, she replied silently. No, I don’t. But I’m all she has right now.

  Miriam took a deep breath and refocused on the desk attendant. “I’m going to get a breath of air, and then I’ll be back,” she said. “I’m not leaving.”

  The woman stared back, expressionless.

  Miriam glided out the door, projecting the calm, with-it image she knew she needed in order to have any chance. For heaven’s sake, she’d brought Dicey in. Surely that ought to count for something!

  As Miriam walked out the door, a helicopter approached, heading for the landing pad in the corner of the parking lot. The noise disrupted the quiet of a small-town Sunday morning. She shivered as she stretched her neck in the cold wind. The sky glowered in the gray predawn. She imagined she could see the blizzard clouds to the north, covering highways she and Dicey had traversed only a couple days earlier.

  The chopper powered down. Miriam walked to the end of the drive and then continued. A walk around the block might help clear her mind. So would finding a church to go to Mass. How could it be Sunday again? In the real world, people had gone through an entire workweek, an entire school week, a week of lessons and sports practices. The last seven days had passed in a flash, yet she felt years older.

  Miriam set off at a brisk clip. How could she convince them to give her information? Someone had to get word to Dicey’s family. Or had Dicey been coherent enough to give the hospital personnel contact info?

  She’d been coherent enough to show that orderly her bracelet. The bracelet she’d refused, again and again, to let Miriam see.

  What if Dicey had specifically told them not to tell Miriam anything?

  “Stop it,” she said aloud. “That makes no sense. She just asked you to be her baby’s godmother.” She rubbed her eyes. In the corner of the parking lot, the landing pad buzzed with activity: one swarm of people loading equipment onto the chopper, another shepherding a stretcher toward it.

  Wait a minute. Was that guy putting Dicey’s suitcase into that chopper? He closed the door and retreated, and the helicopter powered up again.

  Miriam took off running. “No!” she shouted, running toward them, waving her arms. “Wait! Wait for me! Please!”

  Too late. The icy wind from the blades sliced through Talia’s flowing brown skirt and peasant blouse as if they weren’t there at all. In the gray predawn, the chopper’s spotlight blinded her. As it banked right and turned, nose-down, into the wind, Miriam blinked repeatedly, trying to clear her vision enough to see the emblem on the side. All she caught was one word, written in black just forward of the tail rotor:

  Albuquerque.

  Her head spun; her vision blacked over. She sat down hard on the ground, her ears roaring. By the time sight and sound returned, the helicopter lights had shrunk to a point, the noise fading from a deafening roar to a faint murmur. Dicey was gone.

  Miriam put her hands to her forehead, the emptiness inside so vast, surely the whole universe could fit inside. Except emptiness shouldn’t hurt, and this hurt like hell.

  The sun broke the horizon and flowed across the valley, bathing the mountains and everything between them in a deep orange-pink glow. She felt the warmth on the backs of her hands, her eyelids, and the tip of her nose.

  And Miriam knew:

  She loved this girl.

  She’d thought herself incapable of love. She’d thought she’d spent everything she had on her children, an entire life’s supply poured out, wasted now that they were gone. She’d thought she had no more to give.

  She knew now she was wrong. Maybe she’d buried it, maybe she’d turned her back on it, but here it was, coursing and raging like a river swollen by spring rains, sweeping away all the barriers she’d erected to keep it in and everything else out.

  She could feel it now, for the first time since she’d seen Simeon and that police officer coming up her front walk last April. There was something out there again, a sense of connection and understanding and wonder at the world and all that existed within it. A sense of being part of something much larger than herself.

  Be still, the melody whispered in her mind. Be still and know.

  How long Miriam stood soaking in the rising sun, she couldn’t say. But when she finally moved, she had a purpose again. She was going to find Dicey, whatever it took. Because Dicey had broken her open, and allowed her to touch the best that lay within her once more.

  * * *

  Sunday morning text message conversation:

  Miriam: Dicey’s been sent to the hospital in ABQ.

  Becky: WHAT???????????? Details!

  Miriam: Later. Just pray. Anybody in ABQ have a friend with a spare room?

  Becky: Your mom?

  Miriam: Not sure I can deal with that much togetherness.

  Becky:

  Becky: CALL YOUR MOTHER

  * * *

  Texts between Miriam Tedesco and Josephine Lewis-Thurston:

  Miriam: Well, I’m going to see mom.

  Jo: About damn time.

  Part 9

  Albuquerque, New Mexico

  There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.

  —
Martin Luther King Jr.

  Miriam’s e-mail to her choir members:

  Hi, everybody,

  First of all, I want to thank you for all your messages on Facebook. I don’t think I’ve ever fully appreciated, until this trip, just how blessed I am to have you all in my life.

  I had to stop and nap on the road to Albuquerque … didn’t sleep much last night. Dicey got very sick, and the hospital in Alamosa transferred her on to ABQ. I can’t give you all the details because, frankly, I don’t have them, but it looks a lot more serious than I had guessed. So please pray for her.

  And for me, because there’s something else I have to do there, and I’m not sure I’m ready for it.

  Thanks all,

  Miriam

  40

  Sunday, May 8

  Albuquerque, New Mexico

  Noon

  MIRIAM’S ENTIRE CHILDHOOD IN Detroit, she’d known what to expect when she came home from school: the smell of savory spices on the stove, so strong, even the walls of the house couldn’t contain them. That, and the sound of a vacuum cleaner.

  It was disorienting to step out of the car in front of a row of identical zero-entry duplexes in Albuquerque and experience exactly the same thing.

  Miriam rang the doorbell. The vacuum shut off, and momentarily the door opened. “Mira,” said Sallie Lewis, opening her arms. “At last.”

  Embraces had never been part of earlier homecomings; it added to the foreignness of this one—her first time visiting Mom’s new home. How small her mother had become, her frame shrinking, her skin loosening on her bones. Had this happened recently, or had Miriam just been too wrapped up in herself to notice?

  Sallie released her, patting both her arms and stepping back to wave her inside. “All right, come on in,” she said. “Judging by the looks of that car, you’ve had a rough ride. I’ll get it cleaned out, but Becky’s not going to be happy.”