A Song for a New Day

by Sarah Pinsker

  “Kinda,” I said.

  13

  ROSEMARY

  Adventures Close to Home

  Leaving the highway for the county road, watching the county road roll into Jory’s Main Street, Rosemary was struck by the emptiness. She’d never noticed before, or else she’d assumed the mix of dead businesses and thriving ones was normal. Now that she was supposed to seek out secret places, she had no idea where to find them. Were they hiding in the back rooms of the open stores or the boarded-up ones? Were there dance parties in the old high school gym? Rap battles on the playground after dark? She still couldn’t figure out how to find what she’d been sent to look for.

  Her mother was waiting for her in an isolation booth at Micky’s. She unlocked the door and grabbed the handle of the rolling bag, squeezing Rosemary’s hand for a moment before pulling the bag onto the seat beside her. Rosemary took the opposite bench. They both ordered the macaroni and cheese without even bothering to scroll through the menu screens, and she paid for both her own and her mother’s meal, with a smile into the camera; it was nice to feel known.

  “So tell me,” her mother said. “Do you like the job? Are you glad you quit Superwally? Unless that’s a bad question . . .”

  “It’s not a bad question at all, Mom. I’m glad I quit Superwally. It’s an interesting job. I get to help people, kind of.”

  “Well, that’s exciting. What’s the downside?”

  Their food arrived, looking and smelling like Micky’s mac and cheese always looked and smelled, at exactly the right temperature. The SHL food had been fine, but different. Rosemary poked the edges with her fork. “It’s a little overwhelming, but I’m willing to give it a try.”

  “Good. How long are you home for? Your father thought you were coming back for good, but I said I thought this was a visit.”

  “It’ll depend, I guess. There’s an assignment I have to do here, unless it goes badly.”

  Her mother cocked her head. “Well, eat and then I want to hear whatever you’re willing to tell.”

  * * *

  —

  They got back to the farm in midafternoon. She took a moment as they stepped from the truck to appreciate what she had always taken for granted: home, the friendly ruckus of chickens conversing, people who loved her and didn’t expect her to do miracles.

  She dropped her bags in her room, where the Superwally customer support posters still decorated half her walls, and bands the other half. Funny how she’d always thought those bands lived in a different world from hers; she’d never considered them people before. They’d existed as verse and chorus, as notes and chords, as videos or recordings, as celebrities whose clothes and breakups were the subject of gossip, but never as people who had their own opinions and personalities outside the time they spent in public. The fact that she hadn’t grown up watching them in glorious SHL quality probably contributed to her flat image of them. She lay back on her bed and imagined striking up a conversation with Iris Branches at a bar.

  Her father was in the kitchen making dinner when she came out.

  “What can I do?” she asked.

  “Nothing.” He didn’t turn from grating potatoes.

  It took her a moment to realize he was angry. Had he ever been angry with her before? Never in a way he’d let show. “I don’t even get a hello?”

  “Hello.” He still didn’t face her.

  “Or an explanation of why you’re not turning around? This is a weird welcome.”

  He slammed the grater onto the counter and turned to look at her. “Welcome home. I’m glad you’re back. I’m pissed off.”

  “Pissed off?”

  “You would be, too, if your daughter told you she was going to a training program at a protected compound, but secretly took a job requiring her to travel to places where she could be killed.”

  Ah. “Okay, first, I should have explained. I’m sorry I lied, but it’s not like that. I’m here first, aren’t I? This job could take me anywhere, but I’m starting at home, because I know it’ll make you sleep easier if I can stick to towns near here. It’s a good job, and I’m lucky to have gotten it.”

  If he hadn’t started down this line, she might have talked to him about her fears about the job. Instead, she was stuck defending it. “Secondly, I could be killed anywhere. A blade could fall off a windmill and kill me tomorrow. Some chicken virus might mutate and kill more than the pox did. ‘Safe’ is not a reason to stay home.”

  “Statistically speaking . . .”

  “Statistically speaking, you could have a heart attack tomorrow. Are you going to stay in bed waiting for it?”

  He cocked his head. “I just don’t understand why you’d put yourself in danger. We built this farm so you’d be safe. You can live here forever without any of these jobs between state basic income and the windmills.”

  “Because I’m twenty-four and my entire world for half my life has been these five rooms and this farm, and I like having a job. You got to live in the real world before you hid here. Why can’t I have a chance to do the same?”

  “It’s more dangerous now, honey. You know that.”

  “Is it, though? How old are your statistics? I was terrified for the first few days, even on that compound, because you made me terrified to be there. Maybe I don’t want to be terrified anymore.”

  “She’s right, Dan.” Rosemary hadn’t heard her mother come into the kitchen.

  “I don’t care if she’s right, Em. I’d rather she was safe.”

  He turned back to the potatoes. Her mother looked at her and shrugged. “I should have warned you he was upset. Go feed the animals. I’ll talk to him.”

  * * *

  —

  Her father was still sullen over dinner, but her mother must have convinced him that being mad at her was pointless.

  “So tell me about your job.” It sounded like a forced line reading.

  She explained the basics, putting the most positive spin on it, leaving out the cities. She wished she could tell him she understood his fears, that she’d felt them, too, but she thought she was better off taking a hard line. Talking about the job—even if it was still conceptual to her—made her feel braver and stronger. She concentrated on describing the bands she’d seen in the studio, the people she’d met, the compound itself.

  “That’s a lot of responsibility. I’m impressed, honey.” At least that sounded genuine. Maybe he would come around. “So what are you back here for?”

  “I’m supposed to try to find local musicians.”

  He cocked his head. “In Jory? There’s nothing here.”

  “That’s what I said, too, but everyone I talked to says there are hidden pockets of music everywhere. I wanted to give it a try. See what I can find.”

  “Like venues? Secret garage bands? Or people making professional-quality music on their computers?”

  “Any of the above. Are garage bands a real thing?”

  He nodded. “They used to be. I guess if it’s ‘any of the above’ you’ll find someone. Not necessarily anyone good, but someone.”

  * * *

  —

  She woke early to feed the chickens and clean their coop, the closest she was willing to come to apologizing for deceiving her parents—both the deceptions they knew about and the ones yet to come. She drove the farm truck toward town on an empty two-lane. High overhead, a hawk sketched circles in the cloudless blue, while a package drone took the more direct route at a lower altitude. She’d only witnessed a hawk attacking a drone once, years ago, but she always held her breath waiting to see it happen again.

  A second bird darted low across the road, small and quick, brown with wings and tail tipped electric blue. Even though you weren’t supposed to use a Hoodie for anything other than maps while driving, she asked for a quick ID: indigo bunting, male, winter plumage. A “First of the
Season!” birding badge flashed in her peripheral vision, which wasn’t an accomplishment anyone should be celebrating. Buntings never arrived before summer, and this one was here before it had even put on its breeding finery.

  She drove through the license plate scanner at the north end of town, where the county road became Main, past the twelve stately houses lurking behind their security fences, houses that told of a past Jory she’d never known, ten of them now subdivided for multiple families. Then the municipal lot, where she parked the truck and continued on foot. What remained of Main Street was a long strip of vacant two-story buildings with signage nobody had bothered to remove, for types of stores she’d never seen. Ghosts: laundromat, Lucky Chinese, Carrie’s Hair, Quigley Antique Mall. She didn’t remember any of them ever having been open, though someone once graffitied KILL THE POXIES—SAVE A LIFE on the side of Quigley’s, and her mother told her to look the other way, as if she hadn’t already seen it, and it was gone the next time they returned to town.

  There was still a feed store, a small grocery with a post office and health clinic inside, a gas station, a Micky’s, and a bar. Of those, the only one she’d never been in was the bar. She wasn’t going to find a secret venue in any of the others.

  The bar was called Sweeney’s, according to the marquee, and the Shamrock, according to the front door, propped open. It was a sunny day and dark inside, so her eyes took a minute to adjust. Inside, it looked like a replica of the one hoodspace Irish bar she’d been in, unless she had that backwards.

  There were only two customers this early, both older white guys, on opposite ends of the wooden bar, with eight stools in between them. The rest of the room held six tables, separated and sealed by clear floor-to-ceiling booth isolators, like at Micky’s. The bartender was middle-aged, another white guy, with more hair on his forearms than his head. She chose a stool midway between the two customers, realizing too late that it put her behind the tap handle contraption. She didn’t want to move, so she stuck with her choice. Brave enough to not be isolated in a booth, but nowhere near the other customers.

  “Can I help you?” the bartender asked.

  She was on the clock, but she wanted to look like she belonged, and SHL had made it clear she should do what she needed to get the job done. She pointed to the tap handle shaped like an apple slice. The bartender poured a tall golden glass. She sipped cider, as she’d hoped. She rested one elbow on the narrow bar and tried to ignore the fact that her elbow was now sticky with who knew what. Exude nonchalance, that was the key.

  “So, ah, anything interesting happening around here tonight?”

  The bartender squinted at her. “Here, like this bar? Or in town?”

  “Either?”

  “Neither.” He grinned like he’d been clever. “A new girl walking into my bar is enough to make the newspaper.”

  “We have a newspaper?” Even after over a decade here, her family was still not part of the town. Her parents would say it didn’t matter because they had each other.

  “Nah, figure of speech, sweetie.”

  Ugh. She couldn’t tell now if the grin was a leer. Avs were so much easier to read than actual human faces.

  It wasn’t like she didn’t know nothing happened here. She’d lived here forever, even if she was a stranger to the bartender. She remembered fragments of things before they’d moved to Jory: the water park, fireworks watched from a blanket on a crowded hillside. But here? No parades, no ball games, no dances. None of the stuff she’d read about or seen on-screen. This was a place where people followed the congregation laws. That was why her parents had moved here. Silly to think she’d find anything, even if everyone at SHL said all places had secrets.

  Silly, too, to think even if the town did have secrets, anyone would tell them to her. Even here, in her own hometown, nobody knew her but the farm’s most immediate neighbors and the staff at the feed store. Maybe that was the trick. Instead of marching into this bar and expecting people to tell all to a stranger, maybe she needed to start with people she knew. Let them connect her with others, who’d connect her with others. She put her drink on the bar and reached for the pay terminal.

  * * *

  —

  Rosemary tried. She browsed the gas station’s convenience store eavesdropping on other customers, but nobody talked about anything except the weather and the fishing. The grocery store was empty, except for a single bored-looking attendant and a security guard behind glass; if everyone else was like her family, they droned in most stuff they couldn’t grow or raise. The attendant was in her eighties and didn’t look like she’d be a source of hot leads.

  She called her father. “Do you need anything at the feed store?”

  “We’re low on probiotics for the chickens, if you want to pick some up.” She could tell he was surprised. She’d complained about going in there for years now.

  Simmons’s Feed smelled sweet as grain, but was always freezing in winter and sweltering in summer, thanks to the open door to the warehouse. This was the only store she’d ever spent much time in, before she’d started inventing excuses not to go.

  She’d always resented being dragged along to load the truck. It didn’t help that the Simmons kids never dropped their Hoodies, while Rosemary’s parents still insisted she not use hers outside school. It took until she turned sixteen to convince them she had no social life because of that rule, and even then she was stuck with her lousy old Hoodie. “Why do we have to come here? Can’t you just order it?” she would ask.

  Her father would shake his head. “Feed, vitamins, salt. Too expensive to drone because of the weight.”

  At least his insistence she come along had bought her a passing familiarity in this one place, and at least it was spring, so the store’s temperature was tolerable. She wasn’t sure if luck or the opposite had put Tina Simmons behind the register. Tina was the closest person to her age she had ever known in person until the last few weeks. She was two years older than Rosemary, and had taken her to the one party Rosemary had ever been to, when Rosemary was eighteen. That party was the only proof she had that people did gather occasionally, even in a by-the-book town like Jory, and she had never even thought to ask Tina how she had met those guys.

  She still remembered it with embarrassment. Eleven total strangers, the only other teenagers left in a fifty-mile radius who hadn’t been killed by the pox or kept from leaving the house by their parents. It was nothing like hoodspace: a haze of too much beer; people sitting too close and talking too loud and calling one of their own friends Poxface, as if most of them didn’t have scars under their clothes; boys who smelled of sweat and kept trying to put their hands on her; a five-mile walk home in the dark because she wanted to leave before Tina. Bodies. Her overwhelming impression had been bodies in proximity, and every motion having so much more impact than it had in hood.

  “Hey!” Tina said. Apparently whatever memory Tina had of that party, it wasn’t as awkward as Rosemary’s. She was always friendly, even if she’d never invited Rosemary out again. “I heard you quit your job.”

  “Quit because I got a better one.” Amazing how fast news traveled; her parents must have been in while she was gone.

  “No kidding?”

  “Yeah. Actually, I have a funny question, related. You know those people you used to hang out with?”

  “My friends?”

  Rosemary’s cheeks burned. “Yeah. Your friends. Anyway, I was wondering, do any of them play music?”

  Tina gave her a quizzical look.

  “Like, a band,” Rosemary said. “Or computer stuff. Anything. I’ve been told there are bands in Jory, playing in secret rooms or barns or garages.”

  “Sorry. I don’t know of any. Mike Powell plays guitar, but he isn’t exactly good. Oh! And Roberta Parker plays keyboard for her online church.” Roberta Parker was the elderly attendant at the grocery.

  “T
hanks anyway. Can you charge five pounds of Fancy Feathers probiotics to our account?”

  “No problem! Do you want me to invite you the next time we get together? I can tell Mike to bring his guitar.”

  “Sure.” Rosemary hefted the tub of chicken vitamins into the truck bed and drove back to the farm. There was no way Mike Powell was what she was supposed to be looking for if even Tina admitted he wasn’t any good. A church keyboard player wouldn’t impress her bosses, either. She’d hit a dead end. She could call her high school friends, wherever they were, and ask if any played music, though that promised a long, awkward series of conversations with people she hadn’t bothered to stay in touch with.

  Back in her room, she pulled up her SHL Hoodie—they’d offered to issue her another new one, but she didn’t see anything wrong with using the one that had been sent to her for the Bloom Bar. Aran had given her his number, and she found herself pinging him into an empty chat room.

  He spawned into the empty space, glanced around, and with a quick swipe, conjured a woodsy background. “For old times’ sake! I get nervous in empty rooms.”

  He had an expensive, photo-realistic av. His band did well enough for him to afford it, or maybe SHL gave talent high-end looks to keep up appearances. Either way, she felt shoddy in comparison.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve spent the whole day searching this stupid town trying to find musicians, and as far as I can tell there aren’t any. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do short of inspecting every barn and garage in the county for amps and drum kits.”

  He laughed. “That’d be some good detective work, but it does sound time-consuming. How big is the town you’re in?”