A Song for the Road

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 her 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