A Song for the Road

knew it. She summoned a wan smile. “Have fun.”
“We’ll miss you, but it’ll be good for you to have this time to yourself. Good luck with the concerto. I know you’ll do great.”
“Thanks.”
“I love you.” He kissed her, shouldered his duffel bag, and headed into the line himself. He caught up with Blaise and said something to him. Blaise turned back and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Play pretty!” he called, echoing the words Miriam had said to them before every one of their performances. “We’ll see you on Monday!”
When Miriam got home, an hour later, the flowers were still waiting, spread on Teo’s jacket on the old, metal-legged kitchen table, a relic of the 1970s. Tiny blue irises and a pale yellow bulb-shaped flower, violets and something feathery white whose name she didn’t know. They’d already started to wilt. She fingered the stems as she put them in water. She should have done this before they left for the airport. Teo probably thought she didn’t like them. Like all her responses to him, this one had been half-assed.
I need to do better by him. The thought had the familiarity of knowledge that had lain dormant for months—years, perhaps, waiting for her to take notice. It was time. Past time. Once her performance was out of the way—on Monday, when she flew out to join them in California—she would turn over a new leaf.
Two days later, when she saw Simeon get out of the police car in front of the house, she didn’t at first connect what it must mean.
Unlike the weeks that followed, almost everything about that moment remained crystal clear in Miriam’s memory. The unusually cool April day. The boards from the porch swing striping her jeans. The warm fatigue in her fingers following an hour of practicing. The cardinal that cut a slash of crimson across her vision as Father Simeon and the policeman came up the walkway, stirring up the pungent smell of the chocolate mint growing on either side. The car that backfired on the next street, and farther away the high whine of a circular saw punctuated by hammer blows. The way the setting sun gleamed on Simeon’s bald black head as he sat down beside her.
She remembered it all except the words. The words were gone long before their meaning sank in. The look on Simeon’s face told her everything that really mattered, anyway.
She had waited too long to love Teo, and now it was too late.

 8
Friday, April 29
Green Bank, West Virginia
BY MORNING, MIRIAM WASN’T feeling bold so much as battered. Spring came late to the mountains; when she finally got settled in her tent with an arrangement of blankets and a sleeping bag that kept her warm enough to drop off, the parade of memories started up, yanking her back from the edge of consciousness, with her heart pounding.
It had been quite a while since she’d experienced a night like this. Right after the accident, it had happened regularly: she’d lie awake, playing God, trying to rearrange the sequence of events of the last few days before her family died, to see if she could change the outcome. If she’d been with them on the trip; if she’d gotten them moving sooner, so they were already on the beach before the man, drunk from a business lunch, crossed the center line as they drove down the highway toward it. If she’d said no to the concerto performance. If she’d never tried to start a performance career at all.
It always seemed like she had to go further back, further and further into the past. Back to the beginning, even, to college and choices she’d never realized could have such earth-shattering consequences.
Tonight, the exercise in futility did a tarantella in her brain opposite Teo’s invitations and Talia’s accusations. And always, the niggling thought of the e-mail tucked into Blaise’s manuscript notebook. Out of sight, but not out of mind, like a scratchy clothing tag that kept rubbing: half itch, half pain, all aggravation.
And then, just for fun, a gut-hollowing tune—more motif than melody, really—emerged from the darkness, sinuous and haunting. She couldn’t identify it, no matter how many times she hummed it through, trying to wrap it around to its beginning. Two measures, circling in her head all night long. It was the earworm from hell.
The sun hadn’t yet risen when Miriam decided enough was enough. She gathered her toiletries and headed for the campground shower house.
The water stayed stubbornly tepid. Shivering, Miriam showered in record time and slipped into a pair of Talia’s leggings and a tan, cable-knit sweater with lace sewed to the bottom. She liked the look, but the longer she wore these clothes, the harder it became to shake off her daughter’s ghost.
Miriam hadn’t thought about that when she’d packed the suitcase full of them.
Or maybe, somewhere in her subconscious mind, she’d planned it this way.
She wiped down the tent with her towel, the locket like a drumbeat against her chest. She couldn’t wait to rejoin a world that had Wi-Fi and cell signal and plenty of distraction.
Shortly after eight, she pulled out and headed back south, retracing yesterday’s route. She couldn’t handle the energy of the Argentine music this morning. Until she got back within range of an NPR station, which could occupy her brain with discussions of other people’s problems, her own memories would have to do. Mom wasn’t here to scold her for wallowing, after all. Besides, she’d spent all night self-flagellating. There were no memories left except good ones.
There was Talia, six years old, presiding over a birthday tea party at the kitchen table. Miriam had filched the gauzy royal purple drapings they used for Advent decoration at St. Greg’s and camouflaged the cracked, dingy walls. Everything was purple that year, from the girls’ pipe-cleaner crowns to the cupcakes. She remembered feeling like a real grown-up, doing a lot with very little, like her mother before her.
There was the impossible softness of Blaise’s cheeks, the