A Song for the Road

here. You could take a picture for me.” She twisted her neck to look at the hard black cases in the back seat.
Dicey followed her gaze. “You actually play those?”
“Some. I mean, I’m not bad. I played cello in high school.”
“Okay, then let’s go.” Dicey opened her car door.
Miriam got out too. Was she really doing this? Maybe she had absorbed some of Talia’s courage. Playing on a stage was one thing. Playing to a bunch of trees and fields beside a road felt somehow far more conspicuous and threatening.
But Talia would have done it. No question.
Miriam opened the car and grabbed the cello before she talked herself out of it. She’d sung for Blaise yesterday at the telescope. Today, she’d play for her daughter.
Miriam braved the tattered remains of last year’s undergrowth, getting Talia’s leggings and lace-lined tunic full of sticktights for her trouble. She perched on a stump overlooking a newly plowed field. It wasn’t a cello chair, but it could have been worse. Miriam settled on the stump, extended the end pin, and set it on the ground between her feet. She wondered what Talia would have thought about all this—the peg in the soft dirt, Miriam getting ready to play the instrument that had been her pride and joy.
Who was she kidding? Talia would have loved it. She would probably have materialized an accompaniment track and made a slick, high-production video of the experience. Where had that girl gotten her flair for the dramatic?
Miriam knew exactly where. Keep it together, Mira. Focus on the details.
Rosin the bow. Tune the strings.
Talia’s cello sounded terrible. Miriam couldn’t fix it by adjusting the fine tuners below the bridge. She closed her eyes and reached deep inside for her almost-perfect pitch, then bowed the A string with one hand while twisting the peg at the end of the neck with the other. She’d never heard this instrument so far out of tune. Then again, it had been sitting in its case for a year. What else could she expect?
And once again, she could barely breathe. Had the sun gone behind a cloud? No … she knew this feeling, this sensation of falling in slow motion down a long tunnel, farther and farther from the light.
If she’d harbored a hope that leaving home would deliver her from triggers, she’d clearly miscalculated. A cello, of all things. But a cello that, until a year ago, only saw the inside of its case when Talia was on her way somewhere with it. When she got stuck on a programming conundrum, she played. When she was ticked off at her parents, she played. She’d even taken it with her to Argentina last year—no, two years ago—when Teo took the twins to meet his extended family.
Miriam hadn’t gone on that trip either.
“Miriam? Are you okay?”
Miriam blinked. The sound of birdcalls returned; sunlight still filtered through baby leaves fluttering in a cool, pine-scented breeze. She looked up to find Dicey peering at her. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m, um … I’m here.” Not okay, but still here, among the living.
Dicey seemed to be debating whether to push the issue, but she pursed her lips and moved on. “You ready to go all Sound of Music?”
One thing about this girl: she made Miriam laugh. Or, well, chuckle, anyway. “All right.”
A car passed and slowed to gawk. Miriam tensed, expecting them to stop and accuse her of trespassing.
Dicey glanced at them as they accelerated away. “Just ignore them,” she said. “And ignore me. I’ll walk around and take some pictures so you have several to choose from.”
It felt awkward and slightly forced, but Miriam squashed her antipathy and nodded. She stared across the field, tilled but not yet planted, and the old hills rising beyond it. In the trees around her, birds competed to fill the morning. She didn’t know what to play. The only thing in her head, thanks to Dicey, began with the words “The hills are alive.”
And of course, the melody that had kept her awake last night.
Well, why not? She closed her eyes and began to play. It was a pretty melody, soaring and plaintive. She wished she could place it. This wasn’t like her. On the long car trips to visit Mom and Dad in Detroit, they used to play Name That Tune. Miriam had an almost photographic memory for melody; nobody could beat her, whether they sang classical, pop, show tunes, country, or liturgical music. Once in a while, Teo had managed to stump her by starting in the middle of Tchaikovsky, borrowing from himself. Otherwise, she was invincible.
What was this melody? There was more to it now than in the darkness last night, but still, twelve bars in, she came up blank. The bow faltered. The vibration of the strings faded away. The birds took up the slack. In the distance, Miriam heard the hiss of tires on asphalt.
A touch on her arm. “That was gorgeous, Miriam,” said Dicey. She crouched to examine the sleek lines of the cello. “I wish I could’ve learned to play.”
“Never too late.”
That twist to Dicey’s lips might have been a smile. “If you say so.” She handed Miriam’s phone back to her and started fiddling with her own.
Miriam laid the device on her leg and gazed across the valley. She wasn’t ready to put away the cello. The melody filled more than her head; it seemed to be spreading out inside her heart, connecting her to the profusion of green all around. Playing that melody here, in this space, had felt like … healing.
Her phone dinged. It was her sister: I don’t get it. You couldn’t take one weekend off to spend Easter with the family but you can take who knows how much time for a road trip? How do you think that makes Mom feel?
Miriam growled. “I work on Easter, Jo,” she told the device. “It’s my job.” But they’d been through all this four weeks before Easter, when Jo tried to buy