“Small towns weren’t even easy before,” August said once at three in the morning, the one time Kirsten remembered talking about this with anyone, in the cold of a spring night near the town of New Phoenix. She was fifteen at the time, which made August eighteen, and she’d only been with the Symphony for a year. In those days she had considerable trouble sleeping and often sat up with the night watch. August remembered his pre-pandemic life as an endless sequence of kids who’d looked him over and uttered variations on “You’re not from around here, are you?” in various accents, these encounters interspersed with moving trucks. If it was hard to break into new places then, in that ludicrously easy world where food was on shelves in supermarkets and travel was as easy as taking a seat in a gasoline-powered machine and water came out of taps, it was several orders of magnitude more difficult now. The Symphony was insufferable, hell was other flutes or other people or whoever had used the last of the rosin or whoever missed the most rehearsals, but the truth was that the Symphony was their only home.
At the end of the Midsummer Night’s Dream rehearsal, Kirsten stood by the caravans with the palms of her hands pressed hard to her forehead, trying to will away a headache.
“You okay?” August asked.
“Hell is other actors,” Kirsten said. “Also ex-boyfriends.”
“Stick to musicians. I think we’re generally saner.”
“I’m going to take a walk and see if I can find Charlie.”
“I’d come with you, but I’m on dinner duty.”
“I don’t mind going alone,” she said.
A late-afternoon torpor had fallen over the town, the light thickening and shadows extending over the road. The road was disintegrating here as everywhere, deep fissures and potholes holding gardens of weeds. There were wildflowers alongside the vegetable patches at the edge of the pavement, Queen Anne’s lace whispering against Kirsten’s outstretched hand. She passed by the Motor Lodge where the oldest families in town lived, laundry flapping in the breeze, doors open on motel rooms, a little boy playing with a toy car between the tomato plants in the vegetable garden.
The pleasure of being alone for once, away from the clamor of the Symphony. It was possible to look up at the McDonald’s sign and fleetingly imagine, by keeping her gaze directed upward so that there was only the sign and the sky, that this was still the former world and she could stop in for a burger. The last time she’d been here, the IHOP had housed three or four families; she was surprised to see that it had been boarded up, a plank hammered across the door with an inscrutable symbol spray-painted in silver—something like a lowercase t with an extra line toward the bottom. Two years ago she’d been followed around town by a flock of children, but now she saw only two, the boy with the toy car and a girl of eleven or so who watched her from a doorway. A man with a gun and reflective sunglasses was standing guard at the gas station, whose windows were blocked by curtains that had once been flowered sheets. A young and very pregnant woman sunbathed on a lounge chair by the gas pumps, her eyes closed. The presence of an armed guard in the middle of town suggested that the place was unsafe—had they recently been raided?—but surely not as unsafe as all that, if a pregnant woman was sunbathing in the open. It didn’t quite make sense. The McDonald’s had housed two families, but where had they gone? Now a board had been nailed across the door, spray-painted with that same odd symbol.
The Wendy’s was a low square building with the look of having been slapped together from a kit in an architecturally careless era, but it had a beautiful front door. It was a replacement, solid wood, and someone had taken the trouble to carve a row of flowers alongside the carved handle. Kirsten ran her fingertips over the wooden petals before she knocked.
How many times had she imagined this moment, over two years of traveling apart from her friend? Knocking on the flowered door, Charlie answering with a baby in her arms, tears and laughter, the sixth guitar grinning beside her. I have missed you so much. But the woman who answered the door was unfamiliar.
“Good afternoon,” Kirsten said. “I’m looking for Charlie.”
“I’m sorry, who?” The woman’s tone wasn’t unfriendly, but there was no recognition in her eyes. She was about Kirsten’s age or a little younger, and it seemed to Kirsten that she wasn’t well. She was very pale and too thin, black circles under her eyes.
“Charlie. Charlotte Harrison. She was here about two years ago.”
“Here in the Wendy’s?”
