The Ashtray Accordion

Tia was thirty-four years old, and she was bored out of her skull, which was the only reason she said yes to any of this.

Kathy was the caretaker of the Meridian Hill Observatory, a copper dome on a hill above a small coastal town in southern Chile. Kathy was thirty-six and had known Tia since college, and when Tia came to visit her that August she found, in the corner of the observatory's storage closet, an old accordion in a cracked leather case.

"Take it," Kathy said. "It was here when I got the job. Nobody has touched it in years."

So Tia took it, mostly as a joke, and carried it around town for two days playing badly on the plaza, and that was where Elias found her.

Elias was thirty-eight, a nonprofit director, and he looked as if he had been rehearsing a speech all week and lost his nerve at the last second. He stood in front of her bench for a while before he said anything.

"Is that a Hohner?" he asked.

"It's whatever it is," Tia said. "It came free with a friendship."

He sat down on the far end of the bench, put a brass urn on his knees, and looked at her with the expression of a man who had run out of better options.

"Here's my situation," he said. "My uncle died in March. He was an astronomer, and his will says I have to scatter his ashes from the dome of the Meridian Hill Observatory at midnight, and there's a clause, this is real, a clause, that says there has to be music."

Tia looked at the accordion. Then at the urn. Then at Elias.

"You want me to play the accordion while you dump your uncle into the telescope pit?"

"Not into the pit," Elias said quickly. "From the platform. Off the roof, into the wind, over the ocean. He used to say the sea ate all his best data, so he wanted to feed it the rest of himself." He rubbed his thumb along the urn's lid. "The music part I've been putting off. I don't play anything. I asked at the church and the church wanted a hymn and my uncle hated hymns. Then I heard you in the plaza, and you were terrible, honestly, but you were loud, and I thought, that's him. Loud and terrible."

Tia laughed, and then she thought about it, and what she thought about mostly was that her week had nothing else in it.

"When?" she asked.

"Tonight. Midnight. Kathy said I could come up, she left me the key and a set of instructions about the roof motor, which I have read four times and understood maybe half of."

"Okay," Tia said. "But you owe me a dinner. A plain thank-you dinner, nothing else attached."

"That's fair," Elias said, and he shook her hand like they'd closed a business deal, which in a way they had, though at that point neither of them was imagining anything else at all.

* * *

The climb up to the dome platform happened at eleven forty at night, and it went worse than either of them planned.

The stairs inside the observatory were narrow and steep, and at the top there was a vertical ladder, maybe eight rungs, up through a trapdoor onto the copper roof. Elias went first with the urn in a canvas bag slung across his back. Tia went second with the accordion strapped to her chest, because she had decided, for reasons she could not fully explain even to herself, that she was not leaving it below with the spiders.

She got six rungs up before the top corner of the instrument caught on a rung.

What happened next was physics. She pulled, the accordion squeezed, and the bellows pushed a great slow blast of air through every reed at once, and the instrument produced a note that was long and low and flatulent in a way no music should ever be, at a volume that suggested the accordion had been waiting years to say something.

On the roof, gulls exploded off the copper in every direction, screaming.

"Sorry!" Tia yelled up through the trapdoor. "Sorry, sorry!"

Elias's head appeared in the square of sky above her. He had ashes dusted across one shoulder already, a gray stripe like a military decoration.

"Are you okay?"

"The ladder attacked me," Tia said. "The gulls are upset."

"I think you woke up the whole town," Elias said, and he reached down and grabbed her wrist and hauled her and the accordion up onto the platform, where the night air was cold and the sea below was black and the stars were frankly showing off.

The platform was a ring of copper walkway around the base of the dome's rotating cap. The telescope's housing sat under the cap like a fat metal animal. There was a small control box bolted to a post, and a rail, and not much else.

Elias set the bag down, took out the urn, and knelt at the rail facing the water.

"So this is it," he said. "He wanted the wind to do the work. He said a shovel was for people who couldn't commit."

He unscrewed the lid. And that was the exact moment the wind came off the ocean.

It was a real gust, the kind that arrives like a decision, and it hit the urn at an angle and lifted a whole pale sheet of his uncle up and out and sideways, and Elias made a sound like he was being robbed in public, and the ash went everywhere. Over the rail, mostly, which was technically the plan. But also across the platform, and across Elias, and across Tia, and most importantly across the accordion, which was sitting open on the walkway because Tia had set it down to help with the lid.

The keys were gray. Not dusted, coated. Every white key wore a soft layer of uncle.

"Oh no," Tia said.

"Is it bad?"

"He's all over it. Your uncle is all over my keys." She touched one and the key moved sticky and gave back a dead, muffled clunk. "He doesn't even play. Now everything's sticky."

Elias stood there with the half-empty urn