The Last Frequency

The rain had been coming down since Dayton, and by the time the van rolled into Lark County the fair's lights had gone soft and smeared, like someone had dragged a wet thumb across a photograph.

I was forty-four years old, sitting in the back seat of a rented van with my guitar case and a paper cup of bad coffee, watching those lights blur, and I thought, well. Here we are.

"Kyra. You with us?" Dev asked from the front. Dev is our drummer, thirty-nine, patient as a saint and twice as tired of me lately.

"I'm here."

"You've been quiet since the interstate."

"I'm always quiet."

"You're sarcastic quiet. This is different."

I didn't answer him. Through the window I could see the Ferris wheel turning, its lights running together in the rain like they were melting off the metal. There was calliope music somewhere under the drone on the radio, thin and far away, the kind of sound that gets into a place and never quite leaves.

Fifteen years since I'd been back here. Fifteen years, and the only reason I was back was that our booking agent, a man named Hollis who I'm fairly sure has never once done anything out of kindness, got us on a nostalgia circuit. One hit record. One. "The Last Frequency," back in the day, played on every radio in three states for about four months, and then the band fell apart and I left town and never looked at any of it again.

And here's the joke of it, and you can enjoy this at my expense. That song, the one hit, the thing that pays for this van and this coffee and this tour, is a song about losing someone. I wrote it in a rented room two weeks after I left her, when I was too much of a coward to say goodbye to a person's face, so I wrote it instead and let the whole world sing it back at me.

"Kyra, seriously," Dev said. "You look like someone died."

"Someone did, kind of."

"Well, that's cheerful. You want to share with the class?"

"Nope."

He let it go, which is one of about three reasons I keep him around. The van hissed through puddles. The fair got bigger in the window.

We were playing the fairgrounds Saturday night. Main stage. Which meant tonight, Friday, we had the evening to kill, and the others wanted funnel cake, because of course they did, and I wanted anything with a roof and no line.

That's how I ended up crossing the midway alone under a striped canopy, past the pie judging tent, following a hand-lettered sign that said ARTS PAVILION, ARROW THIS WAY. The arts pavilion turned out to be a repurposed exhibition hall under striped canvas, all concrete floor and fluorescent light, humming with that particular quiet that comes from people doing careful work.

The set list in my jacket pocket was torn. Not badly torn. Torn right down the middle of Saturday's set, which felt, if I'm honest, like a small omen, and I don't believe in omens, but I do believe in paper. My grandmother was a paper person. Paper can be mended if you catch it early and respect the grain.

So there was a sign at the far end of the hall. BOOKBINDING WORKSHOP, FREE, ALL AGES WELCOME. And next to that, a long workbench, a wooden press, stacks of leather and bone folders and a cutting board with a blade scarred across it like an old football field.

And behind the press, a woman.

She was forty-three the way some people are forty-three, the years had settled on her face like she'd agreed to them. Dark hair pinned back with what I'd have bet my guitar was a paintbrush. A spine binder in one hand, brass and worn smooth at the grip.

I knew that grip. I'd watched that hand work a thousand times.

"Welcome, if you're here for the workshop it starts at seven," she said, without looking up. "If you're lost, the midway's back the way you came."

Her voice did a thing halfway through the sentence. Stalled. She looked up.

Lenore Creighton. We'd been together two years, from when I was twenty-seven to when I was twenty-nine, and then I left her with one phone call that went to her machine and one phone call from her, after, that I never answered. Fifteen years ago. I could do the arithmetic faster than I could breathe, which is a kind of useless skill.

"Kyra," she said. Flat. Not angry-flat. Worse. The flat of someone who filed this away a long time ago and is now retrieving it from a drawer.

"Lenore."

"You're here for the fair."

"We're playing Saturday. Main stage."

"The band." She said it the way you'd say the dentist. "The one hit."

"That's the one."

She nodded slowly, and here is the part that undid me a little. She didn't say anything dramatic. She didn't stand up or drop the bone folder or any of the things that happen in songs. She just looked at me for a beat, flat, and then went back to aligning her pages, tapping the stack square against the bench with a small neat sound, tak, tak, tak.

"Workshop's at seven," she said. "I can squeeze you in before, if it's quick."

"It's a set list. Torn down the middle."

"Bring it here, then."

I walked over. My legs worked, which was generous of them. Up close she smelled of leather and glue and the sharp tang of blade-cut paper, and that smell went straight through me like a chord you haven't played in fifteen years and your fingers still know.

"Hand it over," she said.

I handed it over. She spread the two halves on the cutting board and studied the tear with her head tilted, and I stood there like a delivery service.

"Mends fine," she said. "Japanese tissue and paste. You won't see it in a week." She glanced up. "You still play the same stuff?"

"Mostly."

"So the song about losing someone. Still on the set list?"

The question landed exactly where she aimed it, and she knew it, and I let her have it, because what was I going to do, dispute the target?

"Yeah," I said. "Still on the set list."

"Huh." She pulled a tin of wheat paste from under the bench, unscrewed it, stirred it with a stick. "Funny how a thing can be about one person and the whole world thinks it's about them."

"Lenore..."

"Kyra." She said my name the way I'd said hers, flat, and something in my throat just closed up shop. The sorry I'd been carrying up my windpipe for fifteen years sat there like a coin swallowed sideways.

The rain picked up on the canvas overhead. Somewhere out on the midway, the calliope ran through the same eight bars again and again, and the fair spun on toward closing, lights smearing, people laughing under the wet.

"Sit down if you're going to hover," she said. "There's a stool. This takes about ten minutes and I don't work with an audience breathing on the paste."

I sat. There was a small radio on the corner of her bench, an old ham rig, and it was on, low, hissing and crackling between bands of static, catching snatches of somebody two counties over talking about weather. Lenore tuned it a hair, listening the way she used to listen to me tune a guitar, with her whole face turned toward the sound and her hands still.

"You still do this?" I asked. "The radio."

"When the air's good. Rain's bad for it, mostly." She laid a strip of tissue along the tear with a brush, precise as surgery. "You still do this?" She nodded at the guitar case leaning against my stool. "The music."

"That covers the entire tour, so yes."

"And after the tour?"

I didn't have an answer for that. She didn't look up to see if I did. The paste brush moved. The radio crackled, and a voice came through, faint, a man saying a call sign twice and then a report about hail up near the ridge, and Lenore listened to him all the way to the end of his sentence before she turned the gain down.

"You answer people when they call now," I said. Stupid thing to say. I heard it leave my mouth and winced.

She kept her eyes on the paper.

"Eventually," she said. "When the signal's worth it."

The radio hissed again and caught nothing, and the quiet came back in under it, all canvas and rain. Lenore smoothed the tissue down with her fingertip, one pass, two. I watched her hands because watching her face was still more than I could afford.

"That rig yours?" I asked.

"It belongs to the fair. Lost and found." She screwed the paste tin closed. "Somebody left it in the exhibition hall four years ago. Waited the whole season, nobody claimed it. They were going to auction it with the rest of the unclaimed stuff and I bought it for twenty dollars."

"Twenty."

"I felt guilty at fifteen." She turned a dial a hair and the static shifted pitch, a low wash of it. "Mostly it just sits there and hisses. Sometimes at night the skip comes in and you get strangers from three states away talking about their lawnmowers."

"Sounds about right."

"It does." She set the brush down across the jar and finally looked at me. "You want to know the actual reason I keep it?"

"Sure."

"Because when I first found it, it was broken. Bad solder joint on the mic jack. I fixed it, and the first night it worked, I stayed up until two in the morning listening to a guy in Kentucky talk about his antenna tower, and it reminded me of something." She picked the brush back up, which was a mercy, because her looking at me straight on had a specific gravity I remembered too well. "It reminded me of you. Talking on the air late at night, in that apartment on Delmore Street. You'd wait until everybody signed off and then you'd ramble. I'd fall asleep to it."

"I don't ramble."

"You rambled beautifully. That's different." A pause, the brush laying a second strip of tissue. "Some guy in Ohio, I can't remember his handle, used to sign off at midnight and you'd have the band to yourself for an hour. I listened to more of that than I ever told you."

"You never told me."

"Neither did you tell me what you were doing up there, half those nights. Talking to nobody, in the dark, about nothing." She tapped the paper square against the bench. Tak, tak. "I used to think it was practice. Rehearsing being somewhere else."

I sat with that for a while. The calliope out on the midway ran its eight bars again, the same eight bars, like a record with a scratch in its soul.

"That's not what I was doing," I said.

"No?"

"No." And here it was, the thing I'd been carrying around the whole drive from Dayton, through the rain, through the gate, through the whole terrible luck of walking into her pavilion. I heard myself start before I'd decided to. "I heard you. On every show. For years."

Her hands stopped.

Not slowed. Stopped, mid-stroke, the brush hovering over the torn set list with a bead of paste gathering on the bristles. The radio hissed into the quiet. Someplace behind us a fair worker dragged a trash barrel across concrete, a long scrape and then nothing.

"What do you mean, heard me," she said. Flat again, but a different flat. The flat of a person standing very still on a floor they no longer trust.

"Onstage. Sound check, mid-set, wherever. There'd be a second, usually right before we went into the last chorus of the last song, where the monitors would do this thing. This feedback ghost. A hiss, a little burble of it, like a voice under water." I made myself keep talking, since I'd started. "And my brain filled in the rest. It filled in you. Your voice, saying something. I never knew what. Just you, in the static, every single night for years."

"Kyra."

"I wrote that song two weeks after I left here. I've told a hundred interviewers it was about the road. It was about the road for about four percent of its life and about you for the rest."

The brush came down on the bench. She picked up a rag and wiped her fingers slowly, one at a time, like she was buying herself seconds, and I knew the feeling because I was doing the same thing with my own silence. The rain drummed the canvas. Somewhere a kid was losing an argument with a parent about funnel cake, volume diminishing down the midway.

"You left," she said finally. "You left with one phone call I never got, and one phone call I did get that you never answered, and then nothing for fifteen years. And you're telling me you heard my voice in your monitors."

"Yes!"

"Every night."

"Every night."

"And that felt like enough. That was the trade. The voice in the static instead of the actual person." She set the rag down with a small exact care, the way she handled the brass binder, nothing thrown ever. "Do you know how that lands, Kyra? Do you want to know what that actually feels like from my side of the bench?"

"I can guess."

"Guess wrong, probably." She looked at the radio, not at me. "For about three years after you went quiet, I kept that call on my answering machine. The hang-up one. Thirty-one seconds of nothing, a click. I'd play it sometimes. Nobody knew. I'd sit there listening to thirty-one seconds of a dead line and