Where She Went
Page 25
Mia has my guitar. It’s such a straightforward thing and yet I don’t know that I would’ve been more surprised had Teddy popped out of the closet. I feel faint. I sit down. Mia stands right in front of me, holding my guitar by the neck, offering it back to me.
“You?” is all I can manage to choke out.
“Always me,” she replies softly, bashfully. “Who else?”
My brain has vacated my body. My speech is reduced to the barest of basics. “But . . . why?”
“Somebody had to save it from the Hard Rock Café,” Mia says with a laugh. But I can hear the potholes in her voice, too.
“But . . .” I grasp for the words like a drowning man reaching for floating debris,“ . . . you said you hated me?”
Mia lets out a long, deep sigh. “I know. I needed someone to hate, and you’re the one I love the most, so it fell to you.”
She’s holding out the guitar, nudging it toward me. She wants me to take it, but I couldn’t lift a cotton ball right now.
She keeps staring, keeps offering.
“But what about Ernesto?”
A look of puzzlement flits across her face, followed by amusement. “He’s my mentor, Adam. My friend. He’s married.” She looks down for a beat. When her gaze returns, her amusement has hardened into defensiveness. “Besides, why should you care?”
Go back to your ghost, I hear Bryn telling me. But she has it wrong. Bryn is the one who’s been living with the ghost—the specter of a man who never stopped loving someone else.
“There never would’ve been a Bryn if you hadn’t decided you needed to hate me,” I reply.
Mia takes this one square on the chin. “I don’t hate you. I don’t think I ever really did. It was just anger. And once I faced it head-on, once I understood it, it dissipated.” She looks down, takes a deep breath, and exhales a tornado. “I know I owe you some kind of an apology; I’ve been trying to get it out all night but it’s like those words—apology, sorry—are too measly for what you deserve.” She shakes her head. “I know what I did to you was so wrong, but at the time it also felt so necessary to my survival. I don’t know if those two things can both be true but that’s how it was. If it’s any comfort, after a while, when it didn’t feel necessary anymore, when it felt hugely wrong, all I was left with was the magnitude of my mistake, of my missing you. And I had to watch you from this distance, watch you achieve your dreams, live what seemed like this perfect life.”
“It’s not perfect,” I say.
“I get that now, but how was I supposed to know? You were so very, very far from me. And I’d accepted that. Accepted that as my punishment for what I’d done. And then . . .” she trails off.
“What?”
She takes a gulp of air and grimaces. “And then Adam Wilde shows up at Carnegie Hall on the biggest night of my career, and it felt like more than a coincidence. It felt like a gift. From them. For my first recital ever, they gave me a cello. And for this one, they gave me you.”
Every hair on my body stands on end, my whole body alert with a chill.
She hastily wipes tears from her eyes with the back of her hand and takes a deep breath. “Here, are you going to take this thing or what? I haven’t tuned it for a while.”
I used to have dreams like this. Mia back from the not-dead, in front of me, alive to me. But it got so even in the dreams I knew they were unreal and could anticipate the blare of my alarm, so I’m kind of listening now, waiting for the alarm to go off. But it doesn’t. And when I close my fingers around the guitar, the wood and strings are solid and root me to the earth. They wake me up. And she’s still here.
And she’s looking at me, at my guitar, and at her cello and at the clock on the windowsill. And I see what she wants, and it’s the same thing I’ve wanted for years now but I can’t believe that after all this time, and now that we’re out of time, she’s asking for it. But still, I give a little nod. She plugs in the guitar, tosses me the cord, and turns on the amp.
“Can you give me an A?” I ask. Mia plucks her cello’s A string. I tune from that and then I strum an A-minor, and as the chord bounces off the walls, I feel that dash of electricity shimmy up my spine in a way it hasn’t done for a long, long time.
I look at Mia. She’s sitting across from me, her cello between her legs. Her eyes are closed and I can tell she’s doing that thing, listening for something in the silence. Then all at once, Mia seems to have heard what she needs to hear. Her eyes are open and on me again, like they never left. She picks up her bow, gestures toward my guitar with a slight tilt of her head. “Are you ready?” she asks.
There are so many things I’d like to tell her, top among them is that I’ve always been ready. But instead, I turn up the amp, fish a pick out of my pocket, and just say yes.
TWENTY-ONE
We play for what seems like hours, days, years. Or maybe it’s seconds. I can’t even tell anymore. We speed up, then slow down, we scream our instruments. We grow serious. We laugh. We grow quiet. Then loud. My heart is pounding, my blood is grooving, my whole body is thrumming as I’m remembering: Concert doesn’t mean standing up like a target in front of thousands of strangers. It means coming together. It means harmony.
When we finally pause, I’m sweating and Mia’s panting hard, like she’s just sprinted for miles. We sit there in silence, the sound of our rapid breaths slowing in tandem, the beats of our hearts steadying. I look at the clock. It’s past five. Mia follows my gaze. She lays down her bow.
“What now?” she asks.
“Schubert? Ramones?” I say, though I know she’s not taking requests. But all I can think to do is keep playing because for the first time in a long time there’s nothing more I want to do. And I’m scared of what happens when the music ends.
Mia gestures to the digital clock flashing ominously from the windowsill. “I don’t think you’ll make your flight.”
I shrug. Never mind the fact that there are at least ten other flights to London tonight alone. “Can you make yours?”
“I don’t want to make mine,” she says shyly. “I have a spare day before the recitals begin. I can leave tomor-row.”
All of a sudden, I picture Aldous pacing in Virgin’s departure lounge, wondering where the hell I am, calling a cell phone that’s still sitting on some hotel nightstand. I think of Bryn, out in L.A., unaware of an earthquake going down here in New York that’s sending a tsunami her way. And I realize that before there’s a next, there’s a now that needs attending to. “I need to make some phone calls,” I tell Mia. “To my manager, who’s waiting for me . . . and to Bryn.”
“Oh, right, of course,” she says, her face falling as she rushes to stand up, almost toppling her cello in her fluster. “The phone’s downstairs. And I should call Tokyo, except I’m pretty sure it’s the middle of the night, so I’ll just email and call later. And my travel agent—”
“Mia,” I interrupt.
“What?”
“We’ll figure this out.”
“Really?” She doesn’t look so sure.
I nod, though my own heart is pounding and the puzzle pieces are whirling as Mia places the cordless phone in my hand. I go into her garden where it’s private and peaceful in the afternoon light, the summer cicadas chirping up a storm. Aldous picks up on the first ring and the minute I hear his voice and start talking, reassuring him that I’m okay, the plans start coming out of my mouth as though long, long contemplated. I explain that I’m not coming to London now, that I’m not making any music video, or doing any interviews, but that I’ll be in England for the kickoff of our European tour and that I’ll play every single one of those shows. The rest of the plan that’s formulating in my head—part of which already solidified in some nebulous way last night on the bridge—I keep to myself, but I think Aldous senses it.
I can’t see Aldous so I can’t know if he blinks or flinches or looks surprised, but he doesn’t miss a beat. “You’ll honor all your tour commitments?” he repeats.
“Yep.”
“What am I supposed to say to the band?”
“They can make the video without me if they want. I’ll see them at the Guildford Festival,” I say referring to the big music festival in England that we’re headlining to kick off our tour. “And I’ll explain everything then.”
“Where you gonna be in the meantime? If anyone needs you.”
“Tell anyone not to need me,” I answer.
The next call is harder. I wish I hadn’t chosen today to give up smoking. Instead, I do the deep breathing exercises like the doctors showed me and just dial. A journey of a thousand miles starts with ten digits, right?
“I thought that might be you,” Bryn says when she hears my voice. “Did you lose your phone again? Where are you?”
“I’m in New York still. In Brooklyn.” I pause, “With Mia.”
Stone silence fills the line and I fill that silence with a monologue that’s what? . . . I don’t know: a running explanation of the night that happened by accident, an acknowledgment that things never were right between us, right the way she wanted them to be, and as a result, I’ve been a dick of a boyfriend. I tell her I hope she’ll do better with the next guy.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t worry about that,” she says with an attempt at a cackle, but it doesn’t quite come out that way. There’s a long pause. I’m waiting for her tirade, her recriminations, all the things I have coming. But she doesn’t say anything.
“Are you still there?” I ask.
“Yeah, I’m thinking.”
“About what?”
“I’m thinking about whether I’d rather she’d have died.”
“Jesus, Bryn!”
“Oh, shut up! You don’t get to be the outraged one. Not right now. And the answer’s no. I don’t wish her dead.” She pauses. “Not so sure about you, though.” Then she hangs up.
I stand there, still clutching the phone to my ear, taking in Bryn’s last words, wondering if there might’ve been a shred of absolution in her hostility. I don’t know if it matters because as I smell the cooling air, I feel release and relief wash over me.
After a while, I look up. Mia’s standing at the sliding-glass door, awaiting the all clear. I give her a dazed wave and she slowly makes her way to the bricked patio where I’m standing, still holding the phone. She grabs hold of the top of the phone, like it’s a relay baton, about to be passed off. “Is everything okay?” she asks.
“I’m freed, shall we say, from my previous commitments.”
“Of the tour?” She sounds surprised.
I shake my head. “Not the tour. But all the crap leading up to it. And my other, um, entanglements.”
“Oh.”
We both just stand there for a while, grinning like goofballs, still grasping the cordless. Finally, I let it go and then gently detach the receiver from her grasp and place it on the iron table, never releasing my grip of her hand.
“You?” is all I can manage to choke out.
“Always me,” she replies softly, bashfully. “Who else?”
My brain has vacated my body. My speech is reduced to the barest of basics. “But . . . why?”
“Somebody had to save it from the Hard Rock Café,” Mia says with a laugh. But I can hear the potholes in her voice, too.
“But . . .” I grasp for the words like a drowning man reaching for floating debris,“ . . . you said you hated me?”
Mia lets out a long, deep sigh. “I know. I needed someone to hate, and you’re the one I love the most, so it fell to you.”
She’s holding out the guitar, nudging it toward me. She wants me to take it, but I couldn’t lift a cotton ball right now.
She keeps staring, keeps offering.
“But what about Ernesto?”
A look of puzzlement flits across her face, followed by amusement. “He’s my mentor, Adam. My friend. He’s married.” She looks down for a beat. When her gaze returns, her amusement has hardened into defensiveness. “Besides, why should you care?”
Go back to your ghost, I hear Bryn telling me. But she has it wrong. Bryn is the one who’s been living with the ghost—the specter of a man who never stopped loving someone else.
“There never would’ve been a Bryn if you hadn’t decided you needed to hate me,” I reply.
Mia takes this one square on the chin. “I don’t hate you. I don’t think I ever really did. It was just anger. And once I faced it head-on, once I understood it, it dissipated.” She looks down, takes a deep breath, and exhales a tornado. “I know I owe you some kind of an apology; I’ve been trying to get it out all night but it’s like those words—apology, sorry—are too measly for what you deserve.” She shakes her head. “I know what I did to you was so wrong, but at the time it also felt so necessary to my survival. I don’t know if those two things can both be true but that’s how it was. If it’s any comfort, after a while, when it didn’t feel necessary anymore, when it felt hugely wrong, all I was left with was the magnitude of my mistake, of my missing you. And I had to watch you from this distance, watch you achieve your dreams, live what seemed like this perfect life.”
“It’s not perfect,” I say.
“I get that now, but how was I supposed to know? You were so very, very far from me. And I’d accepted that. Accepted that as my punishment for what I’d done. And then . . .” she trails off.
“What?”
She takes a gulp of air and grimaces. “And then Adam Wilde shows up at Carnegie Hall on the biggest night of my career, and it felt like more than a coincidence. It felt like a gift. From them. For my first recital ever, they gave me a cello. And for this one, they gave me you.”
Every hair on my body stands on end, my whole body alert with a chill.
She hastily wipes tears from her eyes with the back of her hand and takes a deep breath. “Here, are you going to take this thing or what? I haven’t tuned it for a while.”
I used to have dreams like this. Mia back from the not-dead, in front of me, alive to me. But it got so even in the dreams I knew they were unreal and could anticipate the blare of my alarm, so I’m kind of listening now, waiting for the alarm to go off. But it doesn’t. And when I close my fingers around the guitar, the wood and strings are solid and root me to the earth. They wake me up. And she’s still here.
And she’s looking at me, at my guitar, and at her cello and at the clock on the windowsill. And I see what she wants, and it’s the same thing I’ve wanted for years now but I can’t believe that after all this time, and now that we’re out of time, she’s asking for it. But still, I give a little nod. She plugs in the guitar, tosses me the cord, and turns on the amp.
“Can you give me an A?” I ask. Mia plucks her cello’s A string. I tune from that and then I strum an A-minor, and as the chord bounces off the walls, I feel that dash of electricity shimmy up my spine in a way it hasn’t done for a long, long time.
I look at Mia. She’s sitting across from me, her cello between her legs. Her eyes are closed and I can tell she’s doing that thing, listening for something in the silence. Then all at once, Mia seems to have heard what she needs to hear. Her eyes are open and on me again, like they never left. She picks up her bow, gestures toward my guitar with a slight tilt of her head. “Are you ready?” she asks.
There are so many things I’d like to tell her, top among them is that I’ve always been ready. But instead, I turn up the amp, fish a pick out of my pocket, and just say yes.
TWENTY-ONE
We play for what seems like hours, days, years. Or maybe it’s seconds. I can’t even tell anymore. We speed up, then slow down, we scream our instruments. We grow serious. We laugh. We grow quiet. Then loud. My heart is pounding, my blood is grooving, my whole body is thrumming as I’m remembering: Concert doesn’t mean standing up like a target in front of thousands of strangers. It means coming together. It means harmony.
When we finally pause, I’m sweating and Mia’s panting hard, like she’s just sprinted for miles. We sit there in silence, the sound of our rapid breaths slowing in tandem, the beats of our hearts steadying. I look at the clock. It’s past five. Mia follows my gaze. She lays down her bow.
“What now?” she asks.
“Schubert? Ramones?” I say, though I know she’s not taking requests. But all I can think to do is keep playing because for the first time in a long time there’s nothing more I want to do. And I’m scared of what happens when the music ends.
Mia gestures to the digital clock flashing ominously from the windowsill. “I don’t think you’ll make your flight.”
I shrug. Never mind the fact that there are at least ten other flights to London tonight alone. “Can you make yours?”
“I don’t want to make mine,” she says shyly. “I have a spare day before the recitals begin. I can leave tomor-row.”
All of a sudden, I picture Aldous pacing in Virgin’s departure lounge, wondering where the hell I am, calling a cell phone that’s still sitting on some hotel nightstand. I think of Bryn, out in L.A., unaware of an earthquake going down here in New York that’s sending a tsunami her way. And I realize that before there’s a next, there’s a now that needs attending to. “I need to make some phone calls,” I tell Mia. “To my manager, who’s waiting for me . . . and to Bryn.”
“Oh, right, of course,” she says, her face falling as she rushes to stand up, almost toppling her cello in her fluster. “The phone’s downstairs. And I should call Tokyo, except I’m pretty sure it’s the middle of the night, so I’ll just email and call later. And my travel agent—”
“Mia,” I interrupt.
“What?”
“We’ll figure this out.”
“Really?” She doesn’t look so sure.
I nod, though my own heart is pounding and the puzzle pieces are whirling as Mia places the cordless phone in my hand. I go into her garden where it’s private and peaceful in the afternoon light, the summer cicadas chirping up a storm. Aldous picks up on the first ring and the minute I hear his voice and start talking, reassuring him that I’m okay, the plans start coming out of my mouth as though long, long contemplated. I explain that I’m not coming to London now, that I’m not making any music video, or doing any interviews, but that I’ll be in England for the kickoff of our European tour and that I’ll play every single one of those shows. The rest of the plan that’s formulating in my head—part of which already solidified in some nebulous way last night on the bridge—I keep to myself, but I think Aldous senses it.
I can’t see Aldous so I can’t know if he blinks or flinches or looks surprised, but he doesn’t miss a beat. “You’ll honor all your tour commitments?” he repeats.
“Yep.”
“What am I supposed to say to the band?”
“They can make the video without me if they want. I’ll see them at the Guildford Festival,” I say referring to the big music festival in England that we’re headlining to kick off our tour. “And I’ll explain everything then.”
“Where you gonna be in the meantime? If anyone needs you.”
“Tell anyone not to need me,” I answer.
The next call is harder. I wish I hadn’t chosen today to give up smoking. Instead, I do the deep breathing exercises like the doctors showed me and just dial. A journey of a thousand miles starts with ten digits, right?
“I thought that might be you,” Bryn says when she hears my voice. “Did you lose your phone again? Where are you?”
“I’m in New York still. In Brooklyn.” I pause, “With Mia.”
Stone silence fills the line and I fill that silence with a monologue that’s what? . . . I don’t know: a running explanation of the night that happened by accident, an acknowledgment that things never were right between us, right the way she wanted them to be, and as a result, I’ve been a dick of a boyfriend. I tell her I hope she’ll do better with the next guy.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t worry about that,” she says with an attempt at a cackle, but it doesn’t quite come out that way. There’s a long pause. I’m waiting for her tirade, her recriminations, all the things I have coming. But she doesn’t say anything.
“Are you still there?” I ask.
“Yeah, I’m thinking.”
“About what?”
“I’m thinking about whether I’d rather she’d have died.”
“Jesus, Bryn!”
“Oh, shut up! You don’t get to be the outraged one. Not right now. And the answer’s no. I don’t wish her dead.” She pauses. “Not so sure about you, though.” Then she hangs up.
I stand there, still clutching the phone to my ear, taking in Bryn’s last words, wondering if there might’ve been a shred of absolution in her hostility. I don’t know if it matters because as I smell the cooling air, I feel release and relief wash over me.
After a while, I look up. Mia’s standing at the sliding-glass door, awaiting the all clear. I give her a dazed wave and she slowly makes her way to the bricked patio where I’m standing, still holding the phone. She grabs hold of the top of the phone, like it’s a relay baton, about to be passed off. “Is everything okay?” she asks.
“I’m freed, shall we say, from my previous commitments.”
“Of the tour?” She sounds surprised.
I shake my head. “Not the tour. But all the crap leading up to it. And my other, um, entanglements.”
“Oh.”
We both just stand there for a while, grinning like goofballs, still grasping the cordless. Finally, I let it go and then gently detach the receiver from her grasp and place it on the iron table, never releasing my grip of her hand.
