EIGHTEEN
Are you happy in your misery?
Resting peaceful in desolation?
It’s the final tie that binds us
The sole source of my consolation
“BLUE”
COLLATERAL DAMAGE, TRACK 6
Mia’s gone.
The bridge looks like a ghost ship from another time even as it fills up with the most twenty-first-century kind of people, early-morning joggers.
And me, alone again.
But I’m still standing. I’m still breathing. And somehow, I’m okay.
But still the question is gaining momentum and volume: How does she know? Because I never told anyone what I asked of her. Not the nurses. Not the grandparents. Not Kim. And not Mia. So how does she know?
If you stay, I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll quit the band, go with you to New York. But if you need me to go away, I’ll do that, too. Maybe coming back to your old life would just be too painful, maybe it’d be easier for you to erase us. And that would suck, but I’d do it. I can lose you like that if I don’t lose you today. I’ll let you go. If you stay.
That was my vow. And it’s been my secret. My burden. My shame. That I asked her to stay. That she listened. Because after I promised her what I promised her, and played her a Yo-Yo Ma cello piece, it had seemed as if she had heard. She’d squeezed my hand and I’d thought it was going to be like in the movies, but all she’d done was squeeze. And stayed unconscious. But that squeeze had turned out to be her first voluntary muscle movement; it was followed by more squeezes, then by her eyes opening for a flutter or two, and then longer. One of the nurses had explained that Mia’s brain was like a baby bird, trying to poke its way out of an eggshell, and that squeeze was the beginning of an emergence that went on for a few days until she woke up and asked for water.
Whenever she talked about the accident, Mia said the entire week was a blur. She didn’t remember a thing. And I wasn’t about to tell her about the promise I’d made. A promise that in the end, I was forced to keep.
But she knew.
No wonder she hates me.
In a weird way, it’s a relief. I’m so tired of carrying this secret around. I’m so tired of feeling bad for making her live and feeling angry at her for living without me and feeling like a hypocrite for the whole mess.
I stand there on the bridge for a while, letting her get away, and then I walk the remaining few hundred feet to the ramp down. I’ve seen dozens of taxis pass by on the roadway below, so even though I have no clue where I am, I’m pretty sure I’ll find a cab to bring me back to my hotel. But when I get down the ramp, I’m in a plaza area, not where the car traffic lets out. I flag down a jogger, a middle-aged guy chugging off the bridge, and ask where I can get a taxi, and he points me toward a bunch of buildings. “There’s usually a queue on weekdays. I don’t know about weekends, but I’m sure you’ll find a cab somewhere.”
He’s wearing an iPod and has pulled out the earbuds to talk to me, but the music is still playing. And it’s Fugazi. The guy is running to Fugazi, the very tail end of “Smallpox Champion.” Then the song clicks over and it’s “Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones. And the music, it’s like, I dunno, fresh bread on an empty stomach or a woodstove on a frigid day. It’s reaching out of the earbuds and beckoning me.
The guy keeps looking at me. “Are you Adam Wilde? From Shooting Star?” he asks. Not at all fanlike, just curious.
It takes a lot of effort to stop listening to the music and give him my attention. “Yeah.” I reach out my hand.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” he says after we shake, “but what are you doing walking around Brooklyn at six thirty on a Saturday morning? Are you lost or something?”
“No, I’m not lost. Not anymore anyway.”
Mick Jagger is crooning away and I practically have to bite my lip to keep from singing along. It used to be I never went anywhere without my tunes. And then it was like everything else, take it or leave it. But now I’ll take it. Now I need it. “Can I ask you for an insanely huge and just plain insane favor?” I ask.
“Okaaay?”
“Can I borrow your iPod? Just for the day? If you give me your name and address, I’ll have it messengered over to you. I promise you’ll have it back by tomorrow’s run.”
He shakes his head, laughs. “One butt-crack-of-dawn run a weekend is enough for me, but yeah, you can borrow it. The buzzer on my building doesn’t work, so just deliver it to Nick at the Southside Café on Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn. I’m in there every morning.”
“Nick. Southside Café. Sixth Avenue. Brooklyn. I won’t forget. I promise.”
“I believe you,” he says, spooling the wires. “I’m afraid you won’t find any Shooting Star on there.”
“Better yet. I’ll have this back to you by tonight.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “Battery was fully charged when I left so you should be good for at least . . . an hour. The thing’s a dinosaur.” He chuckles softly. Then he takes off running, tossing a wave at me without looking back.
I plug myself into the iPod; it’s truly battered. I make a note to get him a new one when I return this one. I scroll through his collection—everything from Charlie Parker to Minutemen to Yo La Tengo. He’s got all these playlists. I choose one titled Good Songs. And when the piano riff at the start of the New Pornographers’ “Challengers” kicks in, I know I’ve put myself in good hands. Next up is some Andrew Bird, followed by a kick-ass Billy Bragg and Wilco song I haven’t heard in years and then Sufjan Stevens’s “Chicago,” which is a song I used to love but had to stop listening to because it always made me feel too stirred up. But now it’s just right. It’s like a cool bath after a fever sweat, helping to soothe the itch of all those unanswerable questions I just can’t be tormenting myself with anymore.
I spin the volume up all the way, so it’s blasting even my battle-worn eardrums. That, along with the racket of downtown Brooklyn waking up—metal grates grinding and buses chugging—is pretty damn loud. So when a voice pierces the din, I almost don’t hear it. But there it is, the voice I’ve been listening for all these years.
“Adam!” it screams.
I don’t believe it at first. I turn off Sufjan. I look around. And then there she is, in front of me now, her face streaked with tears. Saying my name again, like it’s the first word I’ve ever heard.
I let go. I truly did. But there she is. Right in front of me.
“I thought I’d lost you. I went back and looked for you on the bridge but I didn’t see you and I figured you’d walked back to the Manhattan side and I got this dumb idea that I could beat you over in a cab and ambush you on the other side. I know this is selfish. I heard what you said up there on the bridge, but we can’t leave it like that. I can’t. Not again. We have to say good-bye differently. Bet—”
“Mia?” I interrupt. My voice is a question mark and a caress. It stops her babbling cold. “How did you know?”
The question is out of the blue. Yet she seems to know exactly what I’m asking about. “Oh. That,” she says. “That’s complicated.”
I start to back away from her. I have no right to ask her, and she isn’t under any obligation to tell me. “It’s okay. We’re good now. I’m good now.”
“No, Adam, stop,” Mia says.
I stop.
“I want to tell you. I need to tell you everything. I just think I need some coffee before I can get it together enough to explain.”
She leads me out of downtown into a historic district to a bakery on a cobblestoned street. Its windows are darkened, the door locked, by all signs the place is closed. But Mia knocks and within a minute a bushyhaired man with flour clinging to his unruly beard swings open the door and shouts bonjour to Mia and kisses her on both cheeks. Mia introduces me to Hassan, who disappears into the bakery, leaving the door open so that the warm aroma of butter and vanilla waft into the morning air. He returns with two large cups of coffee and a brown paper bag, already staining dark with butter. She hands me my coffee, and I open it to see it’s steaming and black just like I like it.
It’s morning now. We find a bench on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, another one of Mia’s favorite New York spots, she tells me. It’s right on the East River, with Manhattan so close you can almost touch it. We sit in companionable silence, sipping our coffee, eating Hassan’s still-warm croissants. And it feels so good, so like old times that part of me would like to just click a magic stopwatch, exist in this moment forever. Except there are no magic stopwatches and there are questions that need to be answered. Mia, however, seems in no rush. She sips, she chews, she looks out at the city. Finally, when she’s drained her coffee, she turns to me.
“I didn’t lie before when I said I didn’t remember anything about the accident or after,” she begins. “But then I did start remembering things. Not exactly remembering, but hearing details of things and having them feel intensely familiar. I told myself it was because I’d heard the stories over and over, but that wasn’t it.
“Fast-forward about a year and a half. I’m on my seventh or eighth therapist.”
“So you are in therapy?”
She gives me a cockeyed look. “Of course I am. I used to go through shrinks like shoes. They all told me the same thing.”
“Which is?”
“That I was angry. That I was angry the accident happened. That I was angry I was the only survivor. That I was angry at you.” She turns to me with an apologetic grimace. “The other stuff all made sense, but you I didn’t get. I mean, why you? But I was. I could feel how . . .” she trails off for a second, “furious I was,” she finishes quietly. “There were all the obvious reasons, how you withdrew from me, how much the accident changed us. But it didn’t add up to this lethal fury I suddenly felt once I got away. I think really, somewhere in me, I must’ve known all along that you asked me to stay—way before I actually remembered it. Does that make any sense?”
No. Yes. I don’t know. “None of this makes sense,” I say.
“I know. So, I was angry with you. I didn’t know why. I was angry with the world. I did know why. I hated all my therapists for being useless. I was this little ball of self-destructive fury, and none of them could do anything but tell me that I was a little ball of self-destructive fury. Until I found Nancy, not one of them helped me as much as my Juilliard profs did. I mean, hello! I knew I was angry. Tell me what to do with the anger, please. Anyhow, Ernesto suggested hypnotherapy. It helped him quit smoking, I guess.” She elbows me in the ribs.
Of course Mr. Perfect wouldn’t smoke. And of course, he’d be the one who helped Mia unearth the reason she hates me.
“It was kind of risky,” Mia continues. “Hypnosis tends to unlock hidden memories. Some trauma is just too much for the conscious mind to handle and you have to go in through a back door to access it. So I reluctantly submitted to a few sessions. It wasn’t what I thought it would be. No swinging amulet, no metronome. It was more like those guided imagery exercises they’d sometimes have us do at camp. At first, nothing happened, and then I went to Vermont for the summer and quit.
“But a few weeks later, I started to get these flashes. Random flashes. Like I could remember a surgery, could actually hear the specific music the doctors played in the operating room. I thought about calling them to ask if what I remembered was true, but so much time had passed I doubted they’d remember. Besides, I didn’t really feel like I needed to ask them. My dad used to say that when I was born I looked so totally familiar to him, he was overwhelmed with this feeling that he’d known me all his life, which was funny, considering how little I looked like him or Mom. But when I had my first memories, I felt that same certainty, that they were real and mine. I didn’t put the pieces together fully until I was working on a cello piece—a lot of memories seem to hit when I’m playing—anyhow, it was Gershwin, Andante con moto e poco rubato.”
I open my mouth to say something, but at first nothing comes out. “I played you that,” I finally say.
“I know.” She doesn’t seem surprised by my confirmation.
I lean forward, put my head between my knees, and take deep breaths. I feel Mia’s hand gently touch the back of my neck.
“Adam?” Her voice is tentative. “There’s more. And here’s where it gets a little freaky. It makes a certain sense to me that my mind somehow recorded the things that were happening around my body while I was unconscious. But there are other things, other memories. . . . ”
“Like what?” My voice is a whisper.
“Most of it is hazy, but I have certain strong memories of things I couldn’t know because I wasn’t there. I have this one memory. It’s of you. It’s dark out. And you’re standing outside the hospital entrance under the floodlights, waiting to come see me. You’re wearing your leather jacket, and looking up. Like you’re looking for me. Did you do that?”
Mia cups my chin up and lifts my face, this time apparently seeking some affirmation that this moment was real. I want to tell her that she’s right, but I’ve completely lost the ability to speak. My expression, however, seems to offer the validation she’s after. She nods her head slightly. “How? How, Adam? How could I know that?”
I’m not sure if the question’s rhetorical or if she thinks I have a clue to her metaphysical mystery. And I’m in no state to answer either way because I’m crying. I don’t realize it till I taste the salt against my lips. I can’t remember the last time I’ve cried but, once I accept the mortification of sniveling like a baby, the floodgates open and I’m sobbing now, in front of Mia. In front of the whole damn world.