SIXTEEN
You crossed the water, left me ashore
It killed me enough, but you wanted more
You blew up the bridge, a mad terrorist
Waved from your side, threw me a kiss
I started to follow but realized too late
There was nothing but air underneath my feet
“BRIDGE”
COLLATERAL DAMAGE, TRACK 4
Fingers of light are starting to pry open the night sky. Soon the sun will rise and a new day will inarguably begin. A day in which I’m leaving for London. And Mia for Tokyo. I feel the countdown of the clock ticking like a time bomb.
We’re on the Brooklyn Bridge now, and though Mia hasn’t said so specifically, I feel like this must be the last stop. I mean, we’re leaving Manhattan—and not a round-trip like our cruise out to Staten Island and back was. And also, Mia has decided, I guess, that since she’s pulled some confessionals, it’s my turn. About halfway across the bridge, she stops suddenly and turns to me.
“So what’s up with you and the band?” she asks.
There’s a warm wind blowing, but I suddenly feel cold. “What do you mean, ‘what’s up?’”
Mia shrugs. “Something’s up. I can tell. You’ve hardly talked about them all night. You guys used to be inseparable, and now you don’t even live in the same state. And why didn’t you go to London together?”
“I told you, logistics.”
“What was so important that they couldn’t have waited one night for you?”
“I had to, to do some stuff. Go into the studio and lay down a few guitar tracks.”
Mia eyes me skeptically. “But you’re on tour for a new album. Why are you even recording?”
“A promo version of one of our singles. More of this,” I say, frowning as I rub my fingers together in a money-money motion.
“But wouldn’t you be recording together?”
I shake my head. “It doesn’t really work like that anymore. And besides, I had to do an interview with Shuffle.”
“An interview? Not with the band? Just with you? That’s what I don’t get.”
I think back to the day before. To Vanessa LeGrande. And out of the blue, I’m recalling the lyrics to “Bridge,” and wondering if maybe discussing this with Mia Hall above the dark waters of the East River isn’t such a hot idea. At least it isn’t Friday the thirteenth anymore.
“Yeah. That’s kinda how it works these days, too,” I say.
“Why do they only want just you? What do they want to know about?”
I really don’t want to talk about this. But Mia’s like a bloodhound, tracking a scent, and I know her well enough to know that I can either throw her a piece of bloody meat, or let her sniff her way to the real pile of stinking corpses. I go for the diversion.
“Actually, that part’s kinda interesting. The reporter, she asked about you.”
“What?” Mia swivels around to face me.
“She was interviewing me and asked about you. About us. About high school.” The look of shock on Mia’s face, I savor it. I think about what she said earlier, about her life in Oregon being a lifetime ago. Well, maybe not such a lifetime ago! “That’s the first time that’s happened. Kinda strange coincidence, all things considered.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences anymore.”
“I didn’t tell her anything, but she’d gotten a hold of the old Cougar yearbook. The one with our picture—Groovy and the Geek.”
Mia shakes her head. “Yeah, I so loved that nick-name.”
“Don’t worry. I didn’t say anything. And for good measure, I smashed her recorder. Destroyed all evidence.”
“Not all the evidence.” She stares at me. “The Cougar lives on. I’m sure Kim will be delighted to know her early work may turn up in a national magazine.” She shakes her head and chuckles. “Once Kim gets you in her shutter, you’re stuck forever. So it was pointless to destroy that reporter’s recorder.”
“I know. I just sort of lost it. She was this very provocative person, and she was trying to get a rise out of me with all these insults-disguised-as-compliments.”
Mia nods knowingly. “I get that, too. It’s the worst! ‘I was fascinated by the Shostakovich you played tonight. So much more subdued than the Bach,’ she says in a snooty voice. ‘Translation: The Shostakovich sucked.’”
I can’t imagine the Shostakovich ever sucking, but I won’t deny us this common ground.
“So what did she want to know about me?”
“She had plans to do this big exposé, I guess, on what makes Shooting Star tick. And she went digging around our hometown and talked to people we went to high school with. And they told her about us . . . about the . . . about what we were. And about you and what happened . . .” I trail off. I look down at the river, at a passing barge, which, judging by its smell, is carrying garbage.
“And what really happened?” Mia asks.
I’m not sure if this is a rhetorical question, so I force my own voice into a jokey drawl. “Yeah, that’s what I’m still trying to figure out.”
It occurs to me that this is maybe the most honest thing I’ve said all night, but the way I’ve said it transforms it into a lie.
“You know, my manager warned me that the accident might get a lot of attention as my profile went up, but I didn’t think that the connection to you would be an issue. I mean, I did in the beginning. I sort of waited for someone to look me up—ghosts of girlfriends past—but I guess I wasn’t interesting enough compared to your other, um, attachments.”
She thinks that’s why none of the hacks have pestered her, because she’s not as interesting as Bryn, who I guess she does know about. If only she knew how the band’s inner circle has bent over backward to keep her name out of things, to not touch the bruise that blooms at the mere mention of her. That right at this very moment there are riders in interview contracts that dictate whole swaths of forbidden conversational topics that, though they don’t name her specifically, are all about obliterating her from the record. Protecting her. And me.
“I guess high school really is ancient history,” she concludes.
Ancient history? Have you really relegated us to the trash heap of the Dumb High-School Romance? And if that’s the case, why the hell can’t I do the same?
“Yeah, well you plus me, we’re like MTV plus Lifetime,” I say, with as much jauntiness as I can muster. “In other words, shark bait.”
She sighs. “Oh, well. I suppose even sharks have to eat.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s just, I don’t particularly want my family history dragged through the public eye, but if that’s the price to be paid for doing what you love, I guess I’ll pay it.”
And we’re back to this. The notion that music can make it all worthwhile—I’d like to believe. I just don’t. I’m not even sure that I ever did. It isn’t the music that makes me want to wake up every day and take another breath. I turn away from her toward the dark water below.
“What if it’s not what you love?” I mumble, but my voice gets lost in the wind and the traffic. But at least I’ve said it out loud. I’ve done that much.
I need a cigarette. I lean against the railing and look uptown toward a trio of bridges. Mia comes to stand beside me as I’m fumbling to get my lighter to work.
“You should quit,” she says, touching me gently on the shoulder.
For a second, I think she means the band. That she heard what I said before and is telling me to quit Shooting Star, leave the whole music industry. I keep waiting for someone to advise me to quit the music business, but no one ever does. Then I remember how earlier tonight, she told me the same thing, right before she bummed a cigarette. “It’s not so easy,” I say.
“Bullshit,” Mia says with a self-righteousness that instantly recalls her mother, Kat, who wore her certitude like a beat-up leather jacket and who had a mouth on her that could make a roadie blush. “Quitting’s not hard. Deciding to quit is hard. Once you make that mental leap, the rest is easy.”
“Really? Was that how you quit me?”
And just like that, without thinking, without saying it in my head first, without arguing with myself for days, it’s out there.
“So,” she says, as if speaking to an audience under the bridge. “He finally says it.”
“Was I not supposed to? Am I just supposed to let this whole night go without talking about what you did?”
“No,” she says softly.
“So why? Why did you go? Was it because of the voices?”
She shakes her head. “It wasn’t the voices.”
“Then what? What was it?” I hear the desperation in my own voice now.
“It was lots of things. Like how you couldn’t be yourself around me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You stopped talking to me.”
“That’s absurd, Mia. I talked to you all the time!”
“You talked to me, but you didn’t. I could see you having these two-sided conversations. The things you wanted to say to me. And the words that actually came out.”
I think of all the dual conversations I have. With everyone. Is that when it started? “Well, you weren’t exactly easy to talk to,” I shoot back. “Anything I said was the wrong thing.”
She looks at me with a sad smile. “I know. It wasn’t just you. It was you plus me. It was us.”
I just shake my head. “It’s not true.”
“Yes it is. But don’t feel bad. Everyone walked on eggshells around me. But with you, it was painful that you couldn’t be real with me. I mean, you barely even touched me.”
As if to reinforce the point, she places two fingers on the inside of my wrist. Were smoke to rise and the imprints of her two fingers branded onto me, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised. I have to pull away just to steady myself.
“You were healing,” is my pathetic reply. “And if I recall, when we did try, you freaked.”
“Once,” she says. “Once.”
“All I wanted was for you to be okay. All I wanted was to help you. I would’ve done anything.”
She drops her chin to her chest. “Yes, I know. You wanted to rescue me.”
“Damn, Mia. You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
She looks up at me. The sympathy is still in her eyes, but there’s something else now, too: a fierceness; it slices up my anger and reconstitutes it as dread.
“You were so busy trying to be my savior that you left me all alone,” she says. “I know you were trying to help, but it just felt, at the time, like you were pushing me away, keeping things from me for my own good and making me more of a victim. Ernesto says that people’s good intentions can wind up putting us in boxes as confining as coffins.”
“Ernesto? What the hell does he know about it?”
Mia traces the gap between the wooden boardwalk planks with her toe. “A lot, actually. His parents were killed when he was eight. He was raised by his grandparents.”
I know what I’m supposed to feel is sympathy. But the rage just washes over me. “What, is there some club?” I ask, my voice starting to crack. “A grief club that I can’t join?”
I expect her to tell me no. Or that I’m a member. After all, I lost them, too. Except even back then, it had been different, like there’d been a barrier. That’s the thing you never expect about grieving, what a competition it is. Because no matter how important they’d been to me, no matter how sorry people told me they were, Denny and Kat and Teddy weren’t my family, and suddenly that distinction had mattered.
Apparently, it still does. Because Mia stops and considers my question. “Maybe not a grief club. But a guilt club. From being left behind.”
Oh, don’t talk to me about guilt! My blood runs thick with it. On the bridge, now I feel tears coming. The only way to keep them at bay is to find the anger that’s sustained me and push back with it. “But you could’ve at least told me,” I say, my voice rising to a shout. “Instead of dropping me like a one-night stand, you could’ve had the decency to break up with me instead of leaving me wondering for three years. . . .”
“I didn’t plan it,” she says, her own pitch rising. “I didn’t get on that plane thinking we’d split up. You were everything to me. Even as it was happening, I didn’t believe it was happening. But it was. Just being here, being away, it was all so much easier in a way I didn’t anticipate. In a way I didn’t think my life could be anymore. It was a huge relief.”
I think of all the girls whose backs I couldn’t wait to see in retreat. How once their sound and smell and voices were gone, I felt my whole body exhale. A lot of the time Bryn falls into this category. That’s how my absence felt to Mia?
“I planned to tell you,” she continues, the words coming out in a breathless jumble now, “but at first I was so confused. I didn’t even know what was happening, only that I was feeling better without you and how could I explain that to you? And then time went by, you didn’t call me, when you didn’t pursue it, I just figured that you, you of all people, you understood. I knew I was being a chickenshit. But I thought . . .” Mia stumbles for a second then regains her composure. “I thought I was allowed that. And that you understood it. I mean you seemed to. You wrote: ‘She says I have to pick: Choose you, or choose me. She’s the last one standing.’ I don’t know. When I heard ‘Roulette’ I just thought you did understand. That you were angry, but you knew. I had to choose me.”
“That’s your excuse for dropping me without a word? There’s cowardly, Mia. And then there’s cruel! Is that who you’ve become?”
“Maybe it was who I needed to be for a while,” she cries. “And I’m sorry. I know I should’ve contacted you. Should’ve explained. But you weren’t all that accessible.”
“Oh, bullshit, Mia. I’m inaccessible to most people. But you? Two phone calls and you could’ve tracked me down.”
“It didn’t feel that way,” she said. “You were this . . .” she trails off, miming an explosion, the same as Vanessa LeGrande had done earlier in the day. “Phenomenon. Not a person anymore.”
“That’s such a load of crap and you should know it. And besides, that was more than a year after you left. A year. A year in which I was curled up into a ball of misery at my parents’ house, Mia. Or did you forget that phone number, too?”
“No.” Mia’s voice is flat. “But I couldn’t call you at first.”
“Why?” I yell. “Why not?”
Mia faces me now. The wind is whipping her hair this way and that so she looks like some kind of mystical sorceress, beautiful, powerful, and scary at the same time. She shakes her head and starts to turn away.
Oh, no! We’ve come this far over the bridge. She can blow the damn thing up if she wants to. But not without telling me everything. I grab her, turn her to face me. “Why not? Tell me. You owe me this!”
She looks at me, square in the eye. Taking aim. And then she pulls the trigger. “Because I hated you.”
The wind, the noise, it all just goes quiet for a second, and I’m left with a dull ringing in my ear, like after a show, like after a heart monitor goes to flatline.
“Hated me? Why?”
“You made me stay.” She says it quietly, and it almost gets lost in the wind and the traffic and I’m not sure I heard her. But then she repeats it louder this time. “You made me stay!”
And there it is. A hollow blown through my heart, confirming what some part of me has always known.
She knows.
The electricity in the air has changed; it’s like you can smell the ions dancing. “I still wake up every single morning and for a second I forget that I don’t have my family anymore,” she tells me. “And then I remember. Do you know what that’s like? Over and over again. It would’ve been so much easier . . .” And suddenly her calm facade cracks and she begins to cry.
“Please,” I hold up my hands. “Please don’t . . .”
“No, you’re right. You have to let me say this, Adam! You have to hear it. It would’ve been easier to die. It’s not that I want to be dead now. I don’t. I have a lot in my life that I get satisfaction from, that I love. But some days, especially in the beginning, it was so hard. And I couldn’t help but think that it would’ve been so much simpler to go with the rest of them. But you—you asked me to stay. You begged me to stay. You stood over me and you made a promise to me, as sacred as any vow. And I can understand why you’re angry, but you can’t blame me. You can’t hate me for taking your word.”
Mia’s sobbing now. I’m wracked with shame because I brought her to this.
And suddenly, I get it. I understand why she summoned me to her at the theater, why she came after me once I left her dressing room. This is what the farewell tour is really all about—Mia completing the severance she began three years ago.
Letting go. Everyone talks about it like it’s the easiest thing. Unfurl your fingers one by one until your hand is open. But my hand has been clenched into a fist for three years now; it’s frozen shut. All of me is frozen shut. And about to shut down completely.
I stare down at the water. A minute ago it was calm and glassy but now it’s like the river is opening up, churning, a violent whirlpool. It’s that vortex, threatening to swallow me whole. I’m going to drown in it, with nobody, nobody in the murk with me.
I’ve blamed her for all of this, for leaving, for ruining me. And maybe that was the seed of it, but from that one little seed grew this tumor of a flowering plant. And I’m the one who nurtures it. I water it. I care for it. I nibble from its poison berries. I let it wrap around my neck, choking the air right out of me. I’ve done that. All by myself. All to myself.
I look at the river. It’s like the waves are fifty feet high, snapping at me now, trying to pull me over the bridge into the waters below.
“I can’t do this anymore!” I yell as the carnivorous waves come for me.
Again, I scream, “I can’t do this anymore!” I’m yelling to the waves and to Liz and Fitzy and Mike and Aldous, to our record executives and to Bryn and Vanessa and the paparazzi and the girls in the U Mich sweatshirts and the scenesters on the subway and everyone who wants a piece of me when there aren’t enough pieces to go around. But mostly I’m yelling it to myself.
“I CAN’T DO THIS ANYMORE!” I scream louder than I’ve ever screamed in my life, so loud my breath is knocking down trees in Manhattan, I’m sure of it. And as I battle with invisible waves and imaginary vortexes and demons that are all too real and of my own making, I actually feel something in my chest open, a feeling so intense it’s like my heart’s about to burst. And I just let it. I just let it out.
When I look up, the river is a river again. And my hands, which had been gripping the railing of the bridge so tight that my knuckles had gone white, have loosened.
Mia is walking away, walking toward the other end of the bridge. Without me.
I get it now.
I have to make good on my promise. To let her go. To really let her go. To let us both go.