Where She Went (If I Stay 2)

“D’ya think he has superhuman strength?” the woman replies. “Ya could go inside and check for him.”

“And rip my new Armani pants on the fence? A man has his limits. And it looks empty in there. He probably caught a cab. Which we should do. I got sources texting that Timberlake’s at the Breslin.”

I hear the sound of footsteps retreating and stay quiet for a while longer just to be safe. Mia breaks the silence.

“D’ya think he has superhuman strength?” she asks in a pitch-perfect imitation. Then she starts to laugh.

“I’m not gonna rip my new Armani pants,” I reply. “A man has his limits.”

Mia laughs even harder. The tension in my gut eases. I almost smile.

After her laughter dies down, she stands up, wipes the dirt from her backside, and sits down on the bench in the gazebo. I do the same. “That must happen to you all the time.”

I shrug. “It’s worse in New York and L.A. And London. But it’s everywhere now. Even fans sell their pics to the tabloids.”

“Everyone’s in on the game, huh?” she says. Now this sounds more like the Mia I once knew, not like a Classical Cellist with a lofty vocabulary and one of those pan-Euro accents like Madonna’s.

“Everyone wants their cut,” I say. “You get used to it.”

“You get used to a lot of things,” Mia acknowledges.

I nod in the darkness. My eyes have adjusted so I can see that the garden is pretty big, an expanse of grass bisected by brick paths and ringed by flower beds. Every now and then, a tiny light flashes in the air. “Are those fireflies?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“In the middle of the city?”

“Right. It used to amaze me, too. But if there’s a patch of green, those little guys will find it and light it up. They only come for a few weeks a year. I always wonder where they go the rest of the time.”

I ponder that. “Maybe they’re still here, but just don’t have anything to light up about.”

“Could be. The insect version of seasonal affective disorder, though the buggers should try living in Oregon if they really want to know what a depressing winter is like.”

“How’d you get the key to this place?” I ask. “Do you have to live around here?”

Mia shakes her head, then nods. “Yes, you do have to live in the area to get a key, but I don’t. The key belongs to Ernesto Castorel. Or did belong to. When he was a guest conductor at the Philharmonic, he lived nearby and the garden key came with his sublet. I was having roommate issues at the time, which is a repeating theme in my life, so I wound up crashing at his place a lot, and after he left, I ‘accidentally’ took the key.”

I don’t know why I should feel so sucker-punched. You’ve been with so many girls since Mia you’ve lost count, I reason with myself. It’s not like you’ve been languishing in celibacy. You think she has?

“Have you ever seen him conduct?” she asks me. “He always reminded me of you.”

Except for tonight, I haven’t so much as listened to classical music since you left. “I have no idea who you’re talking about.”

“Castorel? Oh, he’s incredible. He came from the slums of Venezuela, and through this program that helps street kids by teaching them to play musical instruments, he wound up becoming a conductor at sixteen. He was the conductor of the Prague Philharmonic at twenty-four, and now he’s the artistic director for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and runs that very same program in Venezuela that gave him his start. He sort of breathes music. Same as you.”

Who says I breathe music? Who says I even breathe? “Wow,” I say, trying to push back against the jealousy I have no right to.

Mia looks up, suddenly embarrassed. “Sorry. I forget sometimes that the entire world isn’t up on the minutiae of classical music. He’s pretty famous in our world.”

Yeah, well my girlfriend is really famous in the rest of the world, I think. But does she even know about Bryn and me? You’d have to have your head buried beneath a mountain not to have heard about us. Or you’d have to intentionally be avoiding any news of me. Or maybe you’d just have to be a classical cellist who doesn’t read tabloids. “He sounds swell,” I say.

Even Mia doesn’t miss the sarcasm. “Not famous, like you, I mean,” she says, her gushiness petering into awkwardness.

I don’t answer. For a few seconds there’s no sound, save for the river of traffic on the street. And then Mia’s stomach gurgles again, reminding us that we’ve been waylaid in this garden. That we’re actually on our way someplace else.

SEVEN

In a weird twisted way, Bryn and I met because of Mia. Well, one degree of separation, I guess. It was really because of the singer-songwriter Brooke Vega. Shooting Star had been slated to open for Brooke’s former band, Bikini, the day of Mia’s accident. When I hadn’t been allowed to visit Mia in the ICU, Brooke had come to the hospital to try to create a diversion. She hadn’t been successful. And that had been the last I’d seen of Brooke until the crazy time after Collateral Damage went double platinum.

Shooting Star was in L.A. for the MTV Movie Awards. One of our previously recorded but never released songs had been put on the sound track for the movie Hello, Killer and was nominated for Best Song. We didn’t win.

It didn’t matter. The MTV Awards were just the latest in a string of ceremonies, and it had been a bumper crop in terms of awards. Just a few months earlier we’d picked up our Grammys for Best New Artist and Song of the Year for “Animate.”

It was weird. You’d think that a platinum record, a pair of Grammys, a couple of VMAs would make your world, but the more it all piled on, the more the scene was making my skin crawl. There were the girls, the drugs, the ass-kissing, plus the hype—the constant hype. People I didn’t know—and not groupies, but industry people—rushing up to me like they were my longtime friends, kissing me on both cheeks, calling me “babe,” slipping business cards into my hand, whispering about movie roles or ads for Japanese beer, one-day shoots that would pay a million bucks.

I couldn’t handle it, which was why once we’d finished doing our bit for the Movie Awards, I’d ducked out of the Gibson Amphitheater to the smokers’ area. I was planning my escape when I saw Brooke Vega striding toward me. Behind her was a pretty, vaguely familiarlooking girl with long black hair and green eyes the size of dinner plates.

“Adam Wilde as I live and breathe,” Brooke said, embracing me in a dervish hug. Brooke had recently gone solo and her debut album, Kiss This, had been racking up awards, too, so we’d been bumping into each other a lot at the various ceremonies. “Adam, this is Bryn Shraeder, but you probably know her as the fox nominated for The Best Kiss Award. Did you catch her fabulous smooch in The Way Girls Fall?”

I shook my head. “Sorry.”

“I lost to a vampire-werewolf kiss. Girl-on-girl action doesn’t have quite the same impact it used to,” Bryn deadpanned.

“You were robbed!” Brooke interjected. “Both of you. It’s a cryin’ shame. But I’ll leave you to lick your wounds or just get acquainted. I’ve got to get back and present. Adam, see you around, I hope. You should come to L.A. more often. You could use some color.” She sauntered off, winking at Bryn.

We stood there in silence for a second. I offered a cigarette to Bryn. She shook her head, then looked at me with those eyes of hers, so unnervingly green. “That was a setup, in case you were wondering.”

“Yeah, I was, sort of.”

She shrugged, not in the least embarrassed. “I told Brooke I thought you were intriguing, so she took matters into her own hands. She and I, we’re alike that way.”

“I see.”

“Does that bother you?”

“Why would it?”

“It would bother a lot of guys out here. Actors tend to be really insecure. Or gay.”

“I’m not from here.”

She smiled at that. Then she looked at my jacket. “You going AWOL or something?”

“You think they’ll s

end the dogs on me?”

“Maybe, but it’s L.A., so they’ll be teeny-tiny Chihuahuas all trussed up in designer bags, so how much damage can they do. You want company?”

“Really? You don’t have to stay and mourn your best-kiss loss?”

She looked me squarely in the eye, like she got the joke I was making and was in on it, too. Which I appreciated. “I prefer to celebrate or commiserate my kissing in private.”

The only plan I had was to return to my hotel in the limo we had waiting. So instead I went with Bryn. She gave her driver the night off and grabbed the keys to her hulking SUV and drove us down the hill from Universal City toward the coast.

We cruised along the Pacific Coast Highway to a beach north of the city called Point Dume. We stopped on the way for a bottle of wine and some takeout sushi. By the time we reached the beach, a fog had descended over the inky water.

“June gloom,” Bryn said, shivering in her short little green-and-black off-the-shoulder dress. “Never fails to freeze me.”

“Don’t you have a sweater or something?” I asked.

“It didn’t complete the look.”

“Here.” I handed her my jacket.

She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “A gentleman.”

We sat on the beach, sharing the wine straight out of the bottle. She told me about the film she’d recently wrapped and the one she was leaving to start shooting the following month. And she was trying to decide between one of two scripts to produce for the company she was starting.

“So you’re a fundamentally lazy person?” I asked.

She laughed. “I grew up in this armpit town in Arizona, where all my life my mom told me how pretty I was, how I should be a model, an actress. She never even let me play outside in the sun—in Arizona!—because she didn’t want me to mess up my skin. It was like all I had going for me was a pretty face.” She turned to stare at me, and I could see the intelligence in her eyes, which were set, admittedly, in a very pretty face. “But fine, whatever, my face was the ticket out of there. But now Hollywood’s the same way. Everyone has me pegged as an ingenue, another pretty face. But I know better. So if I want to prove I have a brain, if I want to play in the sunshine, so to speak, it’s up to me to find the project that breaks me out. I feel like I’ll be better positioned to do that if I’m a producer, too. It’s all about control, really. I want to control everything, I guess.”

“Yeah, but some things you can’t control, no matter how hard you try.”

Bryn stared out at the dark horizon, dug her bare toes into the cool sand. “I know,” she said quietly. She turned to me. “I’m really sorry about your girlfriend. Mia, right?”

I coughed on the wine. That wasn’t a name I was expecting to hear right now.

“I’m sorry. It’s just when I asked Brooke about you, she told me how you two met. She wasn’t gossiping or anything. But she was there, at the hospital, so she knew.”

My heart thundered in my chest. I just nodded.

“My dad left when I was seven. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” Bryn continued. “So I can’t imagine losing someone like that.”

I nodded again, swigged at the wine. “I’m sorry,” I managed to say.

She nodded slightly in acknowledgment. “But at least they all died together. I mean that’s got to be a blessing in a way. I know I wouldn’t have wanted to wake up if the rest of my family had died.”

The wine came sputtering out of my mouth, through my nose. It took me a few moments to regain my breath and my power of speech. When I did, I told Bryn that Mia wasn’t dead. She’d survived the crash, had made a full recovery.

Bryn looked genuinely horrified, so much so that I felt sorry for her instead of for myself. “Lord, Adam. I’m so mortified. I just sort of assumed. Brooke said she’d never heard boo about Mia again and I would’ve come to the same conclusion. Shooting Star kind of disappears and then Collateral Damage, I mean, the lyrics are just so full of pain and anger and betrayal at being left behind. . . .”

“Yep,” I said.

Then Bryn looked at me, the green of her eyes reflecting in the moonlight. And I could tell that she understood it all, without my having to say a word. Not having to explain, that felt like the biggest relief. “Oh, Adam. That’s even worse in a way, isn’t it?”

When Bryn said that, uttered out loud the thing that to my never-ending shame I sometimes felt, I’d fallen in love with her a little bit. And I’d thought that was enough. That this implicit understanding and those first stirrings would bloom until my feelings for Bryn were as consuming as my love for Mia had once been.

I went back to Bryn’s house that night. And all that spring I visited her on set up in Vancouver, then in Chicago, then in Budapest. Anything to get out of Oregon, away from the awkwardness that had formed like a thick pane of aquarium glass between me and the rest of the band. When she returned to L.A. that summer, she suggested I move into her Hollywood Hills house. “There’s a guesthouse out back that I never use that we could turn into your studio.”

The idea of getting out of Oregon, away from the rest of the band, from all that history, a fresh start, a house full of windows and light, a future with Bryn—it had felt so right at the time.

So that’s how I became one half of a celebrity couple. Now I get my picture snapped with Bryn as we do stuff as mundane as grab a coffee from Starbucks or take a walk through Runyon Canyon.

I should be happy. I should be grateful. But the problem is, I never can get away from feeling that my fame isn’t about me; it’s about them. Collateral Damage was written with Mia’s blood on my hands, and that was the record that launched me. And when I became really famous, it was for being with Bryn, so it had less to do with the music I was making than the girl I was with.

And the girl. She’s great. Any guy would kill to be with her, would be proud to knock her up.

Except even at the start, when we were in that can’t-get-enough-of-you phase, there was like some invisible wall between us. At first I tried to take it down, but it took so much effort to even make cracks. And then I got tired of trying. Then I justified it. This was just how adult relationships were, how love felt once you had a few battle scars.

Maybe that’s why I can’t let myself enjoy what we have. Why, in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep, I go outside to listen to the lapping of the pool filter and obsess about the shit about Bryn that drives me crazy. Even as I’m doing it, I’m aware that it’s minor league—the way she sleeps with a BlackBerry next to her pillow, the way she works out hours a day and catalogs every little thing she eats, the way she refuses to deviate from a plan or a schedule. And I know that there’s plenty of great stuff to balance out the bad. She’s generous as an oil baron and loyal as a pit bull.

I know I’m not easy to live with. Bryn tells me I’m withdrawn, evasive, cold. She accuses me—depending on her mood—of being jealous of her career, of being with her by accident, of cheating on her. It’s not true. I haven’t touched a groupie since we’ve been together; I haven’t wanted to.

I always tell her that part of the problem is that we’re hardly ever in the same place. If I’m not recording or touring, then Bryn’s on location or off on one of her endless press junkets. What I don’t tell her is that I can’t imagine us being together more of the time. Because it’s not like when we’re in the same room everything’s so great.

Sometimes, after Bryn’s had a couple of glasses of wine, she’ll claim that Mia’s what’s between us. “Why don’t you just go back to your ghost?” she’ll say. “I’m tired of competing with her.”

“Nobody can compete with you,” I tell her, kissing her on the forehead. And I’m not lying. Nobody can compete with Bryn. And then I tell her it’s not Mia; it’s not any girl. Bryn and I live in a bubble, a spotlight, a pressure cooker. It would be hard on any couple.

But I think we both know I’m lying. And the truth is, there isn’t any avoiding Mia’s ghost. Bryn and I

wouldn’t even be together if it weren’t for her. In that twisted, incestuous way of fate, Mia’s a part of our history, and we’re among the shards of her legacy.

EIGHT

The clothes are packed off to Goodwill

I said my good-byes up on that hill

The house is empty, the furniture sold

Soon your smells will decay to mold

Don’t know why I bother calling, ain’t nobody answering

Don’t know why I bother singing, ain’t nobody listening

“DISCONNECT”

COLLATERAL DAMAGE, TRACK 10

Ever hear the one about that dog that spent its life chasing cars and finally caught one—and had no idea what to do with it?

I’m that dog.

Because here I am, alone with Mia Hall, something I’ve fantasized about now for more than three years, and it’s like, now what?

We’re at the diner that was apparently her destination, some random place way over on the west side of town. “It has a parking lot,” Mia tells me when we arrive.

“Uh-huh,” is all I can think to answer.

“I’d never seen a Manhattan restaurant with a parking lot before, which is why I first stopped in. Then I noticed that all the cabbies ate here and cabbies are usually excellent judges of good food, but then I wasn’t sure because there is a parking lot, and free parking is a hotter commodity than good, cheap food.”

Mia’s babbling now. And I’m thinking: Are we really talking about parking? When neither of us, as far as I can tell, owns a car here. I’m hit again by how I don’t know anything about her anymore, not the smallest detail.

The host takes us to a booth and Mia suddenly grimaces. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. You probably never eat in places like this anymore.”

She’s right, actually, not because I prefer darkened, overpriced, exclusive eateries but because those are the ones I get taken to and those are the ones I generally get left alone in. But this place is full of old grizzled New Yorkers and cabbies, no one who’d recognize me. “No, this place is good,” I say.