COLLATERAL DAMAGE, TRACK 13
When I get a grip over myself and calm down, my limbs feel like they’re made of dead wood. My eyes start to droop. I just drank a huge cup of insanely strong coffee, and it might as well have been laced with sleeping pills. I could lie down right here on this bench. I turn to Mia. I tell her I need to sleep
“My place is a few blocks away,” she says. “You can crash there.”
I have that floppy calm that follows a cry. I haven’t felt this way since I was a child, a sensitive kid, who would scream at some injustice or another until, all cried out, my mother would tuck me into bed. I picture Mia, tucking me into a single boy’s bed, pulling the Buzz Lightyear sheets up to my chin.
It’s full-on morning now. People are awake and out and about. As we walk, the quiet residential area gives way to a commercial strip, full of boutiques, cafés, and the hipsters who frequent them. I’m recognized. But I don’t bother with any subterfuge—no sunglasses, no cap. I don’t try to hide at all. Mia weaves among the growing crowds and then turns off onto a leafy side street full of brownstones and brick buildings. She stops in front of a small redbrick carriage house. “Home sweet home. It’s a sublet from a professional violinist who’s with the Vienna Philharmonic now. I’ve been here a record nine months!”
I follow her into the most compact house I’ve ever seen. The first floor consists of little more than a living room and kitchen with a sliding-glass door leading out to a garden that’s twice as deep as the house. There’s a white sectional couch, and she motions for me to lie down on it. I kick off my shoes and flop onto one of the sections, sinking into the plush cushions. Mia lifts my head, places a pillow underneath it, and a soft blanket over me, tucking me in just as I’d hoped she would.
I listen for the sound of her footsteps on the stairs up to what must be the bedroom, but instead, I feel a slight bounce in the upholstery as Mia takes up a position on the other end of the couch. She rustles her legs together a few times. Her feet are only inches away from my own. Then she lets out a long sigh and her breathing slows into a rhythmic pattern. She’s asleep. Within minutes, so am I.
When I wake up, light is flooding the apartment, and I feel so refreshed that for a second I’m sure I’ve slept for ten hours and have missed my flight. But a quick glance at the kitchen clock shows me it’s just before two o’clock, still Saturday. I’ve only been asleep for a few hours, and I have to meet Aldous at the airport at five.
Mia’s still asleep, breathing deeply and almost snoring. I watch her there for a while. She looks so peaceful and so familiar. Even before I became the insomniac I am now, I always had problems falling asleep at night, whereas Mia would read a book for five minutes, roll onto her side, and be gone. A strand of hair has fallen onto her face and it gets sucked into her mouth and back out again with each inhalation and exhalation. Without even thinking I lean over and move the strand away, my finger accidentally brushing her lips. It feels so natural, so much like the last three years haven’t passed, that I’m almost tempted to stroke her cheeks, her chin, her forehead.
Almost. But not quite. It’s like I’m seeing Mia through a prism and she’s mostly the girl I knew but something has changed, the angles are off, and so now, the idea of me touching a sleeping Mia isn’t sweet or romantic. It’s stalkerish.
I straighten up and stretch out my limbs. I’m about to wake her—but can’t quite bring myself to. Instead, I walk around her house. I was so out of it when we came in a few hours ago, I didn’t really take it in. Now that I do, I see that it looks oddly like the house Mia grew up in. There’s the same mismatched jumble of pictures on the wall—a Velvet Elvis, a 1955 poster advertising the World Series between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Yankees—and the same decorative touches, like chili-pepper lights festooning the doorways.
And photos, they’re everywhere, hanging on the walls, covering every inch of counter and shelf space. Hundreds of photos of her family, including what seem to be the photos that once hung in her old house. There’s Kat and Denny’s wedding portrait; a shot of Denny in a spiked leather jacket holding a tiny baby Mia in one of his hands; eight-year-old Mia, a giant grin on her face, clutching her cello; Mia and Kat holding a red-faced Teddy, minutes after he was born. There’s even that heartbreaking shot of Mia reading to Teddy, the one that I could never bear to look at at Mia’s grandparents’, though somehow here, in Mia’s place, it doesn’t give me that same kick in the gut.
I walk through the small kitchen, and there’s a veritable gallery of shots of Mia’s grandparents in front of a plethora of orchestra pits, of Mia’s aunts and uncles and cousins hiking through Oregon mountains or lifting up pints of ale. There are a jumble of shots of Henry and Willow and Trixie and the little boy who must be Theo. There are pictures of Kim and Mia from high school and one of the two of them posing on top of the Empire State Building—a jolting reminder that their relationship wasn’t truncated, they have a history of which I know nothing. There’s another picture of Kim, wearing a flak jacket, her hair tangled and down and blowing in a dusty wind.
There are pictures of musicians in formal wear, holding flutes of champagne. Of a bright-eyed man in a tux with a mass of wild curls holding a baton, and the same guy conducting a bunch of ratty-looking kids, and then him again, next to a gorgeous black woman, kissing a not-ratty-looking kid. This must be Ernesto.
I wander into the back garden for my wake-up smoke. I pat my pockets, but all I find there is my wallet, my sunglasses, the borrowed iPod, and the usual assortment of guitar picks that always seem to live on me. Then I remember that I must have left my cigarettes on the bridge. No smokes. No pills. I guess today is the banner day for quitting bad habits.
I come back inside and take another look around. This isn’t the house I expected. From all her talk of moving, I’d imagined a place full of boxes, something impersonal and antiseptic. And despite what she’d said about spirits, I wouldn’t have guessed that she’d surround herself so snugly with her ghosts.
Except for my ghost. There’s not a single picture of me, even though Kat included me in so many of the family shots; she’d even hung a framed photo of me and Mia and Teddy in Halloween costumes above their old living-room mantel, a place of honor in the Hall home. But not here. There are none of the silly shots Mia and I used to take of each other and of ourselves, kissing or mugging while one of us held the camera at arm’s length. I loved those pictures. They always cut off half a head or were obscured by someone’s finger, but they seemed to capture something true.
I’m not offended. Earlier, I might’ve been. But I get it now. Whatever place I held in Mia’s life, in Mia’s heart, was irrevocably altered that day in the hospital three and a half years ago.
Closure. I loathe that word. Shrinks love it. Bryn loves it. She says that I’ve never had closure with Mia. “More than five million people have bought and listened to my closure,” is my standard reply.
Standing here, in this quiet house where I can hear the birds chirping out back, I think I’m kind of getting the concept of closure. It’s no big dramatic before-after. It’s more like that melancholy feeling you get at the end of a really good vacation. Something special is ending, and you’re sad, but you can’t be that sad because, hey, it was good while it lasted, and there’ll be other vacations, other good times. But they won’t be with Mia—or with Bryn.
I glance at the clock. I need to get back to Manhattan, pack up my stuff, reply to the most urgent of the emails that have no doubt piled up, and get myself to the airport. I’ll need to get a cab out of here, and before that I’ll need to wake Mia up and say a proper good-bye.
I decide to make coffee. The smell of it alone used to rouse her. On the mornings I used to sleep at her house, sometimes I woke up early to hang with Teddy. After I let her sleep to a decent hour, I’d take the percolator right into her room and waft it around until she lifted her head from the pillow, her eyes all dreamy and soft.
I go into the kitchen and instinct
ively seem to know where everything is, as though this is my kitchen and I’ve made coffee here a thousand times before. The metal percolator is in the cabinet above the sink. The coffee in a jar on the freezer door. I spoon the rich, dark powder into the chamber atop the percolator, then fill it with water and put it on the stove. The hissing sound fills the air, followed by the rich aroma. I can almost see it, like a cartoon cloud, floating across the room, prodding Mia awake.
And sure enough, before the whole pot is brewed, she’s stretching out on the couch, gulping a bit for air like she does when she’s waking up. When she sees me in her kitchen, she looks momentarily confused. I can’t tell if it’s because I’m bustling around like a housewife or just because I’m here in the first place. Then I remember what she said about her daily wake-up call of loss. “Are you remembering it all over again?” I ask the question. Out loud. Because I want to know and because she asked me to ask.
“No,” she says. “Not this morning.” She yawns, then stretches again. “I thought I dreamed last night. Then I smelled coffee.”
“Sorry,” I mutter.
She’s smiling as she kicks off her blanket. “Do you really think that if you don’t mention my family I’ll forget them?”
“No,” I admit. “I guess not.”
“And as you can see, I’m not trying to forget.” Mia motions to the photos.
“I was looking at those. Pretty impressive gallery you’ve got. Of everyone.”
“Thanks. They keep me company.”
I look at the pictures, imagining that one day Mia’s own children will fill more of her frames, creating a new family for her, a continuing generation that I won’t be a part of.
“I know they’re just pictures,” she continues, “but some days they really help me get up in the morning. Well, them, and coffee.”
Ahh, the coffee. I go to the kitchen and open the cabinets where I know the cups will be, though I’m a little startled to find that even these are the same collection of 1950s and 60s ceramic mugs that I’ve used so many times before; amazed that she’s hauled them from dorm to dorm, from apartment to apartment. I look around for my favorite mug, the one with the dancing coffeepots on it, and am so damn happy to find it’s still here. It’s almost like having my picture on the wall, too. A little piece of me still exists, even if the larger part of me can’t.
I pour myself a cup, then pour Mia’s, adding a dash of half-and-half, like she takes it.
“I like the pictures,” I say. “Keeps things interesting.”
Mia nods, blows ripples into her coffee.
“And I miss them, too,” I say. “Every day.”
She looks surprised at that. Not that I miss them, but, I guess by my admitting it, finally. She nods solemnly. “I know,” she says.
She walks around the room, running her fingers lightly along the picture frames. “I’m running out of space,” she says. “I had to put up a bunch of Kim’s recent shots in the bathroom. Have you talked to her lately?”
She must know what I did to Kim. “No.”
“Really? Then you don’t know about the scandale?”
I shake my head.
“She dropped out of college last year. When the war flared up in Afghanistan, Kim decided, screw it, I want to be a photographer and the best education is in the field. So she just took her cameras and off she went. She started selling all these shots to the AP and the New York Times. She cruises around in one of those burkas and hides all her photographic equipment underneath the robes and then whips them off to get her shot.”
“I’ll bet Mrs. Schein loves that.” Kim’s mom was notoriously overprotective. The last I’d heard of her, she was having a freak-out that Kim was going to school across the country, which, Kim had said, was precisely the point.
Mia laughs. “At first, Kim told her family she was just taking a semester off, but now she’s getting really successful so she’s officially dropped out, and Mrs. Schein has officially had a nervous breakdown. And then there’s the fact that Kim’s a nice Jewish girl in a very Muslim country.” Mia blows on her coffee and sips. “But, on the other hand, now Kim gets her stuff in the New York Times, and she just got a feature assignment for National Geographic, so it gives Mrs. Schein some bragging ammo.”
“Hard for a mother to resist,” I say.
“She’s a big Shooting Star fan, you know?”
“Mrs. Schein? I always had her pegged as more hip-hop.”
Mia grins. “No. She’s into death metal. Hard core. Kim. She saw you guys play in Bangkok. Said it poured rain and you played right through it.”
“She was at that show? I wish she would’ve come backstage, said hi,” I say, even though I know why she wouldn’t have. Still, she came to the show. She must have forgiven me a little bit.
“I told her the same thing. But she had to leave right away. She was supposed to be in Bangkok for some R & R, but that rain you were playing in was actually a cyclone somewhere else and she had to run off and cover it. She’s a very badass shutterbabe these days.”
I think of Kim chasing Taliban insurgents and ducking flying trees. It’s surprisingly easy to imagine. “It’s funny,” I begin.
“What is?” Mia asks.
“Kim being a war photographer. All Danger Girl.”
“Yeah, it’s a laugh riot.”
“That’s not how I meant. It’s just: Kim. You. Me. We all came from this nowhere town in Oregon, and look at us. All three of us have gone to, well, extremes. You gotta admit, it’s kind of weird.”
“It’s not weird at all,” Mia says, shaking out a bowl of cornflakes. “We were all forged in the crucible. Now come on, have some cereal.”
I’m not hungry. I’m not even sure I can eat a single cornflake, but I sit down because my place at the Hall family table has just been restored.
Time has a weight to it, and right now I can feel it heavy over me. It’s almost three o’clock. Another day is half over and tonight I leave for the tour. I hear the clicking of the antique clock on Mia’s wall. I let the minutes go by longer than I should before I finally speak.
“We both have our flights. I should probably get moving,” I say. My voice sounds faraway but I feel weirdly calm. “Are there taxis around here?”
“No, we get back and forth to Manhattan by river raft,” she jokes. “You can call a car,” she adds after a moment.
I stand up, make my way toward the kitchen counter where Mia’s phone sits. “What’s the number?” I ask.
“Seven-one-eight,” Mia begins. Then she interrupts herself. “Wait.”
At first I think she has to pause to recall the number, but I see her eyes, at once unsure and imploring.
“There’s one last thing,” she continues, her voice hesitant. “Something I have that really belongs to you.”
“My Wipers T-shirt?”
She shakes her head. “That’s long gone, I’m afraid. Come on. It’s upstairs.”
I follow her up the creaking steps. At the top of the narrow landing to my right I can see her bedroom with its slanted ceilings. To my left is a closed door. Mia opens it, revealing a small studio. In the corner is a cabinet with a keypad. Mia punches in a code and the door opens.
When I see what she pulls out of the cabinet, at first I’m like, Oh, right, my guitar. Because here in Mia’s little house in Brooklyn is my old electric guitar, my Les Paul Junior. The guitar I bought at a pawnshop with my pizza-delivery earnings when I was a teenager. It’s the guitar I used to record all of our stuff leading up to, and including, Collateral Damage. It’s the guitar I auctioned off for charity and have regretted doing so ever since.
It’s sitting in its old case, with my old Fugazi and K Records stickers, with the stickers from Mia’s dad’s old band, even. Everything is the same, the strap, the dent from when I’d dropped it off a stage. Even the dust smells familiar.
And I’m just taking it all in, so it’s a few seconds before it really hits me. This is my guitar. Mia has my guitar. Mi
a is the one who bought my guitar for some exorbitant sum, which means that Mia knew it was up for auction. I look around the room. Among the sheet music and cello paraphernalia is a pile of magazines, my face peeking out from the covers. And then I remember something back on the bridge, Mia justifying why she left me by reciting the lyrics to “Roulette.”
And suddenly, it’s like I’ve been wearing earplugs all night and they’ve fallen out, and everything that was muffled is now clear. But also so loud and jarring.
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.