After that, the cello became her therapy: physical, emotional, mental. The doctors were amazed at Mia’s upper-body strength—what her old music teacher Professor Christie had called her “cello body,” broad shoulders, muscular arms—and how her playing brought that strength back, which made the weakness in her right arm go away and strengthened her injured leg. It helped with the dizziness. Mia closed her eyes as she played, and she claimed that this, along with grounding her two feet on the floor, helped her balance. Through playing, Mia revealed the lapses she tried to hide in everyday conversation. If she wanted a Coke but couldn’t remember the word for it, she’d cover up and just ask for orange juice. But with cello, she would be honest about the fact that she remembered a Bach suite she’d been working on a few months ago but not a simple étude she’d learned as a child; although once Professor Christie, who came down once a week to work with her, showed it to her, she’d pick it right up. This gave the speech therapists and neurologists clues as to the hopscotch way her brain had been impacted, and they tailored their therapies accordingly.
But mostly, the cello improved her mood. It gave her something to do every day. She stopped speaking in the monotone and started to talk like Mia again, at least when she was talking about music. Her therapists altered her rehabilitation plan, allowing her to spend more time practicing. “We don’t really get how music heals the brain,” one of her neurologists told me one afternoon as he listened to her play to a group of patients in the common room, “but we know that it does. Just look at Mia.”
She left the rehab center after four weeks, two weeks ahead of schedule. She could walk with a cane, open a jar of peanut butter, and play the hell out of Beethoven.
That article, the “Twenty Under 20” thing from All About Us that Liz showed me, I do remember one thing about it. I remember the not-just-implied but overtly stated connection between Mia’s “tragedy” and her “otherworldly” playing. And I remember how that pissed me off. Because there was something insulting in that. As if the only way to explain her talent was to credit some supernatural force. Like what’d they think, that her dead family was inhabiting her body and playing a celestial choir through her fingers?
But the thing was, there was something otherworldly that happened. And I know because I was there. I witnessed it: I saw how Mia went from being a very talented player to something altogether different. In the space of five months, something magical and grotesque transformed her. So, yes, it was all related to her “tragedy,” but Mia was the one doing the heavy lifting. She always had been.
She left for Juilliard the day after Labor Day. I drove her to the airport. She kissed me good-bye. She told me that she loved me more than life itself. Then she stepped through security.
She never came back.
FOUR
The bow is so old, its horsehair is glue
Sent to the factory, just like me and like you
So how come they stayed your execution?
The audience roars its standing ovation
“DUST”
COLLATERAL DAMAGE, TRACK 9
When the lights come up after the concert, I feel drained, lugubrious, as though my blood has been secreted out of me and replaced with tar. After the applause dies down, the people around me stand up, they talk about the concert, about the beauty of the Bach, the mournfulness of the Elgar, the risk—that paid off—of throwing in the contemporary John Cage piece. But it’s the Dvorák that’s eating up all the oxygen in the room, and I can understand why.
When Mia used to play her cello, her concentration was always written all over her body: a crease folded across her forehead. Her lips, pursed so tightly they sometimes lost all their color, as if all her blood was requisitioned to her hands.
There was a little bit of that happening with the earlier pieces tonight. But when she got to the Dvorák, the final piece of her recital, something came over her. I don’t know if she hit her groove or if this was her signature piece, but instead of hunching over her cello, her body seemed to expand, to bloom, and the music filled the open spaces around it like a flowering vine. Her strokes were broad and happy and bold, and the sound that filled the auditorium seemed to channel this pure emotion, like the very intention of the composer was spiraling through the room. And the look on her face, with her eyes upward, a small smile playing on her lips, I don’t know how to describe it without sounding like one of these clichéd magazine articles, but she seemed so at one with the music. Or maybe just happy. I guess I always knew she was capable of this level of artistry, but witnessing it fucking blew me away. Me and everyone else in that auditorium, judging by the thunderous applause she got.
The houselights are up now, bright and bouncing off the blond wood chairs and the geometric wall panels, making the floor start to swim. I sink back down into the nearest chair and try not to think about the Dvorák—or the other things: the way she wiped her hand on her skirt in between pieces, the way she cocked her head in time to some invisible orchestra, all gestures that are way too familiar to me.
Grasping onto the chair in front of me for balance, I stand up again. I make sure my legs are working and the ground isn’t spinning and then will one leg to follow the other toward the exit. I am shattered, exhausted. All I want to do now is go back to my hotel to down a couple of Ambien or Lunesta or Xanax or whatever’s in my medicine cabinet—and end this day. I want to go to sleep and wake up and have this all be over.
“Excuse me, Mr. Wilde.”
I normally have a thing about enclosed spaces, but if there is one place in the city where I’d expect the safety of anonymity, it’s Carnegie Hall for a classical concert. All through the concert and intermission, no one gave me a second glance, except a pair of old biddies who I think were mostly just dismayed by my jeans. But this guy is about my age; he’s an usher, the only person within fifty feet under the age of thirty-five, the only person around here likely to own a Shooting Star album.
I’m reaching into my pocket for a pen that I don’t have. The usher looks embarrassed, shaking his head and his hands simultaneously. “No, no, Mr. Wilde. I’m not asking for an autograph.” He lowers his voice. “It’s actually against the rules, could get me fired.”
“Oh,” I say, chastened, confused. For a second I wonder if I’m about to get dressed-down for dressing down.
The usher says: “Ms. Hall would like you to come backstage.”
It’s noisy with the after-show hubbub, so for a second I assume I’ve misheard him. I think he says that she wants me backstage. But that can’t be right. He must be talking about the hall, not Mia Hall.
But before I can get him to clarify, he’s leading me by the elbow back toward the staircase and down to the main lobby and through a small door beside the stage and through a maze of corridors, the walls lined with framed sheet music. And I’m allowing myself to be led; it’s like the time when I was ten years old and was sent to the principal’s office for throwing a water balloon in class, and all I could do was follow Mrs. Linden down the hallways and wonder what awaited me behind the main office doors. I have that same feeling. That I’m in trouble for something, that Aldous didn’t really give me the evening off and I’m about to be reamed out for missing a photo shoot or pissing off a reporter or being the antisocial lone wolf in danger of breaking up the band.
And so I don’t really process it, don’t let myself hear it or believe it or think about it until the usher leads me to a small room and opens the door and closes it, and suddenly she’s there. Really there. A flesh-and-blood person, not a specter.
My first impulse is not to grab her or kiss her or yell at her. I simply want to touch her cheek, still flushed from the night’s performance. I want to cut through the space that separates us, measured in feet—not miles, not continents, not years—and to take a callused finger to her face. I want to touch her to make sure it’s really her, not one of those dreams I had so often after she left when I’d see her as clear as day, be ready to kiss her or ta
ke her to me only to wake up with Mia just beyond reach.
But I can’t touch her. This is a privilege that’s been revoked. Against my will, but still. Speaking of will, I have to mentally hold my arm in place, to keep the trembling from turning it into a jackhammer.
The floor is spinning, the vortex is calling, and I’m itching for one of my pills, but there’s no reaching for one now. I take some calming breaths to preempt a panic attack. I work my jaw in a vain attempt to get my mouth to say some words. I feel like I’m alone on a stage, no band, no equipment, no memory of any of our songs, being watched by a million people. I feel like an hour has gone by as I stand here in front of Mia Hall, speechless as a newborn.
The first time we ever met in high school, I spoke first. I asked Mia what cello piece she’d just played. A simple question that started everything.
This time, it’s Mia who asks the question: “Is it really you?” And her voice, it’s exactly the same. I don’t know why I’d expect it to be different except that everything’s different now.
Her voice jolts me back to reality. Back to the reality of the past three years. There are so many things that demand to be said. Where did you go? Do you ever think about me? You’ve ruined me. Are you okay? But of course, I can’t say any of that.
I start to feel my heart pound and a ringing in my ears, and I’m about to lose it. But strangely, just when the panic starts to peak, some survival instinct kicks in, the one that allows me to step onto a stage in front of thousands of strangers. A calm steals over me as I retreat from myself, pushing me into the background and letting that other person take over. “In the flesh,” I respond in kind. Like it’s the most normal thing in the world for me to be at her concert and for her to have beckoned me into her sanctum. “Good concert,” I add because it seems like the thing to say. It also happens to be true.
“Thank you,” she says. Then she cringes. “I just, I can’t believe you’re here.”
I think of the three-year restraining order she basically took out on me, which I violated tonight. But you called me down, I want to say. “Yeah. I guess they’ll let any old riffraff in Carnegie Hall,” I joke. In my nervousness, though, the quip comes out surly.
She smooths her hands on the fabric of her skirt. She’s already changed out of her formal black gown into a long, flowy skirt and a sleeveless shirt. She shakes her head, tilts her face toward mine, all conspiratorial. “Not really. No punks allowed. Didn’t you see the warning on the marquee? I’m surprised you didn’t get arrested just for setting foot in the lobby.”
I know she’s trying to return my bad joke with one of her own and part of me is thankful for that, and thankful to see a glimmer of her old sense of humor. But another part, the churlish part, wants to remind her of all of the chamber music concerts, string quartets, and recitals I once sat through. Because of her. With her. “How’d you know I was here?” I ask.
“Are you kidding? Adam Wilde in Zankel Hall. At the intermission, the entire backstage crew was buzzing about it. Apparently, a lot of Shooting Star fans work at Carnegie Hall.”
“I thought I was being incognito,” I say. To her feet. The only way to survive this conversation is to have it with Mia’s sandals. Her toenails are painted pale pink.
“You? Impossible,” she replies. “So, how are you?”
How am I? Are you for real? I force my eyes upward and look at Mia for the first time. She’s still beautiful. Not in an obvious Vanessa LeGrande or Bryn Shraeder kind of way. In a quiet way that’s always been devastating to me. Her hair, long and dark, is down now, swimming damply against her bare shoulders, which are still milky white and covered with the constellation of freckles that I used to kiss. The scar on her left shoulder, the one that used to be an angry red welt, is silvery pink now. Almost like the latest rage in tattoo accessories. Almost pretty.
Mia’s eyes reach out to meet mine, and for a second I fear that my facade will fall apart. I look away.
“Oh, you know? Good. Busy,” I answer.
“Right. Of course. Busy. Are you on tour?”
“Yep. Off to London tomorrow.”
“Oh. I’m off to Japan tomorrow.”
Opposite directions, I think and am surprised when Mia actually says it out loud. “Opposite directions.” The words just hang out there, ominous. Suddenly, I feel the vortex begin to churn again. It’s going to swallow us both if I don’t get away. “Well, I should probably go.” I hear the calm person impersonating Adam Wilde say from what sounds like several feet away.
I think I see something darken her expression, but I can’t really tell because every part of my body is undulating, and I swear I might just come inside-out right here. But as I’m losing it, that other Adam is still functioning. He’s reaching out his hand toward Mia even though the thought of me giving Mia Hall a business handshake is maybe one of the saddest things I’ve ever imagined.
Mia looks down at my outstretched hand, opens her mouth to say something, and then just sighs. Her face hardens into a mask as she reaches out her own hand to take mine.
The tremor in my hand has become so normal, so nonstop, that it’s generally imperceptible to me. But as soon as my fingers close around Mia’s, the thing I notice is that it stops and suddenly it goes quiet, like when the squall of feedback is suddenly cut when someone switches off an amp. And I could linger here forever.
Except this is a handshake, nothing more. And in a few seconds my hand is at my side and it’s like I’ve transferred a little of my crazy to Mia because it looks like her own hand is trembling. But I can’t be sure because I’m drifting away on a fast current.
And the next thing I know, I hear the door to her dressing room click behind me, leaving me out here on the rapids and Mia back there on the shore.
FIVE
I know it’s really cheesy—crass even—to compare my being dumped to the accident that killed Mia’s family, but I can’t help it. Because for me, at any rate, the aftermath felt exactly the same. For the first few weeks, I’d wake up in a fog of disbelief. That didn’t really happen, did it? Oh, fuck, it did. Then I’d be doubled over. Fist to the gut. It took a few weeks for it all to sink in. But unlike with the accident—when I had to be there, be present, help, be the person to lean on—after she left, I was all alone. There was nobody to step up to the plate for. So I just let everything fall away and then everything just stopped.
I moved home, back to my parents’ place. Just grabbed a pile of stuff from my room at the House of Rock and left. Left everything. School. The band. My life. A sudden and wordless departure. I balled up in my boy bed. I was worried that everyone would bang down the door and force me to explain myself. But that’s the thing with death. The whisper of its descent travels fast and wide, and people must’ve known I’d become a corpse because nobody even came to view the body. Well, except relentless Liz, who stopped by once a week to drop off a CD mix of whatever new music she was loving, which she cheerfully stacked on top of the untouched CD she’d left the week before.
My parents seemed baffled by my return. But then, bafflement was pretty typical where I was concerned. My dad had been a logger, and then when that industry went belly-up he’d gotten a job on the line at an electronics plant. My mom worked for the university catering department. They were one another’s second marriages, their first marital forays both disastrous and childless and never discussed; I only found out about them from an aunt and uncle when I was ten. They had me when they were older, and I’d apparently come as a surprise. And my mom liked to say that everything that I’d done—from my mere existence to becoming a musician, to falling in love with a girl like Mia, to going to college, to having the band become so popular, to dropping out of college, to dropping out of the band—was a surprise, too. They accepted my return home with no questions. Mom brought me little trays of food and coffee to my room, like I was a prisoner.
For three months, I lay in my childhood bed, wishing myself as comatose as Mia had been. That had to be
easier than this. My sense of shame finally roused me. I was nineteen years old, a college dropout, living in my parents’ house, unemployed, a layabout, a cliché. My parents had been cool about the whole thing, but the reek of my pathetic was starting to make me sick. Finally, right after the New Year, I asked my father if there were any jobs at the plant.
“You sure this is what you want?” he’d asked me. It wasn’t what I wanted. But I couldn’t have what I wanted. I’d just shrugged. I’d heard him and my mom arguing about it, her trying to get him to talk me out of it. “Don’t you want more than that for him?” I heard her shout-whisper from downstairs. “Don’t you want him back in school at the very least?”
“It’s not about what I want,” he’d answered.
So he asked around human resources, got me an interview, and a week later, I began work in the dataentry department. From six thirty in the morning to three thirty in the afternoon, I would sit in a windowless room, plugging in numbers that had no meaning to me.
On my first day of work, my mother got up early to make me a huge breakfast I couldn’t eat and a pot of coffee that wasn’t nearly strong enough. She stood over me in her ratty pink bathrobe, a worried expression on her face. When I got up to leave, she shook her head at me.
“What?” I asked.
“You working at the plant,” she said, staring at me solemnly. “This doesn’t surprise me. This is what I would’ve expected from a son of mine.” I couldn’t tell if the bitterness in her voice was meant for her or me.
The job sucked, but whatever. It was brainless. I came home and slept all afternoon and then woke up and read and dozed from ten o’clock at night until five in the morning, when it was time to get up for work. The schedule was out of sync with the living world, which was fine by me
A few weeks earlier, around Christmas, I’d still held a candle of hope. Christmas was when Mia had initially planned to come home. The ticket she’d bought for New York was a round-trip, and the return date was December nineteenth. Though I knew it was foolish, I somehow thought she’d come see me, she’d offer some explanation—or, better yet, a massive apology. Or we’d find that this had all been some huge and horrible misunderstanding. She’d been emailing me daily but they hadn’t gotten through, and she’d show up at my door, livid about my not having returned her emails, the way she used to get pissed off at me for silly things, like how nice I was, or was not, to her friends.