by Gayle Forman
“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. A
nd 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.
SEVENTEEN
I started playing in my first band, Infinity 89, when I was fourteen years old. Our first show was at a house party near the college campus. All three of us in the band—me on guitar, my friend Nate on bass, and his older brother Jonah on drums—sucked. None of us had been playing for long, and after the gig we found out that Jonah had bribed the host of the party to let us play. It’s a little-known fact that Adam Wilde’s first foray into playing rock music in front of an audience might never have happened had Jonah Hamilton not pitched in for a keg.
The keg turned out to be the best thing about that show. We were so nervous that we turned the amps up too loud, creating a frenzy of feedback that made the neighbors complain, and then we overcompensated by playing so low that we couldn’t hear one another’s instruments.
What I could hear in the pauses between songs was the sound of the party: the din of beer bottles clinking, of mindless chatter, of people laughing, and, I swear, in the back room of the house, people watching American Idol. The point is, I could hear all this because our band was so crappy that no one bothered to acknowledge that we were playing. We weren’t worth cheering. We were too bad to even boo. We were simply ignored. When we finished playing, the party carried on as if we’d never gone on.
We got better. Never great, but better. And never good enough to play anything but house parties. Then Jonah went off to college, and Nate and I were left without a drummer, and that was the end of Infinity 89.
Thus began my brief stint as a lone singer-songwriter about town, playing in coffeehouses, mostly. Doing the café circuit was marginally better than the house parties. With just me and a guitar, I didn’t need to up the volume that much, and people in the audience were mostly respectful. But as I played, I was still distracted by the sounds of things other than the music: the hiss of the cappuccino maker, the intellectual college students’ hushed conversations about Important Things, the giggles of girls. After the show, the giggles grew louder as the girls came up to me to talk, to ask me about my inspiration, to offer me mix CDs they’d made, and sometimes to offer other things.
One girl was different. She had ropy muscled arms and a fierce look in her eyes. The first time she spoke to me she said only: “You’re wasted.”
“Nope. Sober as a stone,” I replied.
“Not that kind of wasted,” she said, arching her pierced eyebrow. “You’re wasted on acoustic. I saw you play before in that terrible band of yours, but you were really good, even for a child such as yourself.”
“Thanks. I think.”
“You’re welcome. I’m not here for flattery. I’m here for recruitment.”
“Sorry. I’m a pacifist.”
“Funny! I’m a dyke, one who likes to ask and tell, so I’m also ill-suited for the military. No, I’m putting together a band. I think you’re an outrageously talented guitar player so I’m here to rob the cradle, artistically speaking.”
I was barely sixteen years old and a little bit intimidated by this ballsy chick, but I’d said why not. “Who else is in the band?”
“Me on drums. You on guitar.”
“And?”
“Those are the most important parts, don’t you think? Fantastic drummers and singing guitar players don’t grow on trees, not even in Oregon. Don’t worry, I’ll fill in the blanks. I’m Liz by the way.” She stuck out her hand. It was crusted with calluses, always a good sign on a drummer.
Within a month, Liz had drafted Fitzy and Mike, and we’d christened ourselves Shooting Star and started writing songs together. A month after that, we had our first gig. It was another house party, but nothing like the ones I’d played with Infinity 89. Right from the get-go, something was different. When I slashed out my first chord, it was like turning off a light. Everything just fell silent. We had people’s attention and we kept it. In the empty space between songs, people cheered and then got quiet, anticipating our next song. Over time, they’d start shouting requests. After a while, they got to know our lyrics so well that they’d sing along, which was handy when I spaced a lyric.
Pretty soon, we moved on to playing in bigger clubs. I could sometimes make out bar sounds in the background—the clink of glasses, the shouts of orders to a bartender. I also started to hear people scream my name for the first time. “Adam!” “Over here!” A lot of those voices belonged to girls.
The girls I mostly ignored. At this point, I’d started obsessing about a girl who never came to our shows but who I’d seen playing cello at school. And when Mia had become my girlfriend, and then started coming to my shows—and to my surprise, seemed to actually enjoy, if not the gigs, then at least our music—I sometimes listened for her. I wanted to hear her voice calling out my name, even though I knew that was something she’d never do. She was a reluctant plus-one. She tended to hang backstage and watch me with a solemn intensity. Even when she loosened up enough to sometimes watch the show like a normal person, from the audience, she remained pretty reserved. But still, I listened for the sound of her voice. It never seemed to matter that I didn’t hear it. Listening for her was half the fun.
As the band got bigger and the shows got bigger, the cheers just grew louder. And then for a while, it all went quiet. There was no music. No band. No fans. No Mia.
When it came back—the music, the gigs, the crowds—it all sounded different. Even during that two-week tour right on the heels of Collateral Damage’s release, I could tell how much had changed just by how different everything sounded. The wall of sound as we played enveloped the band, almost as if we were playing in a bubble made of nothing other than our own noise. And in between the songs, there was this screaming and shrieking. Soon, much sooner than I ever could’ve imagined, we were playing these enormous venues: arenas and stadiums, to more than fifteen thousand fans.
At these venues, there are just so many people, and so much sound, that it’s almost impossible to differentiate a specific voice. All I hear, aside from our own instruments now blaring out of the most powerful speakers available, is that wild scream from the crowd when we’re backstage and the lights go down right before we go out. And once we’re onstage, the constant shrieking of the crowd melds so it sounds like the furious howl of a hurricane; some nights I swear I can feel the breath of those fifteen thousand screams.
I don’t like this sound. I find the monolithic nature of it disorienting. For a few gigs, we traded our wedge monitors for in-ear pieces. It was perfect sound, as though we were in the studio, the roar of the crowd blocked off. But that was even worse in a way. I feel so disconnected from the crowds as it is, by the distance between them and us, a distance separated by a vast expanse of stage and an army of security keeping fans from bounding up to touch us or stage-dive the way they used to. But more than that, I don’t like that it’s so hard to hear any one single voice break through. I dunno. Maybe I’m still listening for that one voice.
Every so often during a show, though, as me or Mike pause to retune our guitars or someone takes a swig from a bottle of water, I’ll pause and strain to pick out a voice from the crowd. And every so often, I can. Can hear someone shouting for a specific song or screaming I love you! Or chanting my name.
As I stand here on the Brooklyn Bridge I’m thinking about those stadium shows, of their hurricane wail of white noise. Because all I can hear now is a roaring in my head, a wordless howl as Mia disappears and
I try to let her.
But there’s something else, too. A small voice trying to break through, to puncture the roar of nothingness. And the voice grows stronger and stronger, and it’s my voice this time and it’s asking a question: How does she know?
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.
