I didn’t really notice her until the day I saw her not playing. She was just sitting in one of the soundproof practice booths, her cello resting gently against her knees, her bow poised a few inches above the bridge. Her eyes were closed and her brow was a little furrowed. She was so still, it seemed like she’d taken a brief vacation from her body. And even though she wasn’t moving, even though her eyes were closed, I somehow knew that she was listening to music then, was grabbing the notes from the silence, like a squirrel gathering acorns for the winter, before she got down to the business of playing. I stood there, suddenly riveted by her, until she seemed to wake up and start playing with this intense concentration. When she finally looked at me, I hustled away.
After that, I became kind of fascinated by her and by what I guessed was her ability to hear music in the silence. Back then, I’d wanted to be able to do that, too. So I took to watching her play, and though I told myself the reason for my attention was because she was as dedicated a musician as I was and that she was cute, the truth was that I also wanted to understand what she heard in the silence.
During all the time we were together, I don’t think I ever found out. But once I was with her, I didn’t need to. We were both music-obsessed, each in our own way. If we didn’t entirely understand the other person’s obsession, it didn’t matter, because we understood our own.
I know the exact moment Mia is talking about. Kim and I had driven to the hospital in Sarah’s pink Dodge Dart. I don’t remember asking Liz’s girlfriend to borrow her car. I don’t remember driving it. I don’t remember piloting the car up into the hills where the hospital is or how I even knew the way. Just that one minute I was in a theater in downtown Portland, sound-checking for that night’s show when Kim showed up to deliver the awful news. And the next minute I was standing outside the hospital.
What Mia inexplicably remembers, it’s sort of the first pinpoint of clarity in that whole petri-dish blur between hearing the news and arriving at the trauma center. Kim and I had just parked the car and I’d walked out of the garage ahead of her. I’d needed a couple of seconds to gather my strength, to steel myself for what I was about to face. And I’d remembered looking at the hulking hospital building and wondering if Mia was somewhere in there, and feeling a heart-in-throat panic that she’d died in the time it had taken Kim to fetch me. But then I’d felt this wave of something, not really hope, not really relief, but just a sort of knowledge that Mia was still in there. And that had been enough to pull me through the doors.
They say that things happen for a reason, but I don’t know that I buy that. I don’t know that I’ll ever see a reason for what happened to Kat, Denny, and Teddy that day. But it took forever to get in to see Mia. I got turned away from the ICU by Mia’s nurses, and then Kim and I devised this whole plan to sneak in. I don’t think I realized it at the time, but I think in a weird way, I was probably stalling. I was gathering my strength. I didn’t want to lose it in front of her. I guess part of me somehow knew that Mia, deep in her coma, would be able to tell.
Of course, I ended up losing it in front of her anyway. When I finally saw her the first time, I almost blew chunks. Her skin looked like tissue paper. Her eyes were covered with tape. Tubes ran in and out of every part of her body, pumping liquids and blood in and draining some scary-ass shit out. I’m ashamed to say it, but when I first came in, I wanted to run away.
But I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. So instead, I just focused on the part of her that still looked remotely like Mia—her hands. There were monitors stuck to her fingers, but they still looked like her hands. I touched the fingertips of her left hand, which felt worn and smooth, like old leather. I ran my fingers across the nubby calluses of her thumbs. Her hands were freezing, just like they always were, so I warmed them, just like I always did.
And it was while warming her hands that I thought about how lucky it was that they looked okay. Because without hands, there’d be no music and without music, she’d have lost everything. And I remember thinking that somehow Mia had to realize that, too. That she needed to be reminded that she had the music to come back to. I ran out of the ICU, part of me fearing that I might never see her alive again, but somehow knowing that I had to do this one thing. When I came back, I played her the Yo-Yo Ma.
And that’s also when I made her the promise. The promise that she’s held me to.
I did the right thing. I know it now. I must’ve always known, but it’s been so hard to see through all my anger. And it’s okay if she’s angry. It’s even okay if she hates me. It was selfish what I asked her to do, even if it wound up being the most unselfish thing I’ve ever done. The most unselfish thing I’ll have to keep doing.
But I’d do it again. I know that now. I’d make that promise a thousand times over and lose her a thousand times over to have heard her play last night or to see her in the morning sunlight. Or even without that. Just to know that she’s somewhere out there. Alive.
Mia watches me lose my shit all over the Promenade. She bears witness as the fissures open up, the lava leaking out, this great explosion of what, I guess to her, must look like grief.
But I’m not crying out of grief. I’m crying out of gratitude.
TWENTY
Someone wake me when it’s over
When the evening silence softens golden
Just lay me on a bed of clover
Oh, I need help with this burden
“HUSH”
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.