But then the social worker stepped in, taking over in her no-nonsense way. She told Mia about the operations she’d undergone so far, “triage, really, just to get you stable, and you’re doing remarkably well,” and then talked about the surgeries that she’d likely be facing in the coming months: First a surgery to reset the bone in her left leg with metal rods. Then another surgery a week or so after that, to harvest skin from the thigh of her uninjured leg. Then another to graft that skin onto the messed-up leg. Those two procedures, unfortunately, would leave some “nasty scars.” But the injuries on her face, at least, could vanish completely with cosmetic surgery after a year. “Once you’re through your nonelective surgeries, provided there aren’t any complications—no infections from the splenectomy, no pneumonia, no problems with your lungs—we’ll get you out of the hospital and into rehab,” the social worker said. “Physical and occupational, speech and whatever else you need. We’ll assess where you are in a few days.” I was dizzy from this litany, but Mia seemed to hang on her every word, to pay more attention to the details of her surgeries than to the news of her family.
Later that afternoon, the social worker took the rest of us aside. We—Mia’s grandparents and me—had been worried about Mia’s reaction, or her lack of one. We’d expected screaming, hair pulling, something explosive, to match the horror of the news, to match our own grief. Her eerie quiet had all of us thinking the same thing: brain damage.
“No, that’s not it,” the social worker quickly reassured. “The brain is a fragile instrument and we may not know for a few weeks what specific regions have been affected, but young people are so very resilient and right now her neurologists are quite optimistic. Her motor control is generally good. Her language faculties don’t seem too affected. She has weakness in her right side and her balance is off. If that’s the extent of her brain injury, then she is fortunate.”
We all cringed at that word. Fortunate. But the social worker looked at our faces. “Very fortunate because all of that is reversible. As for that reaction back there,” she said, gesturing toward the ICU, “that is a typical response to such extreme psychological trauma. The brain can only handle so much, so it filters in a bit at a time, digests slowly. She’ll take it all in, but she’ll need help.” Then she’d told us about the stages of grief, loaded us up with pamphlets on post-traumatic stress disorder, and recommended a grief counselor at the hospital for Mia to see. “It might not be a bad idea for the rest of you, too,” she’d said.
We’d ignored her. Mia’s grandparents weren’t the therapy types. And as for me, I had Mia’s rehabilitation to worry about, not my own.
The next round of surgeries started almost immediately, which I found cruel. Mia had just come back from the brink of it, only to be told her family was dead, and now she had to go under the knife again. Couldn’t they cut the girl a break? But the social worker had explained that the sooner Mia’s leg was fixed, the sooner Mia would be mobile, and the sooner she could really start to heal. So her femur was set with pins; skin grafts were taken. And with speed that made me breathless, she was discharged from the hospital and dispatched to a rehab center, which looked like a condo complex, with flat paths crisscrossing the grounds, which were just beginning to bloom with spring flowers when Mia arrived.
She’d been there less than a week, a determined, teeth-gritted terrifying week, when the envelope came.
Juilliard. It had been so many things to me before. A foregone conclusion. A point of pride. A rival. And then I’d just forgotten about it. I think we all had. But life was churning outside Mia’s rehab center, and somewhere out there in the world, that other Mia—the one who had two parents, a brother, and a fully working body—still continued to exist. And in that other world, some judges had listened to Mia play a few months earlier and had gone on processing her application, and it had gone through the various motions until a final judgment was made, and that final judgment was before us now. Mia’s grandmother had been too nervous to open the envelope, so she waited for me and Mia’s grandfather before she sliced into it with a mother-of-pearl letter opener.
Mia got in. Had there ever been any question?
We all thought the acceptance would be good for her, a bright spot on an otherwise bleak horizon.
“And I’ve already spoken to the dean of admissions and explained your situation, and they’ve said you can put off starting for a year, two if you need,” Mia’s grandmother had said as she’d presented Mia with the news and the generous scholarship that had accompanied the acceptance. Juilliard had actually suggested the deferral, wanting to make sure that Mia was able to play up to the school’s rigorous standards, if she chose to attend.
“No,” Mia had said from the center’s depressing common room in that dead-flat voice she had spoken in since the accident. None of us was quite sure whether this was from emotional trauma or if this was Mia’s affect now, her newly rearranged brain’s way of speaking. In spite of the social worker’s continued reassurances, in spite of her therapists’ evaluations that she was making solid progress, we still worried. We discussed these things in hushed tones after we left her alone on the nights that I couldn’t con myself into staying over.
“Well, don’t be hasty,” her grandmother had replied. “The world might look different in a year or two. You might still want to go.”
Mia’s grandmother had thought Mia was refusing Juilliard. But I knew better. I knew Mia better. It was the deferral she was refusing.
Her grandmother argued with Mia. September was five months away. Too soon. And she had a point. Mia’s leg was still in one of those boot casts, and she was just starting to walk again. She couldn’t open a jar because her right hand was so weak, and she would often blank on the names of simple things, like scissors. All of which the therapists said was to be expected and would likely pass—in good time. But five months? That wasn’t long.
Mia asked for her cello that afternoon. Her grandmother had frowned, worried that this foolishness would waylay Mia’s recovery. But I jumped out of my chair and ran to my car and was back with the cello by the time the sun set.
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 Dvo?ák 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 Dvo?ák, 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 f**king 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 Dvo?ák—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.