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 take 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.