Mia shakes her head. “Yeah, I so loved that nickname.”
“Don’t worry. I didn’t say anything. And for good measure, I smashed her recorder. Destroyed all evidence.”
“Not all the evidence.” She stares at me. “The Cougar lives on. I’m sure Kim will be delighted to know her early work may turn up in a national magazine.” She shakes her head and chuckles. “Once Kim gets you in her shutter, you’re stuck forever. So it was pointless to destroy that reporter’s recorder.”
“I know. I just sort of lost it. She was this very provocative person, and she was trying to get a rise out of me with all these insults-disguised-as-compliments.”
Mia nods knowingly. “I get that, too. It’s the worst! ‘I was fascinated by the Shostakovich you played tonight.
So much more subdued than the Bach,’ she says in a snooty voice. ‘Translation: The Shostakovich sucked.’” I can’t imagine the Shostakovich ever sucking, but I won’t deny us this common ground.
“So what did she want to know about me?”
“She had plans to do this big expose, I guess, on what makes Shooting Star tick. And she went digging around our hometown and talked to people we went to high school with. And they told her about us. . about the. . about what we were. And about you and what happened. .” I trail off. I look down at the river, at a passing barge, which, judging by its smell, is carrying garbage.
“And what really happened?” Mia asks.
I’m not sure if this is a rhetorical question, so I force my own voice into a jokey drawl. “Yeah, that’s what I’m still trying to figure out.”
It occurs to me that this is maybe the most honest thing I’ve said all night, but the way I’ve said it transforms it into a lie.
“You know, my manager warned me that the accident might get a lot of attention as my profile went up, but I didn’t think that the connection to you would be an issue. I mean, I did in the beginning. I sort of waited for someone to look me up — ghosts of girlfriends pastbut I guess I wasn’t interesting enough compared to your other, um, attachments.”
She thinks that’s why none of the hacks have pestered her, because she’s not as interesting as Bryn, who I guess she does know about. If only she knew how the band’s inner circle has bent over backward to keep her name out of things, to not touch the bruise that blooms at the mere mention of her. That right at this very moment there are riders in interview contracts that dictate whole swaths of forbidden conversational topics that, though they don’t name her specifically, are all about obliterating her from the record. Protecting her. And me.
“I guess high school really is ancient history,” she concludes.
Ancient history? Have you really relegated us to the trash heap of the Dumb High-School Romance? And if that’s the case, why the hell can’t I do the same?
“Yeah, well you plus me, we’re like MTV plus Lifetime,” I say, with as much jauntiness as I can muster. “In other words, shark bait.”
She sighs. “Oh, well. I suppose even sharks have to eat.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s just, I don’t particularly want my family history dragged through the public eye, but if that’s the price to be paid for doing what you love, I guess I’ll pay it.”
And we’re back to this. The notion that music can make it all worthwhile — I’d like to believe. I just don’t.
I’m not even sure that I ever did. It isn’t the music that makes me want to wake up every day and take another breath. I turn away from her toward the dark water below.
“What if it’s not what you love?” I mumble, but my voice gets lost in the wind and the traffic. But at least I’ve said it out loud. I’ve done that much.
I need a cigarette. I lean against the railing and look uptown toward a trio of bridges. Mia comes to stand beside me as I’m fumbling to get my lighter to work.
“You should quit,” she says, touching me gently on the shoulder.
For a second, I think she means the band. That she heard what I said before and is telling me to quit Shooting Star, leave the whole music industry. I keep waiting for someone to advise me to quit the music business, but no one ever does. Then I remember how earlier tonight, she told me the same thing, right before she bummed a cigarette. “It’s not so easy,” I say.
“Bullshit,” Mia says with a self-righteousness that instantly recalls her mother, Kat, who wore her certitude like a beat-up leather jacket and who had a mouth on her that could make a roadie blush. “Quitting’s not hard. Deciding to quit is hard. Once you make that mental leap, the rest is easy.”
“Really? Was that how you quit me?”
And just like that, without thinking, without saying it in my head first, without arguing with myself for days, it’s out there.
“So,” she says, as if speaking to an audience under the bridge. “He finally says it.”
“Was I not supposed to? Am I just supposed to let this whole night go without talking about what you did?”
“No,” she says softly.
“So why? Why did you go? Was it because of the voices?”
She shakes her head. “It wasn’t the voices.”
“Then what? What was it?” I hear the desperation in my own voice now.
“It was lots of things. Like how you couldn’t be yourself around me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You stopped talking to me.”
“That’s absurd, Mia. I talked to you all the time!”
“You talked to me, but you didn’t. I could see you having these two-sided conversations. The things you wanted to say to me. And the words that actually came out.”
I think of all the dual conversations I have. With everyone. Is that when it started? “Well, you weren’t exactly easy to talk to,” I shoot back. “Anything I said was the wrong thing.”
She looks at me with a sad smile. “I know. It wasn’t just you. It was you plus me. It was us.”
I just shake my head. “It’s not true.”
“Yes it is. But don’t feel bad. Everyone walked on eggshells around me. But with you, it was painful that you couldn’t be real with me. I mean, you barely even touched me.”
As if to reinforce the point, she places two fingers on the inside of my wrist. Were smoke to rise and the imprints of her two fingers branded onto me, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised. I have to pull away just to steady myself.
“You were healing,” is my pathetic reply. “And if I recall, when we did try, you freaked.”
“Once,” she says. “Once.”
“All I wanted was for you to be okay. All I wanted was to help you. I would’ve done anything.”
She drops her chin to her chest. “Yes, I know. You wanted to rescue me.”
“Damn, Mia. You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
She looks up at me. The sympathy is still in her eyes, but there’s something else now, too: a fierceness; it slices up my anger and reconstitutes it as dread.
“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.