I pour myself a cup, then pour Mia’s, adding a dash of half-and-half, like she takes it.
“I like the pictures,” I say. “Keeps things interesting.”
Mia nods, blows ripples into her coffee.
“And I miss them, too,” I say. “Every day.”
She looks surprised at that. Not that I miss them, but, I guess by my admitting it, finally. She nods solemnly.
“I know,” she says.
She walks around the room, running her fingers lightly along the picture frames. “I’m running out of space,” she says. “I had to put up a bunch of Kim’s recent shots in the bathroom. Have you talked to her lately?”
She must know what I did to Kim. “No.”
“Really? Then you don’t know about the scandale?”
I shake my head.
“She dropped out of college last year. When the war flared up in Afghanistan, Kim decided, screw it, I want to be a photographer and the best education is in the field. So she just took her cameras and off she went. She started selling all these shots to the AP and the New York Times. She cruises around in one of those burkas and hides all her photographic equipment underneath the robes and then whips them off to get her shot.”
“I’ll bet Mrs. Schein loves that.” Kim’s mom was notoriously overprotective. The last I’d heard of her, she was having a freak-out that Kim was going to school across the country, which, Kim had said, was precisely the point.
Mia laughs. “At first, Kim told her family she was just taking a semester off, but now she’s getting really successful so she’s officially dropped out, and Mrs. Schein has officially had a nervous breakdown. And then there’s the fact that Kim’s a nice Jewish girl in a very Muslim country.” Mia blows on her coffee and sips. “But, on the other hand, now Kim gets her stuff in the New York Times, and she just got a feature assignment for National Geographic, so it gives Mrs. Schein some bragging ammo.”
“Hard for a mother to resist,” I say.
“She’s a big Shooting Star fan, you know?”
“Mrs. Schein? I always had her pegged as more hiphop.”
Mia grins. “No. She’s into death metal. Hard core.
Kim. She saw you guys play in Bangkok. Said it poured rain and you played right through it.”
“She was at that show? I wish she would’ve come backstage, said hi,” I say, even though I know why she wouldn’t have. Still, she came to the show. She must have forgiven me a little bit.
“I told her the same thing. But she had to leave right away. She was supposed to be in Bangkok for some R & R, but that rain you were playing in was actually a cyclone somewhere else and she had to run off and cover it. She’s a very badass shutterbabe these days.”
I think of Kim chasing Taliban insurgents and ducking flying trees. It’s surprisingly easy to imagine. “It’s funny,” I begin.
“What is?” Mia asks.
“Kim being a war photographer. All Danger Girl.”
“Yeah, it’s a laugh riot.”
“That’s not how I meant. It’s just: Kim. You. Me. We all came from this nowhere town in Oregon, and look at us. All three of us have gone to, well, extremes. You gotta admit, it’s kind of weird.”
“It’s not weird at all,” Mia says, shaking out a bowl of cornflakes. “We were all forged in the crucible. Now come on, have some cereal.”
I’m not hungry. I’m not even sure I can eat a single cornflake, but I sit down because my place at the Hall family table has just been restored.
Time has a weight to it, and right now I can feel it heavy over me. It’s almost three o’clock. Another day is half over and tonight I leave for the tour. I hear the clicking of the antique clock on Mia’s wall. I let the minutes go by longer than I should before I finally speak.
“We both have our flights. I should probably get moving,” I say. My voice sounds faraway but I feel weirdly calm. “Are there taxis around here?”
“No, we get back and forth to Manhattan by river raft,” she jokes. “You can call a car,” she adds after a moment.
I stand up, make my way toward the kitchen counter where Mia’s phone sits. “What’s the number?” I ask.
“Seven-one-eight,” Mia begins. Then she interrupts herself. “Wait.”
At first I think she has to pause to recall the number, but I see her eyes, at once unsure and imploring.
“There’s one last thing,” she continues, her voice hesitant.
“Something I have that really belongs to you.”
“My Wipers T-shirt?”
She shakes her head. “That’s long gone, I’m afraid.
Come on. It’s upstairs.”
I follow her up the creaking steps. At the top of the narrow landing to my right I can see her bedroom with its slanted ceilings. To my left is a closed door. Mia opens it, revealing a small studio. In the corner is a cabinet with a keypad. Mia punches in a code and the door opens.
When I see what she pulls out of the cabinet, at first I’m like, Oh, right, my guitar. Because here in Mia’s little house in Brooklyn is my old electric guitar, my Les Paul Junior. The guitar I bought at a pawnshop with my pizza-delivery earnings when I was a teenager. It’s the guitar I used to record all of our stuff leading up to, and including, Collateral Damage. It’s the guitar I auctioned off for charity and have regretted doing so ever since.
It’s sitting in its old case, with my old Fugazi and K Records stickers, with the stickers from Mia’s dad’s old band, even. Everything is the same, the strap, the dent from when I’d dropped it off a stage. Even the dust smells familiar.
And I’m just taking it all in, so it’s a few seconds before it really hits me. This is my guitar. Mia has my guitar. Mia is the one who bought my guitar for some exorbitant sum, which means that Mia knew it was up for auction. I look around the room. Among the sheet music and cello paraphernalia is a pile of magazines, my face peeking out from the covers. And then I remember something back on the bridge, Mia justifying why she left me by reciting the lyrics to “Roulette.”
And suddenly, it’s like I’ve been wearing earplugs all night and they’ve fallen out, and everything that was muffled is now clear. But also so loud and jarring.
Mia has my guitar. It’s such a straightforward thing and yet I don’t know that I would’ve been more surprised had Teddy popped out of the closet. I feel faint. I sit down. Mia stands right in front of me, holding my guitar by the neck, offering it back to me.
“You?” is all I can manage to choke out.
“Always me,” she replies softly, bashfully. “Who else?”
My brain has vacated my body. My speech is reduced to the barest of basics. “But. . why?”
“Somebody had to save it from the Hard Rock Cafe,” Mia says with a laugh. But I can hear the potholes in her voice, too.
“But. .” I grasp for the words like a drowning man reaching for floating debris,“. . you said you hated me?”
Mia lets out a long, deep sigh. “I know. I needed someone to hate, and you’re the one I love the most, so it fell to you.”
She’s holding out the guitar, nudging it toward me.
She wants me to take it, but I couldn’t lift a cotton ball right now.
She keeps staring, keeps offering.
“But what about Ernesto?”
A look of puzzlement flits across her face, followed by amusement. “He’s my mentor, Adam. My friend.
He’s married.” She looks down for a beat. When her gaze returns, her amusement has hardened into defensiveness.
“Besides, why should you care?”
Go back to your ghost, I hear Bryn telling me. But she has it wrong. Bryn is the one who’s been living with the ghost — the specter of a man who never stopped loving someone else.
“There never would’ve been a Bryn if you hadn’t decided you needed to hate me,” I reply.