Except, then Kim made a last-minute change and switched to Brandeis in Boston. I was furious about this. After the accident, we frequently had little chats about Mia’s progress and passed along pertinent info to her grandparents. We kept our talks secret, knowing Mia would’ve killed us had she thought we were conspiring. But Kim and I, we were like co-captains of Team Mia. If I couldn’t move to New York with Mia, I felt Kim had a responsibility to stay near her.

I stewed about this for a while until one hot July night about a month before she and Mia were due to leave. Kim had come over to Mia’s grandparents house to watch DVDs with us. Mia had gone to bed early so it was just the two of us finishing some pretentious foreign movie. Kim kept trying to talk to me about Mia, how well she was doing, and was jabbering over the film like a noisy parrot. I finally told her to shut up. Her eyes narrowed and she started gathering her stuff. “I know what you’re upset about and it’s not this lame movie, so why don’t you just yell at me about it already and get it over with,” she said. Then she’d burst out crying. I’d never seen Kim cry, full-on like this, not even at the memorial service, so I’d immediately felt like crap and apologized and sort of awkwardly hugged her.

After she’d finished sniveling, she’d dried her eyes and explained how Mia had made her choose Brandeis. “I mean, it’s where I really want to go. After so long in Goyoregon, I really wanted to be at a Jewish school, but NYU was fine, and New York is plenty Jewish. But, she was fierce on this. She said she didn’t want ‘any more babysitting.’ Those were her exact words. She swore that if I went to NYU, she’d know it was because we’d hatched a plan to keep an eye on her. She said she’d cut ties with me. I told her I didn’t believe her, but she had a look in her eye I’d never seen. She was serious. So I did it. Do you know how many strings I had to pull to get my spot back this late in the game? Plus, I lost my tuition deposit at NYU. But whatever, it made Mia happy and not a lot does these days.” Kim smiled ruefully. “So I’m not sure why it’s making me feel so miserable. Guilt, I guess. Religious hazard.” Then she’d started crying again.

Pretty loud sign. I guess I had my fingers in my ears.

But the end, when it finally came, was quiet.

Mia went to New York. I moved back to the House of Rock. I went back to school. The world didn’t end. For the first couple of weeks, Mia and I sent each other these epic emails. Hers were all about New York, her classes, music, school. Mine were all about our record-label meetings. Liz had scheduled a bunch of gigs for us around Thanksgiving—and we had some serious practicing to do before then, given that I hadn’t picked up a guitar in months—but, at Mike’s insistence, we were seeing to business first. We were traveling to Seattle and L.A. and meeting label execs. Some A&R guys from New York were coming out to Oregon to see us. I told Mia about the promises they made, how each of them said they’d hone our sound and launch us to superstardom. All of us in the band tried to keep it in check, but it was hard not to inhale their stardust.

Mia and I also had a phone call check-in every night before she went to bed. She was usually pretty wiped so the conversations were short; a chance to hear one another’s voice, to say I love you in real time.

One night about three weeks into the semester, I was a little late calling because we were meeting one of the A&R reps for dinner at Le Pigeon in Portland and everything ran a little late. When my call went to voice mail, I figured she’d already gone to sleep.

But the next day, there was no email from her. “Sorry I was late. U pissed @ me?” I texted her.

“No,” she texted right back. And I was relieved.

But that night, I called on time, and that call went right to voice mail. And the next day, the email from Mia was a terse two sentences, something about orchestra getting very intense. So I justified it. Things were starting to heat up. She was at Juilliard, after all. Her cello didn’t have WiFi. And this was Mia, the girl known to practice eight hours a day.

But then I started calling at different times, waking up early so I could get her before classes, calling during her dinnertime. And my calls kept going to voice mail, never getting returned. She didn’t return my texts either. I was still getting emails, but not every day, and even though my emails were full of increasingly desperate questions—“Why aren’t you picking up your cell?” “Did you lose it? Are you okay?”—her responses glossed right over everything. She just claimed to be busy.

I decided to go visit her grandparents. I’d pretty much lived with them for five months while Mia was recovering and had promised to visit frequently but I’d reneged on that. I found it hard to be in that drafty old house with its photo gallery of ghosts—a wedding portrait of Denny and Kat, a gut-wrenching shot of twelve-year-old Mia reading to Teddy on her lap—without Mia beside me. But with Mia’s contact dwindling, I needed answers.

The first time I went that fall, Mia’s grandmother talked my ear off about the state of her garden and then went out to her greenhouse, leaving me to sit in the kitchen with her grandfather. He brewed us a strong pot of coffee. We didn’t say much, so all you could hear was the crackling of the woodstove. He just looked at me in that quiet sad way that made me inexplicably want to kneel at the foot of his chair and put my head in his lap.

I went back a couple more times, even after Mia had cut off contact with me completely, and it was always like that. I felt kind of bad pretending that I was there on social calls when really I was hoping for some news, some explanation. No, what I was really hoping for was not to be the odd man out. I wanted them to say: “Mia has stopped calling us. Has she been in touch with you?” But, of course, that never happened because that never would happen.

The thing was, I didn’t need any confirmation from Mia’s grandparents. I knew from that second night when my call went to voice mail, that it was the end of the line for me.

Because hadn’t I told her? Hadn’t I stood over her body and promised her that I’d do anything if she stayed, even if it meant letting her go? The fact that she’d been in a coma when I’d said this, hadn’t woken up for another three days, that neither of us had ever mentioned what I’d said—that seemed almost irrelevant. I’d brought this on myself.

The thing I can’t wrap my head around is how she did it. I’ve never dumped a girl with such brutality. Even back when I did the groupie thing, I’d always escort the girl du jour out of my hotel room or limo or whatever, give her a chaste kiss on the cheek and a “Thanks, that was a lot of fun,” or something with a similar note of finality in it. And that was a groupie. Mia and I had been together for more than two years, and yes, it was a high-school romance, but it was still the kind of romance where I thought we were trying to find a way to make it forever, the kind that, had we met five years later and had she not been some cello prodigy and had I not been in a band on the rise—or had our lives not been ripped apart by all this—I was pretty sure it would’ve been.

I’ve come to realize there’s a world of difference between knowing something happened, even knowing why it happened, and believing it. Because when she cut off contact, yeah, I knew what had happened. But it took me a long, long time to believe it.

Some days, I still don’t quite believe it.

TEN

Barrel of the gun, rounds one two three

She says I have to pick: choose you, or choose me

Metal to the temple, the explosion is deafening

Lick the blood that covers me

She’s the last one standing

“ROULETTE”

COLLATERAL DAMAGE, TRACK 11

After we leave the diner, I start to feel nervous. Because we bumped into each other. We did the polite thing and stuck around to catch up, so what’s left except our good-byes? But I’m not ready for that. I’m pretty sure there’s not going to be another postscript with Mia, and I’m gonna have to live on the fumes of tonight for the rest of my life, so I’d like a little more to show for it than parking lots and arthritis and aborted apologies.

Which is why every block we walk that Mia doesn’t hail a cab or make excuses and say good night feels like a stay of execution. In the sound of my footsteps slapping against the pavement, I can almost hear the word, reprieve, reprieve, echo through the city streets.

We walk in silence down a much-quieter, muchscummier stretch of Ninth Avenue. Underneath a dank overpass, a bunch of homeless guys camp out. One asks for some spare change. I toss him a ten. A bus goes by, blasting a cloud of diesel exhaust.

Mia points across the street. “That’s the Port Authority Bus Terminal,” she says.

I just nod, not sure if we’re going to discuss bus stations with the same amount of detail we did parking lots, or if she’s planning on sending me away.

“There’s a bowling alley inside,” she tells me.

“In the bus station?”

“Crazy right?!” Mia exclaims, suddenly all animated. “I couldn’t believe it when I found it either. I was coming home from visiting Kim in Boston late one night and got lost on the way out and there it was. It reminded me of Easter egg hunts. Do you remember how Teddy and I used to get about those?”

I remember how Mia used to get. She’d been a sucker for any holiday that had a candy association—especially making it fun for Teddy. One Easter she’d painstakingly hand-colored hard-boiled eggs and hidden them all over the yard for Teddy’s hunt the next morning. But then it poured all night and all her colorful eggs had turned a mottled gray. Mia had been tearfully disappointed, but Teddy had practically peed himself with excitement—the eggs, he declared, weren’t Easter eggs; they were dinosaur eggs.

“Yeah, I remember,” I say.

“Everyone loves New York City for all these different reasons. The culture. The mix of people. The pace. The food. But for me, it’s like one epic Easter egg hunt. You’re always finding these little surprises around every corner. Like that garden. Like a bowling alley in a giant bus depot. You know—” She stops.

“What?”

She shakes her head. “You probably have something going tonight. A club. An entourage to meet.”

I roll my eyes. “I don’t do entourage, Mia.” It comes out harder than I intended.

“I didn’t mean it as an insult. I just assumed all rock stars, celebrities, traveled with packs.”

“Stop assuming. I’m still me.” Sort of.

She looks surprised. “Okay. So you don’t have anywhere you need to be?”

I shake my head.

“It’s late. Do you need to get to sleep?”

“I don’t do much of that these days. I can sleep on the plane.”

“So . . .” Mia kicks away a piece of trash with her toe, and I realize she’s still nervous. “Let’s go on an urban Easter egg hunt.” She pauses, searches my face to see if I know what she’s talking about, and of course I know exactly what she’s talking about. “I’ll show you all the secret corners of the city that I love so much.”