Where She Went

Mia and Adam get onto a subway at 3 in the morning. She assures him that it will be almost empty and no one will recognize him. But the subway car is packed and he’s immediately recognized by a man. People begin nudging each other and getting out their phones. Adam has been mobbed too many times in small spaces and can’t handle it again. He pulls Mia into another train car, then back out onto the platform. He’s overcome with anger at her, and tells her that she led him into a potential mob. He hates that he can’t go outside anymore, or go shopping for records because everyone throws themselves at him. He hates that he has no anonymity. She didn’t see the mob on the subway forming and he feels like she’s talking to him like he’s crazy. Then he remembers the night when everything changed and he just became another rock star cliché. When he became what Mia always referred to as a “guy.” 

“Guys” were what Mia called wet T-shirt aficionados: men who treated women like objects. Adam remembers two times that Mia tried to be sexual with him after the accident. The first time, she had begun crying and moaning without explanation as soon as they started having sex, and he had stopped immediately. The second time, she initiated with a kiss, but he couldn’t get over the fear of upsetting her with physical contact again. His psyche couldn’t take it. So he began sleeping with roadies at every chance. While the physical pleasure was real and welcome, the fleeting encounters were alienating and loneliness-inducing. By the end of the tour, he felt every bit like one of the “guys” for whom Mia had always had such scorn. 

Adam and Mia take a mostly-deserted ferry to Staten Island. They look at the Statue of Liberty. Adam thinks the statue looks like she knows a secret, and that if there is a secret to a happy life, liberty might be it. Mia confides in him that the reason she doesn’t go back to Oregon to visit the graves of her family is that she hears their voices in her head, all the time, as long as she’s not in Oregon. She asks Adam if he thinks she’s crazy. He doesn’t, because he hears voices too. The voices of all of the versions of himself that he might have been, if only she hadn’t left him.

Mia had always hated camping, but she had agreed to go with Adam one weekend when they were juniors. He took her to a secluded spot in the woods that was near a lake. After watching him struggle to set up the tent, Mia had helped him. Then they had a pleasant evening. But when they get in the tent for the night, Mia revealed why she hates camping. She said it made her feel defenseless. There are animals in the woods, and hunters. Adam tells her that when he was nine, his uncles took him hunting. Not knowing how it would affect him, he managed to shoot a rabbit. But when he saw what he had done, when he saw its bloody body, he was inconsolable. His father got him a guitar for his birthday instead of a rifle. In the tent, Mia said that one of her greatest fears was losing Adam. He told her that it was the most irrational fear of all, because it could never happen.