Where She Went

Adam remembers how he and Bryn met. They were introduced at an MTV Movie Awards party. After leaving together, Adam told her about Mia’s accident, and revealed that she was still alive. Bryn had assumed that Mia had also died in the crash, since at that point her name had not been mentioned in the tabloids with Adam’s for a long time. While commiserating about relationships, Adam and Bryn start their own. Even though she is wonderful, Adam has always been ambivalent about their status as a couple. He feels like their relationship is too public and it’s always about their image, not them. Occasionally, when she’s had a couple of drinks, Bryn tells him that Mia’s ghost is the biggest obstacle between them.

 Mia and Adam have dinner in a small diner. The owner knows her well and keeps referring to Adam as her boyfriend, even though they haven’t said they were a couple. Mia tells Adam that she graduated from Juilliard a year early because of her virtuoso status. He tells her about the band and the length of the upcoming tour. It is all small talk and he’s painfully aware of how hard they are both trying to avoid a real conversation. What he really wants to do is to ask why she abandoned him for two years. Why did she respond to his devotion with silence and disappearance? But he also blames himself, and hints that she only did it because he implied that he would be okay if she left him.

Adam thinks about when Mia left for Juilliard. They had agreed to keep in touch every day and make the long-distance relationship work. For two weeks, they dazzled each other in long emails. She wrote about Manhattan and Juilliard, he about the exciting developments with the success of his band. But after a few weeks, she stopped answering the phone when he called in the evening. Her email responses grew shorter and shorter and she just claimed to be busy. In desperation, Adam visited her grandparents, who became her guardians after her parents’ deaths. When her grandfather looked at him with kind pity, Adam felt like he knew the relationship was over. Adam was the only one who hadn’t known. He remembers standing over her bed when she was in the coma. He said that he would do anything if she could stay in this world, including letting her go. Maybe this was her just holding him to his promise.

Mia takes Adam to a bus station that has a bowling alley in it. She has always wanted to bowl there, but never did. Now, because of a lingering pain in her elbow, she still can’t. But Adam agrees to bowl a game for her while she watches, just so she can say she did it before leaving on her tour. Their whole night together, for Adam, feels like a farewell tour to everything they had known before. She tells him about her early days at Juilliard, and how everyone was considerate of her to the point that it became obnoxious. No one would critique her playing because of the trauma she had been through, and it hampered her chances to improve. But one Russian professor told her that if she didn’t start to play better and work harder, she would never realize her potential. He gave her a public critique during a rehearsal and she claimed it was the best therapy she had ever had. At that point, her playing improved and changed, making her into the musician she is today. She is surprised to hear that Adam hates life on the road and seems completely unaware that his angry music is his way of filling the void she created when she left him.