1030 AM Mia
The service began at eleven o’clock, and although Mia arrived at the church early, when she got there people were already standing in loose huddles on the sidewalk in front of it, and on the steps leading up to the chapel.
The doors were open, and through them Mia could see rows of simple wooden pews and an altar decorated with vases of white lilies.
On either side of it were enlarged photographs set on wooden easels.
A formal headshot from the law firm where Adam had worked, a picture of him hiking with Rami during their honeymoon in Patagonia.
Mia remembered that trip, how every few days she would receive a text from him about something incredible he had seen.
But encountering the pictures there, in the church, was strange, and her first instinct was to make fun of him.
She wanted to find him on the street outside, or call him and say, “You would put your picture next to Jesus’s,” but then she remembered that he was gone, and that those thoughts she would now have to reserve for someone else, someone who understood them a little bit less.
She looked at the picture of him in Patagonia again, moving her hair behind her ears.
Lev texted her to say thx for breakfast, and then, have fun at the funeral?
She turned off her phone without responding.
Running along one side of the church was a quiet, enclosed garden.
Mia pushed open a small gate and walked by beds filled with tulips and daffodils, azaleas and peonies.
She saw Nina Guzman and Courtney Paulson sitting on a wooden bench and, after smoothing down the front of her dress, walked over to them.
“Mia.” Courtney startled. “Oh my God, hi.”
“Yeah, hi.”
Courtney’s eyes narrowed. She said, unkindly, “You look amazing.”
Mia looked down at herself. “Thanks?”
“No, I’m serious. What work did you get done?”
Nina said: “Courtney.”
Mia said: “None. I mean, a little Botox, but—”
“Botox doesn’t count. My husband gets Botox.”
“Where is he?”
“Doing an emergency root canal for some idiot in New Canaan.” Courtney squinted. “Seriously, Mia, what have you been doing?”
“I don’t know. Sleeping? Moisturizing?”
“Okay, well, whatever it is, it’s working. You look younger than you did in college.”
“Did I look old in college?”
“Take the compliment, okay?” Courtney set her hands on her knees. “Meanwhile, I can’t lose this baby weight.”
Mia laughed and rolled her eyes, even though what she was thinking was: It’s true, Courtney looks like she ate herself.
It wasn’t a particularly generous thought, though she couldn’t seem to stop it from coming, and after the private shame of having it washed over her, she realized that it actually felt good, or if not good, then at the very least stabilizing, to know that her mind had not succumbed entirely to grief.
She said, “You’re being insane—you look great,” then kissed Courtney’s cheek, smelling the jasmine of her perfume. Church bells pealed; high overhead, a cloud momentarily blocked the sun, darkening the garden in a cool shadow. For a few moments, Courtney, Nina, and Mia stood in silence.
Then Nina said, “Did you see Sasha? She and Theo are inside.”
Mia smiled; holding her hands together at her waist, she answered, “No, not yet.” The last time she’d seen Sasha they had all been standing around at Courtney’s baby shower, drinking glasses of champagne as they watched her unwrap her gifts.
Mia knew Sasha was going to be there, and was prepared to say that she was sorry they had fallen out—she just wanted to hear Sasha say it first. Instead, Sasha had acted like nothing had happened—had said something like, “Oh, thank God you’re here. ”
It was exactly what Mia was thinking, because the baby shower itself was awful and suffocating and weirdly regressive in the precise way that she would want to dissect with Sasha.
There was a gender-reveal moment that involved a red velvet cake whose insides were dyed blue, and a lot of little onesies with trucks on them that said things like “Man of the House.” At that moment, though, it wasn’t good enough for Mia.
She wanted more—she wanted to see Sasha grovel for the things that she had said to her—and it wasn’t until she had walked away from her, and realized that Sasha had quietly left the party, that she began to wonder if she was being greedy.
She considered the possibility that “Oh, thank God you’re here” meant more than “I’m sorry,” which was something she herself muttered thoughtlessly to strangers a hundred times a day.
By that point it was too late, though: she had deserted Sasha and left her alone, which was one more slight for which they would have to account.
A week later, she left for London without saying good-bye.
She posted Instagram stories from Buckingham Palace and the Broadway Market in Hackney, and checked her phone compulsively until she confirmed that Sasha had looked at them.
Smiling at Nina, she said, “I’ll have to go in and say hello,” then looked over her shoulder and back toward the church. The cloud had passed, and now unfettered sunlight turned the bricks a bright shade of red. Silver reflections pooled in the windowpanes.
Mia said, “Did you go inside the church? It feels so weird to see Adam’s face in there.”
“Why?” Nina asked.
“I don’t know—just, like, when was the last time Adam went to a fucking church, you know?”
Now Nina looked at her a little strangely.
“He volunteered here for the last year and a half. He helped in the Community Closet every Saturday afternoon.”
Mia’s forehead warmed. She felt a pressure build behind her eyes.
“I knew that, obviously. I’m only saying that it’s weird.”
Nina sighed. She pulled her phone from her purse, pouted into its screen, then replaced it.
She said, “It feels like people are dying all the time now, you know? Like we’re getting to that age.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Nina,” Courtney said. “We’re forty-two, not ninety-five. And it’s not like everyone has AIDS.”
Nina turned to face Courtney. She began talking about someone’s cousin, who was recently diagnosed with colon cancer and died before his thirty-ninth birthday, and then someone else, who was told she had five months to live after a dermatologist discovered stage-five melanoma during a routine mole check.
Mia’s forehead grew warmer—she felt offended.
Fine, sure, there were a few people who had died, but it wasn’t some great scourge or plague, and she thought that to lump Adam’s death alongside everyone else’s made a mockery of the present situation.
She wanted her grief to feel like a possession, something that she needed to protect, something that was fragile and unique. She wanted to punch Nina in the teeth.
She said: “You’re right, Nina. That’s so true.”
It was weird to think that, a week ago, everything was still possible.
Last Friday, sitting in a crowded pub in Holborn, she could have called Adam up, said something like, “British men have surprisingly good asses,” or “Do you think I’m starting to look more like Angela Merkel or George Clooney?
” She never did that, though—the last time they’d spoken was on the curb in Montclair.
She knew it was her job to apologize to him.
Whereas she was ninety-five percent sure that Sasha had been a bitch to her, she was one hundred percent sure that she had been a bitch to Adam—but for a variety of reasons, some of which she understood and some of which she didn’t, that was a harder pill to swallow.
She had come to the pub in Holborn with one of her colleagues from the London bureau, Maureen.
They were halfway through their second pints when Mia’s phone started ringing.
It was sitting on the bar between two soggy coasters, and she put it in her purse without looking at its screen.
The pub was full, packed with an after-work crowd, and although Maureen was sitting right next to her, occasionally Mia had to yell to be heard.
A trio of men in pressed slacks and button-down shirts squeezed behind her, holding their beers above their heads.
She leaned forward on her stool to let them pass.
Maureen said, “Would you ever date a guy who owned a cat?”
Mia’s phone rang again. Reaching into her purse, she silenced it.
“No way.”
“Okay, but what about two cats?”
“How does two cats make things any better?”
“I can’t explain it.” Her colleague finished her pint. “But it does.”
Another group of men passed behind Mia, and after they had gone, she flagged down the bartender for the check.
She and Maureen weaved their way toward the pub’s entrance, and then out onto Great Russell Street, making small talk about the day.
At the Holborn tube station, Mia watched her colleague disappear, then turned north toward the British Museum.
At Russell Square, she sat on a bench and removed her right foot from its shoe to rub at a sore muscle.
After a minute or so, she slipped her shoe back on, about to stand up and continue walking when she remembered her phone, ringing between the coasters on the bar, that needy, pitiless sound.
Her shoulders slumped: it had been a long week.
She was tired and a little drunk, and chances were it was her mother who had called.
The last thing she wanted to do was hear some story about someone else who had gotten divorced, or some childhood neighbor who was sick. Sighing, she reached into her purse.