1230 PM Mia
Adam was everywhere. There were pictures of him laid out on tables, and in frames set up on the bar, and pinned to corkboards that had been hung on the bar’s walls. Mia stopped when she saw them. She felt Marco bump into her and she said, “Oh my God.”
Richie sat at the bar, wearing a suit and a thin black tie. His face was gaunt and pale, and he was skinnier than the last time she’d seen him. When he waved at her, she saw the small indents of the bones in his wrist.
“Well, well, well,” he said, “look who Death dragged in.”
She pressed her face into his shirt and a second later felt his chin resting on top of her head.
The last time she’d seen him was the night before he admitted himself into the recovery center in Palm Springs for a second time.
She had flown to Los Angeles with him, and they’d stayed together at a hotel on Sunset Boulevard.
After they checked in, they went up to their room and sat on their beds and watched two hours of a Below Deck marathon on Bravo.
At some point, Richie muted the television and asked Mia what he was supposed to do if this time it didn’t work either, and if he managed to fuck things up even more.
Mia looked at the television, where a woman in a white polo shirt and shorts was ineptly scrubbing the deck of a yacht.
She said, “Well, then I guess you’ll just try again.
” She remembered how Richie didn’t say anything, but simply turned off the television and looked out the window of their hotel room, where lights were turning on all over Los Angeles, blinking in the blue dusk that had settled over the basin.
He said, “I’ve never really understood this city,” and then asked Mia if she would think less of him if he drank a few martinis at dinner.
The door to the outside opened. Mia heard the traffic on Hudson Street and then Nina Guzman say: “Oh Em Gee, I haven’t been here in ages.”
She lifted her head from Richie’s chest.
“Where did you find all of this?”
“In an old copy of Crime and Punishment.”
“Please be serious for a second.”
“I am.”
There was this old shoebox, he told her.
A collection of Richie’s stuff that Adam had from when they’d lived together, and that they had both somehow forgotten about.
Adam had dropped it off at Richie’s apartment at the end of December, and like everything else he didn’t feel like dealing with, Richie had shoved it into a corner of his closet. He’d found it again this morning.
“It was mostly books he gave me that I never read. Also a Playbill for Wicked, which honestly I don’t even remember seeing.
Anyway, I picked up Crime and Punishment and this flash drive fell out of it.
I plugged it into my computer and saw all of these.
I thought it might be nice to print them out. Just for people to see them.”
“It was very nice of you.”
“I won’t let it go to my head.”
“I think this time you can.”
He didn’t immediately respond. Instead he reached up and loosened his tie with one finger, then undid the top button of his shirt.
“It’s funny,” he said.
“What is?”
“I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do tomorrow.”
At the bar Alison Liu asked for a vodka soda. Mia heard her say, “We were closer than most people knew.”
“I think we’re just supposed to wake up.” She clasped her hands at her waist. “Like, wake up, and drink our coffee, and take a shower, and wait for the train, and do all the shit we normally do. I think we’re just supposed to keep getting out of bed.”
She watched Richie breathe. The slow expansion and contraction of his ribs against the wool of his suit.
“I really loved him, Mia,” he said.
“I know.”
“Do you think he knew?”
“I don’t know. I hope he did? Because knowing something like that—there’s nothing better, is there.”
“No,” Richie said, “you’re right. There’s nothing better.”
He pressed two fingers against each eye, and seemed like he wanted to say something else, when Rami called out to him.
At that point he kissed Mia on the cheek.
He said, “Excuse me for a second,” and walked to the other end of the bar, leaving Mia standing in front of tables full of pictures.
They were not only of Adam. She also saw Sasha, Theo, Marco, herself.
She saw the old apartment in Midtown East, and Marco’s place on Orchard Street, and their ruddy, smiling faces, happy and oblivious in shitty college dorm rooms. She saw the house in Amagansett where they’d celebrated Richie’s birthday, and the hideous green dress she’d worn to Courtney Paulson’s wedding, and Theo holding Ethan when he was tiny and wrinkled and pink, and Nina Guzman looking sad and lonely in a gold caftan.
She saw bad haircuts and broken ankles and old boyfriends and new pairs of glasses.
Next to a tray of sandwiches, she saw a sepia strip from a photo booth, five shots of Adam and Richie, laughing and wagging their tongues.
“I don’t think I realized that he was taking all of these.”
Mia looked at Sasha. Her hair was pulled back into a bun and the skin of her face was clear and smooth.
“I didn’t either.”
“But it does seem like something he would do, doesn’t it?”
Mia breathed in, then out. She said, “It does.”
Picking the photo strip off the table by one of its corners, Sasha raised it to look at it in the light. She said, “How’s London?”
“Yeah, it’s fine, thanks.”
“That’s good.”
Mia wiped her eyes. She saw Courtney Paulson standing alone near the door.
“Satya told me you had a dinner before you left,” Sasha said.
“It was small. And super last-minute. I’m sor—”
“It’s fine, you don’t have to apologize. I wouldn’t have invited me either. I’m surprised I was even invited to this.” She put the photo strip back down on the table.
“How’s everything going?” Mia asked.
“We’re hobbling along. I crashed the Volvo and broke four bones in my hand.”
Sasha held up her right arm. Mia saw a series of bright-red scars crisscrossing the skin below the knuckles.
“Jesus.”
“Yeah, well. Something about karma, et cetera, et cetera.”
Mia felt a hand pressing against her lower back, and turning around she saw Marco.
He said, “Can I get you anything?”
Sasha smiled; Mia asked for a beer. Marco nodded. He said, “Hi, Sasha,” then began making his way through the crowd.
“What’s that about?” Sasha asked.
“I don’t know.” Mia held one hand to her forehead. “Would I be totally insane?”
“I fucked Mitch Reynolds, Mia. I’m not the person to ask.”
Mia turned toward the bar, where Marco was talking to Theo.
She said, “I look at that woman’s Instagram sometimes, still. Carrie, I think her name is?”
“Claire. Claire Matthews. And why would you subject yourself to that?”
“I don’t know. Morbid fascination, I guess. She hasn’t posted in a while.”
“She left her husband for some fitness influencer in Chicago and started posting some weird shit about trans kids. It wasn’t good for her brand.”
“It’s always too bad when that happens.”
“I don’t think that anyone was too surprised.”
Satya Patel reached past them for a turkey sandwich. She said, “Watch out, bitches, coming through,” and Sasha took a step to one side.
Once Satya was gone she said: “Mia, I’m so fucking sorry.”
Her eyes were red. She pressed them closed.
“Stop it. It was two years ago.”
“It doesn’t matter when it was.”
“I wasn’t perfect, either, you know.”
“But at least you tried.”
“Yeah, well. We all could have tried a little harder, I think.”
Sasha brought her hand to her mouth. She looked down at a picture of the two of them, of Sasha and Mia, that Adam had taken in their old apartment on East Fifty-Seventh Street.
They were sitting in Mia’s bedroom. Sasha was dressed in a black top and jeans; Mia was wearing a black sweater.
They were both holding glasses that they had filled with too much white wine.
“When was that?” Sasha asked.
“God, I don’t know. Why did we ever think those jeans were a good idea?”
“What are all of those?”
Sasha pointed to a corner of the picture, where twenty or so amber vials were scattered across the floor. Mia tilted her head to get a better look.
“Cologne samples. Oh my God, I totally remember this now. I was working at Details, and I had to write dumb little blurbs for all these cologne samples.”
“Yes. Holy shit. I remember that.”
“We went somewhere, though. Like that’s why we were drinking the wine. I remember we went somewhere.”
From near the front door, there was the sound of a spoon hitting a glass. Rami stood on a chair, backlit by the light outside. The crowd quieted. To his left, Adam’s aunt held Lucy to her chest.
Rami said, “I don’t know what to say that I didn’t say in the church. Only that he loved you all. He loved you all very much.”
Nina Guzman clapped loudly. She took a video of Rami speaking with her phone, and said, “So beautiful.”
For a few seconds Mia stood still, the sunlight warming her face. Then she turned back to the table.
“A New Year’s Eve party,” she said.
Sasha picked up the photograph.
“Yes, that’s right. We were going to a New Year’s Eve party.”
Mia stared at the picture in Sasha’s hand.
The two girls in it looked like total strangers, and for a split second she hated them.
She hated them, and envied them, and loved them, and pitied them.
She wanted to tell them: before you know it, everything will change.
They were never going to stop growing up.
Why was that so hard to accept? They were never going to stop growing up, and there was nothing they could do to change that.
One day soon, they would fall in love. They would choose a career, and get married, and have children, and despair over cellulite, and research ways to get rid of it, and google celebrities who were all younger than they were.
They would stop being able to drink like they used to, and have affairs with Mitch Reynolds, and lose their jobs, and their marriages, and go to rehab, and write books, and push a cart through Whole Foods with their children strapped to their chests, and scream at each other in well-appointed kitchens, and move to London, and cut brown crusts off white bread, and buy so many replacement goldfish. One day soon, they would bury a friend.
All of that was going to happen—of course it was.
They were going to lose parts of themselves that they had thought were irreplaceable, only to find they didn’t miss them at all.
There was no other option, nothing else to do.
Because staying young forever wasn’t just impossible—it was exhausting.
No one was meant to shoulder that amount of possibility for very long.
“Mia?” Sasha said. She was still holding the picture.
“Yeah?”
“We haven’t changed all that much, you know.”
Mia looked out through the bar’s windows.
She saw the sunlight and the cars and all the people on the sidewalks of Hudson Street.
There were so many of them, holding hands, and riding bikes, and looking at their phones, and walking their dogs, and doing all the other little things that people do day in and day out.
As she watched them Mia drew in a sharp breath.
She wanted to feel like everything was in front of her again, like life was stretched out, wild and open at her feet.
She thought: Well, why not, it could be, it always could be, and realized she had begun to cry.
“No, you’re right,” she said. “Not really, at least.”
Sasha leaned her head against her. Then she reached down and took hold of Mia’s hand.
“Thank God,” she said. “Thank God.”