The Song Remains the Same

by Allison Winn Scotch

  “Ours, actually. Well, technically yours.” He clears his throat. “I bought it for you as a wedding present. Hoped you’d play more, again. With me. Alone. Both.”

  “And did I?”

  The phone rings, surprising us, before he can answer. He steps into the kitchen and pulls it from the receiver.

  “Yes, yes, no, yes. Can you call back tomorrow? We just got home.” He presses off and tosses it on the counter. “Media. They keep calling.”

  I sigh and fall back—gently—on the sofa cushions.

  “What can I get you? Should I run out and grab some food? Some groceries? A bowl of cereal?” He waves a hand. “I’m sorry, I didn’t have a chance to stock up when I was home—I was either at work or asleep, and then I was right back to Iowa.”

  “No worries, though a soda or something might be nice.” I hear him open the refrigerator, then the hiss of the liter opening, and then the cracking of the ice as he pours it atop. I push myself upward toward the piano, lifting the lid, delicately pressing one key, then another, my fingers sliding up naturally into a scale, like they already know what they’re doing. I close the fallboard and turn toward him.

  He places the soda on the coffee table and carefully arranges himself on the couch. A beat passes between us, neither one of us sure what to say next. I wonder if I should ask again about Ginger but decide that the new me wouldn’t need further reassurances. That she would flip her (gorgeous) hair and laugh into the wind with confidence that when Peter told her—as he did a few nights earlier when he called the hospital from work—that he really and truly ended it (which gave the new me slight pause because the old me was certain that he had ended it months ago), and find a way to put it out of her mind entirely. That forgiveness, as my mom had said, will weave into me over time, and what I needed now was that time, not regurgitation.

  “Why don’t I go get some Chinese food?” Peter says. He stands abruptly when neither of us finds a way to break the silence. “I’ll let you settle in, feel at home without me hovering.”

  “I don’t feel like you’re hovering.”

  “Still, though, let’s get some food.” He jerks toward his wallet on the pass-through counter. “I know what you like. Don’t worry.”

  “Okay,” I say, though I’m not at all hungry. I wonder if I still like what I used to like but say nothing.

  He bolts away, exiting quickly, like a dog startled, scampering from a room. I watch the door close behind him, and my relief puffs up like a cloud. I stand and sniff around the apartment again, running my fingers over the mantel, stepping back and assessing the bookshelf, flipping on the stereo in the TV cabinet to keep me company.

  I hobble into the bedroom. One nightstand—his, I assume—is barren but for a glass lamp. The other holds a collection of picture frames, a stack of New Yorker magazines with a thin film of dust. The walls are a cool but welcoming yellow, the only accessory an enormous mural-size mirror hanging over the bureau opposite the bed. I catch a glimpse of myself in the corner of it: fragile, that’s what Rory had called me weeks back, and that’s exactly how I appear. Tiny. Like a dehydrated prune. That’s what I remind myself of. Old and dried-up fruit. My limbs look breakable, my muscles are flimsy, my hair is a ratty mess with roots that betray the deep brunette of my childhood, a fact I know strictly from photo albums.

  I slip onto the comforter, then slide onto my back and gaze up at the ceiling, adjusting an angora pillow under my neck. It’s less comfortable than I thought it would be. It’s itchy against my skin, so I tug it away and toss it on the floor. The speakers from the living room filter a song through the open door, and I hum along to Jackson Browne, a song I recognize from my iPod, from The Best of Nell Slattery. I can feel the harmony reverberate in my chest, behind my eyes, in my heart.

  I exhale and push onto my elbows, but then something hits me—a sliver of something, something ethereal but honest—of a warm evening, of grass tickling my legs, of a little girl giggling beside me, and of a wide expanse of stars up above.

  Think, goddammit, Nell! Think!

  I press my brain into places I’m not sure it can go. I flex it, I stretch it, I squint, and I try to squeeze out something more.

  The girl, yes, it is Rory. She’s wearing short pajamas with green stars on them and is drinking lemonade. There is a white house in the background, with a porch that looks like it belongs in Georgia—a swing and two loungers and a lantern by the door. It feels like there is jazz in the air, but maybe I’m just making that up. Maybe not jazz, but something else that makes my body feel electric. Maybe Jackson Browne, but maybe that’s just from the radio. It smells like honeysuckle, like summer, and I call out to Rory—“Rory,” I say, “come on! Stop wiggling around. Come sit beside me or else we’ll miss it.”

  “I’m coming,” she responds. “Stop being such a turd. Geez, I’m coming.”

  Then, just as quickly as it comes, it’s gone. I try to find more, more than that small snippet. I lie in my bed and I clench my jaw and press myself like a sponge, hoping that if I force it, another morsel will drip out.

  There’s nothing more. I hear the front door slam, and Peter yells, “Chinese!” and I sit up too quickly so that my head spins with dizzy stars, and then I yell back, “Peter, get me the phone! I need to call Rory! I’ve remembered.”

  Neither Rory nor my mother can verify my account of a childhood summer evening.

  I tell this to my newly assigned shrink, Liv, two afternoons later, when she makes a house call.

  “Hmmm, maybe,” Rory had said when I reached her at Hugh’s apartment. They were planning to move in together, and from what I could tell in the few days since I’ve been home, they more or less already cohabitated. “It sounds familiar, but I might have been too young to remember.”

  “Perhaps, dear,” my mom said when she arrived later the same evening I had the flash, with her own boyfriend, Tate, in tow—a published poet who took to wearing a scarf around his neck despite the swampy late-summer air—and whom I immediately disliked on sight. He kissed me hello and rubbed my back like we were old friends, and who knows, maybe we were, but all the same, he gave me the willies. “That certainly could have happened,” my mom said. “But our house doesn’t have a porch like the one you seem to remember. And I’ve never been a fan of jazz. Still though, darling, feel proud of yourself. You are working toward something here! Give yourself a pat on the back for that!”

  Liv interrupts me here. “This is interesting, that this is the first thing you tell me. That this is how your mom still speaks to you.”

  “Well, this is how she does,” I say. “And I should also add that this feels like her baseline—like this is the sort of thing she says often. Or said often. ‘Be proud of yourself, darling!’ God, we couldn’t be more different.”

  Liv smiles and twists her long dirty-blond hair into a bun at the nape of her neck, securing it with an elastic from her wrist. She is young, my age maybe, give or take a few years, and easy to talk to, whether or not this is part of her job requirement. She makes a note in her file while I spin her name into a made-up melody—Liv, Liv, how do I live? Livie, Livie, what you gonna give me?

  She sets her pen down. “It’s nice to see, even though we’ve just met, that you still have humor despite what has happened. Joy is important.”

  “I don’t know that I would characterize myself as joyful.”

  “So how would you characterize yourself, then?”

  I recline in my armchair and consider it.

  “Well, I don’t know. But joyful isn’t the first thing that comes to mind.” I think of my question to Samantha from weeks ago—what made me happy? Who knew? Who knows?

  “So how about we make it a goal?” she says. “To figure out how you would define yourself. Who you are now.”

  “You mean, who I was before.”

  “No,” she says simply. “Well, yes. That’s part of the goal, too.” She unscrews the top of her water bottle and sips. “But they may not necess
arily be the same. That’s important to know. Scary, too. But important.”

  “But the stuff from before—I mean, my life. Will I remember that? Get that back, regardless of who I am now?” The idea of my brain being a whitewash forever is too terrifying to digest.

  “Well, not to sound like your mother, but she’s right that having a memory at all is a wonderful step,” Liv says, placing the lid back on her water bottle, setting it on the floor by the leg of the couch. “It’s a breakthrough. It’s your brain trying to reconnect the wires.”

  “But it might have connected wires that aren’t even there. Neither she nor Rory remembers anything like that!”

  “Could be,” she says, “though I doubt it. You said it felt real, like a déjà vu. You shouldn’t second-guess yourself if it was that tangible. Perhaps it was pulling together pieces from disparate memories, but it was something. Don’t underestimate that.”

  “I would say, given my life right now, that I don’t underestimate much.”

  The phone rings, interrupting us, and the machine clicks on. Another reporter leaves a message.

  “Sorry for that,” I say. “We get a call every few hours. I don’t know what part of ‘no comment’ they don’t get. Remind me the next time I’m in a plane crash and lose my memory to unlist my number.”

  She laughs, then chews her pen for a moment. “So some logistics. We’ll do this twice a week. Sometimes you’ll feel like talking, sometimes you won’t. Sometimes we’ll use different methods: guided meditation, free association…we’ll see what works and what doesn’t. Which is something for you to think about, too—what’s drawing out these ephemeral feelings? What work can you do on your own?” She smiles. “But you won’t be on your own. Even if you feel like you are, I’ll be here to help.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a little help.”

  “But I don’t want to give you the impression that this is going to be easy.”

  “I’ve never had that impression,” I say. “Nothing about this gives me that impression at all.”

  9

  A full week after I’ve landed back in New York, Rory opens the gallery—which has been booming thanks to public curiosity—for a reunion, a welcome-back party. I don’t bother asking welcome back to what, though the thought has certainly crossed my mind. WELCOME BACK TO…NOTHING! No, that banner wouldn’t be celebratory enough at all. I dot concealer under my eyes, flush my eyelids with a hint of brownish shadow that I’ve found in the vanity, and spike my lashes with mascara. I stare into the mirror and imagine it—the gallery, the pulse of the crowd, the huddle of troops who are rushing to rally for me. Maybe this is where the fabulous me was hidden. Maybe this was my element, the thing I did best, maybe this is where I cast off the dourness of that People photo and flitted about the art world, my deals, my acumen, as a spotlight. Yes, I think, this is where I’ll finally uncover her, glimpse the road map to the new Nell, the hint of who I could have been all along.

  I flatten my hair with my palms and wonder if it doesn’t feel four inches too long for me. Why I wore it so plainly—straight, middle part—when something else might have brought out the softness of my jaw, illuminated my heart-shaped face. I push the wrinkles out of my gray sleeveless dress—my closet is a study in the palette of neutral—and exhale.

  Peter hires a town car, and my mother, wearing a perfume that reminds me of patchouli, and Tate, wearing a blazer and oxford with one button too many undone, accompany us down there. Truthfully, I’m relieved for the company, even if it means I have to watch Tate damply kiss my mother, and then see her wipe her scarlet lipstick stain off his mouth. They’re like teenagers, these two, straight out of a sitcom. They have the laugh track, dammit!

  But I tolerate their company all the same. The simple truth is that with the chaos dying down and more quiet space to fill, Peter and I have run out of things to talk about, and these two help soak up the still air. Of course there are discussions to be had, but mostly Peter and I shuffle around each other and turn the TV louder when things shift from silent to awkward. Last night, after he got home from the gym, he pulled me to the piano bench and asked if I might want to play—for him, with him—and even though I rolled my fingers over the keys, and the muscles found their natural curl, the instinct of rhythm pulsing through them, I shook my head and declined. Then I pushed the bench back, the feet squeaking against the floor, and climbed into the shower. Where I stayed until the mirrors steamed up—chiding myself for doing so—this is not what a seize-life-by-the-balls girl would do!—but unable to find the strength to go back out to him all the same.

  Time. Forgiveness. My mother had implored. I was trying to pay respect to both. Perhaps our wedding song was no coincidence: have a little faith. Indeed.

  The gallery is on Twentieth Street in Chelsea, and the sun is only beginning to tuck itself behind the downtown skyscrapers when we pull up. We’re running late thanks to traffic on the West Side Highway, so there’s already a herd of faces there to greet me, all unfamiliar yet familiar from my photo albums. That is to be expected. What’s not is the bottleneck of camera crews parked on the sidewalk.

  Anderson pushes through them and opens the town car door. He pulls me out, and we braid our now-healed limbs around each other.

  “The girl who saved my life!” he says, burying his chin in my shoulder.

  God, it is good to see him, though it’s only been a few days. A safe space in this tornado.

  “Come on, don’t mind them,” he says, when we break from our embrace and he notices my saucer eyes. I know I should be used to this—that I’ve made magazine covers and that three-parter with Jamie back on the local news in Iowa, and with the interest from American Profiles, and Rory had even told me about the TV crews camped out at the gallery—but mostly, I’ve been folded inside a hospital room and now my apartment, so this loss of anonymity is startling. I feel like the empress who has been stripped of her clothes.

  Of all of us embroiled in the debacle, however, Anderson knows how to handle this particular aspect.

  “She’s not doing press,” he says to them all, guiding me by the elbow.

  “Is it true your memory is returning?” shouts a woman who is holding a digital recorder.

  “How would you know that?” I spin my neck too quickly toward her and a vertebra flares up. How could someone possibly know that?

  “Our sources are reporting that your memory is back,” she says, smiling now, like she’s doing me a favor.

  “Hang on,” Anderson says to me, just as I’m thinking, Your sources? Who is out there citing themselves as a source? Like my life is a covert op that can be clandestinely reported on? Anderson turns back to the reporter while I’m in mid-thought, stepping two inches too close to the microphone. “Listen, Paige, back off. Back off. She’s not required to verify anything with you. So leave her alone.”

  He double-steps back to me, and I tilt my head and assess the oddities of the situation: the paparazzi, the party, and that Anderson, B-list newly turned A-list actor, is jumping to my defense in the midst of both.

  “Nice to see you again, Anderson!” she shouts back.

  “You know her?” I ask once he’s beside me.

  “We have a history,” he says, offering nothing more, so I leave it be.

  “Should I be concerned that I have ‘sources’ now?” I say.

  “They save those for the most important people.” He smiles.

  “Ha ha.” I smile in return.

  “No, I’ve just been through this before—I mean, even before before. I figure if I can help the girl who saved my life…” He holds the door open and I squeeze my way inside. We both fall silent, surveying the landscape, a moment of peace before we’re swallowed up.

  “Stay close,” I say finally. “Who knows who half these ghosts are and what they’ll conjure up.”

  He grasps my elbow. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  At first, this party seems like an ingenious idea. The new
me agrees. The techno music is on just the right level—loud enough to give the energy a needed pulse, quiet enough so that I can still hear everyone’s cheers of encouragement, reintroductions, and the occasional awkward pause because they really don’t make a greeting card for your friend who defied death and lost—nearly literally—her mind.

  Still though, it feels good, welcoming, almost heartwarming, to be here. Rory hands me a club soda after a gaggle of college friends wander off. I’d recognized their faces from my pictures: pressed together, holding spilling plastic cups of beer, in some fraternity basement—Golf Night!—our cheeks glistening with sweat, our bra straps askew under our tank tops. Tonight, they hug me and rub my back, and everyone takes out their phones to schedule a girls’ night, which is something we evidently used to do whenever we were all in the same place at the same time, which, Samantha tells me, wasn’t too often.

  “Life got so busy,” she says, like this is something to feel guilty about. “You were always here, at the gallery; I’m usually in London or Hong Kong for work; the moms could never find a sitter.” I think she’s about to start crying. Jesus, please don’t start crying! What I would really like is if people could stop crying around me! But she glues herself together. “Let’s not do that again? Okay?” She reaches for my hand. “Let’s be better about it this time.”

  So we pull out our phones and promise to be better about it this time. I already suspect that we won’t be. Old patterns, old dogs, new tricks. All of that. Until I catch myself slipping back into the former me. No, no, no. Things will be different, things must be different.

  “I know I can’t remember everyone,” I say to Rory when she brings me the club soda. “But it’s nice to know I was this loved, that these people can all be my parachute.”

  “Oh my god, have you been watching Oprah? Because you’d never have said that before,” she says. If one can manage to simultaneously roll her eyes and make them bulge with surprise, Rory does so.