The Song Remains the Same

by Allison Winn Scotch

  “Tina”—Sam wipes her hand on her napkin and extends it across the table—“Samantha. Her friend from college. We met at…” She narrows her eyes, trying to remember, and for a beat I’m jealous that she can. That she’ll sift around and come up with something. “Oh, yes, we met a few years ago—brunch at Balthazar.” She turns to me to say this. “You and I were having brunch and ran into her.”

  “Of course! Hello, hello!” If there has ever been a more enthusiastic person in the world, I haven’t met her.

  “Small world,” Jamie says.

  “And you!” Tina turns toward him. “You are the talk of the town! The Post! American Profiles!” She extends her hand. “Tina Marquis. Nice to meet you.”

  “So, Tina,” I say, trying to lasso her in, “I called you to get back in touch?” That seems odd, doesn’t seem like the old me at all.

  “Oh god, no,” she laughs. “As soon as high school was over, you dropped all of us like a hot stone in hell.” Ah, yes, as suspected. “The rest of us—our crew, as we called it—got together for drinks over the winter breaks, had our summer barbecues—but as soon as you were done, you were done. I heard a few of them came to your party last week.” She slouches in the booth, a moment of sincerity. “I’m sorry I was out of town, or I would have been there.”

  “Since I didn’t remember you in the first place, I’ll consider your apology accepted.” I smile because that is what the new me would do. And should do. And what maybe I want to do anyway.

  “Well, good, thank you for accepting it.” She reaches over and pours some of my Diet Coke into a Styrofoam cup without asking. “But to answer your question, you called me because I’m a real estate broker.”

  “I was looking for a new apartment?” Maybe that was what I was doing: kicking Peter out, starting fresh. I look at Sam for an answer, but she’s as bewildered as I am.

  “I don’t know quite what you were doing, to be honest,” she says. “You had me taking you to all sorts of spaces: lofts, walk-ups, doormen. You were very quiet about it. Said I couldn’t tell your mother—like I would!—and I couldn’t tell your sister.”

  I flick my hand in a circle, indicating that I’d like her to get to the point already. “So you called, and I showed you well over a dozen places, and you fell in love with one of them in Gramercy—high beamed ceilings, back wall made entirely of brick, original fireplace, and then…well…then you stopped calling. I figured it was cold feet. I tried you back a few times, but then I got another interested party, and I leased it out. You left me a message right before…right before the crash, and we played phone tag and set up one more appointment.” She grabs a pepperoni from Jamie’s slice and drops it in her mouth, just as her cell phone dings in her purse.

  “Excuse me for a second,” she says and eases out of the booth as nonchalantly as she came. I watch her mime her order for a slice of cheese pizza to the guy behind the counter, and then, still on the phone, she grabs a pen from her purse, scribbles something on a napkin, and strides back to us.

  “Call me sometime,” she says, her palm covering her cell phone, thrusting the napkin toward the center of the table. She turns, grabs her boxed slice from the cashier, and is gone, her chatter a wave behind her. The door of Ray’s slams, and for a second she reminds me of a tornado, like one of those cartoon characters I used to watch as a kid. I furrow my brow and try to place it. Wile E. Coyote. Yes, that’s it. A blond version of an incoming storm. And then I remember something more—why her name was so familiar. It wasn’t the high school yearbook. No, of course not. She was on my desk calendar. Tina Marquis. Past meets present—a collision of time, memory, and circumstance. I must have been looking to move, but to what? For what?

  “What was that all about?” Jamie asks.

  I shrug and pocket her number in my bag, wondering the same thing exactly. What was that all about? Everyone has their secrets, Jamie had said just minutes before. It turns out everyone does: even me.

  17

  “You Can’t Always Get

  What You Want”

  —The Rolling Stones

  T hat night I fall asleep early and dream, for the first time, of the crash. I wake at 12:47 a.m., the sheets soaked in my virulent sweat, the spot next to me unoccupied in my bed. Peter is still at work—he’ll be home by 1, he’d texted earlier. Some sort of television commercial musical catastrophe, though just what that is, I don’t know. I press back my doubts that are biting at my psyche, tempting my better judgment, and close my eyes, drifting right back to where I was before I startled awake.

  I am on the plane. Not just any plane, but the plane, the doomed 757 that tossed me unceremoniously into that Iowa farm field. But for now, all is copacetic, nothing has plunged or faltered to even give so much of a hint that destiny is about to seriously go haywire on the lot of us. My mother is our flight attendant and when the pilot comes on the PA system, Jasper Aarons’s voice echoes overhead. “Uh, folks, we’re all set for smooth sailing,” he says. “But keep that seat belt fastened anyway because you never know what’s ahead.” The worst of a bad metaphor.

  Anderson is next to me—just as he was in real life—but this time, we’re back in coach, not in first class—in the row that saves our lives—and I’m in the middle seat, which feels uncomfortably small and getting smaller, like a trash compactor pushing in on my hip bones, my elbows, jostling my shoulders for space. I turn to my other side and there is Rachel Green from Friends! She is perfect, her hair and skin luminescent. I want to reach over and clutch her because on the show, nothing goes wrong, and when something goes wrong, they gather in Central Perk and buoy each other by the time the credits roll.

  The armrests on my seat are digging now into my waist, and my mom leans over, her face fifteen years younger than in real life, and offers me a drink. I order a club soda, and Anderson asks for a Bloody Mary, and Rachel declines anything at all, but rather than returning her headphones to her own ears, she instead shoves them into mine. And she is so violent in doing so, I wince—I can feel myself wince in my sleep—at the way they grate against the skin in my ear. She is listening to the Rolling Stones, whom I know from my own playlist, and for a flicker of a moment, I am lost in a New Year’s Eve—a memory within a dream—with Tina Marquis and the other ghosts from high school, and we are throwing our arms into the air, crooning toward the ceiling. “If you try sometimes, you just might find—you get what you need! Oh yeah!”

  And then, just as my mother is placing the Bloody Mary on Anderson’s tray table, I sense it, and then I can feel it, and then it’s as if the insides of the plane are scrambled eggs: tossed and whisked so violently that I can feel my cheekbones shaking, like I might implode from within. We are being pulled downward, a vacuum, a black hole, a Bermuda Triangle that has us in its clenches and refuses to relent. The gravity pulls on my skin, thrusting my entire being backward. Rachel starts screaming, and I try to tell her that we’ll all be okay, but when I turn toward her, she’s now morphed into Tina Marquis, and Tina Marquis then flings off her seat belt and starts running toward the rear of the plane. As if anything can save her back there. I want to yell at her to come back, that if we stay in this row, we’re somehow fated to survive, but it’s too late for that. Anderson has his head between his knees, and reaches up and shoves mine down, too, and then, in that tiny crevasse between us, I say to him, “Thank you, you’ve saved my life.”

  He shakes his head because he can’t hear me over the squealing engines, which sound like slaughtered pigs, and the hysteria all around us, which sounds like death. Then, as if an omen, the engines go silent, their screeching vaporized, and I know that it won’t be long now, that I will wake in the field in Iowa and someone will come save me. Peter? Jamie? Rory? Who?

  And then, we have impact, and fireballs swarm overhead, but just like in real life, I am alive. I am strapped into my row of seats, hanging upside down, the blood pooling in my brain, spinning stars and white lights around me. I cock my neck, despite my vertebrae
begging for me not to, and peer upward, defying the forces of gravity working every which way against me.

  I am not in a cornfield in Iowa.

  Anderson moans and fidgets beside me, and I fight to stay conscious, fight to take it all in.

  I am here, at the house, the big white house with the expansive porch where I spent that summer away from my other life. Where he spent his life away from his other life.

  My muscles, still strapped to my seat, surrender—we can’t hold you up forever, they seem to say—and my head flops toward the earth. Tan work boots with black smudges on the worn toes appear in my line of vision, and I fight—goddammit! fight for it!—to keep my eyes open, cast my neck upward.

  “Hello, Nell,” the woman’s voice says, and I follow her long legs toward her face. “I’m Heather. It’s nice to see you back again.”

  I finally shake myself awake again, it is 6:17 a.m. I have always been a morning person—this hasn’t changed. But my brain is perpetually on now, the dial always amped toward high, and so even when rest may literally be what the doctor has prescribed, there’s no having it.

  The bedroom is dark. Fall has officially planted its roots: the sun pushing into the sky later each morning, sinking beneath the horizon ever earlier, evaporating those last gasps of warm air that can soothe you underneath the deepest layers of your skin. Outside, I can hear the occasional whoosh of traffic, which sounds almost exactly like a wave crashing on a beach, but mostly it’s silent. No noise, no light, not much of anything. A void.

  The dream still weaves in and out of me, even though I’m now alert. The Rolling Stones have wormed themselves into my ear, the thought of that New Year’s party as real as anything I know. “You can’t always get what you want! You can’t always get what you want!”

  I laugh at the irony—so true—and hum a bit of the melody before swinging my legs out of bed, happy that I have the mobility to now do so. I peel off my dank pajamas and toss them—two points, swish!—into the laundry basket. Suddenly, something about that motion—the movement of my arm, the snap of my wrist—feels familiar, like a sense of déjà vu.

  My father. Yes. I’m remembering my father. How old could I have been? I sift through the sensors of my brain. Thirteen? I shake my head. No, it wasn’t that summer in Virginia. It was before. Ten. Maybe I was ten. I can smell the air, a mix of paint and cigarettes, and see the glow of the easel, illuminated in the dim light of the room, in front of me. And though I may be meshing it all together—the dream and the memory and now this—I could swear that I can hear the Stones in the background, too. Where are we? My mind races, hunting for clues. Then it comes to me. His workshop. We are in Vermont, and he is teaching me the art of letting go, of giving in to randomness, of creating a masterpiece even when most of that masterpiece is out of your control.

  “It’s not out of your control, Nell. It might seem out of your control, but it never really is.” He took my wrist, held it high above my shoulder with the brush in hand, and flicked it toward the canvas. Magenta paint spread like a firework. “See, my darling? Look there. You’ve just created a thing of beauty.” He leaned down to kiss my cheek, and I could smell—can smell even now—the ash and nicotine on his breath, and then I took a giant step back, like I was about to hurl a baseball or a shirt into the hamper, and let the paint fly.

  I stare at my hamper now for a beat and try to remember more—where was my mother? Rory? What of them? But there’s nothing else; this must be enough for now. I reach for the phone to call Liv, but it is too early, so instead I gather up my father’s notebook that Jasper has delivered two decades too late, and stride into the living room, bursting with exuberance that something is working. The wires are being reignited, the switches are being reset.

  I step into the kitchen and dump out a liberal amount of coffee grinds into the coffeemaker. Peter has left a note under a smiley face magnet on the fridge: Went for an early workout. Back by 7. To be honest, it hadn’t even occurred to me that he was gone.

  The coffeemaker sputters to life, and I pour a dark mug, retrieve the notebook from the floor, and then sink into the couch.

  I stop on the second-to-last image and turn the book horizontally, then vertically, trying to peer at it from all sides. It’s unlike any of the others, like a Georges Braque that I’ve seen in one of the books on my shelves: shattered fragments litter the page, as if my father had drawn what his mind saw, then dropped the picture like a mirror, sending the splinters every which way. I spin the image round and round, trying to place the pieces back in their rightful place. Slowly, cloaked in the artistic noise, an eye ekes itself out, then another eye, then the slope of a nose, the hint of a lip. But this isn’t Heather, I can tell that, even without knowing her. Having only dreamed her. These eyes are younger, less sure of themselves. Maybe, I think, these eyes are mine.

  I reach for the phone. It’s early but what the hell. A man’s gravelly voice answers on the second ring.

  “Hello?” I check the keypad to ensure I typed the right number. “Is Rory there?” I say. He grunts and then I hear sheets shifting, and then my sister comes on the line.

  “What?” she snaps, offering neither a hello nor an explanation as to why a random guy is both answering her phone and sleeping beside her.

  “Dad,” I say. “I need you to level with me. Tell me the truth. I need you to tell me everything you can remember about Dad.”

  18

  Rory rubs her eyes, flakes of old mascara fluttering down just below her lashes. The diner smells like fried eggs and burned hash browns, and the NYU kids in the booth next to hers—clearly still awake from an all-night bender—are laughing too loudly, throwing their youth in her face, that she can’t recover as quickly as they still can, as she once could.

  “Okay, first of all, you are strictly forbidden, like ever again, to call me before eight thirty. Is that understood?” Rory says, then cranes her head around. “Jesus Christ, can the waitress bring me some goddamn coffee?”

  “Understood,” Nell says.

  “Second of all, why the urgency? You couldn’t wait until, you know, a reasonable hour to decide, after two months, that you have to hear our lovely childhood stories?” She rubs her eyes again. Her head feels like a giant crater, like someone has a sledgehammer driving right into her temples. She has a flash from last night. Oh god, last night. If she thinks about it much more, she’s going to hurl her brains out right here on the Formica table, with Lady Gaga singing in the background. She winces, wishing someone would turn down the music, stop the endless bleat of noise from the kitchen, from the fucking NYU kids three feet away.

  “Because of this,” Nell says, and pulls out a sketch pad from her purse. “Jasper Aarons gave it to me.”

  “Dad’s friend?” Rory tries to focus, to not betray herself. Of course she knows who Jasper Aarons is. Her mother nearly had a hysterectomy when she saw him that night at the gallery.

  “Yeah, I met him for coffee. He said he’d had it for years.”

  “What took him so long?” She waves her hand frantically for the waitress, then mouths coffee in an overexaggerated way.

  “Are you okay?” Nell says.

  “Hungover,” Rory says. Succinct. Enough of an explanation for now. She’s not sure if she should feel guilty or a little victorious. She watches Nell, so oblivious, and she knows: guilty. Most definitely guilty. One-upping Nell was fun until it wasn’t fun anymore. Like now. This, here, now—this is definitely not fun. Shit. She wishes she could rewind the past twelve hours.

  “Moving on from Hugh just fine, I see,” Nell says. The waitress finally ambles over with a silver pot and two mugs. “Or I heard. This morning, when I called.”

  Rory leans closer and examines her statement for judgment—normally, there would be more than a healthy serving of judgment, but she finds none, which guts her even further. Things weren’t like they used to be; Nell didn’t remember what they used to be, of course, but Rory did, so while Nell was being kinder, diff
erent, Rory kept on going like the old days. Tit for tat. Nell says she can jump, Rory then tries to jump higher. Oh, Jesus, she thinks again.

  “Just one of those things—one off. One-nighter,” Rory says. “No one worth discussing.”

  “Fair enough,” Nell says, happy to let it go.

  “You’re not going to mock me, say that I’m doing myself irreparable harm? Need to stop acting like a child and start making grown-up, responsible life choices?” Rory gulps down a Herculean-size swallow of coffee and exhales at the relief it provides.

  “Why would I say that?” Nell answers, sipping some coffee of her own.

  “Just…before. You would have.”

  “It’s not before.” Nell shrugs.

  “You’ve changed.” Rory flags the waitress over once more. Oatmeal. That’s what she needs. To soak up the excess tequila before it seeps into her organs.

  Nell laughs at this. “I don’t know. People are who they are. Maybe I’m just evolving.”

  “Semantics.”

  Rory squints and assesses, wondering if Nell would react today like she had six months ago when Rory delivered the news about Peter, about Peter’s infidelity. If the same acid would infuse her voice, if she’d still shoot the messenger, say that Rory must feel vindicated in telling her this because she could finally top her sister in everything. Everything! Not only was she prettier, hipper, easier to talk to, got along with Mom, but now! Now! She could triumphantly point to Hugh and hold that over her, too. Rory scoffed—well, she more than scoffed, she unleashed at this wholly ridiculous posturing, and this was when more words were exchanged: about how Nell was always Dad’s favorite, and about how Rory never minded that, never minded Nell rubbing Rory’s face in that part of things, either. More things were said after that. More things that the two of them would wish they could undo but, of course, could not.