The Song Remains the Same

by Allison Winn Scotch

  33

  “Forever Young”

  —Bob Dylan

  M y mother is waiting on the front porch when we pull up. I slam the Land Rover door shut, and Wes does the same—bam, bam—the sounds of the metal doors reverberating through the quiet country air like gunshots.

  She starts to rise when she sees us, like she’s actually going to greet us as if this were some sort of homecoming, but for once in her life she reconsiders and flops back on the bench, which has been righted after Peter and Anderson’s earlier melee.

  As I get closer, I can see that her eyes are bloated, the skin around them puckering like cauliflowers, and they are pink and watery and guilty. She opens her mouth to speak, but I flare a hand up quickly—don’t—because I do not, not for one second, want to hear another excuse from her.

  Wes scoots around me and heads inside with a squeeze of my shoulder, and I stop, there on the front steps, and jut my chin, wondering if words can ever be enough to clear the debris from the fallout, to say what needs to be said. After a lifetime of carrying around the weight of her—of all of the grown-ups’—sins, of the debt that mired us, what is there even left to do to move toward healing?

  She clears her throat. “Before you say anything, I sent Peter home. Rory took him to the airport.”

  “And?” I say, like I’m supposed to thank her for this when I didn’t ask her to bring him here in the first place. Didn’t ask her to stick her head into any of this in the first place, until a wiser voice reminds me that, in fact, I did. Back in the hospital, when I didn’t know where to lean, I leaned on her, and asked indeed. So maybe the lines are blurred between black and white, family and foes, instinct and self-preservation. The new me and old. And also, my responsibility in this and to her and my loved ones.

  “And I’m sorry,” she says, hiccupping like a toddler.

  “For which part?” I contemplate sitting next to her but it feels like too much of a concession.

  She gnaws her upper lip and blinks, and for a split second I think she’s going to delve back into her plasticized, spiritual guru self. I can see her debating it, slipping under that mask because under that mask, she never had to reveal her true self. The woman who stayed with him despite my purple welts. But then she surprises me.

  “Look,” she says in a voice so guttural I barely recognize it. “I screwed up. I screwed up from the minute your father first met Heather, and I didn’t stop until now.”

  “And you’re only realizing this now? Because of everything that’s happened?”

  She shakes her head, staring down at the painted white porch. “No, no. I’ve pretty much known it from the start. I just didn’t know what to do about it, didn’t know any better. And he was everything I had, back then, when they met at some party for the artist crowd. I was just…I didn’t find out for a few years. He always told me he was in Vermont at his studio.” She loses herself to something, then circles back. “And by then, well, I was desperate. You’d already been born, and I had no career, and our lives rose and set around your father, and so when I discovered that he was screwing other people, well, I mean, what else was I supposed to do?”

  “What else were you supposed to do? Are you seriously asking me this question?” After everything, is she really asking me this?

  “Well, sure, now, today, you guys are all very I-am-woman-hear-me-roar, but it wasn’t like that back then. And besides, he promised that he wouldn’t leave. Not leave leave. I mean, not leave us. Just for a few weeks in the summer because, well, there was Wes, and then you sometimes went with him and seemed content. He had his terrible moments.”

  “Clearly an understatement.” I instinctively reach for my upper arms, and she knows exactly of what I speak, her eyes welling.

  “I drove down and got you as soon as I could,” she says, her voice breaking. “Of course I knew that he had his moods, but never once…”

  “You know what I hear? I hear a whole slew of excuses. I hear a mother who didn’t do right by her daughters twenty years ago and who didn’t do right by one of them this past year, either.” I am suddenly seething, rage boiling viscerally in my guts, that she could sit here and still not own it, still not see the weight of my inheritance. Even though I know that I’m better than this anger, even though I know I need to let it go if I’m ever going to find it in me to move on. “I’m seeing a mother who didn’t learn from her own goddamn mistakes! Who instead urged me, when I was most vulnerable, to repeat them! To take my own dickish husband back, for god’s sake!”

  “You don’t get it!” She stands now and squeals. “It wasn’t just me! It was you, too!”

  “Don’t make me complicit in your games! Don’t tell me that I knew what I was doing when you told me to forgive him because I was, for all intents and purposes after the crash, a goddamn newborn! How can you hold me accountable for my decisions when I had no information—except what you told me—in making them?”

  “No, no,” she says more quietly now, retreating and sitting back down. “I meant with your dad.” She sighs and regroups. “After I picked you up that summer, you refused to talk about it. Refused to even acknowledge it. And you were so very, very angry with me for ruining your time here, for making you leave. So angry.”

  I narrow my eyes and try to remember—how much of this is coming through her own filter?

  Bits and pieces come to me: of the drive home, of the hot pleather seat in the station wagon on the back of my thighs, of Rory sitting up front and tuning the radio from station to station, the static of the in-between moments fraying my already frayed nerves. The bruises were ripe by then, so I’d tossed on one of Wes’s long-sleeved lacrosse shirts, like concealing the welts meant anything. I stared at the back of my mom’s head, at the wisps on her nape that dragged beneath her ponytail, and wished her dead. Dead in the way that only teen girls can. I wish you dead! I’d watch the hairs fly around from the open window, Bob Dylan singing dissonantly between us—“May your heart always be joyful, may your song always be sung, and may you stay forever young”—and come up with the various ways that I could maim her.

  “Go on,” I say to her today, the seeds of her truth finding their way into me.

  “I tried to make you go see a therapist, which, at the time, was almost unheard of.” For a moment, she can’t help herself, and she so easily slides back into her old persona. But she realizes her mistake, clears her throat, and continues. “But you were having none of it. You retreated to the guesthouse and painted and painted—music blaring just like he used to, like you were, I don’t know, sending him a message, compensating. And then your dad did come back—one day, a few weeks later, out of the blue, he shows up, and you ran out to the front lawn, swallowing him up. Instant, total absolution on your half. Both of you pretending like nothing happened.”

  “And then?” I ask, though part of me remembers what comes next. Part of me, if I were to dig far enough into my cerebrum, could tell her the story myself: that my dad stayed for a few months, fighting his fight against whatever demons eventually consumed him, and that when he did leave, I kept pretending—that he would come back, that he loved me more than he loved himself, more than he loved anything, and that when I finally understood that he wasn’t and that he didn’t, I underwent a transformation of my own. Stopped believing that the lines could be blurred, stopped seeing in color, started living in black and white. Stopped painting (for him), stopped making music (for me), stopped absorbing joy, stopped absorbing much of anything. Until the plane crash reset all of that.

  I scurry my head. No, it was before that. Own it. Yes, this I will. It was back when Wes sent me the letter, the keys. That’s when everything got set in motion, when I stopped following the hard lines like a subway rat. I left Peter. I contacted Tina Marquis. I pursued my passion for music. I relished the joy from the plus sign on the drugstore pregnancy test. The crash hadn’t changed me—I had. I had. I’d been reawakened, stepping out from the shadows into the heated light of day. />
  “I was going to keep the baby,” I say, and her head snaps up, a vein throbbing in her temple.

  She mistakes this as a question. “I don’t know. You didn’t tell me you were pregnant.” She chokes back a noise that’s somewhere between a muffled sob and a laugh. “You probably didn’t trust me with it, knew that I’d bring you home and make you drink holistic tea for the next nine months.”

  “No, I was going to keep the baby,” I say, more firmly now. “I was going to leave the gallery, and keep the baby and aim for a new life.”

  She digests this, her eyes welling. She finally allows herself to speak.

  “Well, you were certainly going to leave the gallery. You and Rory had stopped speaking over it. Things were tense enough between you two already.”

  “So I’ve figured.”

  “Don’t be mad at her about it,” she says, detecting my undertones. “For starters, she never condoned my urging you to stay with Peter after the crash, and the gallery? You guys had worked so, so hard on it, that for you to up and decide to leave without so much as an explanation—well, it was hard for her to understand.”

  “How could she have been okay earning our keep off Dad’s name for all of those years?”

  She stands, wearily, placing her palms on her knees and pushing herself up, then moving to me like she has aged thirty years over one night.

  “Your dreams are your dreams,” she says. “Sometimes you compromise yourself to get there.” She drops her chin just a touch, then gazes out across the landscape. “Show me someone who isn’t guilty of that, and I’ll show you someone who never dreamed in the first place.”

  When Rory returns from the airport, she comes and sits with us after it’s obvious that neither one of us is abandoning the front porch for the duration of the morning. I’m curled over the front steps, my mom back on the bench, the silence wafting between us in what some might call a peace. I want to reach over and smack Rory when she slides up next to me, but then a wiser, more forgiving voice, one without the ragged corners—the new new me—realizes that, well, what’s the goddamn purpose?

  “Are you going to hold Anderson against me forever?” she asks.

  “No, not forever,” I say.

  “Then you have changed,” she says, and we both smile tired smiles at her point.

  I hear my mom exhale behind us.

  “I should probably be honest with you both now. Your father did come back for your high school graduation, Nell. It wasn’t just the town rumor.”

  “What?” Rory and I say in unison, turning to face her.

  She averts her eyes. “He knocked on the door one day and asked to come in for coffee. You were at tennis.” She nods toward me. “And I can’t remember where you were, Rory.” She sighs and runs her hands through her hair. “I told him no. I said—and I remember it to this day—‘Get out of this house, get off of my property, and don’t you ever, ever try to get in touch with us again.’” She flops her hands. “And I hated myself so much because I’d tried so hard to go against that anger, to make myself over into someone kinder, more compassionate. But I couldn’t stand the thought that he came back on his own terms, and that—and this I understood, finally—he would leave again on his own terms, too.”

  Beside me, Rory is pale, and I feel like this should stick more, like I should care more, that after this quest, after this whole endless search—really a lifetime of a search—this is what it’s come to: that he was there, and who knows, maybe would have been there, be here, again—if circumstances had been different. But they weren’t, and he wasn’t. And that’s all it can be for now. I stare out at the deadened lawn, the dormant trees.

  “Please don’t hate me,” my mother says, and I can hear her crying behind us, which sounds both pitiful and remorseful.

  “I don’t,” I say.

  “I know where you can reach him,” she says, this time really sobbing, the weight of her guilt releasing her. “If you want, I do know how you can reach him.”

  I rise now and gaze at her, then at Rory, then crane my neck and inhale the expansiveness of this house and the gravity of everything that has happened here and beyond.

  I step across the creaking steps and glide past her, the screen door slamming as an exclamation point.

  “No,” I say from behind the metal door. “I have had enough with old ghosts. Let’s finally bury them so we can all just find our peace.”

  Come the next evening, everyone heads for the airport, though Anderson and I linger behind for the road trip, neither of us quite set to hurl ourselves midair just yet. Wes drops them at their flights, while Anderson and I load up the car—packing it up without ever really unpacking in the first place. But ensuring that we don’t leave anything behind all the same.

  Wes is going to sell the house—he made his decision earlier in the day, when we took a final walk down to the dock, past my father’s studio, which has sat vacant, a vessel, for years now. I’ll probably sell the apartment up in New York, too. Maybe call Tina Marquis and ask her to show me something totally unexpected, something that might resonate with the new me who is yet unwritten, the me without the heft of my birthright weighing me down. Or maybe I’ll leave New York entirely. Point myself in a direction where I can make music again, feel the notes inside of me, listen to how they can move me. I don’t know. This has to be what I can do for now. Embracing the change and the shades of color that it brings into my life.

  “You sure you’re okay with driving back with me?” Anderson says. It’s dark now, and we’re both zipped into our jackets, the temperatures dropping with the last light of day. The fallen leaves smell of evergreen, the branches cackling, the few remaining birds and squirrels keeping us company with their busywork. He leans against the hood of the car. “Because look, I get it, I get that I screwed up—messed up everything by doing what I did with Rory.”

  I wave my hands. “Don’t.”

  “No, let me.” And because I’m living in the softer moments of who I wasn’t before, I do. Let him. “I promised to have your back, to do anything to thank you for saving me, and I lost track of that.”

  “We all lose track of things sometimes,” I say, pressing back against the hood next to him.

  He shakes his head. “It was more than that. I just…I just couldn’t step outside myself, even when I wanted to. I couldn’t stop myself from self-destruction, despite knowing better.”

  I nod and rest my head against his shoulder because I know. Who hasn’t known better and who hasn’t crossed a threshold anyway? My father, sure. But my mom, sister, husband, and yes, me, too.

  “I just want you to be able to rely on me. Always,” he says.

  “I’m the girl who saved your life.” I smile.

  “You are indeed. There’s no replacement for that.”

  “I think you should do the Spielberg movie.” I right myself and look at him now.

  “What? No, I told my agent to pass.”

  “Call them back, convince them that you made a mistake.” I stare at him, the lanterns from the porch our only light, and honest to god, he looks like a movie star, like he never fell from the sky alongside me, like we never lost ourselves to everything along the way. Both before and after. I lost myself long before I lost myself to that crash. I lost myself at thirteen, and then again every year since when I refused to shovel through the muck, digest it, own it, and let it all go. But I can now, can shovel through that muck to hopefully tunnel through to the other side.

  “I don’t know,” he hesitates. “There’s something nice about not, about staying here, parked in the backwoods of Virginia with the girl who saved my life.”

  “But there has to be more,” I say. “I think it’s time to go out, live our lives, and try not to duck behind the shadows anymore. Your drinking, my hard lines. They’re crutches, you know?”

  He bites the inside of his gum and assesses. “And then what?”

  I laugh because I can barely remember the past, much less predict the
future.

  “And then, hell if I know. But I’m pretty sure that’s as good a start as we’re going to give ourselves.”

  He wraps his arms around me, and I sink into the barrel of his chest. For tonight, I let my new self trust my instinct to lean in and let him hold me up. And then tomorrow? Well, there is music to be made tomorrow, and it is bright, beckoning, wide-open.

  Acknowledgments

  A writer is only as good as the people who hold her hand along the way, and I couldn’t be more grateful to the amazing team at Putnam for holding mine. I’m not sure that I have the right words to prop-erly express my admiration and gratitude for my editor, Marysue Rucci, so I’ll just say this: how fortunate I am to have found you, and how appreciative I am that you pushed me to be a better writer when I didn’t realize that I had it in me. Thank you, thank you. Ivan Held, Kate Stark, Lance Fitzgerald, Alexis Welby, Chris Nelson, Lydia Hirt, and Diana Lulek: my deepest and unending thanks as well.

  Thank you to Elisabeth Weed, my Jerry Maguire: you had me at hello. (Because saying “you complete me” would be creepy, even if true.)

  Thank you to Laura Dave: my critique partner and the other half of my brain. Also my dear friend who makes me laugh every single day.

  Thank you to Jon Cassir, Jessica Jones, Crystal Patriarche, Lucinda Blumenfeld, and the team at Parents.com, all of whom have been such advocates and friends.

  Thank you to my husband and children, who remain my biggest cheerleaders.

  Finally, thanks to you guys, my readers. I am so, so grateful that I get to make up stories and that you all take the time to read them. You push me to keep going, to keep improving, and not a day goes by that I don’t realize that I’m the luckiest woman in the world because of all of you.