The Song Remains the Same Read online

  Just before the commercial, Jamie reemerges on-screen, teasing my upcoming segment, his face stoic, his voice infused with just the right intonation of gravitas that the situation calls for.

  “You’re going to be a star someday,” I say to him.

  “You think?” he says, though I can tell he’s pleased, like the thought itself is the greatest thing he can dream of.

  The phone is now a constant bleat in the background: buzzing steadily at patterned intervals. I hear the machine click on and on and on—a few journalists calling for personal quotes, but mostly friends emerging from my past to wish me well. Jamie is fielding his texts, as are both Anderson and Peter, and I realize that though my life is anonymous to my own brain, I’ve never been more of an open book: the world is out there, gazing in, begging to sift through my open pores and see my guts.

  A laundry detergent commercial wraps up the advertisements, and Peter pipes up to say, “Oh, my office wrote that one. Not bad, right?” He hums the melody, and my mom and Tate bob their heads in approval. Rory shoots me a look as if she has sucked on a rotten lime, and I know what she’s thinking—Ginger—even though I am doing my best not to think of it. Because it is over, and your brain can tuck even the most serious of transgressions away if it wants to. I give her a look in return—just shut up! Let it go! And she rolls her eyes and does.

  And then, the show is back and there I am. The makeup artist has bathed me in blush and dark eyeliner, and for a beat I don’t recognize myself. Then I squint and shift closer and yes, there I am. Me. Different. Tweaked. Sexier? Yes, maybe sexier. Like if I actually want to pull off this new fabulous me, with my weight loss and my defined cheekbones and now perfectly tweezed eyebrows, I might just be a knockout, a title usually reserved for Rory. Peter’s jaw unhinges and he glances toward me and winks.

  “Gorgeous!” he says, totally oblivious to the undercurrent—Ginger!—that pulsed between Rory and me just seconds before.

  “Every once in a while, miracles do happen,” I say.

  “You really do look good,” Anderson says, and everyone murmurs their approval.

  “Survive a plane crash, get a makeover. Seems like a fair trade,” I say.

  Jamie and I chat about the usual things: what I remember (a short segment), what I don’t, what life has been like upon return. I share the few memories I’ve had—describing the house in Virginia and that summer evening in such acute detail that even my family sits rapt, my mother pushing the tears from her cheeks, Tate massaging her neck. I talk about the pregnancy, what I lost, though I don’t share the great unknown question—What was I going to do?—and I try to watch Peter without letting him know that I’m watching, to see what he’s thinking, how he reacts, what that might have meant for the future, as it was back then. Through it all, I don’t cry, though I feared that I would. I speak strongly and valiantly, and toward the end, when Jamie asks, “So why do you think you survived?” I offer a shrug of my shoulders, a limp shaking of my head, and have no answers. Only that I am choosing to move forward each day, that I am trying to make this second chance worthwhile. That’s all I can do, I tell him, and I hope that Liv is watching because I think she’d think my answer was the right one.

  The phone is ringing and ringing, and Jamie goes to the tape, as images of my childhood—photos from junior high and tennis matches and that honeymoon in the Caribbean—are blended together as a montage of my life.

  Finally, Peter throws an arm toward the cordless and says, “Can we please get that now? It’s giving me a headache.”

  I push myself up from the couch and grab the phone from the base in the kitchen. The machine has twelve messages. I click the off button and rub my temples.

  “Hello?” I say into the receiver.

  “Nell?” says the voice. “I’m sorry to disturb you. It’s Jasper. Jasper Aarons. We met at your gallery. I’m the old friend of your father’s.”

  “Oh yes, of course,” I say, already regretting answering. Yes, I know that you’re sorry for my losses and you’re thrilled that I’m making a recovery! All of these messages, the reporters aside, will echo much the same sentiments.

  “Well, I just saw your American Profiles segment”—he clears his throat—“and I have something that I think you should see. I’d forgotten about it, to be honest, until tonight.”

  “What? A map to my dad’s whereabouts?” I ask, trying to be funny but failing on every level.

  “Not exactly,” he answers. “Look, I’ll take the train into the city tomorrow. Meet me for coffee. I’ll explain then.”

  15

  J asper Aarons meets me at a nondescript Starbucks two blocks from our building the next morning at ten. Peter has gone in to work, and as I shuffle down the sidewalk, my ribs still occasionally sore, it occurs to me that this is the first time I’ve gone anywhere on my own since I’ve been home. Like I’m a child who still needs a babysitter, a dog who needs its owner to be walked.

  Outside, with Labor Day having come and gone, summer is fighting a dying battle against the fall air. The leaves are hanging perilously on the trees, knowing full well they’re going to make the plunge, clinging on as if they stand a chance not to. The garbage smell that has wafted around us for the better part of August is dissipating, ushered out with the humidity, and in its place a briskness is filtering in, like something you’d smell from a bottle of Tide. All around me, New Yorkers hustle to their daily lives, oblivious to those faltering leaves, to the scent of autumn in the air, to the winds that are blowing in from the north that are threatening to change everything, even if for today they will not.

  More than a few people do a double take when they pass me on the sidewalk: a cute twenty-something hipster nodding and smiling, a harried mom overly apologetic—Oh my god, I am so, so sooooo sorry!—when her toddler knocks into my right leg. I tug my hoodie tighter around my neck, protecting my last vestiges of anonymity, and sidle inside the Starbucks, the aroma of burned coffee beans overtaking me.

  He is there before me, reading the Arts section of the New York Times, which seems entirely stereotypical and yet entirely logical at the same time. I hesitate before moving closer, wondering whether or not I’m ready. To trust him. To believe him. And even with these things, whether or not I want to hear what he says in the first place.

  Yesterday, in our session, Liv and I continued with our free-association exercise. We’d been discussing Peter, and the progress he and I had made, and then she asked me to explore the word trust, to spit out my first instinct.

  “Ask again later,” I said in reply.

  “‘Ask again later’ is your first instinct?” she said. “Or ‘ask again later’ because you’re being cynical and thus your first instinct about trust is actually cynicism.”

  “Both,” I said.

  “There’s a reason they call it blind trust,” she said.

  I gazed at her and thought not of Peter but instead of my mom, and how even though she knew I needed her to support my memory of that house in Virginia, she didn’t: she instead hedged her bets and protected her own self-interest until it became clear that the ruse was up.

  “I think I’m impaired enough,” I said. “Do I need to add blindness to my list, too? People are who they are. Nothing changes.”

  She half-smiled, her eyes crinkling into fans. “People can surprise you.”

  “Well, you got that right.”

  “No, you’re intentionally misinterpreting me.” She spun her hair into a bun. “You’re right: mostly, people are who they are. But if you accept this about them, you can move forward and build from there—then, they can surprise you. People do evolve, people do grow. Some of us may not. But some of us may. Maybe you and Peter can change together, can learn to trust again together.”

  Today, I watch Jasper Aarons studying the Arts section with a certain air of what?: Royalty? Snobbery? Je ne sais quoi? And I am more certain than ever that people are who they are—that I can sum him up in this snapshot of a moment.
r />   Jasper spies me over the edge of his headline, crumples the paper onto the ground in a haphazard, almost violent way—surprising me, proving that, in fact, maybe I can’t read everything about him in this one moment—and flags me over. He moves back the free chair at our table, and then, once I’ve eased in and gotten comfortable, inches a latte and a scone toward me.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” he says. “I took the liberty of getting you something.”

  “Not at all.” I flake the crust off the top of the scone and slide it into my mouth, the butter, the currants, the sugar colliding atop my tongue.

  “I’m sure you’re curious why I called, why the urgency,” he says.

  “I guess,” I say. I’m trying to study him, employ what Liv would call heightening my senses, homing in on clues other than the obvious.

  “Well, at the behest of my producer friend, I watched your American Profiles interview, and when they showed the retrospective of some of Francis’s work, I remembered something.” He shakes his head. “Your dad, he left me something for you, and Jesus, I have been a lousy friend—a gigantic screwup who royally let him down by not watching out for you in the way that I promised—but honestly, I sincerely forgot about this.” He reaches into his bag, strung across the back of his chair, and pulls out a notebook, which he nudges toward me. “Your dad wanted you to have this. He told me before he, well, before he left, that when you were old enough, you were to have it.” His hand flits. “Like I said, time got the best of me.”

  “What did you spend all those years doing?” I ask, like that has anything to do with anything. But I’m looking closer, picking things apart the way a medical examiner might, poring over the corpses left behind in my old life.

  “Painting. Marriage. Rehab. Divorce. Repeat. Occasionally repeat again,” he says, smiling but not smiling all the same.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Demons can be a hard thing.”

  “Your dad knew that better than anyone.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “No, it’s nothing,” he says. “Only that we artists are tortured souls, so to speak. Painting tells our story, attempts to exorcise those demons. Your dad did it better than any of us.”

  “Exorcised his demons?”

  “No,” he laughs softly. “I meant paint, but I guess you could take it any way you wanted to.”

  “My mom’s already told me that they had their share of problems,” I say. “But we all have our baggage.” A husband who cheated, a brain that’s gone haywire. Yes, I have a few boatloads of my own. I open the front cover of the notebook. “What’s in here? Sketches?”

  “The best I can tell. To be honest, I knew he wanted me to get that to you, so I set it aside and didn’t really examine it too, too much, and then, well, I fell down the rabbit hole, and I never took the time to sort through it. Knew it was private.”

  “It’s his diary?”

  “Not really a diary, no. It’s sketches, but maybe also a diary, if that makes sense. I remember—back when you were younger—you were quite a little painter yourself, so maybe it will make sense. Your dad thought you were quite good.”

  “Not as good as he was. Besides, if left to my own devices, I’d probably have chosen music.”

  “Easy to say that now, with hindsight,” he says.

  I don’t correct him to say that, in fact, I have no hindsight at all.

  He stops for a beat, watching the barista make change behind the counter. “You know, your dad wasn’t always the best communicator. Get a little vodka in him, and then, yes, he could pour his fucking heart out, but mostly, he spoke via his work. That’s what made him so damn magnificent.”

  “So this is him speaking to me?” I gesture toward the notebook, with its faded gray cover, its fraying corners, its yellowed sheets. I chew on the scone and mull it over.

  “Look, Nell, you asked on the phone if I had a map. Well, this is him giving you one—of where he’s been, what he wanted for you,” he says, his green eyes meeting mine. I’m once again reminded—thrown back to that time when he and my dad must have inhaled this whole goddamn town. Jesus, they must have been glorious, lighting it on fire.

  “And in all these years, you never heard from him? You were his best friend.”

  “And you were his daughter.” He sips from his cup, which I’m sure is black, no sugar, no milk. “And yet, you didn’t hear anything from him, either.” He swallows and sighs, and now he looks so very tired, rumpled, like a messy-haired shar-pei. “Look, I wish that things had been done differently. God knows that I have my own list of regrets, and yes, I wish I’d stopped him or at least forced him to reconsider, but your dad was who he was. Once you’re in that deep to your own skin, really, is there any turning back?”

  The barista calls out an order for a double-tall skim latte, and Jasper and I fall silent at the truth of his words. That people don’t change, and that after a certain point, there’s no point in hoping.

  16

  Peter is working late, so Jamie and Samantha, who slips out of work for an hour before having to return, join me for pizza slices at the corner Ray’s, while I flip through the notebook, trying to make sense of the images. I’d called Anderson, too, but he wasn’t picking up, and I figured he was tipsy, asleep, or potentially on the other line with his agent.

  “Maybe you should call your mom and ask,” Sam says, blotting the grease from the corners of her mouth with a napkin.

  “If she knew about this, she’d have told me.” Really? How can you be so sure?

  “People do strange things in strange circumstances,” Jamie offers, like he’s reading my mind.

  “Meaning what?” Sam counters.

  “Just that in my experience, I’ve seen an awful lot of people try to play the odds in their favor rather than show their full hands. The kids mourning their parents who don’t disclose that they’re anxiously awaiting their inheritance, the husband who doesn’t report his car accident until he’s gotten his mistress safely away from the scene. That sort of thing. Everyone has their secrets.”

  Sam raises her eyebrows and turns her attention to her BlackBerry.

  “So you think my mom isn’t telling me everything?” Of course she isn’t telling you everything.

  Jamie pops part of the crust into his mouth by way of an answer, and I concede my agreement with a long sip of Diet Coke.

  “You’re very smart, you know.”

  “Ha, not so much!” he says. “But years with nothing to do on my parents’ farm except sitting around observing—figuring out the story, the beginning, the middle, the end: I guess I got good at it. My mom always told me I’d be a good novelist because of my love of the story.”

  “And my story? Have you figured it out?”

  “That’s trickier because the only person who knows the truth and nothing but it can’t remember it in the first place.”

  “She’s not the only person who knows the truth,” Sam interjects, back from typing a reply to her boss. “We’re here. Her friends, family, we’re trying, too.”

  “You’re right, of course, Sam.” I rest my head on her shoulder as my way of thanking her. I know that she’s needed at the office, I know that she rarely has a spare thirty minutes to see her husband, work out at the gym. She doesn’t have to be here, grubbing on slices that have been sitting under a warmer for the better part of an hour. “But still, Jamie, thank you, too—I know that you didn’t have to, didn’t have to push for your producer connection, help link me to Jasper.”

  His own e-mail vibrates, and he holds up a finger to say hold on, and then starts typing, greasy fingers and all, with fervor. I fold my chin into my palm, staring down at the images in the notebook. Sam leans over to take a peek, too.

  There are abstracts, exaggerated notions of what appears to be fields, sun, sky, stars, what? They should be telling me a story; I can see that somewhere there’s a line threaded between them, leading me from one to the next, but nothing is linear, none of it jumps out at me as
making any sense.

  I used to be good at this—I was the one with the eye, but now, with nothing to reason with, it’s fled me entirely.

  “This, right here, what does that say to you?” I ask Sam. “Quick, without thinking, the first thing that comes to mind. Free associate.” I point at one of the pictures—like fragments of broken glass pieced back together again—and push the notebook toward her.

  “I don’t know…art was never my forte.” She hesitates, squinting, taking another bite of the pizza. “Maybe a farm? A silo?”

  “A silo?”

  “Yes, those buildings they have on farms? I grew up in Chicago, so maybe I’m not articulating it right.”

  I pause, digesting this. “Maybe this is of Vermont, where his studio was. Maybe I’m supposed to go to Vermont.” I flip to the next page while both of them attend to their BlackBerrys.

  “Oh my god, Nell Slattery!” a voice calls out to me from in front of the pizza counter, and then a woman rushes forward, her blond hair flying behind her, her high heels tapping the cheap linoleum floor. “I knew it was you from the second I walked in here!”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” I say, “but I have no idea who you are.”

  “Yes, of course, no, you wouldn’t, now would you?” She waves her cotton candy–colored manicured nails. “I’m Tina Marquis. I haven’t seen you since…well, since before. A few months before, when you called me.” She makes a frowny face like this is supposed to indicate since before the accident, and I match her frowny face to assure her that we don’t need to rehash it. Tina motions to Jamie to scoot over, and then she slides into the booth, uninvited, next to him.

  “High school,” I say. “I’ve seen you in the yearbook. High school, right?”

  “Yes, darling, high school!” She has an ever so slight lilt of a southern accent, and I’m not sure if it’s because she’s developed an affectation or if, before Bedford, she actually grew up there. I picture her from Texas. Yes, she seems like she might be from Texas. “Anyway,” she continues, “I just can’t believe this! I never come for pizza, but I just got off work and my fridge is empty, so I made a quick stop in!”