The Song Remains the Same Page 18

  “Touché.” I smile. I see Rory start toward us, then reconsider and spin on her heels toward the bar. Anderson watches her as she does so. “She’s in rare form tonight,” I say.

  “Probably just not used to the pressure.” He shrugs it off. “Like asking her to headline a movie when she’s not quite ready.”

  “So now we’ve shifted to talking about you.”

  “I’m an actor, we try to keep it about us nearly all the time.” He smiles his trademark smile, all dimples, perfect teeth. “But my agent keeps telling me, ‘You gotta step up. Gotta seize the moment.’ I guess that’s right. For Rory, me, you. Everyone.”

  “Ergo, the Spielberg film.”

  “Ergo that.” He sighs, then stutters. “You remember Stephen Calhoun from the passenger manifest?” I scrunch my eyes. Vaguely. Jesus. I’ve forgotten the hundred fifty-two of them already. “The teenage kid who was heading to Duke in the fall on a basketball scholarship? Incredible kid. He’d started a foundation helping underprivileged kids: baked dog biscuits to raise money for them.”

  “Seems worthy, if random.”

  “It was. His family got in touch to ask if I’d continue in his honor, you know, pass the torch, and keep his dream alive.” Anderson leans back against the door frame. “And of course I want to say yes. I mean, that kid had everything going for him in the world, he was someone who truly could have lit things on fire…and yet, when my publicist relayed their message, my first thought was, ‘Another favor? Who else is asking?’” He rubs his temples. “Shit, I’m a walking Hollywood cliché.”

  “You’re not,” I say, touching his arm. “We’re all just wading our way through.”

  I stare down at the guest list. Anonymous names of who—friends? patrons?—who will soon arrive to brush next to me and engage as if nothing ever happened. No, that’s not true. Some will lower their voices and their eyes will cast downward and they’ll ask questions that feel too intimate, and I will freeze my smile and provide answers in such a way that I don’t answer them at all.

  “Excuse me, Nell?” I glance up and the reporter—the one from weeks back with the inside sources—is too close in front of me on the sidewalk. “Nell Slattery? We…met…we met last month at your welcome-back party. Do you have a second?”

  “Paige,” Anderson says, and she looks at him with surprise, as if she’s only just seeing him there. “This isn’t the time.”

  “What? Oh Jesus, get over yourself, Anderson,” she says. “I’m here for Nell.”

  “This is Paige Connor, she works for the Post,” Anderson says to me, as if he’s actually announcing that this is Paige Connor, who severs little puppy heads.

  “Oh, Paige, it’s nice to meet you.” I run my finger down the list, then hesitate. “I’m sorry, I’m not seeing you on here. I’ll have to confer with my sister to get you inside.” I offer an apologetic shrug. “She’s running the show right now. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “That’s not why I’m here,” she says, fishing in her bag until she pulls out a tape recorder, which she clicks on without asking. “Anderson, will you give us a moment?”

  “No,” he says, “I won’t.” She locks her jaw and gives him a look that suggests she’d like to inflict physical harm.

  “Paige is the reporter for Page Six. We go back a few years,” he says to me.

  “Oh! Listen, Paige, if this is a personal query, you know that I’m open to talking with the press,” I say, “but right now, we’re trying to launch this show with our artist, and I have American Profiles here, and I’ve given them exclusive access until the pieces run. Also”—and I laugh here, one of those trying-too-hard types of chuckles, ha ha, that it feels like a girl who wears a beret might be able to pull off—“you guys haven’t exactly been kind to Anderson these past few weeks. I kind of have a loyalty…”

  “Again, you’re missing the point,” she says, shoving the recorder closer to me, the way that I’ve seen reporters do in the movies.

  “Nell!” Rory yells from the back, right before I hear a splintering crash and spin around just in time to see one of our hand-blown glass vases shattering and skidding every which way across the floor.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ!” I sigh. “Paige, I’m sorry, now’s not a good time. Try back in a few weeks. I’ll do my best to chat with you.”

  I glide past Peter, who is kicking the shards with the insole of his loafers, and step into the back office to unlock the supply closet in search of a broom. When I come up empty, I pull out the step stool and haul myself up toward the top shelf. I’d seen a DustBuster around here somewhere. I shove my hands toward the back, blind to whatever I’m grasping. My fingers work their way over papers, what feel like glossy magazine covers, but no DustBuster. They wind their way along the side and wade over something cool, sharp, gilded. I flex my wrist and yank them down: keys. Three to be exact. I step down and peer more closely. They’re all identical, carved from the same set, triplets who haven’t yet been broken up.

  “Hey,” I say to Rory, walking back into the main gallery. She doesn’t hear me at first, the Journey singles amped up too loud. I step closer. “What are these for?” She’s on her knees, having found a handheld broom and dustpan. She stares up at me.

  “Are you going to help me or not?” she bellows. “We have five minutes until people start officially arriving, and Hope isn’t even here! Can you at least get her on the phone?”

  “Calm down, yes, I will get her on the phone, but these keys—are they yours?”

  She stands, exhales, and unintentionally wipes her hands on her pants, leaving a film of fine dirt across her thighs. I consider pointing this out, but suspect this would only be to both of our detriments.

  Rory grabs the keys and inspects them. “No, I’ve never seen them before. Okay? Now, please go call Hope. Her number is on a sticky on the desk. And then please get back to your post.” She looks toward the door, where Anderson is contemplating the sole of his shoe, and then she sighs in the most dramatic of ways and continues cleaning up the mess.

  I wrap my palm around the key chain, letting the sharp edges pock the outer layer of my skin. These keys seem important, seem to matter somehow. I slink back to the office and sit in my chair, trying to let my brain run loose, to free-associate, as Liv would advocate. It feels almost cliché that a key might unlock something in me, but it also feels intrinsically like I have to try. That’s the one thing that I miss, I realize, leaning back in the chair, closing my eyes, absorbing the coolness around me, the bustle and the music in the gallery fading to a mashed-up hum. I miss that compass. I miss my instincts distinguishing the right path from the rocky one, the one that marked smooth terrain from the one loaded with land mines. In any other life, I’d trust my gut or I’d fall back on my history. And now, I’ve been stripped of everything, but it’s this lack of animal intuition that has left me feeling most at bay. So I rely on my mother and my sister and my husband and my therapist and even my new friend Jamie to guide me, but what is a life, after all, when you can’t guide yourself?

  The gallery goes silent for a moment as the CD skips to a new song.

  “Just a small town girl, livin’ in a lonely world. She took the midnight train goin’ anywhere.”

  Something warm runs through me, a hit, a drug, a burst of adrenaline from my nervous system. I unclench my palm and stare down at these three beacons of promise. They are telling me something. I can feel it. I know it. I can sense it deep in the bowels of that instinct that I am so fervently trying to steer toward the surface. I close my eyes and lean back and listen until finally Rory clears her throat behind me and says, “Don’t bother calling. Hope’s here.”

  21

  I t has been more than three months since the crash now. The calendar has shifted yet again, time unwilling to be pinned down despite the fact that I am stuck in the hazy muddle of inertia. Miraculously, if you didn’t know my story, if you didn’t read People or watch American Profiles, and didn’t probe too deeply into the de
pths of my memory, you’d never even know that I had tumbled from the clouds on that evening of the last day of June.

  Today I sit in Liv’s office, an emerald green sweater and a tailored corduroy blazer layered over my once-broken ribs, and I contemplate how far I’ve come. Even though, quite obviously since my brain is still impaired, I may not have come far at all.

  “You seem distracted,” Liv says.

  I peer around. This is the first time I’ve ventured to her, rather than she to me. Her office is warm, homey, but professional, too. Behind her, there’s a framed photograph of her with a yellow Lab, whom I take to be Watson, and next to it a shot of her with her parents at college graduation. She hasn’t aged much, maybe some finer lines on her forehead, the circles a little more concave under her eyes, but mostly she’s the same. I feel a rush of tears at this idea, that she still has her map, from A to B, that she can glance toward her framed diploma that sits on her back wall and know how she got here. Know why she got here.

  I wave a hand, covering. “I’m okay. Tired. Stayed up too late talking with Peter. He left today for a work retreat. Maybe the fatigue is making me overly emotional.”

  “Talking about what?”

  “Nothing. Everything. We sat on the piano bench, and I played a little, then he played a little, then we played a little together.” I inhale now, getting my grip. “He said we used to do it when we were dating. It sounds silly to say, but it feels like he’s wooing me again.”

  “So things have changed,” she says. A statement, not a question.

  “Maybe things have changed,” I respond, less skeptically than I intended. With honest enthusiasm, actually. Because perhaps they have. Maybe Peter is different, or maybe we’re just different because, according to all parties, I am different. Maybe you can’t change that when you mix blue and red, you’re destined for purple, but what if you alter the hue, modify the depths of the blue? Change your variables, such that both your equation and the solution to that equation shift, too. Before, in my old life, I didn’t need him, and the simple fact is that I do now—mostly for the minutiae, but for the bigger things, too. And so maybe that tweak is enough. Accepting that he isn’t the sole one who needed to change—maybe I did, too.

  “Thereby defeating your theory.”

  “It’s a work-in-progress theory, not something carved in stone.”

  “Fair enough,” she concedes.

  “Also, I think I found a clue. Or something. I found a set of keys in the gallery, and well, it was like I held them and I knew that they were important.”

  “Important how?”

  “I don’t know. With my dad. Or something. I felt like they were tied to another memory, another time, something that’s close to the surface but that I can’t pull out yet.”

  She makes a note on her pad now, and doesn’t respond.

  “Can’t or don’t want to?”

  “Can’t!” I say, annoyed at her intimation. “Why wouldn’t I want to? I look around here, and I’m jealous, mind-blowingly jealous, that you can remember your graduation, your…I don’t know…your classes in medical school!”

  “I’m sure that consciously you do want to remember them,” she says. “But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that nearly every memory you think you have is tied to your dad.”

  “Jesus, I know that you think I need to stop obsessing about him! But I honestly feel like he’s my answer.”

  She looks up at me. “Why?”

  “Why? Why? Aren’t you the therapist? Shouldn’t you be telling me that?” I run my hands down my brilliantly-hued sweater, as if removing excess lint, but really more as a way to show her: Look! I’ve focused on myself! I’m different! I’ve done the hard work, so why the hell won’t you let me focus on him?

  “I can’t tell you that,” she says plainly. If she picks up on my clues, she ignores them. “Because I don’t know that I agree.”

  “Listen.” I exhale. “Like it or not, I need to know who he was. I feel like that can unlock who I was.”

  “Look, Nell, I understand that this is difficult for you. And maybe we need to try something different—art therapy, which you expressed disinterest in. Or maybe music therapy, as I know that’s a passion. Or maybe we can discuss God and your take on why you’re here, why you survived.”

  “Well, it’s not because of God.” I cut her off, slicing my hand in the air.

  “Fine. Point made. But the direction you’re taking”—she pauses and chews the cap to her pen—“well, I think you need to decide which is more important: letting go of your past or uncovering it.”

  “Well, what if they’re the same thing?” I retort.

  “Well, what if they are?” she says back, just before her assistant buzzes her intercom to alert her for her next patient.

  I mull over her point long after I’ve hailed a taxi and made my way home. Come dinnertime, after the microwave dings that it’s nuked my macaroni and cheese, I grab my TV dinner and tumble onto the (ruby red!) couch with a fork in hand. I know that Liv isn’t being unreasonable: that when you lose, very literally, your mind and survive the unsurvivable, the very purpose is to dig as deeply as you can go to unearth the core, the ultimate epicenter, and maybe this means shifting the spotlight more on myself, less on him. It’s easier the other way, though, isn’t it? I think. I’ve made changes, sure. I’ve become less judgmental. I’ve reveled in the newfound joy of life. I’ve overhauled my living room and my wardrobe, and yet…still. Still, I might be stuck right back where I started.

  I test the noodles with my fork. Anderson feels guilt at surviving but I just feel…I contemplate it. I feel lost. That’s it exactly. And maybe I’m so lost because I had no idea who I was in the first place. Rory and Peter and Tina Marquis and my mother have all told me who I was, who I was supposed to be, but how can they really know? How can anyone really know? Can our lives be summed up by the assorted impressions of bystanders? Ice Queen. I ponder my high school nickname. Really? Surely, the Ice Queen couldn’t have been everything about me.

  I set aside the plastic container and reach for the phone.

  My mother picks up, out of breath, on the third ring. Oh Jesus, please don’t let me be interrupting their sex session.

  “Darling! Yes, hello!” she says.

  “Are you busy?”

  “Well,” she hesitates. “A little.” Tate mutters something in the background. “But I’ll make time.” She clearly covers the phone with her hand and says something muffled to Tate.

  “Were you in the middle of yoga?” I ask. Please, please let it be yoga!

  “We can call it yoga if that makes you feel more comfortable, dear.” Oh for god’s sake, it’s no wonder I’m as fucked up as I am!

  “So listen, Mom, I ran into Tina Marquis the other day.”

  “Tina Marquis?” My mother’s voice creaks up a decibel as she tries to place the name. “Oh, the cheerleader from high school? I haven’t thought of her in ages, though I guess that’s not true since I occasionally see her mother at the market. It’s a shame what happened.”

  “What’s a shame? What happened?”

  “Oh, nothing of consequence. Just let herself go. As if she can’t still be living and loving her life in her sixties. Darling, if I have to tell you that I’m in the prime of my life, then you haven’t been listening.”

  “Ugh, Mom, I’m listening. Can this not be about you and your weird fetishes and spirituality?”

  She tuts and sounds offended. “Now, why do you have to go and be contrary?” She seems poised to unleash a diatribe, so I cut her off.

  “Anyway, Tina Marquis said that Dad came back. In high school. For my graduation. Which, quite obviously, is the first I’ve heard of this. So is it true or not?”

  There’s a long swab of dead air on the other end. I watch the cable box tick from 7:33 to 7:34 and glance down to notice my macaroni slowly congealing. Finally, I hear her inhale.

  “That was never proven,” she says. “I really can’
t say.”

  “So it’s possible.”

  “I don’t believe so, no. I would have known. You aren’t just married to a man for seventeen years of your life and don’t know these things.”

  “But you didn’t know he was going to leave. How could you know if he came back?”

  “Because I would have known!” she says, her temper slowly elevating. “I just would have. A wife knows these things. He would have told me, would have wanted to see you and Rory. He wouldn’t have just blown through town without so much as an explanation for why he left!”

  “A wife just knows,” I say flatly. “That’s a ridiculous sort of explanation. Is that to convey that I should I have known about Peter? Done something to prevent him from sleeping with Ginger?”

  “Oh, now, Nelly Margaret! Don’t start testing me! Don’t start personalizing this! But I would have known, and this has nothing to do with you and Peter, and besides, the fact that if he came back for graduation, do you honestly think”—she pushes her breath out now, and I envision her turning a particularly flush shade of purple—“well, do you honestly think that if he were still checking up on you, after all you’ve been through with the crash, he wouldn’t have tried to reach you now?”

  Something sharp detonates inside of me. My heart.

  “Oh,” I say, because it’s all I can manage. This has never occurred to me before this very moment. That my father is out there and hasn’t extended himself even after…even after all of this.

  “Oh, see, now look. I always talk too much when I’m upset!” my mother bleats. “Your sister gets that from me. I just can’t keep my mouth shut. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have put that out there.” She pauses. “But I’ve gone and said it, and really, that’s probably the most cathartic thing for us both. So darling, please, let this go. Let him go. You are doing wonderfully and your marriage is healing, and you’re back at the gallery, and life is looking so up it can’t look any higher.”