The Song Remains the Same Page 19

  I nod, and then I click good-bye, which is for the best so that she can’t hear my tears, either. I kick his sketchbook, the one that Jasper promised was a map back to my father’s world, from the coffee table to the floor, where it splays and flops open like a dead fish.

  I should have trusted that instinct, I realize. To hate him. To exorcise him from my life because, really, who needs a father once you’ve grown and made it on your own?

  It’s only later, once I’ve tucked myself under my sheets, that I realize how wrong I was: not that I didn’t need a father, but that my instinct was never to hate him. That, in fact, it was the opposite: that I loved him so much that I was never capable of fully letting him go. I stare at the blackened ceiling, waiting for sleep to come, haunted by the notion that if I can’t trust my own instincts, then, well, what else have I got?

  22

  “There’s a Light That

  Never Goes Out”

  —The Smiths

  M aybe he’s dead,” Peter says when he calls me the next day from his retreat in the Berkshires, and I am weaving my way through foot traffic. I haven’t asked if Ginger will be there because it seems almost beside the point, but still, a niggling part of me wonders. The old me wants to ask—is Ginger there?—but the new me tempers her, trying to be more confident, trying to move on from the scars of the past.

  “Is that supposed to be helpful?” I press my finger into my ear to ward off the car horns. It’s started to drizzle, the bleak clouds hovering too close, bearing down, threatening suffocation.

  “I’m just saying. Maybe he’s dead, and that’s why he didn’t call you when the crash happened.”

  An umbrella nearly takes my eye out as a fellow pedestrian jockeys for sidewalk space, and I spin around and flip him off with my free hand. But he’s already pushed beyond me, unaware of his intrusion, unaware of my overreaction to it.

  “He can’t be dead.” I sigh, annoyed at the chilliness of Peter’s suggestion but simultaneously disheartened because death seems like the only decent explanation to prove me wrong. “Even if he were the most reclusive of recluses, someone would have known. It would have been reported. We’d know.”

  “Well, then, this doesn’t make sense.”

  “None of this makes sense!” I say a little too loudly while waiting for the light, and the two men next to me, hipsters in their twenties with scarves tied in perfect knots around their necks, baseball hats with ironic graphics tugged low on their faces, turn to stare. Then they do double takes at the recognition that, yes, it’s me—the freak from People, the anomaly from American Profiles—and my eyes bulge back at them. Just move the hell along, there’s nothing to see here. So they adjust their hats even lower and step off the curb, despite the still-red light.

  Peter and I click good-bye, and I shove my phone into my bag, pulling out my iPod, stuffing the earbuds in. I filter through the music, looking to match the angry beat of my steps. I settle on the Smiths and keep moving.

  It’s been less than a full day since my conversation with my mom, and already I can feel myself coming unhinged in a way that I haven’t been since the immediate aftermath of the accident. The grayish, dour me rearing her head despite my best efforts to shove her back. My mother’s revelation—that after months of my trying to pin myself to my father, perhaps he never wanted to be pinned down in the first place—has set me off, a skein of yarn coming completely unwound.

  Last night, after sleep refused me, I succumbed to Anderson’s helpful text to “grab a six-pack and just let it go.” I threw my phone onto Peter’s side of the bed, tossed the sheets back, and slunk toward the kitchen. I started with the six-pack, despite my medication, despite the side effects. Truth be told, it felt good. To be loose, to blunt the endless chatter in my head. Armed with the alcohol, I plunked down on the piano bench and played—spontaneously, freely—until finally, yes, I adhered to the second part of the text, and let go. I called Jasper Aarons and left him a long, expletive-filled message about what he could tell my dad should they ever come in contact, and then I stormed around the apartment, scooping up my father’s sketchbook, tearing out at least half the pages and tossing them into the garbage bin, the lid slamming with approval and finality. I pulled out my childhood pictures, excising him from my photo albums—not, to be fair, that he was in all too many pictures to begin with. But a few, yes. A posed family shot out by the woodshed. A hazy captured moment during an Arizona vacation, a drop from the nearby pool blurring the outer corner of the lens, the sun reflecting idyllically to project a portrait of the perfect family unit.

  And then there was one of us that I’d missed the first time, tucked in between the pages, not in the plastic sleeves themselves. It must have been taken that summer, the summer of the white house, the one buried somewhere in my memory. Who manned the camera? Perhaps me, because the photo was of my dad, sleeping, solitary, content. In the background, I could barely make out a sliver of a painting in progress. He has a mustache and a goatee, which he appears to have grown for this occasion alone, as he’s scruffy but clean-shaven in every other image, and his cheeks are tanned, his eyelashes thick and protective. There’s a baseball bat on the floor underneath the couch on which he sleeps and splatters of paint, well, everywhere. His fingers, the pillows, the hardwood next to the slippers near the sofa.

  I stared at the photograph, with the fourth beer blurring my edges, and cocked my head, a rage sparking through me like dynamite. Rory claimed that it took me months the first time around to believe that he had gone. I flipped my palm over and stared at the scar entrenched deep in my skin. And here we were all over again: my refusing to acknowledge the simple truths. I had fallen from the sky and my dad hadn’t come to try to heal me. Hadn’t abandoned his selfish need for solitude to wander out into the bright lights of the world and rescue his little girl.

  Well, fuck that. Well, fuck you!

  I popped the lid to the fifth beer and fell, exhausted, onto the sofa. It turns out that my theory was right all along: people don’t change. Me, my dad, no one. Screw the red couch, screw the sweaters and the cute little blazers and the closet that now looked like the underside of a rainbow. Screw the new, fabulous me. Screw it, screw her, screw him.

  Today on the street, I spot Tina Marquis under her pink umbrella. The rain is picking up now, and I shuffle as quickly as the sidewalk congestion and the ache in my torso allow. The change in weather makes my bones hurt in a way that they didn’t before the accident, as if they’re all imploring me to stay in bed, dive deep and safely under the covers.

  “Sweetie!” Tina says, pulling me close by the elbow. “You’re practically a drowned rat. The first rule of this weather: always come prepared.”

  It’s impossible not to smile at her genuine, openhearted kindness, despite my mood, despite everything. I pop out my headphones. I can see why we were friends way back when.

  “That’s what happens when you lose your mind. You forget the basics,” I say, matting back my damp hair, brushing the wayward pellets off the shoulders of my trench coat.

  “So I told him that we’d be in and out,” she says. I nod. This seems like a Hail Mary anyway.

  “Thanks for doing this,” I say. “I’m trying to put things back together, but it’s starting to feel like they’re impossible to connect.”

  “Listen, Nell.” She’s suddenly morose, that chameleon rearing her head. “We were best friends. And then we weren’t. But we were for a long time, and if I can help you—even with some easy favor like calling up the client to show you the space you were interested in—I’ll do it. That’s no skin off my back.”

  “Well, I know you have places to be.”

  Tina unlatches the outside door and enters a security code into the panel on the side of the foyer.

  “And I know that you’re terrible at asking for help. So I’m hardly going to shirk it when you finally do.”

  “Always? Was I always terrible?”

  She pokes the Up button for the
elevator. “Hmmm, not always. I don’t need to tell you that you became, well, more independent when your dad left. But then, who could blame you?” She shrugs, holds the open door, and I step inside. “I didn’t.”

  “I just cut you off? Like, black and white?” I remember my mom’s words from way back in the hospital: We all have our faults. Yours is that life is in black and white.

  “It wasn’t just me, so I didn’t take it personally.” She smiles, and we both watch the overhead numbers as they tick upward. “Being a teenager is brutal. We were all dealing with our own crap.”

  “What was your crap?”

  “Mine? Oh, the usual: eating disorder.” She looks at me, her shoulders rising, then falling. “Bulimia through sophomore year in college.”

  “Wouldn’t it be nice not to have our own crap?” I say, recognizing fully that losing your memory of that old crap is precisely the opportunity to do just that.

  “The crap makes us what we are,” she says, then shakes her head and laughs. “Or maybe that’s just a pile of bullshit left over from too many self-help books.”

  “Maybe.” I grin back. “Maybe that’s exactly what it is.”

  The door dings open on the fifth floor.

  “Just down here to the left,” she says, pointing the way. I survey the hallway. It’s nondescript in the way that a lot of New York apartment buildings are. Beige carpet, dull overhead lighting, muted wallpaper with an innocuous faded stripe. A sad-looking pumpkin cutout bought at a local drugstore adorns one of the doors as we pass it by, a pathetic attempt to brighten the hallway for Halloween, still weeks away. Tina stops in front of apartment number 513, pulls an enormous set of keys from her purse, and tinkers with the lock until she finds the right one. The latch unbolts with a confident click.

  “You loved this place as soon as you saw it,” she says, our heels echoing on the hardwood through the foyer. “You said it was almost animalistic, how much it spoke to you. I remember that quote because it seemed so poetic.”

  I step forward into the space. It is expansive, radiating light despite the dreary, depleted day, with soaring ceilings and that original brick wall and fireplace that Tina had told me about back in the pizza parlor. The beamed ceilings resonate somewhere inside of me, and I stare upward, wondering why they look so familiar, why this whole scene puts me both instantly at ease and entirely on edge. I move toward the wall of windows, with their view of the East River. The glass is streaked with threads of rain, and below, the river looks treacherous, roiling from the storm overhead.

  I close my eyes and imagine. I can still hear the Smiths in my mind, providing me a sound track, a map to what I am dreaming.

  “It’s not my home, it’s their home. And I’m not welcome no more.”

  I must have first seen this place when? Five or six months ago? April. It would have been April, right on the cusp of spring. I open my eyes again and envision the river calm, welcoming, and then it comes to me.

  Of course.

  I remember it clearly, that summer. This wasn’t in the main house, it was…where? In my father’s studio. I know this on instinct. In my memory, the rug beneath my feet, it’s the same one that’s now in my living room. I am barefoot, and the fabric isn’t as worn as it is today, but still it’s soothing, tickling the rough skin of my arches. The Smiths, just like today, are thundering in the background, but I’m unsure if this is a crossover from my synapses or if this, too, is real. There is a picture window in front of me, swallowing up nearly the entire front façade of the workspace, and out just beyond it is a body of water. A lake? A river? It is a wildly beautiful, glorious day, and my thirteen-year-old self is itching to dive into it, so I have gone in search of my dad to come out and play. My dad…I search my brain as I stare out at the rain-soaked skyline and try to home in on my father. There he is. He is in the corner, leaning against the brick wall of his studio, pressed together like a ball, a fetus. He is sobbing, moaning, emitting sounds of an injured seal. There are pools of paint splattered every which way on the wall, a smashed easel at his feet. A lonely, empty dartboard has fallen on the floor just beyond the fringe of the rug. My childhood self watches him from just inside the door frame, and gingerly I take a step back, then another, creeping so I don’t betray what I’ve seen. I take one step more, and my ankle gives way, rolling under itself until I, too, am crashing to the floor. A baseball bat—the picture in my album—spirals next to me, and I hear my dad jolt from the other room. Suddenly, he is over me, his shadow casting a pallor from the bright rays brought in by the outside sun. He is pale underneath his goatee; the circles under his eyes are etched in black.

  “Get out of here, Nell,” he says, his voice weary, with no malice behind it.

  “Don’t be sad, Daddy.” I push myself to a stand.

  “Some things can’t be helped,” he says, already turning and moving to fold himself back into the corner.

  An explosion of thunder roils over the East River, and as quickly as it came, the memory is gone.

  On the way out, after Tina has bolted the door and stuffed her cartoon-size key chain back in her bag, I remember my own set of keys. I dig into the front pocket of my purse.

  “You seem to be an expert in locksmanship,” I say, placing them in her hand. “These. In your opinion, what are they from?”

  She flips each one over in her palm, inspecting them like a biologist, running the tip of her index finger over the grooves.

  “They’re house keys,” she says. “Nothing like this is from a New York apartment, and they’re too big for a safe-deposit box or locker or storage facility.”

  “But I don’t have a house,” I say flatly.

  “Well,” she says, just as the elevator plunges us downward, “someone does.”

  23

  J amie and I convene on Saturday for our next interview for American Profiles. The producers want to take advantage of the perfect blast of October air by shooting in Central Park.

  “They want to get that melancholy stroll with the leaves crunching in the background, your face looking pensive,” says Anderson when he picks me up in the town car that the show provides. He’s insisted on coming, to stand by and ensure that I’m not in over my head—after all, you’re the girl who saved my life, he says, our little inside, though still truthful, joke—and that Jamie doesn’t take advantage, even though I’ve assured him that he wouldn’t, that he won’t.

  “Still won’t reconsider?” I ask Anderson. I know that Jamie has implored him once again for a sit-down, told him that, like it or not, he is part of this story, part of my story.

  “Still won’t,” Anderson says. “No more press. No more unnecessary press.”

  “You realize you sound a bit like an ass when you say that. Like you’re beating them off with a stick.”

  “In case you haven’t read, I am a bit of an ass.” Anderson shakes his head. “Or I was. I’m trying to be better. Not believe the hype. Remind myself that being the star of a now-canceled television show and a few so-so movies really isn’t all that, not bringing world peace or anything.”

  “Though Spielberg is calling,” I say, scooting closer, resting my head on his shoulder, letting my eyes float shut under the weight of my exhaustion. The phone rang three times last night between 1:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m.—hang-ups each time—and I never fully ebbed back into sleep. Instead, I lay there and wondered who was on the other end: Wrong number? Ginger? No, no, not Ginger. My father? That last one seemed the most preposterous, but still, I wondered. At 4:00 a.m., I gave in to the insomnia, furious at myself for even indulging in the fantasy that my mother was wrong—that my dad, after all these years, was extending himself. I rose and brewed the strongest coffee I could stomach. Since five o’clock, I’ve been sitting on my couch, staring at my father’s painting over the mantel, waiting for Anderson to arrive.

  The driver drops us off at the Sixty-sixth Street entrance near the old Tavern on the Green. Three horse-drawn carriages wait in the cul-de-sac, the ani
mals looking both annoyed and depressed, their owners smoking cigarettes on a nearby bench. The sidewalks and abutting curbs are littered with gourd-colored leaves, and the air smells like burning pumpkin, like someone on Central Park West has fired up his wood-burning stove high enough to scent the whole city. Jamie is standing by the traverse with my mother and Rory, both of whom will be imparting their own versions of my story on air. They wave in unison, and we cross to meet them.

  My mother kisses Anderson hello and pulls me into a tight embrace. I swallow what smells like patchouli oil and clamp down on my gag reflex.

  “Are you nervous?” she asks. “Because I remembered something you used to do when you were nervous as a girl, in case you are, in case you need to relax.” I pull back and look at her. “It’s nothing, just something small. An idiosyncrasy of sorts.” She bats her hands, and I can see that clearly, she’s nervous. “Anyway, you used to sing to yourself. Made-up songs. All sorts of here-and-there melodies and lyrics. I’d come into your room on the first day of school or before a swim meet or whatnot, and you’d be staring out the window, just lost in your own place, singing.”

  “That’s sweet, Mom.” I kiss her on the cheek. I can sense how that might put me at ease, how music could have been my balm, and I’m grateful that she’s offered this to me. It’s not so difficult to have gratitude, I realize. Even as the new me and the old me struggle to find a middle ground, still, I can evolve somewhere in that space between them. I kiss my mother again, riding this wave of appreciation for her, for my life.

  “It’s not much,” she shrugs. “But maybe it will help soothe your nerves.”

  “I’m not nervous, but thank you all the same.”

  I wave to Rory, who gestures nonchalantly back at me and sort of wrinkles her nose at Anderson as a way of greeting. He mirrors much the same back. There’s a strange tension between them, has been since the gallery show, and I narrow my eyes and assess.