The Song Remains the Same Read online

  This entire time, I’d counted on that: those little shards of memory easing their way back in. But what if that’s it, there are only slivers, nothing in its entirety? The idea of failure weaves into my psyche, sweat pulsing from my underarms. What if this trip yields nothing? What if my father’s sketchbook means nothing?

  I open his book once again in my lap, my fingers tracing those familiar eyes, the emotion behind them both resonant and haunting.

  Think, Nelly, think! Who is this? What does it mean to you? I try to force the circuits in my brain to connect, to somehow rewire themselves and magically grant me, after months of fumbling in the darkness, a light.

  I ease the seat back and shut my eyes, trying again, trying harder, trying to knock down the walls to whatever it is that I’m protecting, refusing to let back in. What else is there left to lose? Nothing. There is nothing else to be taken from me, so by god, this is me at my lowest. I implore my will to relent. Relent. Because from here, there is nowhere else to go.

  The static on the radio blares then fades, and then the music is back, swarming the car, swarming me. It’s a song that Rory has thought to include on my iPod, so the melodies, the harmonies are already part of me, the lyrics like a vision: Van Morrison, rusty and croaking and wonderful.

  “When that foghorn blows you know I will be coming home, And when that foghorn whistle blows I got to hear it, I don’t have to fear it.”

  Something sparks within me, and it spreads like a flame of joy throughout my veins. And then I can see it, I can remember it—the music from both now and before, melting together, a swirl of past and present, memory and reality, now and then.

  “Hey!” I hear a voice, startling me. Anderson is outside the open window.

  “You’re already done?” I ask.

  “It’s been half an hour.” He pokes his head closer. “What have you been doing?”

  I stare down at the sketch, to the one thing that I’ve been running from maybe this entire time.

  “Oh my god,” I say, peering closer, and then, yes, I remember. “I know where we’re going. Come on, get in. I don’t need directions. I know the way.”

  Behind the house, there is a dock. This was what my memory had unlocked for me. This is what my ears—nearly disconnected from my brain—had sifted through the black noise for me.

  I am in a pink bathing suit, with a stripe of flowers running up each side. My legs still are skinny, gangly, my hips haven’t yet formed a full curve, my breasts are mostly small buds. There is a glaring red scab on my temple. My arms are scrawny and bruised on the biceps, like the tomboy in me who maybe played tackle football with Rory that summer. There is a boom box on the dock, its volume turned up to full tilt. Van Morrison is singing “Into the Mystic,” just like he was in the car, his voice both aching and tender, from a mix tape that I have made for the summer. Journey, the Police, Jackson Browne, Van Morrison. They’re all on there. Of course. It’s so obvious, I nearly want to throttle myself for not seeing it sooner—that the music was the key. Always.

  “Come in!” a voice shouts from the water. “Last one to the raft owes the other a Coke.” I look out and see a rash of sandy hair bobbing and weaving, arms lapping each other in perfect form. So I take off at a full sprint, hurling myself into the cool, dark lake, pushing my legs as fast as they can propel me under the silent water until my lungs demand air. I resurface and see him already up there—squirming up atop the wooden raft moored fifteen feet away.

  “You owe me a Coke!” he yells, smiling, his dimples cratering into his cheeks.

  “Over my dead body,” I shout back, sipping the lake water, spitting it back out as I paddle closer. “You got a head start. That’s cheating.”

  I’m nearly at the raft when I hear someone calling me from shore. I turn and tread water, my pigtails wrapping around my neck like damp snakes.

  “Nelly! Come on!” Rory whines. “You weren’t supposed to get wet again! You have to come in now.”

  I turn and look back at the boy, his face a shadow of what it was just thirty seconds before.

  “Come on. Now!” she yells. “Mom’s here. And she’s ready to take us home.”

  “Seriously? You just listened to something…and remembered? And now you know where we’re going?” Anderson says.

  We’re nearly there now—thirty miles or so outside of Charlottesville. I remember the roads, the smell of the fields, the pastures, and though I can’t pinpoint why, I know how to get there.

  “Can you just drive faster?” I say, partially because I can’t articulate it myself, partially because it doesn’t matter: I do know, I saw something, and I want to get there as soon as possible to confirm it. Dr. Macht had expressed this way back when, almost four months and a lifetime ago, he explained that maybe there was a block, a straitjacket that I’d sewn myself into, and now, maybe I can find a way to set myself free from it, too. Everyone has told me that I’d always been a musician, always had that gift (“You got that from me!” my mother had said), but my father had pushed me toward art. And then when he left, I’d pushed it aside completely, barring the small gasps of bliss from the radio, a few binges of karaoke with Samantha, a stolen moment with Peter when we first fell in love.

  And perhaps now, it’s the key to finding my way back. To what? To who I was before. To who I can be after.

  “So is everything back? All of it, all of your memory?”

  “Not everything.” I shake my head.

  “But you’re close,” he says.

  “Maybe,” I concede, watching the whoosh of the trees blend into each other as we speed by, wondering who the boy was, if he was my first love, if he loved me back. You owe me a Coke! What else did we owe each other?

  “It’s strange that your mom wouldn’t have just flat out told you the address, told you about this place,” Anderson says after we’ve fallen into silence for a bit, the wheels and the engine our background noise. I turn up the radio, that same oldies station following us down the highway. “Wouldn’t she have thought to look here for him, your dad?”

  “Who’s to say that she didn’t? That she didn’t find him, that she didn’t know?”

  “True enough.”

  “Who’s to say anything at this point?”

  He goes quiet at this, and then quickly glances toward me.

  “You think I’m wrong?” I say.

  He shakes his head. “No. No, not wrong at all.” He wants to say more but thinks better of it.

  “I don’t know,” I say, a non sequitur of sorts, talking mostly to myself. “He loved this place.”

  On the radio, the DJ who has the evening shift clears his throat on air, detailing tomorrow’s weather, then reading a kitschy advertisement for a local car dealership. “Here’s your next set of oldies, coming to you commercial-free thanks to Dwayne’s Custom Chevrolet,” he says.

  I don’t even recognize the tune until a minute or so in, right when the chorus is about to break. It’s following me, this song, this curse, this birthright.

  “You know my parents named me for this song,” I say. “About the loneliest woman in the world. My dad, for a while, as cliché as this sounds, well, John Lennon was his muse. Until he outgrew that phase. But by then it was too late. I was already named.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Anderson says. “No parent would do that to a child.”

  “Ah Buddha, there you are again. It’s true. I looked it up on Wikipedia.”

  Anderson laughs. “So no one has told you that you can’t believe anything you read on there?” He glances over to me. “Maybe he just really loved the name and then wanted to look cool by dropping the Beatles into it. You know, coolness by association.”

  “You might know a thing or two about that,” I say.

  “I might. We artists are afflicted with the desire for coolness by osmosis.” He reaches over and touches my arm. “Besides, it’s only a song.”

  “But what if, as ridiculous as it sounds, it was my destiny? Who names the
ir kid after the loneliest woman in the world?”

  “So what if it is true. Parents do worse things,” he says, and we both nod, an acknowledgment that indeed they do. “And besides, I thought we decided that we don’t believe in destiny, that things don’t have to happen for a reason. That that’s all total bullshit.” He looks over at me now and smiles.

  “But what if it’s not?” I don’t smile back.

  “Yeah,” he says, “but what if it is?”

  Anderson kills the engine in the driveway. A solitary light near the front door casts just enough of a glow to barely make out the house, which is dark but doesn’t appear deserted. There is a red-and-green Indian blanket strewn across the bench on the porch, trash cans outside of the garage, a rake leaning up against the side wood paneling: all signs of life inside.

  “So you’re just going to go up and knock?” Anderson asks.

  “Yes.” I exhale. “I am just going to go up and knock.”

  “Listen.” His voice catches, and he folds his hand over mine. I tear my eyes from the front porch to meet his.

  “What?” I say when he falters. “You okay?”

  “It’s nothing.” His hand is off mine now, and he waves it through the air, dismissing whatever has gone unspoken. “We’ll talk another time.”

  “Okay.”

  “Remind me,” he says, “in case I forget.”

  “You’re not going to tell me you love me, are you? That I’ve finally ensnared the ungettable Anderson Carroll?” I am still staring at the porch, wondering how I am going to find the strength to ascend it. Now, with this banter, I’m just buying myself time.

  “No.” He laughs. “There are things to talk about before I profess my love for you. Just remind me, okay?”

  We fall quiet.

  “Want me to go with you?” Anderson asks.

  I wobble my head but force a weary smile. No. People have clanged too much in my ear as of late. If I’d trusted myself earlier, maybe it wouldn’t have all become such a mess. This, I’ll do alone. Not because I have to go alone, always. But because this time, I must.

  I collect my breath, which is moving quickly through my core, my heart accelerating along with my trepidation.

  “Good luck,” Anderson says, leaning over, kissing my cheek. “I’ll be right here if you need backup.”

  I click the door open. The Virginia air is surprisingly cool, with a bite that nips my cheeks and a scent of dead pine. The gravel gives way under my feet as I steer toward the house, each step crunching beneath me toward what I can feel in my bowels is my destiny, what this whole thing has maybe been leading up to.

  The house itself, even in the dim light of night, is exactly as I remembered it, exactly how I painted it, and just before stepping up onto the front porch stairs, I pause, lean back, and stare. The paint is peeling around the second-floor windows, and the black shutters are tightly shut in the attic, but other than that, it is as if I am thirteen again, remembering for the first time, remembering all over again.

  It’s amazing, I realize, the details that your mind can store: lyrics to every song you’ve ever known, even if you haven’t heard it in twenty years; scents that can place you right back at your sweet sixteen or your first Christmas spent with your husband; small details—a run of notes in a melody, a hint of cinnamon in your apple cider—that embed themselves in your brain forever. Unless, of course, you’re tossed from the sky, and your memory is tossed with it. But even then. Yes, even then, some of those details remain. Bread crumbs to help you make your way back.

  The porch boards creak as I ascend the stairs, my hands trembling from a dangerous combination of adrenaline and nerves. I turn to glance back at the hopeful face behind me. Anderson peers out the car window, and I can see him nodding his encouragement. Suddenly, something shifts, and I hover over the porch railing, wondering if, for a fleeting second, I might puke. But then I gather myself and push up the final two steps to the front door.

  There’s no bell, so I grab the knocker and rap three times.

  Nothing.

  I don’t even realize that I’m holding my breath until I hear myself exhale loudly, my entire torso shaking, like I’m exorcising a demon. I wait another ten seconds, and still nothing, so I turn on my heels, the weight of defeat, of the fact that this whole concept was utterly foolhardy, totally ridiculous, like it could have been as easy as this! Why did I start listening to myself now when I’ve more than proven that I have no fucking concept what I’m talking about!—and start back to the SUV. But then I plunge my hand into my pocket and remember: the keys. Found on the top shelf of the gallery. They gave me hope, they gave me a glimmer, a sense that I might be able to tie a bow on this just yet. They are what set me off in the first place. I can’t have come all this way and not at least try.

  I pull them out, assessing which one to slide in first, even though they’re all identical, when I hear it: the latch unbolting on its own, and I stare up to face the reaper of what? My past, my present, my future. Yes, all of these. The foyer light inside flips on, and then the porch light, too. I squint, trying to adjust to the changes.

  A man, handsome in a rugged way, with crinkles around his eyes, and tanned cheeks even in dying days of October, swings open the door. His face goes slack when he sees me.

  “Oh my god,” he says. “You came.”

  27

  S he looks exactly like he remembers her from nineteen years ago, though he wonders if this is accurate, since he’s seen her on the news, seen her wary face in People magazine. Maybe he’s mixing up what he remembers and what is reality, he thinks, once she’s seated on the couch, sipping the coffee that he’s brewed at this hour, and trying not to stare. But it’s been two decades. It’s hard not to.

  “So you live here,” she says, “not my dad?”

  “Yes,” he says, for the third time. He’s read about her amnesia, so he knows that it shouldn’t be as jarring as it is, but everything, the lot of it—her showing up, her void of memory—well, he might be as shell-shocked as she is.

  “And these keys?” She sets down the coffee and jangles a familiar set of keys in the air. “You sent them to me?”

  He nods again. They’ve been over this in the very first minute she arrived.

  “Yes, back in March.” He clears his throat. “With a note, too.”

  “I didn’t find a note.” Her brow creases, like this might be the most perplexing thing in all of this. That she didn’t find a note.

  “I sent one.” He shrugs, then wishes he hadn’t, hoping he’s not coming off as cavalier. “I remember writing it, telling you that my mother had died, that she’d have wanted you to know that, and know that the house was still here and that you were always welcome.” He sighs. “I never heard back from you, and, well, I wanted to be in touch when I saw you on the news, but I took your silence as a sign that you didn’t want to hear from me. Didn’t want to revisit that chapter, which, I mean, just to be clear, I don’t blame you for.”

  Shit, he thinks. He knew he should have followed up. Shouldn’t have let his own crap stop him.

  “Your mom is Heather.”

  “Yes,” he says. “You remember her?”

  “Kind of, vaguely. In a dream…” She stops to think, wrapping her arms around herself, like she’s still cold from the outside air. “I don’t understand, though. I have so many questions.”

  He eyes her, wondering how much he can share in a singular conversation that won’t send her off the deep end. She seems different than who she used to be, though really, after what she’s been through, who wouldn’t be?

  “Your friend, in the car, should you bring him inside?”

  She startles, like she’s forgotten, then stands abruptly, rattling the table with her knee, and upends the coffee onto the rug.

  “It’s fine.” He waves a hand. “You go get him, I’ll clean up. I’ll get more drinks—I think I have some Coke and wine in the fridge. It’s all I have. I wasn’t expecting visitors on a Mo
nday night.”

  She angles her head, faltering for a moment, staring at him in the way that a child does a zoo animal.

  “Cokes.” She says it like she’s hypnotized.

  “Yes…Cokes. I have some cans in the basement.”

  “You—you’re the kid from the dock.”

  “I’m sorry? I’m not following.” He steps toward her and guides her back to the couch. She is frail—he can feel that when he moves his hand over her hip—and paler than he remembers. Her eyes have faded—they have a gray hue behind them that wasn’t there. Her cheekbones are sharper, which makes her nose look sharper, too.

  “Earlier today, I heard something—a song—and remembered you,” she says. “Of you down at a dock, racing me to a raft, owing me—or rather me owing you—a Coke.”

  His face glazes over for a moment, and then he grins, widely, like maybe he did when he was thirteen, too.

  “Yeah, that was me.” He laughs. “You almost always lost, though not for lack of trying.”

  “And we”—she hesitates, her forehead wrinkling in thought—“I’m sorry, were you, like, my first boyfriend?”