The Song Remains the Same Page 26

  “How long did he stay?”

  “Off and on for a few months. I didn’t ask questions.”

  “And then he left?” It’s an assumption phrased as a question.

  “And then he left,” he says. “He and my mom made their peace, and she begged me not to hate him, and I swear to god, she believed it, she truly, honestly loved him. And because she was dying, and because I was so far past hatred by that point, I promised her that I wouldn’t. We never heard from him again.”

  “Not even when she died?”

  “I don’t think his forte was showing up during a catastrophe,” he says plainly. “He was never a man to rise to the occasion—good or bad, despite whatever his devout art-collecting followers believe about him.”

  And yet, I worshipped him, too. Ignored all of those signs, all of the neglect, because when he loved you, for those rare glorious moments that he gave himself to you, it was all you ever needed. A drug in and of itself.

  I think of that rumor that Tina Marquis passed on, a real-life, high-stakes game of telephone. Could he really have come back for something as simple as my high school graduation? Would he really have been there to mark the occasion, when all other evidence points to the contrary? No, probably not. Just another hallucinogenic that I swallowed up and hoped to somehow make a reality.

  Behind us, something stirs in the kitchen, and we both turn in unison to see my mother gaping at us from behind the glass door, like we’re zoo animals. Her standard-issue muumuu has been replaced by age-appropriate dark-rinsed jeans, a robin’s-egg-blue oxford, and a tasteful (tasteful!) violet neck scarf. Her skin is blotchy and her eyes are swollen, and part of me breaks in half for her, because I can vaguely remember who she was before all of this came undone, and how difficult it must have been for her to swirl herself into someone she thought was entirely different than before.

  “She did come get you,” Wes says softly. “I know that she’s had her share of screwups, but through everything, she was actually the grown-up who always came to get you. Figuratively or not.”

  I start to agree—the new me would want to agree with him, until I remember that she has held on to secrets for so long that they must be part of her, integral to her very being, like her blood or her liver or her heart. And that part of me that breaks for her seals itself all the way back up.

  Before I can articulate an answer, there is a distorted crash from behind where my mother stands, out toward the front of the house. She swivels toward the noise, then rushes toward it, and Wes and I, after a moment’s hesitation, do the same. It’s a family trait, of course, rushing forward toward disaster.

  “What the fuck, man?” Peter is yelling from the front porch. He is on his ass, barreled over, and nursing what appears to be a bleeding lower lip. He touches it gingerly, then winces. “Seriously, man, what the fuck?”

  Anderson has backed off toward the corner of the porch, his left foot resting on the toppled bench, his arms folded, assessing the situation like this is some sort of movie shoot, and he is waiting for his close-up. His ever-so-perfect stubble frames his locked jaw. Oh my god, I realize, he thinks that he is fighting on my behalf. Like I need him to fight on my behalf!

  “Jesus, Anderson, what happened?” I manage.

  “He confronted me,” he says, throwing his palms in the air. Hey, don’t look at me, I’m innocent.

  “What’s your problem with Anderson?” Rory says from behind me. She scoots beside me, and here we are all, gravitating around this mess.

  “This asshole convinced her to leave,” Peter says, steadying himself and rising. The back of his hand never leaves his lip, and I can see the bright spread of blood washing across his wrist.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Anderson says. “Like I had anything to do with it!”

  “He had nothing to do with it, Peter! Didn’t you get my note? Didn’t you see the Post?” I say. Is he the one person on the planet who doesn’t read Page Six? “If you want to blame someone, blame yourself.”

  “You didn’t want to leave until he started hanging around, started being there when I couldn’t,” Peter says, and for the first time in, well, ever, I start to pity him. Is this what we were like before the crash? Making excuses? Deflecting blame? Working so hard to avoid the obvious that the work itself became more exhausting than anything else? “I tried, you know! I tried to be there every step of the way until you got better.”

  “I haven’t gotten better!” I gripe, and then I realize that maybe I have. Maybe I have gotten a hell of a lot better, and I’ve only been holding on to my amnesia because I’ve been working hard to avoid the alternative. The memories. The journey. But I am standing here now, strong, capable, and perhaps it’s time to accept where I’ve been, what I’ve gone through, what comes next. I step toward Peter, who looks so small now, cowering up against the front porch beams. “Besides, you’re forgetting,” I say, my voice quieting, “I kicked you out the first time, too.”

  “But you forgave me.” He starts to cry now, knowing that it’s over.

  “Don’t you get it?” I shout, and everyone startles, even Anderson, who has been practicing his best menacing brood, even Rory, who is shifting her weight back and forth, debating the details of what exactly has transpired between Anderson and me and what this means for her own confessions. Too late, I think. Too late for all of that. For everything.

  “Don’t I get what?” Peter says, and I can see in him that he really doesn’t. That none of them do. Only Wes. They don’t get that I can remember now, that I’ve figured out how to guide myself back into my cerebral space, and that, despite their best efforts to stop me, I’m going to dredge it all back up.

  “I know that you’re full of shit!” I say. “I know that I didn’t forgive you, that I never intended to forgive you!”

  His eyes grow to orbs, and mine do, too. To be honest, I didn’t even realize that I had indeed remembered this detail—that, like Wes suggested just a moment ago, the history was tucked in my brain, waiting to be cajoled out. I can recall it so clearly now—Rory telling me about the disgusting mess, Peter professing his love for Ginger, his showing up on that one night when I was nursing my sadness with wine, and how we fell into bed together. And how I recognized, almost immediately, that taking him back was a cataclysmic mistake. And then there was baby…oh god, the baby—yes, I was going to keep it and raise it on my own.

  I spin around to see the faces of my family who have led me too far outside of this pasture. “Don’t all of you get it? What this has taken from me? What all of you have taken from me?”

  They stare back at me, and I can see that they don’t get it at all. And then I am crying, real and hard and purging tears. Mourning the months that I wasted after the crash trusting them, tuning my ear toward them, when I should have been listening to my own inner beat instead. Mourning, too, my own culpability in this: that it was so much easier to listen to them than do the heavy lifting that was actually required. If I’m to blame them, I must also blame myself. Though that does little to soothe anything, to make anything any better.

  “We were trying to help,” Rory offers.

  “Bullshit,” I say. “You were trying to help yourselves.”

  “Nelly,” my mom interjects. “Please.”

  I shake my head at her—do not even think of saying anything else—and wipe the snot from my nose, before I turn to flee down the steps and out to the dirt road, away, for once, from catastrophe. As I fly down the steps, the sides of my ribs flare, a quiet reminder that I may have healed, but somewhere inside of me, there are still plenty of scars.

  32

  I find a quaint little coffee shop about thirty minutes later in town. In my haste, I hadn’t thought to bring my wallet, but the cashier, who wears a waitress uniform with the name Mimi sewn on in blue thread, gives me a once-over and says, “Hey, I know you. You’re Francis Slattery’s kid.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been on TV.” I sigh, scooting out a chair, its iron leg
s scraping the tile floor. I think of Jamie, and how he duped me, and then I consider that part of me wanted to be duped. To believe that Operation Free Nell Slattery could be as simple as I thought it could be. That somehow pouring my trust onto this relative stranger could offer me answers that really only I had. I’ll call him when I get back, I resolve. Tell him that I wish him luck, even though we’ll never be friends, that he’ll never earn a morsel of my loyalty again.

  “Yeah, I’ve seen you on TV,” she says, pouring me a mug of black coffee without my even asking. “But I remember you from when you summered here, too.”

  “You do?” I say, squinting my eyes, wondering just how old is she anyway. She can’t be more than midfifties, with a round head of brown hair that looks like she wears a shower cap to bed. Her breasts are too large for her smaller frame, and her skin is leathery, but in a way that suits her. Mostly, despite all of these things, she looks content. Content. How far do I have to go to find that? I tried everything, it seems: embracing my childhood, running from it, pretending it never existed, and yet still. Content? No, I never found that.

  “You and Wes, you were always causing some sort of trouble,” she says, cutting off my thoughts. “You were in town a lot, rode your bikes in for ice cream.”

  “And my dad? Have you heard much about him lately?”

  “Oh, darling, that ship has sailed.” She takes a grungy-looking rag and starts wiping down the other tables, though I’m the only customer and, given the dead air swaddling the rest of main street, there won’t be many others this morning.

  “I know.” I sigh. “But figured I’d ask.” I sip the coffee, and it burns my tongue.

  “I saw him here a few years ago,” she says, reopening the conversation I thought she’d just closed. “When Heather was sick.” She winces ever so slightly. “God rest her soul. No one deserves that.”

  “Cancer or my father?”

  She stares at me for a beat too long, and I hope that I haven’t offended her.

  “Oh, child, the cancer! Heather and your dad—and your mom—well, they were grown-ups, and they knew what they were getting into.”

  “And what about the rest of us?”

  In my mind, I can still feel the water ebbing over me, the cold, murky water from that day on the lake, how it lapped up against my cheeks, how it nearly suffocated me and pulled me down to the bottom. God knows what lay on the bottom. And part of me knows that I was unconscious, that I can’t really remember those blackened moments because my brain had all but turned off, but another part of me wonders if maybe I can. If, like so many other things, I’d just spent years blocking it out, building that wall because, as a kid, what other choice do you have? My father didn’t rescue me, and then, months later, he drowned me all over again by leaving. Really—Eleanor Rigby—did I stand any chance?

  I gulp down the coffee too quickly, and I feel its heat all the way into my guts.

  Enough of that for now, I think. Anderson had told me as much. That it is only a song, not a destiny, and maybe it was just some stupid Wikipedia entry in the first place. Something we all took as lore but wasn’t any more real than anything else. Why must my father’s abandonment have to trail me forever? Maybe this was the cork that needed to be popped, and now that it’s off, everything else—the memories, the instincts, the trust in my own self instead of everyone else—will follow.

  “And what about the rest of you?” Mimi echoes, her dirty dishrag slowing to a stop as she considers the question.

  “Yes, what of the rest of us? The kids who were damaged in their wake? What of us? Did we deserve that?”

  “I suppose not,” she says, her bosom rising and falling. “But eventually, kids become grown-ups, too, and from there, the world is whatever they choose to make of it.”

  I’m on my third cup of coffee when I hear Wes’s Land Rover before I see it. The muffler must have fallen off, so it comes clanging down the road, echoing through the glass storefront of the coffee shop, until he careens into a parking space just across the street. A dinky little bell rings overhead when he enters, and a sole couple who has ventured out for pumpkin muffins, young retirees who look like former investment bankers who made a few million and then figured what the hell and bought a farm, turn and give him a little nod.

  “How’d you know I was here?” I ask. I’m picking at a scone, thinking of way back when with Jasper, at Starbucks, and soaking up both how much and how little can change. Despite your best efforts, despite everything.

  “Mimi,” he says, then gestures toward her. She toddles over with a full mug and a croissant.

  “Wes”—she greets him—“the usual,” and slides the plate across the table.

  “Is it okay that I’m here?” He tears the corner off the pastry and places it under his tongue, looking just like I imagine him to be as a kid, and the memory of who he was, who we were, is so close on my brain, so acutely begging to come out, that it’s as if I can physically feel it lighting fire to my gray matter. It doesn’t yet, but I trust that it will.

  “It’s fine,” I say, “though Mimi’s a pretty good therapist.”

  He laughs. “One of the best.”

  I think of Liv and how I have to call her, but that also how, one day soon, I’d like not to think of her so much, not to have my sentences begin with phrases like “my therapist.” How one day soon, accountability to myself will be enough to keep me in line.

  “The keys,” I say. “Why send them?”

  He chews on the croissant for a moment, then swallows. “As a gesture, I guess. After Mom died. That, as cheesy as it sounds, we had the power to reopen the doors, despite the mess that our parents made of everything.”

  “Do you miss him?” I say, out of context but not really.

  “Who? Our dad?”

  I nod, pushing my scone away.

  “No, not really. I let go of him—or the idea of him—a long time ago.”

  “So you’ve never wanted to find him, track him down?”

  He considers this for a long time, watching a pickup truck loaded with dead branches amble down the street, stopping for the red light, then skidding out too quickly when it finally turns green.

  “Not really,” he says finally. “I guess I always felt like he gave us what he could, and when he couldn’t any longer, he didn’t. And of course, I spent a few years being royally messed up by it.”

  “Ergo, the weed arrest.”

  “Ergo that.” He chuckles. “But I got tired of wondering, tired of wasting so much goddamn energy on a guy who didn’t deserve it. Sure, yeah, wouldn’t it have been great to have him there at baseball games and college graduation and blah, blah, blah. But he was always with you guys, most of the time anyway—he only did summers at our place, and even then, a few weeks here and there for the most part, so I guess it was just one more thing on top of the other.” He sighs. “I don’t know, at what point do you start owning your own life?”

  I smile. “That’s exactly what Mimi just told me.”

  “We raise them smart around here.” He smiles back, and we fall into a bubble of comfortable silence.

  “I’m thinking of selling the house,” he offers, after we’ve drunk nearly half of our coffees.

  “Your mom’s house? Really? How could you?”

  “I don’t know, not a lot is left for me there. I have an apartment near the university. The house is too big for me, too much maintenance. What’s the point in trying to deal with the upkeep? It’s just history, that’s all it is.”

  As he says this, something small but tangible snaps in place, the cork moves just a little farther out of the neck of the bottle, and I remember. Yes, I remember asking Tina Marquis to show me that apartment because I was determined to leave Peter, not to simply let him leave me—no matter what I told Rory. I wasn’t going to pretend that the smoking ruins he’s created could be rebuilt, not in the way that my mother pretended as much in her own marriage. My dad deserted her, deserted us, and I am paralyzed with this
realization: that she never left, not even when his own hands inflicted purple welts around my arms, not even when he spent his summers with a woman whom he might have loved more. So I asked Tina to find me a new home, and then what? What was I going to do? I focus and grind my teeth just a bit, and Wes, rightfully perceiving that something was shifting in me, interlocks his fingers with mine and doesn’t let go.

  I was going to start making music again. Raise the baby and make some music. Of course. Playing the piano. Writing. Singing. See what that could do for me, what direction that may lead. That is who the new me really was, really is. Yet because I remain my father’s daughter, I chose a studio that mirrored his. And that’s why Rory and I were fighting: not just about Peter and that she was the one who told me. But that I was going to leave her to pursue something that could have been mine, that I could have claimed rightful ownership to, rather than peddling the wares of a man who made it all too clear that he didn’t want to be owned in any capacity.

  Jesus. I feel sick. Even while I was trying to untangle myself from him, from how much he defined me, I never really did. With the studio, with my innate comparisons of my marriage to theirs. With the years I delayed in getting back to the one thing that I loved more than anything other than him. Even in my attempts to run away from him, I snared myself back in his net. And now, for the past few months at least, I’ve done it all over again. Working at the gallery. Listening to my mother and accepting my too-flawed husband because I didn’t trust myself to stand out on the high wire and walk across it on my own, without a safety net below.

  I unlace my fingers from Wes’s and push my chair back, standing upright and feeling my legs steady beneath me, ready to take ownership of what is mine. My life, my name, my memory.

  “Eleanor Rigby…waits by the window, wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door. Who is it for?”

  Of course it’s only a song. How was I ever foolish enough to think something otherwise?