The Song Remains the Same Page 3

  He squinted his face to remember my favorite flowers. “What are they called? Oh. Hyacinths. Something about their fragrance. Reminded you of being a kid. I’ll track some down and bring them tomorrow—maybe that will help.”

  “Maybe that will,” I said, and we both looked at the other with a hopefulness that hyacinths might actually be the answer to this.

  When everyone finally leaves me alone, I sleep and try to remember, but there’s nothing there, nothing to remember, and after a while, it feels like I’m trying to use a limb that’s not connected to me. What’s that phenomenon? A phantom. Yes, that’s exactly what it is. How can I flex my foot if it’s not attached? How can I curl my fingers into my palm if my brain has no way to send the message?

  Mostly, I zone out at Jamie Reardon—that reporter from the local news who now covers the story for the one national cable station the hospital receives. He reminds me of someone whom I can’t recall, but the reminder is comfort enough. Like he could be my confidant, an old high school love, a brother. He looks sturdy, reliable, and though he’s just a projection on the screen, I already feel like we are friends.

  Sometimes, Anderson comes by, and we sit—strangers but not really strangers—and watch Jamie in silence as he transmits the details of the crash, of our recovery, to the world that gobbles them up. We confer over our mutual gratefulness to have survived, leaving the murkier details—the guilt, the families of those who didn’t, the enormity of the questions like Why us?—untouched. To be alive is enough for now, and when it’s not, Jamie Reardon fills in the quiet spaces that are too difficult to consider if we allowed for them anyway.

  On day five back into the waking world, Dr. Macht, my mother, and Peter weave their way into my room. My mom instinctively reaches for the remote, zapping the white noise.

  “Nell, we need to tell you something,” the doctor says, with Peter shadowing his shoulder, looking like he might fall apart at any second. Without his baseball cap, he looks fifteen years older—the circles under his eyes the color of dark bruises, the pallor of his cheeks near-dead.

  “I know that you can’t remember this.” Dr. Macht hesitates, but then puts on his best doctor voice and continues. “But it’s important that you know that you were pregnant.”

  I feel my eyelashes flutter.

  “Unfortunately, with all the damage your body sustained, that pregnancy is no longer viable.” He hesitates. “Actually, you miscarried when you first came in. We needed to wait until you were stable to tell you.”

  Peter starts weeping behind him, and I wish, in a way, that I could, too. Wish that I could feel the loss of this as tangibly as he does. Something akin to a wad of emotion forms in my throat but it’s easily swallowed.

  “How far along was I?”

  “Relatively early into the pregnancy—it appears well within the first trimester, maybe eight weeks or so. We have a call in to your insurance company to track down your New York obstetrician, maybe get some answers from her.” He glances toward Peter. “I’ll give you two some privacy to digest this.”

  He shuts the door and leaves Peter and me in a vacuum of silence, barring Peter’s unsuccessful attempts to clamp down his emotion.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I know that this whole thing is hard on you. Were we trying for long?”

  “No,” he says quietly. “It was a surprise.”

  I nod and stare out the window. Everything to me is a surprise.

  “I know that this sounds weird for me to tell you, and I don’t mean it rudely, but it feels strange to be discussing this with you,” I say. “Not that I’m not sure that we didn’t have a great life together, it’s just…you know…I don’t remember where we lived or us having sex or trying for a baby. Any of that.”

  His face looks like he mistakenly swallowed vodka when he meant for water.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he says, when he’s pieced himself back together—I watch him, forcibly trying to do so, stitch himself back up so he doesn’t totally come undone right here in my hospital room. He leans down to kiss my forehead, and I breathe deeply and try to recognize a familiar scent. “Get some rest. And when you’re ready—tomorrow, the next day, the day after that—I’ll sit down and tell you our story.”

  Our story, I think, after he goes, and I’ve flipped the volume back up on the television. Yes, that sounds nice. Everyone, after all, has a story.

  3

  T here is good news and bad news on day seven. The bad news is that Anderson is being transferred to a rehab clinic.

  When he comes to offer his good-byes, I ease out of bed, slowly, delicately, self-conscious in my hospital gown, and embrace him the best that we can—with my bruised ribs and his wheelchair-folded body. He smiles the smile that likely made him a star. It’s magnetic, infectious, damn near hypnotizing. I’ve read his section of the People article, though, seen the clips on Access Hollywood. I know that he has spent the past few years bedding too many women for him to remember their names, being chastised for showing up drunk more than once on set. I know that he is immensely talented but that he is his own worst enemy: torpedoing a career that could be taken to a grander scale if he would only stop doing it in. I know all this, and so I both trust him and am wary. That smile. That goddamn smile is so absorbing that I want to hurl myself onto his wheelchair and bus to rehab with him, and yet, I suspect that I am just one of many women to feel this way.

  And also, of course, there is Peter. And my marriage. And my life before this. I feel myself blushing at my idiocy, at the fantasy of escaping this life with Anderson, even though there’s nothing—and yet everything—to escape from. Samantha wished that she was twenty-one again, but I don’t have twenty-one to wish for. I only have something else—make-believe—to dream of.

  “Give everyone else a chance,” Anderson says kindly, though not particularly like he wants me to hurl myself on his wheelchair and run with him, though not particularly like he doesn’t, either. More like confidants, which I suppose we’ve become. “Take it day by day. That’s the only way to deal.”

  “You’ve been in therapy, haven’t you?” I center myself, my thoughts, pulling back into the real world, into this, into the moment. “The shrink who comes by here every day keeps telling me the same thing.”

  “Years,” he laughs. “More years of therapy than anyone has the right to. Started at sixteen—my parents forced me when they heard I was doing whippets every day after school.”

  “What screwed you up?” I am prolonging it now, his exit.

  “Nothing screwed me up,” he says. “That’s the joke of it now. Nothing at all screwed me up—I had a perfectly decent childhood, perfectly wonderful parents. My dad is a dentist. I don’t know…I just was. Screwed up”—he pauses—“though now I need therapy for entirely different reasons. The nightmares, all of that.”

  “In some ways, maybe it’s better that I don’t remember.”

  “Catch-22,” he says.

  Neither of us knows quite how you say good-bye to the former stranger with whom you fell from the sky, so he hands me the new issue of People—we’ve been bumped from the headline to the corner cover story—and promises to e-mail or call as soon as he settles in.

  I’m glancing through the Star Tracks section of the magazine, when Rory and Dr. Macht, in blue surgery scrubs and a white lab coat, wander in. They are armed with the good news of the day.

  “Mom’s on her way,” Rory says, like I’ve asked a question. I smile at her because she has been so giving this past week, so available when I know she’s had other things to attend to: her life back home, the gallery she’s left to come take care of me. The old me didn’t seem like someone who needed taking care of, but Rory does it well all the same.

  “So there’s good news,” Dr. Macht says. “We’ve gone over your CAT scans, the MRIs, sent them to the best specialists out at UCLA, and it doesn’t appear that there’s anything permanent going on in your brain.”

  “So why can’t I remember anyt
hing?”

  “Could be a variety of things.” He clears his throat. “It could be psychosomatic…”

  “Wait, you think this is intentional?” I stutter. Of all the things that have occurred to me lying here through the endless hours, intentional amnesia wasn’t one of them.

  “No, no, nothing like that, not intentional. That wouldn’t be the word to use. But sometimes when people undergo an extremely traumatic event, their brain shuts down for them. It’s called dissociative amnesia—in reaction to the stress of what you’ve been through, the brain has blocked it out. Only yours took it too far—it blocked out too much. With dissociative amnesia, you can still remember all of the generalities of the way life works—you may remember world history references or what the Statue of Liberty is, for example, or”—he gestures to the television—“how a remote control works or that you flush the toilet upon using it. You just can’t remember the way that your life has worked.” He hedges, waiting for me to absorb this, to protest and say, Well of course that’s just utterly ridiculous! I’m not some sort of whacked-out head case! But I don’t. Don’t say that. Because who knows? Just who the hell knows? Maybe I am. A quick glance at the photo on the cover of People tells me that I don’t have any idea of who I really am, how the square pegs of my life refuse to fit into the round holes.

  When I don’t respond, he continues. “But, that said, we’re just working on theories here. Amnesia—any form of it—is quite rare, and I happen to think it’s more likely that there is indeed some damage, and with time, and with use, your memory should return. Maybe in bits and pieces.”

  “So my options are that I have actual brain damage or that my brain is damaging itself?” I say finally.

  “What’s the time frame?” Rory interrupts, and Dr. Macht opts for the less prickly of the two questions.

  “Unclear. Could be anywhere from tomorrow to months from now. Your therapist,” he says to me, “will come in and explain what you can do to nurture your memory back. Think of it as a muscle: you need to flex it to regain strength.”

  The overhead PA system pages him to the nurses’ station, and he’s off with a nod and a promise to check in later that evening before he goes back into surgery.

  “This all feels a little preposterous,” I say to Rory, using my good arm to rub the apex of my neck, “like someone is pulling the world’s worst practical joke.” I flop my hand down and hold up my palm. I’d noticed the scar there earlier today, running from my lifeline clear down my wrist.

  “This,” I say, thrusting my hand upward. “How’d I get this?”

  “Childhood accident—a broken plate,” Rory says, leaving it at that and easing into the chair beside the bed. She roots around in her bag, unveiling a mini box of doughnuts and two Snapple bottles, which clang against each other in her hand. A melody of iced tea. “I know it’s junk,” she says, “and that it can’t really fix anything. But we always ate doughnuts and Snapple when we signed an artist or had something else to celebrate. The day I convinced you to open the gallery in the first place, we binged like we’ve never binged before.” She pauses, awash in happy nostalgia. “Mom used to make doughnuts fresh for us when we were kids. Now we settle for Dunkin’.”

  “What are we celebrating?” I ask. “That one day—maybe in ten years, maybe never, according to the experts—I might not be committed to an asylum?”

  “No, nothing specific.” She unscrews the top of one of the Snapples. “But I thought it might be nice. Something your little sister can do for you. We’re all…well, we’re all feeling a little helpless.” She hands me a jelly doughnut, which promptly explodes upon my first bite all over my gown. “Now you look like you’re bleeding, too.” She giggles.

  “That’s not so funny.”

  “No, you’re right.”

  We snicker anyway. I lick the jelly off of my lips.

  “Do you always have to watch this guy?” She nudges her head up toward the TV, toward Jamie Reardon. “It’s on every time I’m in here. Sort of macabre, isn’t it?”

  “I like him.” I shrug.

  “He’s just some talking head, a piranha circling the waters.”

  “No, he seems different,” I say, like I have experience discerning between tabloid reporters and not, between different and not. But Anderson did, and he liked him, too. Something wholesome, welcoming about him. “I don’t know, he feels like he’d be easy to talk to.”

  “Funny, he stopped me outside—there’s an entire mass of reporters out there—and asked if you were up for an interview. I told him to stop being such a leech, feeding on catastrophe.” She crosses her six-inches-longer-than-mine legs. “Please tell me you’re not going to think about talking to him. That would just be so entirely out of character.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Who knows what my character is anyway?”

  “Well, I do, for one. I’ve lived with you for twenty-seven years. And you were never one to seek publicity. I practically had to beg you to agree to help me promote the gallery, consider anything out of the straight and narrow. That you agreed to consider Hope Kingsley—the artist you were going out to see in San Francisco—was no small miracle. She was from the slush pile and, oh man, were you a bitch about the slush pile.”

  “The slush pile?”

  “The commoners, as you said. The un-agented. In theory, you’d think you of all people would want to nurture untapped talent, but it was just the opposite.”

  This does not at all sound like the fabulous me!

  “Why me of all people?”

  “Because you had more talent in your left toe than just about anyone I know. Maybe other than Dad. But maybe even more than him. It made me crazy as a kid.”

  “Painting?” I ask, surprised.

  “Music,” she says, like I should have already known.

  I chew on this, and then, apropos of nothing but because I no longer have a filter, I say, “Did you know that I was pregnant?”

  “Oh god.” Her lower lip starts to tremble.

  “No, that’s not what I meant. I wasn’t blaming you. I meant, since I can’t remember it, did you know that I was pregnant?”

  She shakes her head, composing herself. “No. I’m surprised, actually.” She considers it. “What does Peter say about it?”

  “We haven’t talked much about it yet. It feels weird—having a husband who I don’t remember.”

  “You have a sister who you don’t remember, either.”

  “True,” I say. “But he’s always darting around, sort of skulking in the corner. It just feels…different. He’s seen me naked, seen my orgasm face, you know, stuff like that. I know that for all intents and purposes you and I don’t know each other, either…but it feels like we do, it feels like we’re family.” I laugh. “Though maybe I shouldn’t be talking about my orgasm face to you, either.”

  “Well, it’s an adjustment period for all of us,” she says, firming her jaw, closing the subject.

  “I know.” I exhale. “Maybe I’m the one who’s being weird, not him.”

  She wipes her hands on her jeans and stands to go.

  “Oh, I forgot, one more thing.” She reaches into her bag and yanks out a stack of DVDs. “Here. Your favorite movies, TV shows, whatever, from when we were kids. I thought it might help.” She fingers something else and pulls it out. “And this—here’s an iPod, a music player. I put together all of the bands that I could remember that you loved, that meant something to you. I had Hugh search your closet for the box of mix tapes that you kept.”

  “Hugh?”

  “My boyfriend?” she says, and I detect a flash of annoyance, that the detail has slipped my mind, when so many details have slipped my mind.

  “Yes, yes, I’m sorry. I lose track of things.”

  “Well, I asked him to get the box from your apartment, and he did, and I made what I think is The Best of Nell Slattery. It’s all on there, hundreds of songs—everything from, I don’t know, your wedding song…”

  �
�My wedding song? Which was?”

  “Joe Cocker—‘Have a Little Faith in Me,’” she says, like that means anything to me. “To the Beatles to the Smiths to, well, just listen to it. You’ll get the idea.” She pops the earbuds in my ears and hits a button. My sensory system feels like I’m going through a car wash—poured over and cleaned. The music, it’s a balm, an anesthetic, and for a few seconds, it’s as if none of this happened, and I’m already healed. Or didn’t need to be healed in the first place.

  “You’re a pretty great sister,” I say, popping out the headphones, a rush of gratitude warming me, though it could have been the sugar high.

  “Sometimes.” She smiles, though it’s not necessarily a happy one. “Sometimes not.”

  The first season of Friends is as funny as I remember it, or more accurately, as funny as I probably remembered it, since I’m theoretically watching it for the first time. Rory has overloaded me with DVDs, and upon reading the description of each—Good Will Hunting, Party of Five, Reality Bites, Saving Private Ryan, Pretty in Pink—this seemed like the safest bet to ensure that I didn’t beg the nurses to euthanize me in my sleep.

  The six of them—the crew from Friends at their hangout of Central Perk—make life in New York seem glamorous, effortless almost, even though their dating lives are woeful, and their jobs relatively unfulfilling, and Ross has discovered that his lesbian ex-wife is having a baby, and he wants Rachel so badly that his whole face has evolved into a basset hound. But still, their apartments are huge and sparkling, and their clothes tight-fitting around their lithe bodies, and damn if it didn’t make me crave my old life, even if I didn’t know what that old life was. Maybe it was like Friends. Maybe an episode straight out of Friends in which Samantha and I hung out on faux-velvet couches at our local coffee joint, and Peter and Rory and her boyfriend, Hugh, filled in the crevices with off-the-cuff jokes and witty banter that made everyone around us green with envy. I could see that, even if I couldn’t really see that. Yes, that would be a nice life to return to.