The Song Remains the Same Read online

  Remember, goddammit!

  I hit pause on the DVD player and sweep some scattered photos off my nightstand. Rory has left the stack of photos along with the DVDs. In them, I’m on the cusp of adulthood, she’s on the cusp of puberty. The date stamp reads 1994, and though she is eleven, and I am sixteen, she’s already sprouted nearly taller than I. I’m dressed in some god-awful prom attire, while she wears a violet sundress with smocking across the chest that can’t conceal her little breast buds that are poking through. Even at eleven, she’s breathtaking—vacuuming up all of the beauty between us, your eyes inevitably drawn to her, not me. I’m in a red-and-white-polka-dotted concoction with a skirt comprising three taffeta tiers and a bustier that makes my own breasts look lopsided. My smile is reflected in the flash of the camera, thanks to upper and bottom braces, and my hair—evidently the victim of both a perm and an overdose of Sun-In—does my heart-shaped face no favors. I have a corsage around my wrist, and just in the edge of the corner, I can make out the shoulder of a man-boy in a tuxedo who must have been my date.

  Upon closer inspection, my smile looks more like a wince, and I stare at my old self and wonder who I was at sixteen. Who that boy was. If we steamed up the windows to his mom’s station wagon that night, if we got drunk on wine coolers at the after-party. No, of course not. Everyone from Samantha to Rory has already well informed me that I was the straitlaced, buttoned-up one.

  I stop and rewrite this in my mind: that I broke curfew, that I unsnapped my bra and let him feel me up before we went skinny-dipping after one too many wine coolers, that I slipped home through a bedroom window so I didn’t tip off my mom.

  I feel my nose pinch, my cheeks spasm, my chest seize, and suddenly, really, for the first time, I am gutted at my loss. Sliced open. Fatally punctured with no hope of resuscitation. I’m overwhelmed with the loneliness of living the life of a skeleton—no meat, no flesh, nothing to fill in the holes, and the tears come quickly and furiously, my free hand wiping away what it can, but no match for the onslaught. I briefly consider the 152 people who didn’t even have this opportunity: Jesus! Get real! At least you’re alive, living, breathing, here, and with the chance to try to remember! But my brain can’t linger on the vastness of that loss, so it’s no use. There’s a time for appreciating the moment, and this isn’t it. Maybe eventually. Maybe I’ll call Anderson, and eventually we’ll find a way to answer the question: Why us? But now, it’s only my pain, eviscerating and hollow all at once. I reach for the iPod in an attempt to soothe myself, the way a baby does a pacifier, but the music only makes it worse—piercing my wounds, penetrating me from all angles.

  Alicia must hear my sobbing because soon she’s wiping my cheeks dry, flushing my nose of snot.

  “What can I get you, sweetheart?” she says.

  “Nothing.” I hiccup. “No one can get me anything.”

  She picks up the remote, flicks off the DVD, and the TV returns to the news channel I had on earlier.

  She rubs my back until I’ve stopped crying, and then I reconsider.

  “Could you get my sister on the phone?”

  “Of course, dear.” She reaches for the telephone and punches in the digits, then places the cradle under my shoulder.

  “Rory, it’s me,” I say when she picks up. “Listen, who was I before?”

  “What do you mean?” She sounds like I’ve woken her. “You were my older sister. We worked together at the gallery. We’ve been over this.”

  “No, no, I remember that. I mean, like, who was I? Who did I go to prom with?”

  “Oh god, um…” She pauses. “Oh, yeah, his name was Mitchell Loomis. Um, he was on the wrestling team.”

  “Was he my boyfriend? Like, did we make out at prom, go skinny-dipping, get drunk, go crazy?”

  She laughs, even through her grogginess. “Of all the things you were, Nellie, crazy was never one of them.” She hesitates. “I don’t really know what you did at prom, to be honest. I was in middle school. But if I had to bet, I’d bet that no, you probably weren’t making out in a corner, much less going skinny-dipping.” I sigh. No, that can’t be right! I was out all night in an open-aired convertible, braying at the moon.

  “So me, I mean, my life, it wasn’t like Friends?” Flashy! Vibrant! Perfect hair! I can’t let the idea go.

  “Like Friends the sitcom?” She laughs. “Nell, nobody’s life is like Friends. That’s why we all watched it.” I hear the sheets stirring beneath her.

  “So what you’re saying is that I was the rational one? Not a live-by-the-seat-of-my-pants type of girl?” I think of Anderson, of his infectious, mischievous energy, of how the space he occupied seemed bigger than oxygen, bigger than life. Of Monica and Rachel—screw it if it’s make-believe—and their ever-present laugh track. I wanted a laugh track. I wanted the life that came with that fucking laugh track.

  “Not so much, but that’s what we loved about you,” Rory says. “You were the one we could count on. There’s a reason you went to law school, you know.”

  “I went to law school?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “Rory”—I sigh—“please. Don’t make me repeat myself. When I doubt, I don’t know. I don’t know. Okay?”

  “Jesus, okay.”

  Both of us linger, the friction passing through the line, then evaporating.

  “So, wait, I was a lawyer?” That doesn’t feel right at all.

  “No, you only went for a year and a half. Then you quit and Mom found you a job with one of her friends who was a director for One Life to Live.”

  “The soap opera?” I’d seen it on during endless looping hours of my day.

  “Yes, the soap opera!” Exasperation on her end. Like you have any right to be exasperated! “You were good at it, what can I say?” She sighs. “Eventually, you ran the office there—you know, paperwork and contracts and managing the staff and whatnot. Which is why I knew you could do the same thing at the gallery. And which is why you finally agreed. That and because Dad always told you that you had the eye, could have been great.”

  “Great like him?” I sit up taller, intently staring out the window. Maybe this was my entree, my opening to the fabulous me. Yes, yes! I could have been great!

  “Great like him,” she affirms. “Though you never quite were.” And just like that, I sink back into the pillow. “Not that I mean that rudely,” she says. “I just mean, you know, he was never quite satisfied. Music was always your thing anyway. I don’t know why he wouldn’t just let that be.” She snips herself, like maybe she’s revealed too much.

  I gaze at the ceiling and make myself a vow: in this life, in this new life, I’ll have that greatness, that laugh track that the fabulous me deserved. A hundred and fifty-two people died. I didn’t. Maybe this is my chance, my rewind button, my fast-forward button. Both. Whichever. Either way, this is my chance to do things differently.

  “I don’t want to be that person,” I say, “the one who could have been great.”

  “Okay,” she says. I’m pretty sure I can hear her peeing in the background. “But it’s who you are.”

  “I want the laugh track.”

  “You’ve lost me,” she says.

  “I want the excitement, I want some fun,” I say. “I want to be, well, extraordinary.”

  “I think you’ve given us enough excitement for a while,” she says. The toilet flushes.

  I glance up at the television. There he is.

  “I need a favor.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Tomorrow, on your way in, stop Jamie Reardon and tell him that I’ll talk to him. Go out there and tell him that I’ll tell him my story.”

  “That’s nuts,” she says. “You’re fragile! You’re not ready for that.”

  “The thing is, Rory, I’m not ready for anything.”

  4

  Jamie Reardon looks exactly like he does on TV: perfectly gelled blond hair, perfectly robin’s-egg-blue eyes. His teeth are alabaster, his smile more impish
than you’d expect for a news reporter. He has a smattering of freckles across his nose that makeup must cover up on camera, and he’s lankier than I envisioned: the blazers that he sports on air make him look like a man, but when he shows up in my hospital room, he’s more of an overgrown boy. A farm boy, a replica of the type you’d think would be born and bred in Iowa.

  Two days after I have vowed that I will take this second chance by the reins and steer the new me someplace better, after I have issued my decree to Rory—go out there and tell him that I’ll talk to him—here he is. Dr. Macht ushers him in and tells me he can think of better ideas than this. That I shouldn’t be wasting my energy granting press access, but I wave my arm at him because he doesn’t get it: that this is my chance to start being something great, that this is the first step toward fulfillment. Isn’t this my second chance? Who wouldn’t try to shake things up if they plummeted to the ground and discovered that their life wasn’t much of a life at all, and that a clean slate might be theirs for the taking? Maybe someone, but not me. Not the new me, anyway.

  Rory staged a halfhearted intervention this morning—she showed up with my mother trailing behind her, who was muttering about privacy and exploitation and how I really didn’t know what I was doing. But I’d already decided. Who cared what Jamie Reardon unearthed, I said to my mom and Rory. Why did it matter? There wasn’t anything to hide from, to run from, right? This was the time to do the opposite of what I’d done before. Shouldn’t I be doing that? I pointed to the cover of People. Shouldn’t I be running as far from that person as possible? They stuttered, and my mother said that I was being crazy, that I was close to perfect before, which we both knew wasn’t true at all, and then Alicia came in to take my blood pressure, and that was that.

  It’s only once we’re left alone and Jamie has taken out his digital recorder, plopped himself on the side of my bed like an old confidant, and cracked his knuckles, ready to go, that I realize I don’t have much of a story to tell. I feel myself blanch with the embarrassment of being so unprepared. I suspect that the old me wouldn’t have approved of such unpreparedness at all.

  “I really didn’t think this through,” I say. “I, well, you probably know that I can’t remember anything. I don’t know how much I can help you.”

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “Let’s just talk. I won’t even record it.”

  “Okay.” I will myself to relax. “I’m very well versed in the first season of Friends, in Jamie Reardon’s reporting on cable TV, and on sleeping sixteen hours a day. And this.” I hold up the iPod on my lap. “The wider selection of musical hits from the past two decades. Any of those subjects are fair game.”

  “So what you’re saying is you’re either rapidly becoming a pop culture expert or you’re about to lose your mind to boredom?”

  “In a nutshell, yes.” I laugh.

  “So you’re talking to me simply because you have nothing better to do?”

  He’s good at this, I can see. Even as a local reporter. He’s smooth, comforting, intentionally easy to be around, like we’ve been friends since forever.

  “No, it’s not just that.” I consider it. “I don’t know, this is going to sound weird, but I feel like everything I’ve learned about myself so far hasn’t resonated, is…indigestible.” I search for how to better articulate it. “Like, have you ever thought that you’re in a rut, even without realizing that you’re in a rut in the first place?”

  I’m suddenly self-conscious, like I’m in an overly-meta TV show that I can’t quite reference. “That sounds ridiculous.” I hiccup. “After all I’ve been through, I know. That after all of that, I need to shake things up, try something new. This is what the new me should be doing: trying something the old me never would have done.”

  “It doesn’t sound ridiculous to me at all,” he says, and looks at me with such openness that I believe him. He’s a professional but I’m buying it all the same. “Well, whatever your reason”—he clears his throat—“do know that I’m indebted to you for this.”

  “For being blown up at thirty thousand feet and surviving?”

  “No”—he shakes his sandy hair—“for talking to me.” He tilts his head like a rooster and eyes me. “You’re pretty cavalier for what you’ve gone through.”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t be if I could remember any of it. I’m sure I’d be horrified, in therapy for life.” I think of Anderson, who told me that he wakes each night, despite medication, in soaking sweats from the nightmares. “Come to think of it,” I say, “I might be anyway.”

  “Well, I have to thank you regardless. This story—you really—you’re changing my life, too. I’ve been trying to get out of Iowa since I was eighteen. This might do it.”

  “So I’m nothing more than leverage for you?”

  His eyes noticeably widen and he rights himself upward.

  “I’m kidding, Jamie. I’m kidding.” Who is he? Why is he so familiar? Why am I acting like we’ve known each other our lives through?

  “You’re nothing like I expected you to be,” he says. “Not from what I’ve researched.”

  Finally! Someone who frigging gets it! I think, but instead say, “What have you researched? You probably know more than I do.”

  “Eleanor Slattery. Thirty-two. Named for the Beatles song ‘Eleanor Rigby’ but goes by Nell. Grew up in Bedford, New York. Sister of Rory Slattery—older by five years. Daughter of Francis Slattery, one of the geniuses behind the pop art movement of the sixties. Friend of Andy Warhol. Total recluse whom no one has heard from in years.”

  “I thought my dad was dead.” I hear my heart beat.

  “Dead?” He laughs, missing the innuendo of the moment. “No, not unless no one has reported it. Very much alive.”

  I swallow, absorbing this. My mother told me that he was gone, but maybe I misinterpreted. Yes, maybe it was that. She simply meant gone—vanished. I’d assumed gone—dead. I chew the cuticle of my good hand, the one with the scar.

  “Go on.”

  “Well, underground or not, he was brilliant. May still be brilliant. That’s how you and your sister started your gallery: sold some prime pieces of his, established a reputation in the art world, and made your connections with old collectors in your very first show. You guys opened about six years ago—Rory was basically straight out of college at UVM.”

  “And what do you mean, can you elaborate on…recluse?”

  “Like…recluse,” he says, bewildered that he’s the one to fill me in on this gaping branch in my family tree. “Like, fell off the map when you were a teenager—thirteenish, I believe. J. D. Salinger–like.” He pauses. “Wait, that probably doesn’t help you.”

  “No, it doesn’t really,” I answer.

  I think of that big-haired, braced-teeth teenager in her polka-dotted prom dress, and the pity in my core nearly slices my guts open. That she—that I—had to deal with such nuclear emotional fallout of my father abandoning us right when I may have needed him the most, to come into my own. But I offer none of this to Jamie. It’s too much too soon to share with him, despite how much I want to, how much I want him to solve everything, put the bow on the package for me.

  I say, “Don’t you need notes for this or something?”

  “Not really.” His cheeks turn pink now. “Like I said, this is the big story for me. I’m pretty well versed on it.”

  “Okay, continue.” I clamp down on the open-ended questions that this news has brought, too interested, like a masochist, in what else Jamie might unspool.

  “Graduated third in your class in high school. Rumor had it that you were your father’s musical equivalent, but opted to focus on tennis in high school instead.”

  “What does that mean?” I interrupt.

  “That his thing was painting, your thing was music, but that it all blended together in your genes.” He hesitates, the reporter in him alarmed that he may have overlooked a fact. “I don’t know much about that angle, to be honest.”

  I nod. �
�Keep going.”

  “Earned a tennis scholarship to Lehigh but went to school in Binghamton. Dropped out of NYU law. Married Peter Horner five years ago, started your gallery with your sister shortly before that. Now recently separated from Peter Horner. Boarded plane that crashed in Iowa, and that’s where we’re at.”

  Recently separated from Peter Horner? What?

  “Wait, what? I’m separated from Peter?” I sit up, trying to get closer to him, as if that might clarify what he just said.

  “Oh, shit. You didn’t know?” His already pink cheeks burn red, and yes, there it is, I trust him—he’s human in his mistakes, human in his empathy—a good reporter but still amateur enough to lower his guard. “Oh my god, you didn’t know? Oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god. I didn’t know that you didn’t know.” He stands and starts pacing. “Shit. I thought you’d have known this! How can you not have known this?” He inhales and stares and reminds me of what I imagine he looked like at eight. “Please don’t have a heart attack.”

  “You mean a literal heart attack, don’t you?” I say, and his head bounces. “No, Jamie, I’m not going to have a heart attack.” But I might fucking maim my family for not telling me! First my dad, then this? What else? Who else? What else is tucked in darkened corners that they know I can’t get to in my present state?

  “Shit, shit, shit. I shouldn’t have said anything—Dr. Macht was very clear about not upsetting you, that you’re not ready for jarring conversations or emotional news.” He sits back on the edge of the bed. “Christ, I’m sorry.”

  I chew the inside of my lip, assessing how pissed off I am, how devastated I am by the realization of my broken marriage. The answer: not so much. Probably not as much as if I remembered why I should be devastated in the first place.

  “Why did we separate?” I ask simply.

  “I’m not sure I should tell you,” he says.

  “Look, Jamie, I like you. I have no idea why, but I like you. I trust you. Evidently, you’re the only one around here who is willing to tell me the facts of my life, facts that I cannot goddamn remember. So please. Level with me.”