The Song Remains the Same Read online

  He exhales, then runs his palms over and down his cheeks.

  “I have significant doubts about this.”

  I eye him, mulling how I can best deconstruct the situation to my advantage. It comes naturally, the idea, the manipulation to get him on my side for good. Like an old sweatshirt, too long tucked into the back of my closet. I slide it on and oh, yes, that feels just about right.

  “Jamie, do you want to be part of Operation Free Nell Slattery?” I’d heard a similar such phrase on the news. It had a nice ring to it. Inspiring, I think.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Do you want to be part of Operation Free Nell Slattery—you know, like, free me from the hospital?” Free me from this void of blackness.

  “I do,” he says, taking it too seriously.

  “Relax,” I say aloud. “You’re not selling me your soul. Besides, I thought journalists didn’t have souls to begin with.”

  Ha ha, we say together.

  “I have a soul,” he assures me. “That’s why I didn’t want to upset you in the first place.” You do. I nod. He does, I think. Which is exactly why I went to him to begin with. My gut instinct. I might not be armed with much, but at least I can listen to that. How it’s imploring me to start over, be different, tell him my story. All of the above.

  “You’re not upsetting me, you’re educating me. Telling me things that for reasons unknown, no one else is.” He bobs his head. He gets it. He’s a journalist after all—wise enough to know how both the medium and the message can change things. “Look. You know as well as I that there’s a wall of reporters out there, waiting to talk to me, to get some information. I hear them call the nurses’ station, I see them jockeying next to you when you go live. But I chose you. I choose you. So let’s do this: you tell me what I need to know, what I want to know, and I promise you exclusive access.”

  “Exclusive access?”

  “Yes, to me, to my story, to my family. You can use me for all you need to get, as you said, the hell out of Iowa. I just want you to keep me on the straight and narrow, be sure that I’m getting the whole truth and nothing but it.”

  He swallows, and I can tell that I have him, that he’s taken the bait. He wants this, more than he wants to be kind to me. It’s human nature after all. Self-preservation.

  “So tell me,” I say. “If we have a deal, if you’re going to be part of Operation Free Nell Slattery, explain to me why Peter and I separated. Just tell me quickly, like pulling off the Band-Aid.”

  He watches me for a beat, gauging my strength and my sincerity, and deems them both to be hearty. Then he says, “Okay, we have a deal.” He goes still for a moment, a newscaster once more. “He was cheating on you.”

  “Huh,” I say, and stare at my cuticles—they’re tattered, the nail beds fraying, white crescent moons butting up from the skin. I check my internal pulse. I should feel sicker over this, I know that I should feel sicker over this. Get mad, goddammit! Get so goddamned pissed off that you think you’ll never speak to that asshole again! “With whom?”

  “Some woman he works with,” he says, his head moving almost undetectably. “I didn’t want to exploit it, so I didn’t dig too deeply—that’s why you never heard it on the air. I just knew that he’d moved out, that you kicked him out, actually. Four months ago or so.”

  “But I was eight weeks pregnant.”

  “I don’t know the intimate details just yet.” He stutters, human again. “I mean, if you want me to, I can ask some questions, I just…well, there’s a line that I didn’t want to cross. It didn’t seem fair, after what you’d been through.”

  My eyes purge themselves with a quick rash of tears, not for Peter, but for Jamie’s kindness. Or maybe they are for Peter, maybe this is my true visceral reaction, but I just can’t remember how I should be reacting in the first place. Jamie freezes, uncertain what to do next, so I run my hands over my cheeks and push away the lump of emotion that’s boring down on my chest.

  “You’re too moral to be a journalist,” I say after a few minutes have passed, almost half-smiling.

  “It’s nothing like that.” He half smiles in return. “Trust me. But they’re tearing through Anderson’s past—old girlfriends emerging to give sound bites, one-night stands who are cashing in on their fifteen minutes, neighbors who can’t get to the Enquirer fast enough—it didn’t seem right to do it to you, who didn’t ask for any of this. I just wanted—despite my journalistic instincts—to let this one go for now.” He clears his throat. “The affair, the pregnancy, that is. The rest of it, obviously, I’ve been covering.”

  I lean back and stare out the window into the cloudless Iowa summer sky. The sun will sink lower soon enough, turning the fields into open black space, ushering another day out, another day in—one after the next, all the same for me: a void, a crater.

  “In everything you’ve read about me, everything you’ve seen, do you think I was happy?” I say, finally.

  “Oh, gosh, Nell, I’m not the person to ask that.” He averts his eyes. “Surely, there’s someone better to ask.”

  I close my eyes as a way of answering. Because the thing is, the thing that we both already know, is that it is now all too clear that there’s not.

  When I wake again, the sky is dark, my room silent, and my body feels exhausted in a way that it hasn’t for a few days.

  “Nell.” Peter is sitting in the corner.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I say. I shut my eyes and wish he’d vanish like a real apparition might. “You should have told me.” My voice bounces around the room, cutting through the solitude. Of course you should have told me! If not you, then Rory. If not Rory, then my mother! How many layers do I have to unpeel to get to the core of my life? But I don’t say this, don’t act on my indignation. I’m not sure whom I can trust now, why I should trust them, even when they tell me otherwise.

  “I know. I know I should have.” His own voice cracks, and instead of pity, I feel revulsion. That after everything I’m dealing with, now I have to bear his pain, his selfishness, too. “They told me not to. They didn’t want to stress you. We were given instructions not to do anything upsetting. So…” His hands flop by his sides. “So I didn’t.”

  A barely quantifiable excuse.

  “Fine,” I say. “I know now.”

  “I’m sorry,” he answers and starts to sob. “I mean, I told you that a thousand times before, but…you can’t remember. But I am. So sorry.”

  “I’m too tired for this. If this is what I can’t remember, then that’s fine. Who wants to remember how her husband slept with someone else?”

  “Let me tell you what happened,” he pleads. “Maybe it will help.”

  “Help me or you?” I want to press the call button and get him the hell out of here.

  “Both of us,” he says. “Maybe it can help both of us.” He sputters. “More than anything in the world, I need you to let me fix us.” He adjusts his baseball cap, clutching it in his hand for a beat too long before replacing it. His unwashed hair is matted to his forehead, the grief of these past two weeks erasing any hint of healthfulness in his cheeks. I imagine what the fabulous me, the one who would never have needed to pledge herself to a second chance, might have seen in him: even through the scrim, I can see how he is good-looking, how maybe I should be appreciative that he is here, penitent, open, begging for a reprieve.

  “Before…was I letting you fix us?” I’m hovering over the murky divide that separates numbness and anger.

  “Kind of. I mean, I was doing everything I could…” His voice cracks again, and I want to slug him right across the chin.

  “Well, you know that I have no recollection of that.”

  “I know.” He nods, a pitiful concession that he is powerless here.

  Aren’t we all powerless here? I want to scream at him. Why the hell does it matter what you want so badly, anyway? What about what I want? Like how I want to remember my prom date, remember that last picture of my father at my
eighth-grade graduation.

  “And this baby? What of that?”

  He breaks here, and as his shoulders start to shake, his meaty torso trembling, I stare up at the ceiling and wait for his contrition to pass. Finally, he sutures himself up.

  “I didn’t know,” he says, meeting my eyes. “Okay? I didn’t know. Didn’t know about the baby. You never told me.” He mats his damp face with the back of his hand. “But it, the baby, was mine. We…we had reconciled.” His voice shakes here but he presses on. “So knowing now—knowing what I lost for the both of us—I will do anything, anything, for a second chance.”

  “Why should I give you that?” I say, listening to the steady hum of the medical machinery, wishing it could drown out all this other noise.

  “Because I want to fill in the blank spaces, remind you of how you loved me, how we loved each other. I think I can do that. I want to remind you of your memories of us, of who we were.” He clears his throat, almost back together now. “Of who we are.”

  I don’t say that I’ve already employed Jamie to do this. I want to say this, but somewhere tucked very, very deep inside of me, a surprising voice urges me not to. That the heartbreak has been enough for now and that maybe he knows this without my saying so. That I can still be furious and disgusted, and yet also let it go, if only for this hour. The new me. Softened, with her slightly rose-tinted glasses.

  “Please,” he says, sensing my hesitation. “Nell. I’ll do anything.”

  I sigh and notice the clock in the corner. It’s only 8:35 p.m. Jamie won’t be on TV until morning and Anderson has gone to rehab and I need the nurse to reload the next Friends DVD anyway and I’ve listened to my iPod so many times today that the battery is depleted beyond a quick recharge. So what else do I have to do with my time?

  I close my eyes and envision picking up my distrust, my rage, and setting it aside, like a tumor carved out by a surgeon.

  “Fine,” I say. “Tell me. Tell me our story. Though I can’t make any promises that it will help.”

  5

  “Have a Little Faith in Me”

  —Joe Cocker

  Peter chews his bottom lip. You can tell that he wants to pick the best place to start because he has so much riding on this. That if he inadvertently chooses the wrong place to begin, she’ll never concede, never look at him the way she once did, never, of course—and this is all that mattered—take him back.

  She stares at him expectantly, but only for a few moments. Then she flicks her eyes away and rolls her jaw around, as if she’s reconsidering, but then she finds her way back toward him, breathing and waiting and breathing.

  He flicks off his baseball cap, runs his fingers through his hair that the low-pressure hotel shower did no favors to, and inhales. And then he begins.

  “I should start at our wedding,” he says, unintentionally nodding, like he’s reassuring himself even more so than he’s reassuring her. He knows how much he has to lose here. He knows that he can’t return to that shitty one-bedroom apartment that he rented when she kicked him out. The type that you lease just out of college and erect a plaster wall in the living room to create an extra bedroom for your just-as-broke roommate. Where the residents are a decade younger and stumble in from walks of shame while he’s already heading out to work in the morning, reminding him of his lost youth and, well, of how the rest of him has been pretty lost, too. “Let’s start at our wedding because, well, really, I know it’s cliché and all, but it was the best day of my life”—he clears his throat—“of our lives.”

  Was it really the best day of hers? He doesn’t know. But there are enough land mines to avoid in the stories of their life together, and this one seems safe, a round, comforting place to get a toehold.

  “I saw the pictures,” she says, and he hesitates again, unsure if she’s simply making conversation or if she’s trying to make this harder on him.

  “I know, I know.” His head bobbles up and down. “But they can’t convey how great it was, how seriously magical it was.”

  “Magical?” she says, and stifles a laugh.

  His ears burn when she laughs at him, though he’s used to it all the same. She was never the kindest of wives, not the type who rubbed his feet nightly on the couch, not the type who relied on him day in and day out, leaning on his shoulder when the chips crumbled. No, she was the mother ship and he was her wake—though she didn’t look over her shoulder too often to ensure that he hadn’t drowned while swimming behind her. At first, it had worked well, this configuration: his friends told him how lucky he was, that his wife let him have endless guys’ nights, that she wasn’t clingy and begging him for a baby when he wasn’t yet ready. And sure, he loved his guys’ nights and was as appreciative as any new husband would be that his days hadn’t been totally upended because they swapped vows. But, let’s face it, he told himself about a year ago in the mirror while shaving, “You are a guy who likes to be needed, and she, well, she didn’t really need anyone,” so their banter grew less funny and more acerbic, and one thing led to another and, eventually, that led to Ginger, his coworker.

  “Say what you want, mock me if you must,” he says today in the hospital, holding his ground, trying to forget all about Ginger. Ginger! The massive fucking mind-blowing mistake of Ginger. “Our wedding was magical.”

  He pauses, and she smiles, and he can tell that she’s not being cruel now, not mocking him like maybe she would have before, so he smiles back. She seems different, he thinks—happier, less angry despite the circumstances. Then he worries that he’s pushing his luck, jinxing himself. Like your wife surviving a plane crash isn’t lucky enough and that hoping it’s somehow changed her for the better is just too much, pushing the Vegas odds too far in the wrong direction.

  “We got married in Saint Lucia in April. April twenty-third. Your mom tried to talk us out of it—she wanted us to do it in her backyard or even at your dad’s old studio in Vermont, but you fought her on it. You were very, very sure of Saint Lucia.”

  “Why Saint Lucia?”

  He shrugs. “I suppose it was anywhere your mother, well, I don’t know, and your dad—reminders of him or whatever—were not. And hell, I didn’t care where we got married. But you cared—you cared about that, and you cared about our music. So I just shut up and did what I was told.”

  “Joe Cocker,” she says, because her sister had told her.

  “Joe Cocker,” he says back, then sings a line, embarrassed at himself but desperate all the same. “‘Give these loving arms a try, baby, and have a little faith in me.’” He veers slightly off-key, but it’s not a half-bad rendition. Not her perfect-pitch level, but still, not awful.

  She stares at him for a beat, and he steels against it, ready for the mockery. But instead, she squints and says, “Just put a tux on you and you’ll be there,” like this is an inside joke of theirs, which it was, even though she can’t remember.

  “Yep. Exactly! That’s more or less what I said.” Peter grins now, genuinely, less nervously, and she can see, for one of the first times, how he is handsome beyond the generically handsome way that he already is. In the tiny folds around his eyes, in the dimple that craters into his left cheek. He is almost large enough to be oafish, but bent over in his chair, he looks more compact, less imposing, and she can see that way back when, maybe in high school, his size would have made him the lead tackle on the football team rather than just the biggest guy at a cocktail party, which he probably is these days.

  “It was a small wedding—we invited only fifty or so, and about thirty made their way down. But you wanted it private and not a big to-do, and again, your mom wanted two hundred, but this was all the hotel could accommodate, so you won that argument in the end.”

  “Up on the cliff,” she says. “There’s a picture here somewhere of the wedding—we got married up on a cliff?”

  “Yes, yes,” he says, a wave of momentum building in his voice. “It had rained about an hour earlier and you were devastated—sitting in
your room getting ready with Rory and Samantha and your mom and sobbing because it turns out that the weather was the one aspect you couldn’t control—but then it cleared up right before we started.” He smiles now, lost in the vision of what he’s trying to re-create for her. “And you—and this is the part that I’ll never forget. You surprised me with your guitar. For the first time in forever, you played, much less played for me. I still—to this day—don’t know how you got that guitar down to Saint Lucia without my noticing.” He floats his eyes down to meet hers. “I don’t know. It was just, like, out of a movie or something. The clouds rolled out, and the sun came through, and you were making music for me again, and it felt like God was watching down on us.”

  “But he wasn’t,” she says, the conversation flailing instantly from where he intended. She thinks she might cry for a beat but then realizes that her sadness has already passed. She wants to consider the wedding, the simple white gown she saw in the photos and how euphoric she looked. But without the background to their love and their history, she feels like he’s reading her a story about someone else’s life. There was something for a moment—in the melody when he sang, in the lyrics—that maybe resonated, but like everything else, that’s gone now, a flicker that has been extinguished.

  Peter’s sucked back into the reality of the moment. He narrows his eyes at her as he intuits her meaning and shrugs.

  “You’re here, aren’t you? Doesn’t that mean something?”

  “Who knows what it means?”

  “I think it means that we’re supposed to be together. To do great things.”

  Easy for you to say, she thinks.

  “That cliff, you don’t think it’s a metaphor?”

  “A metaphor?” he apes. “Like, for us?”

  “Yes, like for us,” she says. “Our marriage. Your cheating.”

  He sighs and rubs his nose, his wedding band tarnished but still catching the dim hint of the overhead lights. Indira, Nell’s mother, had told him yesterday, when they were refilling their sour coffee in the hospital cafeteria, that she, too, thought Nell seemed different since the crash, that—despite the physical damage—she somehow seemed more buoyant, less controlling than she used to be. Indira had patted his right shoulder and said, “Hang in there,” like he had any choice in the matter. “She’ll come around. I’ll talk to her,” she’d said, though Peter didn’t add that Indira talking to Nell, in just about any context, was often among the worst ideas. He didn’t have many options here, so he’d gulped down a bitter swallow of coffee and nodded his okay.