The Song Remains the Same (20 page)

My father. Yes. I’m remembering my father. How old could I have been? I sift through the sensors of my brain. Thirteen? I shake my head.
No, it wasn’t that summer in Virginia. It was before
. Ten. Maybe I was ten. I can smell the air, a mix of paint and cigarettes, and see the glow of the easel, illuminated in the dim light of the room, in front of me. And though I may be meshing it all together—the dream and the memory and now this—I could swear that I can hear the Stones in the background, too. Where are we? My mind races, hunting for clues. Then it comes to me. His workshop. We are in Vermont, and he is teaching me the art of letting go, of giving in to randomness, of creating a masterpiece even when most of that masterpiece is out of your control.

“It’s not out of your control, Nell. It might
seem
out of your control, but it never really is.” He took my wrist, held it high above my shoulder with the brush in hand, and flicked it toward the canvas. Magenta paint spread like a firework. “See, my darling? Look there. You’ve just created a thing of beauty.” He leaned down to kiss my cheek, and I could smell—can smell even now—the ash and nicotine on his breath, and then I took a giant step back, like I was about to hurl a baseball or a shirt into the hamper, and let the paint fly.

I stare at my hamper now for a beat and try to remember more—where was my mother? Rory? What of them? But there’s nothing else; this must be enough for now. I reach for the phone to call Liv, but it is too early, so instead I gather up my father’s notebook that Jasper has delivered two decades too late, and stride into the living room, bursting with exuberance that
something is working.
The wires are being reignited, the switches are being reset.

I step into the kitchen and dump out a liberal amount of coffee grinds into the coffeemaker. Peter has left a note under a smiley face
magnet on the fridge:
Went for an early workout. Back by 7.
To be honest, it hadn’t even occurred to me that he was gone.

The coffeemaker sputters to life, and I pour a dark mug, retrieve the notebook from the floor, and then sink into the couch.

I stop on the second-to-last image and turn the book horizontally, then vertically, trying to peer at it from all sides. It’s unlike any of the others, like a Georges Braque that I’ve seen in one of the books on my shelves: shattered fragments litter the page, as if my father had drawn what his mind saw, then dropped the picture like a mirror, sending the splinters every which way. I spin the image round and round, trying to place the pieces back in their rightful place. Slowly, cloaked in the artistic noise, an eye ekes itself out, then another eye, then the slope of a nose, the hint of a lip. But this isn’t Heather, I can tell that, even without knowing her. Having only dreamed her. These eyes are younger, less sure of themselves. Maybe, I think, these eyes are mine.

I reach for the phone. It’s early but what the hell. A man’s gravelly voice answers on the second ring.

“Hello?” I check the keypad to ensure I typed the right number. “Is Rory there?” I say. He grunts and then I hear sheets shifting, and then my sister comes on the line.

“What?” she snaps, offering neither a hello nor an explanation as to why a random guy is both answering her phone and sleeping beside her.

“Dad,” I say. “I need you to level with me. Tell me the truth. I need you to tell me everything you can remember about Dad.”

18

R
ory rubs her eyes, flakes of old mascara fluttering down just below her lashes. The diner smells like fried eggs and burned hash browns, and the NYU kids in the booth next to hers—clearly still awake from an all-night bender—are laughing too loudly, throwing their youth in her face, that she can’t recover as quickly as they still can, as she once could.

“Okay, first of all, you are strictly forbidden, like ever again, to call me before eight thirty. Is that understood?” Rory says, then cranes her head around. “Jesus Christ, can the waitress bring me some goddamn coffee?”

“Understood,” Nell says.

“Second of all, why the urgency? You couldn’t wait until, you know, a reasonable hour to decide, after two months, that you have to hear our lovely childhood stories?” She rubs her eyes again. Her head feels like a giant crater, like someone has a sledgehammer driving right into her temples. She has a flash from last night. Oh god, last night. If she thinks about it much more, she’s going to hurl her brains out right here on the Formica table, with Lady Gaga singing in the background. She winces, wishing someone would turn down the music, stop the endless bleat of noise from the kitchen, from the fucking NYU kids three feet away.

“Because of this,” Nell says, and pulls out a sketch pad from her purse. “Jasper Aarons gave it to me.”

“Dad’s friend?” Rory tries to focus, to not betray herself. Of course she knows who Jasper Aarons is. Her mother nearly had a hysterectomy when she saw him that night at the gallery.

“Yeah, I met him for coffee. He said he’d had it for years.”

“What took him so long?” She waves her hand frantically for the waitress, then mouths
coffee
in an overexaggerated way.

“Are you okay?” Nell says.

“Hungover,” Rory says. Succinct. Enough of an explanation for now. She’s not sure if she should feel guilty or a little victorious. She watches Nell, so oblivious, and she knows: guilty. Most definitely guilty. One-upping Nell was fun until it wasn’t fun anymore. Like now. This, here, now—this is definitely not fun. Shit. She wishes she could rewind the past twelve hours.

“Moving on from Hugh just fine, I see,” Nell says. The waitress finally ambles over with a silver pot and two mugs. “Or I heard. This morning, when I called.”

Rory leans closer and examines her statement for judgment—normally, there would be more than a healthy serving of judgment, but she finds none, which guts her even further. Things weren’t like they used to be; Nell didn’t remember what they used to be, of course, but Rory did, so while Nell was being kinder, different, Rory kept on going like the old days. Tit for tat. Nell says she can jump, Rory then tries to jump higher. Oh, Jesus, she thinks again.

“Just one of those things—one off. One-nighter,” Rory says. “No one worth discussing.”

“Fair enough,” Nell says, happy to let it go.

“You’re not going to mock me, say that I’m doing myself irreparable harm? Need to stop acting like a child and start making grown-up, responsible life choices?” Rory gulps down a Herculean-size swallow of coffee and exhales at the relief it provides.

“Why would I say that?” Nell answers, sipping some coffee of her own.

“Just…before. You would have.”

“It’s not before.” Nell shrugs.

“You’ve changed.” Rory flags the waitress over once more. Oatmeal. That’s what she needs. To soak up the excess tequila before it seeps into her organs.

Nell laughs at this. “I don’t know. People are who they are. Maybe I’m just evolving.”

“Semantics.”

Rory squints and assesses, wondering if Nell would react today like she had six months ago when Rory delivered the news about Peter, about Peter’s infidelity. If the same acid would infuse her voice, if she’d still shoot the messenger, say that Rory must feel vindicated in telling her this because she could finally top her sister in everything. Everything! Not only was she prettier, hipper, easier to talk to, got along with Mom, but now! Now! She could triumphantly point to Hugh and hold that over her, too. Rory scoffed—well, she more than scoffed, she unleashed at this wholly ridiculous posturing, and this was when more words were exchanged: about how Nell was always Dad’s favorite, and about how Rory never minded that, never minded Nell rubbing Rory’s face in that part of things, either. More things were said after that. More things that the two of them would wish they could undo but, of course, could not.

“I’m trying—you know, I got that new couch,” Nell says. “Think I’ll get some new clothes. But really, aren’t we are who we are?” Nell isn’t sure what she believes anymore. She made the vow to herself to be a changed woman, but tied to this vow is the idea that the plane crash could have been a blessing. All those people died, and even though she’s been given this second chance, this do-over, this makeover, the idea that this is a blessing seems disgusting almost—too trivial, too trite.

Rory grunts because she doesn’t really know, either.

“So, anyway,” Nell says, ordering a buttered bagel when the waitress makes her reappearance, “Dad.”

Rory feels too hungover and too torn to ascend this hurdle, but she nods as if she’s ready, ready to answer whatever questions come her way. She’d promised her mother she wouldn’t go deep, wouldn’t plunge Nell all the way back in—and besides, she and Nell had their own problems that she was more than happy to put behind them—so she sips her coffee and wonders what version of the truth she can get away with. She was the better liar of the two of them anyway. Always had been. She’d gotten that from Indira.

“I had the weirdest dream last night,” Nell says. “I was back on the plane, Mom was there, Jasper was there, Anderson was there.”

At the mention of Anderson’s name, Rory nearly chokes on her coffee, forcibly swallowing and trying not to demonstrate her obvious alarm. Or her guilt. Or her regret. Which of the three was it? She’d made Anderson promise to pretend like it had never happened. This morning, while he was zippering his zipper, buttoning his waistband, tugging on a shirt to cover his body that, after four shots too many, Rory had unapologetically disrobed the night before. They hadn’t planned it, of course. They’d unintentionally collided at The Palms, a club downtown where she was doing her best to pretend that she didn’t miss Hugh, and he was doing his best…well, just doing his best, Rory supposed now. This morning, when the phone rang, Nell hadn’t recognized his voice, grainy, from the night spent screaming over too-loud techno music—and thank god for that, they both concurred when they awoke newly sober and absorbed the situation, mulled over the consequences.

“What does your dream have to do with Dad?” Rory says.

Nell shakes her head. “I don’t know. Something. Anyway”—she flips her hair—“okay, let’s start with this: I know that you didn’t always get along with him, but what do you remember about me? About the two of us?”

“I got along with him well enough. I just didn’t idolize him, that’s all,” Rory says. “But you, no, you idolized him. You flat out worshipped him.”

“Example.”

Rory rubs her eyes. “After Dad left, you didn’t believe it. You refused to believe it for a good six months.”

“Well, that seems normal. I mean, we were kids. Who would want to believe that their parent wasn’t coming back?”

“No, it wasn’t just that. It wasn’t normal. That’s the whole point.” Rory presses her thumbs down on her temples in an attempt to beat back the shadow that the tequila left behind. “Mom would try to talk to you—I remember so clearly her trying to talk to you one night at dinner. She’d made this rice and bean dish because she freaked out when Dad left and had just gone vegetarian, and you insisted that she put out a plate for him. She refused because she thought you needed to accept that he was gone, but you kept nagging her, not even nagging, it was like needling, ribbing her—you couldn’t let it go.”

The waitress approaches with their breakfast, sliding the dishes in front of them, and Nell tears a piece of bagel with her teeth, her eyes focused as she tries to remember.

“So Mom kept saying no,” Rory continues, “and you kept insisting that he was going to come back, and that we had to make it totally clear that we wanted him back, or else of course he wouldn’t come, and how couldn’t she see this?”

“And what were you doing while we were arguing?”

“I was sitting on a stool watching everything unravel. That was the difference between us. I accepted it right away. We woke up one morning and Dad’s stuff was gone, and he’d left us each a postcard with a little stupid fucking drawing—which I guess was to signify his love or whatever—but I knew that it was his way of saying good-bye. I tossed mine in the garbage within a week. You? You tacked yours up to the bulletin board in your room for half the year, until you finally realized what he meant by it—that it was his suicide letter of sorts.”

“Don’t say it like that,” Nell says.

“See, even now you’re doing it—defending him.”

Nell reaches over and dips a finger into Rory’s oatmeal for a taste, considering the point, and then says, “So what happened that night at dinner? Who won?”

“Neither of you.” Rory’s teeth skate over the metal of her spoon. “Jesus, it was awful. You wouldn’t give up and she wouldn’t cave, and so eventually you tried to force yourself toward the oven to make a plate for him yourself, and Mom tried to block you, and you shoved her some more, and she shoved you some more…” Rory suddenly feels furiously ill, unsure if it’s from the tequila or the story. She grabs Nell’s hand.

“This scar,” Rory says, running her index finger over a long vine just above the fold of Nell’s wrist and winding all the way down the shallow end of her arm. “That’s where you got it.”

Nell pulls her arm from Rory’s fingers and examines the consequence of that evening.

“It wasn’t her fault,” Rory says quietly now. “I mean, it wasn’t intentional. She didn’t scar you on purpose.”

“When is it ever on purpose?” Nell asks, finally raising her eyes to meet her sister’s.

Rory sighs. “Mom was just so hysterical, and to be fair, you weren’t at your best. You were both delusional in your own way. You loving him too much, her hating him too much or…God, I don’t even know what she was doing. Blaming herself? Blaming Dad? Blaming God?”