The Song Remains the Same (24 page)

I test the noodles with my fork. Anderson feels guilt at surviving but I just feel…I contemplate it. I feel lost. That’s it exactly. And maybe I’m so lost because I had no idea who I was in the first place. Rory and Peter and Tina Marquis and my mother have all told me who I was, who I was supposed to be, but how can they really know? How can anyone really know? Can our lives be summed up by the assorted impressions of bystanders? Ice Queen. I ponder my high
school nickname.
Really?
Surely, the Ice Queen couldn’t have been everything about me.

I set aside the plastic container and reach for the phone.

My mother picks up, out of breath, on the third ring.
Oh Jesus, please don’t let me be interrupting their sex session.

“Darling! Yes, hello!” she says.

“Are you busy?”

“Well,” she hesitates. “A little.” Tate mutters something in the background. “But I’ll make time.” She clearly covers the phone with her hand and says something muffled to Tate.

“Were you in the middle of yoga?” I ask.
Please, please let it be yoga!

“We can call it yoga if that makes you feel more comfortable, dear.”
Oh for god’s sake, it’s no wonder I’m as fucked up as I am!

“So listen, Mom, I ran into Tina Marquis the other day.”

“Tina Marquis?” My mother’s voice creaks up a decibel as she tries to place the name. “Oh, the cheerleader from high school? I haven’t thought of her in ages, though I guess that’s not true since I occasionally see her mother at the market. It’s a shame what happened.”

“What’s a shame? What happened?”

“Oh, nothing of consequence. Just let herself go. As if she can’t still be living and loving her life in her sixties. Darling, if I have to tell you that I’m in the prime of my life, then you haven’t been listening.”

“Ugh, Mom, I’m listening. Can this not be about you and your weird fetishes and spirituality?”

She tuts and sounds offended. “Now, why do you have to go and be contrary?” She seems poised to unleash a diatribe, so I cut her off.

“Anyway, Tina Marquis said that Dad came back. In high school. For my graduation. Which, quite obviously, is the first I’ve heard of this. So is it true or not?”

There’s a long swab of dead air on the other end. I watch the cable box tick from 7:33 to 7:34 and glance down to notice my macaroni slowly congealing. Finally, I hear her inhale.

“That was never proven,” she says. “I really can’t say.”

“So it’s possible.”

“I don’t believe so, no. I would have known. You aren’t just married to a man for seventeen years of your life and don’t know these things.”

“But you didn’t know he was going to leave. How could you know if he came back?”

“Because I would have known!” she says, her temper slowly elevating. “I just would have. A wife knows these things. He would have told me, would have wanted to see you and Rory. He wouldn’t have just blown through town without so much as an explanation for why he left!”

“A wife just knows,” I say flatly. “That’s a ridiculous sort of explanation. Is that to convey that I should I have known about Peter? Done something to prevent him from sleeping with Ginger?”

“Oh, now, Nelly Margaret! Don’t start testing me! Don’t start personalizing this! But I would have known, and this has nothing to do with you and Peter, and besides, the fact that if he came back for graduation, do you honestly think”—she pushes her breath out now, and I envision her turning a particularly flush shade of purple—“well, do you honestly think that if he were still checking up on you, after all you’ve been through with the crash, he wouldn’t have tried to reach you
now
?”

Something sharp detonates inside of me. My heart.

“Oh,” I say, because it’s all I can manage. This has never occurred to me before this very moment. That my father is out there and hasn’t extended himself even after…even after all of this.

“Oh, see, now look. I always talk too much when I’m upset!” my mother bleats. “Your sister gets that from me. I just can’t keep my mouth shut. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have put that out there.” She pauses. “But I’ve gone and said it, and really, that’s probably the most cathartic thing for us both. So darling, please, let this go. Let
him
go. You are doing wonderfully and your marriage is healing, and you’re back at the gallery, and life is looking so up it can’t look any higher.”

I nod, and then I click good-bye, which is for the best so that she can’t hear my tears, either. I kick his sketchbook, the one that Jasper promised was a map back to my father’s world, from the coffee table to the floor, where it splays and flops open like a dead fish.

I should have trusted that instinct, I realize. To hate him. To exorcise him from my life because, really, who needs a father once you’ve grown and made it on your own?

It’s only later, once I’ve tucked myself under my sheets, that I realize how wrong I was: not that I didn’t need a father, but that my instinct was never to hate him. That, in fact, it was the opposite: that I loved him so much that I was never capable of fully letting him go. I stare at the blackened ceiling, waiting for sleep to come, haunted by the notion that if I can’t trust my own instincts, then, well, what else have I got?

22

“There’s a Light That
Never Goes Out”

—The Smiths

M
 aybe he’s dead,” Peter says when he calls me the next day from his retreat in the Berkshires, and I am weaving my way through foot traffic. I haven’t asked if Ginger will be there because it seems almost beside the point, but still, a niggling part of me wonders. The old me wants to ask—
is Ginger there?
—but the new me tempers her, trying to be more confident, trying to move on from the scars of the past.

“Is that supposed to be helpful?” I press my finger into my ear to ward off the car horns. It’s started to drizzle, the bleak clouds hovering too close, bearing down, threatening suffocation.

“I’m just saying. Maybe he’s dead, and that’s why he didn’t call you when the crash happened.”

An umbrella nearly takes my eye out as a fellow pedestrian jockeys for sidewalk space, and I spin around and flip him off with my free hand. But he’s already pushed beyond me, unaware of his intrusion, unaware of my overreaction to it.

“He can’t be dead.” I sigh, annoyed at the chilliness of Peter’s suggestion but simultaneously disheartened because death seems like the only decent explanation to prove me wrong. “Even if he were the most reclusive of recluses, someone would have known. It would have been reported. We’d know.”

“Well, then, this doesn’t make sense.”

“None of this makes sense!” I say a little too loudly while waiting for the light, and the two men next to me, hipsters in their twenties with scarves tied in perfect knots around their necks, baseball hats with ironic graphics tugged low on their faces, turn to stare. Then they do double takes at the recognition that, yes, it’s me—the freak from
People
, the anomaly from
American Profiles
—and my eyes bulge back at them.
Just move the hell along, there’s nothing to see here.
So they adjust their hats even lower and step off the curb, despite the still-red light.

Peter and I click good-bye, and I shove my phone into my bag, pulling out my iPod, stuffing the earbuds in. I filter through the music, looking to match the angry beat of my steps. I settle on the Smiths and keep moving.

It’s been less than a full day since my conversation with my mom, and already I can feel myself coming unhinged in a way that I haven’t been since the immediate aftermath of the accident. The grayish, dour me rearing her head despite my best efforts to shove her back. My mother’s revelation—that after months of my trying to pin myself to my father, perhaps he never wanted to be pinned down in the first place—has set me off, a skein of yarn coming completely unwound.

Last night, after sleep refused me, I succumbed to Anderson’s helpful text to “grab a six-pack and just let it go.” I threw my phone onto Peter’s side of the bed, tossed the sheets back, and slunk
toward the kitchen. I started with the six-pack, despite my medication, despite the side effects. Truth be told, it felt
good.
To be loose, to blunt the endless chatter in my head. Armed with the alcohol, I plunked down on the piano bench and played—spontaneously, freely—until finally, yes, I adhered to the second part of the text, and
let go.
I called Jasper Aarons and left him a long, expletive-filled message about what he could tell my dad should they ever come in contact, and then I stormed around the apartment, scooping up my father’s sketchbook, tearing out at least half the pages and tossing them into the garbage bin, the lid slamming with approval and finality. I pulled out my childhood pictures, excising him from my photo albums—not, to be fair, that he was in all too many pictures to begin with. But a few, yes. A posed family shot out by the woodshed. A hazy captured moment during an Arizona vacation, a drop from the nearby pool blurring the outer corner of the lens, the sun reflecting idyllically to project a portrait of the perfect family unit.

And then there was one of us that I’d missed the first time, tucked in between the pages, not in the plastic sleeves themselves. It must have been taken that summer, the summer of the white house, the one buried somewhere in my memory. Who manned the camera? Perhaps me, because the photo was of my dad, sleeping, solitary, content. In the background, I could barely make out a sliver of a painting in progress. He has a mustache and a goatee, which he appears to have grown for this occasion alone, as he’s scruffy but clean-shaven in every other image, and his cheeks are tanned, his eyelashes thick and protective. There’s a baseball bat on the floor underneath the couch on which he sleeps and splatters of paint, well, everywhere. His fingers, the pillows, the hardwood next to the slippers near the sofa.

I stared at the photograph, with the fourth beer blurring my edges, and cocked my head, a rage sparking through me like dynamite. Rory
claimed that it took me months the first time around to believe that he had gone. I flipped my palm over and stared at the scar entrenched deep in my skin. And here we were all over again: my refusing to acknowledge the simple truths. I had fallen from the sky and my dad hadn’t come to try to heal me. Hadn’t abandoned his selfish need for solitude to wander out into the bright lights of the world and rescue his little girl.

Well, fuck that. Well, fuck you!

I popped the lid to the fifth beer and fell, exhausted, onto the sofa. It turns out that my theory was right all along: people don’t change. Me, my dad, no one. Screw the red couch, screw the sweaters and the cute little blazers and the closet that now looked like the underside of a rainbow. Screw the new, fabulous me. Screw it, screw her, screw him.

Today on the street, I spot Tina Marquis under her pink umbrella. The rain is picking up now, and I shuffle as quickly as the sidewalk congestion and the ache in my torso allow. The change in weather makes my bones hurt in a way that they didn’t before the accident, as if they’re all imploring me to stay in bed, dive deep and safely under the covers.

“Sweetie!” Tina says, pulling me close by the elbow. “You’re practically a drowned rat. The first rule of this weather: always come prepared.”

It’s impossible not to smile at her genuine, openhearted kindness, despite my mood, despite everything. I pop out my headphones. I can see why we were friends way back when.

“That’s what happens when you lose your mind. You forget the basics,” I say, matting back my damp hair, brushing the wayward pellets off the shoulders of my trench coat.

“So I told him that we’d be in and out,” she says. I nod. This seems like a Hail Mary anyway.

“Thanks for doing this,” I say. “I’m trying to put things back together, but it’s starting to feel like they’re impossible to connect.”

“Listen, Nell.” She’s suddenly morose, that chameleon rearing her head. “We were best friends. And then we weren’t. But we were for a long time, and if I can help you—even with some easy favor like calling up the client to show you the space you were interested in—I’ll do it. That’s no skin off my back.”

“Well, I know you have places to be.”

Tina unlatches the outside door and enters a security code into the panel on the side of the foyer.

“And I know that you’re terrible at asking for help. So I’m hardly going to shirk it when you finally do.”

“Always? Was I always terrible?”

She pokes the Up button for the elevator. “Hmmm, not always. I don’t need to tell you that you became, well, more independent when your dad left. But then, who could blame you?” She shrugs, holds the open door, and I step inside. “I didn’t.”

“I just cut you off? Like, black and white?” I remember my mom’s words from way back in the hospital:
We all have our faults. Yours is that life is in black and white.

“It wasn’t just me, so I didn’t take it personally.” She smiles, and we both watch the overhead numbers as they tick upward. “Being a teenager is brutal. We were all dealing with our own crap.”

“What was your crap?”

“Mine? Oh, the usual: eating disorder.” She looks at me, her shoulders rising, then falling. “Bulimia through sophomore year in college.”

“Wouldn’t it be nice not to have our own crap?” I say, recognizing fully that losing your memory of that old crap is precisely the opportunity to do just that.

“The crap makes us what we are,” she says, then shakes her head and laughs. “Or maybe that’s just a pile of bullshit left over from too many self-help books.”

“Maybe.” I grin back. “Maybe that’s exactly what it is.”

The door dings open on the fifth floor.

“Just down here to the left,” she says, pointing the way. I survey the hallway. It’s nondescript in the way that a lot of New York apartment buildings are. Beige carpet, dull overhead lighting, muted wallpaper with an innocuous faded stripe. A sad-looking pumpkin cutout bought at a local drugstore adorns one of the doors as we pass it by, a pathetic attempt to brighten the hallway for Halloween, still weeks away. Tina stops in front of apartment number 513, pulls an enormous set of keys from her purse, and tinkers with the lock until she finds the right one. The latch unbolts with a confident click.