The Song Remains the Same (33 page)

31

I
 find Wes in the kitchen. I tiptoe inside so as not to alert my mother or Peter or Rory that I have come up from the lake down below. Wes is typing on his laptop, his fingers flying furiously, the wrinkles on his forehead crinkling like a paper fan. I slide the glass door into place behind me, and he pauses abruptly, looks up, and smiles. And then, as if he knows me too well after so many years apart, he holds his pointer finger to his lips, rises, and ushers me to the back porch.

“Zeppelin,” I say, as if I need no other explanation.

“He had it on all summer,” Wes says back.

“And the lake, the water…” I gesture inside to the painting.

“You never truly trusted it,” he says. “You loved it, you forced yourself to love it, but you always took a while to warm up to it. Every summer.”

“But I’m a good swimmer,” I say.

“I’m not saying it was rational.” He shrugs.

“That day,” I say, turning to meet his eyes. “That day when I went under, you found me, didn’t you?”

He grimaces, then nods. “I got back from the dentist and went out looking.” He unconsciously rubs his jaw. “My face was still half-numb. Jesus, can you believe I remember that? That my face was still half-numb from the Novocain?”

“Who knows why we remember the things that we do?”

“Ah.” He wiggles his finger. “The easy way out, the metaphor to your problems.” He picks up the iPod, sticks an earbud in his ear, placing the other one in mine. We listen to Zeppelin together until he says, “I subscribe to the theory that we block out what we don’t want to see, but it’s always there, buried in our brains, waiting to be called up again.”

“Is this some sort of Big Brother intervention?” I turn toward him, and the bud drops out, hanging between us. “Are you saying that I’ve unconsciously buried a wheelbarrow of crap because it seemed easier?”

“I’m saying that I think we all wish we could forget those last few days that you were here. So it’s no surprise that you managed to.”

“But it was among the first things that also came back to me.”

“That’s not particularly surprising, either.” We stare out into the fading fall landscape of his childhood home, and he removes his earbud, refocusing. “Anyway, yes, I found you. You’d fallen into the water somehow on your back. Thank god. If it had been the other way…” He trails off, then collects himself. “I pulled you out, and checked your pulse, and you were still breathing, just unconscious, and so I ran to Dad’s studio to get help, but he’d locked the door by then. I knocked for a good three minutes until I realized it was pointless, so I ran to the main house to get my mom.”

I lean over the balcony now, waves of nausea cresting over me, and I wrap my palms around the railing to ensure that I don’t spiral over.

“My mom called an ambulance,” Wes says, “and by then, you’d come to. They did some tests at the hospital, determined it wasn’t anything more than a bad contusion. But the bruises on your arms—Jesus, they were these massive, purple welts, like tattoos or something—they didn’t really show up until we were headed home or else they’d have never sent you back with us.” He hesitates, wondering how to sum it up. “So that was that.”

“So that was that,” I echo.

“Dad didn’t even know about it until he finally came up to the house long after dinner. You were already asleep, but I was still up, watching TV. My mom confronted him, and insisted on calling your mom, who promptly—and rightly—demanded that you guys come home immediately. She got here, I don’t know, a day or so later. Of course, Dad reacted to the news in the only way that seemed fitting for our family—with visceral cries of pain that were so loud, I remember flipping off the TV, heading up to my room, and stuffing a pillow over my head.”

“And when I woke up the next morning,” I say, filling in the blanks, it all rushing back to me now, “he made us pancakes, kissed the top of my head, and we all acted like it hadn’t happened.”

Wes bobs his head. “It was his surest path to forgiveness.”

“Ours or his?”

“Both, I guess. We learned what we know from our parents”—he waves a hand—“or something like that.”

“Jesus, that’s depressing.”

“When he came back, when my mom was sick, it was the same thing all over again. Hat in hand but no real acknowledgment of his sins in the first place.”

“How long did he stay?”

“Off and on for a few months. I didn’t ask questions.”

“And then he left?” It’s an assumption phrased as a question.

“And then he left,” he says. “He and my mom made their peace, and she begged me not to hate him, and I swear to god, she believed it, she truly, honestly loved him. And because she was dying, and because I was so far past hatred by that point, I promised her that I wouldn’t. We never heard from him again.”

“Not even when she died?”

“I don’t think his forte was showing up during a catastrophe,” he says plainly. “He was never a man to rise to the occasion—good or bad, despite whatever his devout art-collecting followers believe about him.”

And yet, I worshipped him, too. Ignored all of those signs, all of the neglect, because when he loved you, for those rare glorious moments that he gave himself to you, it was all you ever needed. A drug in and of itself.

I think of that rumor that Tina Marquis passed on, a real-life, high-stakes game of telephone. Could he really have come back for something as simple as my high school graduation? Would he really have been there to mark the occasion, when all other evidence points to the contrary? No, probably not. Just another hallucinogenic that I swallowed up and hoped to somehow make a reality.

Behind us, something stirs in the kitchen, and we both turn in unison to see my mother gaping at us from behind the glass door, like we’re zoo animals. Her standard-issue muumuu has been replaced by age-appropriate dark-rinsed jeans, a robin’s-egg-blue oxford, and a tasteful (
tasteful!
) violet neck scarf. Her skin is blotchy and her eyes are swollen, and part of me breaks in half for her, because I can vaguely remember who she was before all of this came undone, and how difficult it must have been for her to swirl herself into someone she thought was entirely different than before.

“She did come get you,” Wes says softly. “I know that she’s had her share of screwups, but through everything, she was actually the grown-up who always came to get you. Figuratively or not.”

I start to agree—the new me would want to agree with him, until I remember that she has held on to secrets for so long that they must be part of her, integral to her very being, like her blood or her liver or her heart. And that part of me that breaks for her seals itself all the way back up.

Before I can articulate an answer, there is a distorted crash from behind where my mother stands, out toward the front of the house. She swivels toward the noise, then rushes toward it, and Wes and I, after a moment’s hesitation, do the same. It’s a family trait, of course, rushing forward toward disaster.

“What the fuck, man?”
Peter is yelling from the front porch. He is on his ass, barreled over, and nursing what appears to be a bleeding lower lip. He touches it gingerly, then winces. “Seriously, man, what the fuck?”

Anderson has backed off toward the corner of the porch, his left foot resting on the toppled bench, his arms folded, assessing the situation like this is some sort of movie shoot, and he is waiting for his close-up. His ever-so-perfect stubble frames his locked jaw.
Oh my god,
I realize,
he thinks that he is fighting on my behalf. Like I need him to fight on my behalf!

“Jesus, Anderson, what happened?” I manage.

“
He
confronted
me,
” he says, throwing his palms in the air.
Hey, don’t look at me, I’m innocent.

“What’s your problem with Anderson?” Rory says from behind
me. She scoots beside me, and here we are all, gravitating around this mess.

“This asshole convinced her to leave,” Peter says, steadying himself and rising. The back of his hand never leaves his lip, and I can see the bright spread of blood washing across his wrist.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Anderson says. “Like I had anything to do with it!”

“He had nothing to do with it, Peter! Didn’t you get my note? Didn’t you see the
Post
?” I say.
Is he the one person on the planet who doesn’t read Page Six?
“If you want to blame someone, blame yourself.”

“You didn’t want to leave until he started hanging around, started being there when I couldn’t,” Peter says, and for the first time in, well, ever, I start to pity him. Is this what we were like before the crash? Making excuses? Deflecting blame? Working so hard to avoid the obvious that the work itself became more exhausting than anything else? “I tried, you know! I tried to be there every step of the way until you got better.”

“I haven’t gotten better!” I gripe, and then I realize that maybe I have. Maybe I
have
gotten a hell of a lot better, and I’ve only been holding on to my amnesia because I’ve been working hard to avoid the alternative. The memories. The journey. But I am standing here now, strong, capable, and perhaps it’s time to accept where I’ve been, what I’ve gone through, what comes next. I step toward Peter, who looks so small now, cowering up against the front porch beams. “Besides, you’re forgetting,” I say, my voice quieting, “I kicked you out the first time, too.”

“But you
forgave me
.” He starts to cry now, knowing that it’s over.

“Don’t you get it?” I shout, and everyone startles, even Anderson,
who has been practicing his best menacing brood, even Rory, who is shifting her weight back and forth, debating the details of what exactly has transpired between Anderson and me and what this means for her own confessions.
Too late,
I think.
Too late for all of that. For everything.

“Don’t I get what?” Peter says, and I can see in him that he really doesn’t. That none of them do. Only Wes. They don’t get that I can remember now, that I’ve figured out how to guide myself back into my cerebral space, and that, despite their best efforts to stop me, I’m going to dredge it all back up.

“I know that you’re full of shit!” I say. “I know that I didn’t forgive you, that I never intended to forgive you!”

His eyes grow to orbs, and mine do, too. To be honest, I didn’t even realize that I had indeed remembered this detail—that, like Wes suggested just a moment ago, the history was tucked in my brain, waiting to be cajoled out. I can recall it so clearly now—Rory telling me about the disgusting mess, Peter professing his love for Ginger, his showing up on that one night when I was nursing my sadness with wine, and how we fell into bed together. And how I recognized, almost immediately, that taking him back was a cataclysmic mistake. And then there was baby…oh god,
the baby—yes, I was going to keep it and raise it on my own.

I spin around to see the faces of my family who have led me too far outside of this pasture. “Don’t
all of you get it?
What this has taken from me? What
all of you
have taken from me?”

They stare back at me, and I can see that they don’t get it at all. And then I am crying, real and hard and purging tears. Mourning the months that I wasted after the crash trusting them, tuning my ear toward them, when I should have been listening to my own inner beat instead. Mourning, too, my own culpability in this: that it was so
much easier to listen to them than do the heavy lifting that was actually required. If I’m to blame them, I must also blame myself. Though that does little to soothe anything, to make anything any better.

“We were trying to help,” Rory offers.

“Bullshit,” I say. “You were trying to help
yourselves.
”

“Nelly,” my mom interjects. “Please.”

I shake my head at her—
do not even think of saying anything else
—and wipe the snot from my nose, before I turn to flee down the steps and out to the dirt road, away, for once, from catastrophe. As I fly down the steps, the sides of my ribs flare, a quiet reminder that I may have healed, but somewhere inside of me, there are still plenty of scars.

32

I
 find a quaint little coffee shop about thirty minutes later in town. In my haste, I hadn’t thought to bring my wallet, but the cashier, who wears a waitress uniform with the name Mimi sewn on in blue thread, gives me a once-over and says, “Hey, I know you. You’re Francis Slattery’s kid.”

“Yeah, I’ve been on TV.” I sigh, scooting out a chair, its iron legs scraping the tile floor. I think of Jamie, and how he duped me, and then I consider that part of me wanted to be duped. To believe that Operation Free Nell Slattery could be as simple as I thought it could be. That somehow pouring my trust onto this relative stranger could offer me answers that really only I had. I’ll call him when I get back, I resolve. Tell him that I wish him luck, even though we’ll never be friends, that he’ll never earn a morsel of my loyalty again.

“Yeah, I’ve seen you on TV,” she says, pouring me a mug of black coffee without my even asking. “But I remember you from when you summered here, too.”

“You do?” I say, squinting my eyes, wondering
just how old is she anyway
. She can’t be more than midfifties, with a round head of brown hair that looks like she wears a shower cap to bed. Her breasts are too large for her smaller frame, and her skin is leathery, but in a way that suits her. Mostly, despite all of these things, she looks content.
Content. How far do I have to go to find that? I tried everything, it seems: embracing my childhood, running from it, pretending it never existed, and yet still. Content? No, I never found that.

“You and Wes, you were always causing some sort of trouble,” she says, cutting off my thoughts. “You were in town a lot, rode your bikes in for ice cream.”

“And my dad? Have you heard much about him lately?”