Элисон Скотч: The Song Remains the Same

“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.