Элисон Скотч: The Song Remains the Same

He nods.

Yes, he thinks, forever.

Y ou would think that after a month, I’d be itching to leave the hospital. That when Dr. Macht and Alicia come in, shake me from my state of half-dreaming, with The Best of Nell Slattery as the sound track to those dreams, and tell me that I can head home, albeit with a rigorous rehab schedule and biweekly shrink appointments, I would leap out of bed—my nearly resealed ribs notwithstanding—and tackle them with euphoria. But when they do tell me this—that I’m ready to return to my old life, mostly—I want to reply, What old life?

Earlier in the week, Peter returned to New York for work obligations, and truth be told, though I am trying, trying, to let us be something great—to honor that promise I made to myself—I’m relieved to have the space to breathe, to sort it all through. My mother, too, has been muddying the waters, urging me to give this second chance an honest go, a buzz in my ear that can’t be swatted away.

Shortly after Peter confessed his one-night stand, my mom swooped by and convinced the doctors to let me take a spin outside. In hindsight, of course, she also knew that this would indebt me to her—the first person to offer me a literal breath of fresh air after two weeks of sterilized, recirculated hospital oxygen. And she must have known that she was thus bound to earn her way into my good graces. She’s cunning, my mother. Even without knowing her well, I know this. But she wheeled me outside, delicately, like a china vase, and I inhaled the lung-expanding sunshine while she talked to me about forgiveness. About how you never regret doing it and how it can be the greatest gift you’ll ever give yourself— Take the other party out of it entirely and do it for yourself, she said. About how things aren’t always black and white, even though my earlier incarnation almost always thought that they were. There is gray, you know, she said. About how vulnerability was never my strong suit but now, she thinks, it might be. I confessed to her about my vow to seize this second chance, and she in turn embraced me and said, “There is life in you yet, a new life, a new course.” I nodded and felt the heat of the late July air burn my cheeks, and I felt good enough, forgiving enough, to want to dance on the sun. Okay, I nodded to her in agreement. Forgiveness. Yes. I will try. That’s what the new me might want anyway. My mother rubbed my forearm and smiled in a way that reminded me of someone who had taken too much morphine, and told me that she knew it, she knew that I had it in me now.

Still, though, I’m relieved that Peter has gone back to New York all the same, not because I don’t want to rebuild, or that I don’t think I can trust him again, but because working toward this forgiveness that my mother impugns is exhausting. It requires tangible effort. And I’m already exhausted enough.

Not that Peter knows this. Before he flew back on Monday, I was breeziness and happy anecdotes (from him, not me, as I still have no anecdotes of my own to speak of) and the occasional kiss, which still felt like a first-date kiss—all hesitation and question marks. He brought me chocolate bars and vanilla pudding, which he said were my favorites before, and which now taste good, mediocre good, and the fabulous me wonders if maybe I might enjoy something more exotic, more me, but I thank him and don’t say anything else.

While I ate, he told me of our first date—a setup, and not a good one at that—stilted conversation, no common ground. But then he got up to put a song on the jukebox, and that he chose “Sister Christian” made me smile and tell him of my sick, deep crush for the lead singer of Night Ranger in the seventh grade. And then we both loosened ourselves up and ordered another beer, and when he walked me home, he kissed me, and—extra beer or not—I kissed him back.

“You guys had that,” Samantha said over the phone the other night, “that music thing. Every once in a while in college, we’d karaoke and we’d all see how good you were— perfect pitch, you said, but mostly, you were over it. But with him, you found it again.”

“What do you mean, over it?” I fingered the iPod on my lap, where it almost always sat—plugged into my ear—when I wasn’t being tested, rehabbed, prodded.

“I don’t know,” she said. “You didn’t talk about it. Only that you once loved it, were great at it, but then…I guess you just lost interest.” I heard her pause to bite into her lo mein, still at her office, stuck waiting for a client to file some paperwork. “Like I said, to be honest, I don’t know all of the details.”

“Funny, isn’t it? How people only know what we want them to know?” I said.

I think of Peter, of the confession he made after the first-date story: “In the interest of full disclosure, I want you to hear it from me, all of it,” he had said. That one evening, I was staying late at the gallery to put up a show and we’d been fighting, though about what, he couldn’t remember, only that we were fighting badly and often. And that he and Ginger had just wrapped an H and R Block commercial ( they have music in H and R Block commercials? I’d asked), and that they went to the bar in their building to celebrate. And that when closing time came—armed with either too much alcohol or, in his case, too much vitriol at his wife—they’d become that coworker cliché by retreating to their mixing studio and doing it on the floor. But that was it, he said.

How well do I know you, Peter?

“I knew you plenty well,” Sam said, and pulled me back to the conversation.

“Still though.” I shrugged, though she couldn’t see me.

“Well, also, you liked that Peter was reliable,” she offered.

“Ironic since he wasn’t,” I said back.

“True enough,” she agreed. “The easy reads are never what they appear. Though you are. You were.”

“I’m not sure if that’s a compliment,” I said.

“I’m your best friend. Of course it’s a compliment,” she said.

“So if it wasn’t music, what was it, then?” I asked. “What made me happy? What did I do in my downtime?”

She hesitated, and I wondered if it was because she was still chewing or if it was because she didn’t yet know the answer.

“Work, I guess.”

“Work, you guess?”

“Well, I mean, the truth of the matter is, now that I’m really thinking about it, most of the time when we catch up, we’re…well, we’re bitching about something.”

“Like what?” I asked. The face from the cover of People certainly looked like she had plenty to bitch about.

“Oh, my mother-in-law, your mother. My sleep schedule, my work schedule. Your sister. Things like that.” She exhaled. “I never really thought about it until now—how little of our time we spend discussing the things that actually make us happy.”

“What would I say about my sister?” I said, ignoring her prophecy on happiness. “What could I possibly complain about with Rory?”

Sam laughed. “Oh god, see, and I don’t mean this to come out wrong, but in some ways, it’s probably better that you don’t remember. Clean slate and all. But you guys—you were always getting into it. You know, sister stuff. Competitive stuff. Driving each other crazy with gallery disagreements, nitpicky things. You were meticulous, she was less worried about the details. You were reserved, she was a show-off. Yin and yang, oil and water.”

“I don’t see that at all,” I said.

“Well, that’s the good thing about those clean slates,” she said, right before her brief came in and she had to run. “You don’t see what you just wiped away.”