Элисон Скотч - The Song Remains the Same

Shortly after Dr. Macht informs me that he has granted me freedom to fly back to my sister, to my husband, and to discover why I once made music for him, Jamie pops his head through the door frame.

“News,” he says. “I have news.”

“Me, too,” I say. “I also have news.”

“You’re going home. I already know.” He grins, a little too self-importantly.

“Of course you do.” I close my eyes.

“It’s part of the job.”

I hear him sliding a chair next to the bed, and I open my eyes to find him already seated.

“So you already know mine. What’s yours?”

“ American Profiles, ” he says.

“ American Profiles ?” I say.

“Yes, American Profiles .” He emphasizes both words like that will answer my question. “That show on Thursday nights?” I shake my head, still unknowing. “Well, they ‘profile’ all these amazing stories, amazing people. I think they might be interested.”

“Interested?”

“In us, in a story!” He claps his hands for emphasis. “I’ve been pitching it like crazy, and I think today they bit.”

I busy myself wrapping the headphone wire around the iPod and consider it. My instinct—despite my initial zeal for Operation Free Nell Slattery, a zeal that has since waned, as these cockeyed ideas often do—is to burrow under the covers until the public loses interest. But the new me, the fabulous me, the one that conceived of OFNS in the first place, and the one I committed to as a penance for surviving the crash, implores my instincts to rethink this, to see it as an opportunity—for what, I’m not even yet sure. Maybe just to live on a grander scale, to fly down life’s zip line instead of standing beneath it, craning my head to see what was coasting by. Besides, Jamie is a means to an end—he’s out there, uncovering details, angling for information—and my new instinct, my new gut is telling me to trust him, telling me that there’s something here to believe in. Just last week, we did an hour-long interview that his station stretched over three nights, and viewers marveled at my voided memory and told us as much in e-mails.

What I wouldn’t do to erase the memory of my lousy ex-husbands (three of ’em) and son-of-a-bitch boss, Clara from Iowa City wrote in.

My heart goes out to this poor girl. What a loss—I have asked my church group to pray for her this Sunday, Eugenia from neighboring Wichita, which now received the show via satellite, told us.

“Before you answer, I have these.” Jamie reaches into his bag and thrusts a pack of postcards in my hand.

I finger through the lot of them. They’re semi-abstract paintings—if you look hard enough you can see the shape of a woman’s breast or the ampleness in her butt cheek or the curve of her chin in almost all of them. They are in glaring, blinding colors—cherry red the shade of fresh blood, vibrant blue so vivid you couldn’t find it in nature, a yellow that forces me to squint.

“My dad’s, I take it?” I ask. “I thought he did pop art?”

“This was his early work. And it wasn’t easy to find. Rory blew me off when I asked about getting some prints and your mom flaked on me twice. I finally called a friend of a former colleague who’s an assistant art professor at Columbia. These were from some of your dad’s old shows.” He pauses. “Anything look familiar?”

“I’ll give you two guesses.” I pause and cock my head, turning one of the images vertically. “Still, though, I can tell he was amazing.”

“Rory told me—curtly, I should add—that you were his apprentice.” He shakes his head. “No, maybe she said muse.”

“I could have been. I wouldn’t know.” I look again at the photos. “But these aren’t of me. Not if he left when I was thirteen.”

“No.” Jamie reaches for a postcard and examines it. “These predate you.”

“My mom, maybe?” I suggest helpfully.

“Maybe,” he says, handing it back, refocusing. “But that’s not the point. The point is American Profiles .”

“Well, you’re not making your point about it.” I pause, examining the scattered postcards, of the archaeology that Jamie has uncovered when no one else has. “So what exactly is your point about American Profiles ?”

“I think they’re going to make us an offer: you, me, Anderson—none of their regular anchors—a four-part series tracking your recovery, your transition back into the real world. I’m still negotiating it.”

“Shouldn’t people be sick of us by now?” I say this, and yet I know they are not. I still hear the calls to the nurses’ station, can still see the media trucks parked on the street outside my window. There have been no other national catastrophes since the crash and until there is—a bomb threat, a sports star scandal—I’m still it.

“If I’ve learned anything in my job, it’s that people get stuck on stories that resonate. I mean, you were just some up-and-coming thirty-something woman whose life was wiped out, which to a lot of them seems like a blessing, not a curse—a second chance but also an unwanted chance. And they read about you and think, ‘What if that were me? What then?’ You are them, they are you. That’s what they’re thinking every time they see you.”

“I get it, I know.” I do get it and I do know. I want the laugh track! “Anderson will never agree. He wants anonymity now, not more hype.”

In fact, Anderson had just been released from his rehab center early last week, his body healing at an unexpectedly remarkable pace, and had flown back to New York to regroup, to see if he could pick up the shards where his life left off. His sister and mother came down from Boston to help him acclimate.

He called two nights ago, after getting settled. I was watching Fatal Attraction, an ill-advised selection, to be sure, but a pop-culture classic all the same, and Rory had told me we used to watch the boiled-bunny scene over and over again, partially to terrorize ourselves, partially because we knew it was coming and would start giggling five minutes prior.

When the cell phone vibrated, I was taking the movie a little too personally, letting it hit a little too close to my core, and all of those initial doubts about Peter were firing at full throttle—despite my mother’s plea for forgiveness, despite Peter’s own. I stared at Glenn Close and her savage eyes and wild, curly hair and wondered if that wasn’t Ginger, wasn’t Ginger exactly. And then I wondered if Michael Douglas could go back and do it over—before she boiled his bunny, before he realized the damage he had wrought on his wife and family—if he had really learned his lesson. Not because Glenn nearly kills them, but because he never should have done it in the first place. There’s a difference there, you know. But that’s the part we’ll never know.

Ginger! Glenn!

Even though I’d promised Peter I’d put it out of my head, that it didn’t matter, I couldn’t put it out of my head entirely. There was nothing else to fill it: no history to fall back on, no soft space to catch me when I was free-falling through my doubts. So when Anderson called, it was a relief—to plug that space with something else.

“I wish you wouldn’t trust this guy Jamie too much,” he said. “My sister showed me those spots he did with you that ran last week. The three-parter. They’re up on YouTube.”

I considered it. “Trust is a moving target right now. And besides, didn’t you once tell me that you have to control the press, not let them control you?”

“Ah.” He laughed. “Now the student is the master. Like the Jet Li movies I used to watch when I got stoned.”