Элисон Скотч - The Song Remains the Same

“I don’t know that I would characterize myself as joyful.”

“So how would you characterize yourself, then?”

I recline in my armchair and consider it.

“Well, I don’t know. But joyful isn’t the first thing that comes to mind.” I think of my question to Samantha from weeks ago— what made me happy? Who knew? Who knows?

“So how about we make it a goal?” she says. “To figure out how you would define yourself. Who you are now.”

“You mean, who I was before.”

“No,” she says simply. “Well, yes. That’s part of the goal, too.” She unscrews the top of her water bottle and sips. “But they may not necessarily be the same. That’s important to know. Scary, too. But important.”

“But the stuff from before—I mean, my life. Will I remember that? Get that back, regardless of who I am now?” The idea of my brain being a whitewash forever is too terrifying to digest.

“Well, not to sound like your mother, but she’s right that having a memory at all is a wonderful step,” Liv says, placing the lid back on her water bottle, setting it on the floor by the leg of the couch. “It’s a breakthrough. It’s your brain trying to reconnect the wires.”

“But it might have connected wires that aren’t even there. Neither she nor Rory remembers anything like that!”

“Could be,” she says, “though I doubt it. You said it felt real, like a déjà vu. You shouldn’t second-guess yourself if it was that tangible. Perhaps it was pulling together pieces from disparate memories, but it was something. Don’t underestimate that.”

“I would say, given my life right now, that I don’t underestimate much.”

The phone rings, interrupting us, and the machine clicks on. Another reporter leaves a message.

“Sorry for that,” I say. “We get a call every few hours. I don’t know what part of ‘no comment’ they don’t get. Remind me the next time I’m in a plane crash and lose my memory to unlist my number.”

She laughs, then chews her pen for a moment. “So some logistics. We’ll do this twice a week. Sometimes you’ll feel like talking, sometimes you won’t. Sometimes we’ll use different methods: guided meditation, free association…we’ll see what works and what doesn’t. Which is something for you to think about, too—what’s drawing out these ephemeral feelings? What work can you do on your own?” She smiles. “But you won’t be on your own. Even if you feel like you are, I’ll be here to help.”

“I wouldn’t mind a little help.”

“But I don’t want to give you the impression that this is going to be easy.”

“I’ve never had that impression,” I say. “Nothing about this gives me that impression at all.”

A full week after I’ve landed back in New York, Rory opens the gallery—which has been booming thanks to public curiosity—for a reunion, a welcome-back party. I don’t bother asking welcome back to what, though the thought has certainly crossed my mind. WELCOME BACK TO…NOTHING! No, that banner wouldn’t be celebratory enough at all. I dot concealer under my eyes, flush my eyelids with a hint of brownish shadow that I’ve found in the vanity, and spike my lashes with mascara. I stare into the mirror and imagine it—the gallery, the pulse of the crowd, the huddle of troops who are rushing to rally for me. Maybe this is where the fabulous me was hidden. Maybe this was my element, the thing I did best, maybe this is where I cast off the dourness of that People photo and flitted about the art world, my deals, my acumen, as a spotlight. Yes , I think, this is where I’ll finally uncover her, glimpse the road map to the new Nell, the hint of who I could have been all along .

I flatten my hair with my palms and wonder if it doesn’t feel four inches too long for me. Why I wore it so plainly—straight, middle part—when something else might have brought out the softness of my jaw, illuminated my heart-shaped face. I push the wrinkles out of my gray sleeveless dress—my closet is a study in the palette of neutral—and exhale.

Peter hires a town car, and my mother, wearing a perfume that reminds me of patchouli, and Tate, wearing a blazer and oxford with one button too many undone, accompany us down there. Truthfully, I’m relieved for the company, even if it means I have to watch Tate damply kiss my mother, and then see her wipe her scarlet lipstick stain off his mouth. They’re like teenagers, these two, straight out of a sitcom. They have the laugh track, dammit!

But I tolerate their company all the same. The simple truth is that with the chaos dying down and more quiet space to fill, Peter and I have run out of things to talk about, and these two help soak up the still air. Of course there are discussions to be had, but mostly Peter and I shuffle around each other and turn the TV louder when things shift from silent to awkward. Last night, after he got home from the gym, he pulled me to the piano bench and asked if I might want to play—for him, with him—and even though I rolled my fingers over the keys, and the muscles found their natural curl, the instinct of rhythm pulsing through them, I shook my head and declined. Then I pushed the bench back, the feet squeaking against the floor, and climbed into the shower. Where I stayed until the mirrors steamed up—chiding myself for doing so— this is not what a seize-life-by-the-balls girl would do! —but unable to find the strength to go back out to him all the same.

Time. Forgiveness. My mother had implored. I was trying to pay respect to both. Perhaps our wedding song was no coincidence: have a little faith. Indeed.

The gallery is on Twentieth Street in Chelsea, and the sun is only beginning to tuck itself behind the downtown skyscrapers when we pull up. We’re running late thanks to traffic on the West Side Highway, so there’s already a herd of faces there to greet me, all unfamiliar yet familiar from my photo albums. That is to be expected. What’s not is the bottleneck of camera crews parked on the sidewalk.

Anderson pushes through them and opens the town car door. He pulls me out, and we braid our now-healed limbs around each other.

“The girl who saved my life!” he says, burying his chin in my shoulder.

God, it is good to see him, though it’s only been a few days. A safe space in this tornado.

“Come on, don’t mind them,” he says, when we break from our embrace and he notices my saucer eyes. I know I should be used to this—that I’ve made magazine covers and that three-parter with Jamie back on the local news in Iowa, and with the interest from American Profiles, and Rory had even told me about the TV crews camped out at the gallery—but mostly, I’ve been folded inside a hospital room and now my apartment, so this loss of anonymity is startling. I feel like the empress who has been stripped of her clothes.

Of all of us embroiled in the debacle, however, Anderson knows how to handle this particular aspect.

“She’s not doing press,” he says to them all, guiding me by the elbow.

“Is it true your memory is returning?” shouts a woman who is holding a digital recorder.

“How would you know that?” I spin my neck too quickly toward her and a vertebra flares up. How could someone possibly know that?

“Our sources are reporting that your memory is back,” she says, smiling now, like she’s doing me a favor.

“Hang on,” Anderson says to me, just as I’m thinking, Your sources? Who is out there citing themselves as a source? Like my life is a covert op that can be clandestinely reported on? Anderson turns back to the reporter while I’m in mid-thought, stepping two inches too close to the microphone. “Listen, Paige, back off. Back off. She’s not required to verify anything with you. So leave her alone.”