Элисон Скотч - The Song Remains the Same

He adjusts his glasses, and I notice his green eyes, and I imagine how stunning he must have been thirty years ago. He’s an artist, I can sense that from his worn hands and his earthy demeanor, and I can already see my father and him lighting up the world. A twinge of envy pinches my insides, at their brazenness, at their glory.

“Thank you, I mean, obviously I really don’t know much,” I say, then consider the specifics of what he’s said. “So you knew that he was leaving? Leaving…us? You’re the first one who’s been willing to speak frankly about it.”

He clears his throat. “I wouldn’t say that I knew…explicitly. But on a more fleeting level, I suppose I did. He…struggled. That’s probably the best way of putting it. He struggled for a long time to conform himself to the straight and narrow.…”

“The straight and narrow?” I interrupt. “Like, living within the law or living with my mother, being married?”

“The latter.” He smiles, and I try to force one, too, but don’t find much funny in this. “It just broke him. Conventional society, he used to say. Some men aren’t cut out for it, and then the fame”—he flops a hand—“so I knew that it was perhaps too much for him, and when he hinted that he might be, well, leaving, I didn’t press him for more because I wasn’t sure if he meant this earth or just his current life.”

“So you think he could have killed himself?” My throat feels like it’s closing in on itself, the visceral emotional reaction that comes from stored memories, even if I can’t tap into them.

His shoulders bob, and he starts to reply, but my mom bumps into me at this exact moment and spills red wine clear down the side of my pale gray dress.

“Oh, Jesus!” she and I say together. Jasper grasps her arm but she jolts it away, purposefully ignoring him.

“Hello, Indira,” he says. “It’s so nice to see you.”

She looks up as if she hadn’t noticed him before and makes an enormous show of her false surprise.

“Oh, Jasper! Jasper Aarons, I didn’t recognize you! It’s been so long!”

No one involved in the charade believes it, so Jasper winks to break the tension, then grabs some cocktail napkins from a waiter. I dab at the spreading stain, but am forced to excuse myself before I look like a gunshot victim at my own welcome-back party.

“Listen, he’d want you to move on with your life, to be happy,” Jasper says to me before I retreat to the back office to salvage my outfit, “to know that he loved you more than anything. I know you can’t remember, but try not to forget that .”

I replay his words a few minutes later, after I’ve found a bottle of club soda behind the bar and am blotting my dress with paper towels. I’m huddled in my old office, back behind the hive of activity out front. The chair squeaks when I sit down— welcome back! —and then I survey the furnishings from my former life. The desk is cast iron—spare but both antique and modern at once. There are stacks of papers neatly piled on the left corner, contracts, I’m sure, and a tumbling pile of mail scattered next to the printer. I can tell this is the slush pile—solicitations from aspiring artists who for some reason think that Rory and I can change their destinies, offer them open space on our walls, and alter their futures in doing so.

I flip through the desk calendar parked in front of the computer.

Six weeks ago, there it is: San Francisco. Hope Kingsley.

The following week, I’ve scribbled, 9-week ultrasound.

My chest seizes in grief, grief I wasn’t even aware I was carrying around until I see it. Here. Confirmed. This lost child is like an apparition, something that I never had, never held, can’t even fucking remember, but still, when I allow it to, it haunts me. Just because I can’t remember it, like everything really, doesn’t mean that it can’t cause me pain. Because here, faced with proof, I’m eviscerated. I want to reach into those dark corners of my brain and pull out answers: What was I going to do? What we were going to do? Become that cliché and hope that a baby can repair our relationship? Become a single mom? Not have it at all?

Peter, in vague terms, has implied that we were working it out, that I was aiming toward forgiveness. But a niggling part of me wonders how much of this is true. Now, with my mind washed clean and without the memory at the outrage of his betrayal, maybe I can—can forgive him. But back then? Really? Was I capable of such a thing? Of forgiveness in the grandest of scales? I sigh, wondering how much it matters what I was going to do before. I flip the calendar a few weeks back and forth to see what else there is, what other bread crumbs I’ve left myself to follow.

Mostly, it’s empty, but there. There it is: something. Something small, and who knows if it’s anything. Probably a dead end. But I commit it to memory anyway. Tina Marquis. 11 a.m. Fifteen letters that mean nothing to me.

Peter pops his head through the door, breaking me free.

“Hey, you okay?”

I pat my dress. It’s still damp and looks like a ruby reddish gray mosaic, but it’s presentable enough. The stain almost looks intentional.

“I’m okay,” I say. I stand and reach for his outstretched arm, and then I shuffle back toward the beckoning crowd.

Three hours later, the guests have scattered themselves out the front door and into the warm New York City night, and I am too tired to move. Really. So tired that I don’t know how I’m going to make it home. Peter will take me, but I am oh-my-god-I-can’t-even-walk-to-the-town-car tired.

“This was too much for her,” my mom hisses at Rory, like I’m not perfectly present and can’t hear her perfectly well.

“You’re the one who told me to do it in the first place!” Rory replies, and I wish they would both shut the hell up and let me go to sleep right there on the bench underneath Still Life with Purple Chair by Antonio Molinero, an artist Rory discovered last year in Barcelona. The lights of the stark gallery are burning my pupils: too much white, too much brightness, all contrast and glare in here. It is hip, it is fabulous, and I can’t take one second more of it. If I had an ounce of energy left, I’d use it for the new me to chastise the old me at being so quick to abandon her promises. As it is, I lie back, resting my head on a faux-glass bench, and accidentally knock over a wayward plastic wineglass.

“I’m here, you know. Right in front of you. So you can stop talking about me like I’m not,” I bleat.

“Yes, of course you are, dear. We’re only trying to sort out what’s best for you,” my mom says, kneeling to mop up the spill.

“Who died and made you my keeper?” I answer, until I realize that 152 people died. And then we all just shut up. Finally, I say, “Can someone please just take me home?”

“Yes, we should go,” Peter says, until Rory gives him a stare that could wither a flower. I’ve seen how she eyes him now—distrustful, distasteful, but when I ask her about it, she usually just hiccups and says, “He has a lot to prove,” which is true, so I let it rest.

“You can stay and help clean,” Rory says. “Anderson can take her home.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m taking her,” Peter says.

“Don’t be ridiculous my ass,” Rory says back. “Half of the drunks here were your friends, and I’m not cleaning up their mess by myself.”

“I’m helping,” my mom says, still on her knees. “And Tate’s here, too. And Hugh.” Rory rolls her eyes, and Hugh, as if on cue for his boyfriend-of-the-year award, strolls from the back office with a box of garbage bags, ready to man up. If he didn’t love my sister so much, he’d make me sick.