Элисон Скотч - The Song Remains the Same

She walks over to me and kisses the top of my head. “You got that from me, you know. People said that you got it from your dad, your love of music, but it was from me. He couldn’t sing to save his life.

“You’ll have to forgive the guesthouse,” she says to Jamie, after we’ve made our way out back, as he drops his duffel onto the creaking farmhouse floors. “I had it cleaned but it’s still a little musty, I’m afraid. It hasn’t been used for guests in years. But with all the company we’re having this weekend, it’s the only way to make it work.”

Rory and Hugh are taking the train up this afternoon, and since Peter and I aren’t currently sharing beds, the two of them were now deposed to the extra bedroom on the third floor. The house itself is huge—too big for my mom alone—but she’d long ago tossed out the ancillary family rooms and bedrooms to make way for her yoga room, her sewing room, her “quiet” room where Tate could write poetry and nary a word could be spoken, though sometimes, she whispered, as she gave me a tour, “we like to make love in here without any sound.”

My old room, much like my apartment with Peter, is nothing like I would have pictured for myself. Where are the teenage heartthrob posters? Where are the old record albums and drawers full of letters to camp friends? Instead, there is a collection of tennis trophies on a bureau, a ceiling-high bookshelf stuffed with fraying guitar sheet music and old high school textbooks—physics, biology, French, European art—a barren white desk, and a wicker rocking chair adorned with faded flowery pillows better suited for an old-age home. If you were to look around here—a detective in search of whom I would grow up to be—there’d be no signs: my teenage self is a generic whiteboard, a canvas with no color. I feel a pang of sadness for her, for me.

I ease down onto the bed and breathe through the ache in my ribs. Seven weeks now after the crash, my pain has mostly dissipated. It pops up now and again when I’ve stretched myself too thin—a reminder that I’m not who I used to be: I’m less strong, more breakable. Though it could be worse—it could be like Anderson’s: ever-present, constant, unwilling to be tamed.

Peter knocks on the door.

“Going to jump in the pool. Want to join?”

“In a minute,” I answer.

I lie back on the bed, with its Holly Hobbit–esque comforter that feels too childish for the woman I grew into in this room, and listen to the noises of the house, hoping they will bring something back. A floor below, in the kitchen, I can hear my mother working the blender, making god knows what—a spinach smoothie? a tofu shake?—and out the open window, a lawn mower in the distance. Then, a splash as Peter catapults himself into the pool. I close my eyes. What did I used to hear when I was drifting off to sleep at night? Nothing comes, so I try to envision it anyway. My parents—while my dad was still around—playing Dylan or the Smiths in the living room, or in later years, my sister’s thumping hip-hop from her closed door across the hall. Crickets on the lawn? Neighbors pulling into their driveways? A ringing phone from a boy on whom I had a crush?

All of that seems right but none of it is confirmation of anything, so I thrust myself to my elbows and make my way toward the pool.

Outside, Jamie is dipping his feet in, while Peter is moored on a raft. They’ve uncovered an old beat box from Rory’s room, the radio making conversation between them. “It’s eighties weekend!” the DJ says. “Call in and share your favorite hit from the decade.”

The late August air is surprisingly devoid of humidity—just one of those crystalline days that you wish could go on forever—filling your lungs and your being with a type of unmatched lightness. I squint at the two of them, my farm-boy journalist and my repentant husband, staring for a beat until Peter notices me and offers me a wave.

“Hey.” Jamie jumps to his feet. “Before you sit, come here for a sec.”

He steers me toward the guesthouse, holding my waist steady with a comforting familiarity.

“Are you okay in here? Is everything settled and cleaned up?” I ask.

“Yes, perfect,” he answers. “I’m glad you invited me. I can’t imagine a better place to start.”

The guesthouse used to be my father’s studio, as evidenced by the occasional paint spatter that my mother had never quite erased, and the ceiling mural of jewel-toned waves that—my mom explained to Jamie—my father concocted during a particularly bad spate of insomnia. A queen-size bed is pushed against the back wall, a set of drawers with an old TV atop it sits to the side, and a faded rug, so much like the one found in my apartment, conceals the rest of the scars of my father’s work. Every few feet, you encounter a giant splotch of oil paint or acrylic that hadn’t come up. Though my mom redid the main house, she didn’t have it in her, I suppose, to gut this one, too.

The scent inside is familiar—part paint, part paint thinner, part coffee, part lemon cleaner—and it hits me with both purpose and electricity—that still after all of these years, it can smell like what? What is that smell? Who is that smell? Jamie unhinges a window, and I can hear Peter on his raft, singing freely along to the Police on the radio.

The floor spins for a moment, and I lose my way. “Every smile you fake, every claim you stake, I’ll be watching you.”

“You okay?” Jamie asks.

“The smell in here…and with the music…it’s just…” I inhale and try to imagine. Yes, that’s it. “It’s exactly like my father.” I fall still and wait for something else to come.

“You remember something?”

I shake my head. “Only that this reminds me of him.” I don’t say that the pulse in my neck feels like it might detonate inside of me, and that something about this smell is both exhilarating and terrifying. I make a mental note to raise it with Liv. That’s my new favorite line. Anderson had said, Or so my therapist says.

Jamie steps over to a closet on the right side of the bed. “And what about this?” The door creaks as he opens it, a small tuft of grime kicking up. No one has sniffed around here in years.

I shuffle closer and peer inside. Even in the half-darkness, I can make out canvases leaning atop one another like dominoes.

“Are these my dad’s?”

“Yours,” he says. “I went to hang up my shirts and here they were.” He kneels down. “Look, you signed the bottom.”

I can’t comfortably squat to join him, so he lifts the front painting and raises it to me.

“I’ve never seen my own stuff.” I wrinkle my brow. “Not great, but not bad. Not my father by a long shot.”

“Who says you have to be your father? I mean, I’m no expert or anything, but for a kid—look, it’s dated—you weren’t more than thirteen. I’d say this is pretty good.”

He’s right: the way I’d blended the colors, the flare I placed on the horizon, the shadow of the far-off rolling hills, and the jagged lines to create an illusion of pine trees. You can tell that I’ve been taught by the best, even in the cliché of the landscape.

Jamie starts to place it back on the floor when we both—together, at once—notice the painting behind it.

I’m breathless, stunned, feel my chest closing in.

“Jesus Christ,” we say simultaneously. He tugs it up, closer.

“It’s the house I remembered!”

I feel like I’m hovering outside myself, having an out-of-body experience. But it’s there—put down on the canvas years back. The white wooden front, the enormous porch with a picture-perfect bench, the lanterns aglow, the green landscape behind it.

“It’s exactly like what you described,” he confirms, and then his face morphs into a wide grin. “This is something, this is really something !”