Элисон Скотч - The Song Remains the Same

I stare down at the guest list. Anonymous names of who—friends? patrons?—who will soon arrive to brush next to me and engage as if nothing ever happened. No, that’s not true. Some will lower their voices and their eyes will cast downward and they’ll ask questions that feel too intimate, and I will freeze my smile and provide answers in such a way that I don’t answer them at all.

“Excuse me, Nell?” I glance up and the reporter—the one from weeks back with the inside sources—is too close in front of me on the sidewalk. “Nell Slattery? We…met…we met last month at your welcome-back party. Do you have a second?”

“Paige,” Anderson says, and she looks at him with surprise, as if she’s only just seeing him there. “This isn’t the time.”

“What? Oh Jesus, get over yourself, Anderson,” she says. “I’m here for Nell.”

“This is Paige Connor, she works for the Post ,” Anderson says to me, as if he’s actually announcing that this is Paige Connor, who severs little puppy heads.

“Oh, Paige, it’s nice to meet you.” I run my finger down the list, then hesitate. “I’m sorry, I’m not seeing you on here. I’ll have to confer with my sister to get you inside.” I offer an apologetic shrug. “She’s running the show right now. I hope you don’t mind.”

“That’s not why I’m here,” she says, fishing in her bag until she pulls out a tape recorder, which she clicks on without asking. “Anderson, will you give us a moment?”

“No,” he says, “I won’t.” She locks her jaw and gives him a look that suggests she’d like to inflict physical harm.

“Paige is the reporter for Page Six. We go back a few years,” he says to me.

“Oh! Listen, Paige, if this is a personal query, you know that I’m open to talking with the press,” I say, “but right now, we’re trying to launch this show with our artist, and I have American Profiles here, and I’ve given them exclusive access until the pieces run. Also”—and I laugh here, one of those trying-too-hard types of chuckles, ha ha , that it feels like a girl who wears a beret might be able to pull off—“you guys haven’t exactly been kind to Anderson these past few weeks. I kind of have a loyalty…”

“Again, you’re missing the point,” she says, shoving the recorder closer to me, the way that I’ve seen reporters do in the movies.

“Nell!” Rory yells from the back, right before I hear a splintering crash and spin around just in time to see one of our hand-blown glass vases shattering and skidding every which way across the floor.

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” I sigh. “Paige, I’m sorry, now’s not a good time. Try back in a few weeks. I’ll do my best to chat with you.”

I glide past Peter, who is kicking the shards with the insole of his loafers, and step into the back office to unlock the supply closet in search of a broom. When I come up empty, I pull out the step stool and haul myself up toward the top shelf. I’d seen a DustBuster around here somewhere. I shove my hands toward the back, blind to whatever I’m grasping. My fingers work their way over papers, what feel like glossy magazine covers, but no DustBuster. They wind their way along the side and wade over something cool, sharp, gilded. I flex my wrist and yank them down: keys. Three to be exact. I step down and peer more closely. They’re all identical, carved from the same set, triplets who haven’t yet been broken up.

“Hey,” I say to Rory, walking back into the main gallery. She doesn’t hear me at first, the Journey singles amped up too loud. I step closer. “What are these for?” She’s on her knees, having found a handheld broom and dustpan. She stares up at me.

“Are you going to help me or not?” she bellows. “We have five minutes until people start officially arriving, and Hope isn’t even here! Can you at least get her on the phone?”

“Calm down, yes, I will get her on the phone, but these keys—are they yours?”

She stands, exhales, and unintentionally wipes her hands on her pants, leaving a film of fine dirt across her thighs. I consider pointing this out, but suspect this would only be to both of our detriments.

Rory grabs the keys and inspects them. “No, I’ve never seen them before. Okay? Now, please go call Hope. Her number is on a sticky on the desk. And then please get back to your post.” She looks toward the door, where Anderson is contemplating the sole of his shoe, and then she sighs in the most dramatic of ways and continues cleaning up the mess.

I wrap my palm around the key chain, letting the sharp edges pock the outer layer of my skin. These keys seem important, seem to matter somehow. I slink back to the office and sit in my chair, trying to let my brain run loose, to free-associate, as Liv would advocate. It feels almost cliché that a key might unlock something in me, but it also feels intrinsically like I have to try. That’s the one thing that I miss, I realize, leaning back in the chair, closing my eyes, absorbing the coolness around me, the bustle and the music in the gallery fading to a mashed-up hum. I miss that compass. I miss my instincts distinguishing the right path from the rocky one, the one that marked smooth terrain from the one loaded with land mines. In any other life, I’d trust my gut or I’d fall back on my history. And now, I’ve been stripped of everything, but it’s this lack of animal intuition that has left me feeling most at bay. So I rely on my mother and my sister and my husband and my therapist and even my new friend Jamie to guide me, but what is a life, after all, when you can’t guide yourself?

The gallery goes silent for a moment as the CD skips to a new song.

“Just a small town girl, livin’ in a lonely world. She took the midnight train goin’ anywhere.”

Something warm runs through me, a hit, a drug, a burst of adrenaline from my nervous system. I unclench my palm and stare down at these three beacons of promise. They are telling me something. I can feel it. I know it. I can sense it deep in the bowels of that instinct that I am so fervently trying to steer toward the surface. I close my eyes and lean back and listen until finally Rory clears her throat behind me and says, “Don’t bother calling. Hope’s here.”

I t has been more than three months since the crash now. The calendar has shifted yet again, time unwilling to be pinned down despite the fact that I am stuck in the hazy muddle of inertia. Miraculously, if you didn’t know my story, if you didn’t read People or watch American Profiles, and didn’t probe too deeply into the depths of my memory, you’d never even know that I had tumbled from the clouds on that evening of the last day of June.

Today I sit in Liv’s office, an emerald green sweater and a tailored corduroy blazer layered over my once-broken ribs, and I contemplate how far I’ve come. Even though, quite obviously since my brain is still impaired, I may not have come far at all.

“You seem distracted,” Liv says.

I peer around. This is the first time I’ve ventured to her, rather than she to me. Her office is warm, homey, but professional, too. Behind her, there’s a framed photograph of her with a yellow Lab, whom I take to be Watson, and next to it a shot of her with her parents at college graduation. She hasn’t aged much, maybe some finer lines on her forehead, the circles a little more concave under her eyes, but mostly she’s the same. I feel a rush of tears at this idea, that she still has her map, from A to B, that she can glance toward her framed diploma that sits on her back wall and know how she got here. Know why she got here.

I wave a hand, covering. “I’m okay. Tired. Stayed up too late talking with Peter. He left today for a work retreat. Maybe the fatigue is making me overly emotional.”