Элисон Скотч - The Song Remains the Same

I stare at her for a beat and then realize that, finally, she’s not crying. Dried up like a well. Does that make it more plausible or less? I chew my lip and wonder. And then something else occurs to me, too: after years of running from who she was, after all the goddamn yoga retreats in the world, my mother has been running a loop. Running right back to who she was before my dad left, still filled with the same hypocritical bullshit that probably started her on that loop in the first place.

“You don’t get it, Mom,” I say finally, that stupid goddamn cameraman adjusting his angle for a close-up. “You’re like a rat in a wheel. Running, running, running, running. And you think you’ve gotten somewhere. But that’s the illusion of the experiment. Nothing, no matter what you think, has changed.”

There, I think, triumphantly. I’ve gone and proven my theory: people can’t change . And then it occurs to me, of course, that this isn’t a triumph. This is a brick wall. And there’s no getting around it, no matter how hard I try.

“Let the River Run”

—Carly Simon

I n his vow to become a contributing member of society and actually attempt to use this second chance to do something with his life, Anderson has agreed to host a benefit later that evening for the Humane Society.

“You don’t even have a dog,” I point out in the limo on the way down. Along with his promise to spread the philanthropic love, he’s also staying true to his promise to curb his taste for supermodels and less than Mensa-quality actresses, and thus, with Peter still in the Berkshires, I am his date for the evening. I am wearing a wholly un-me, but entirely fabulous eggplant-hued, thigh-high cocktail dress that I bought back when I still believed that people could change. I blew my hair out, swiped a new lipstick from the makeup artists on the set, and, as Anderson noted when he met me in my lobby, cleaned up nicely. “They’ll start to write about us, you know,” he said. “If you keep this up, they’ll mistake you for one of those models I go home with.” I knew this was his form of a compliment, so I blushed and took his hand and stepped into our ride.

“But I love dogs, I do,” he says in the limo, adjusting his navy tie and popping a CD into the stereo. “So…some news. I remembered something from the plane.”

“Another nightmare?” I rest my hand on his knee.

“No, in fact, just the opposite.” He smiles. “Remember how I couldn’t remember the bands, the bands we were listing? As a distraction?” I nod because he doesn’t have to elaborate: the bands we were listing as a distraction amid the horror of the crash. “Well, I remembered. Last night when I couldn’t sleep. This was who you’d been listening to on the flight before I interrupted you.”

We both fall silent, the music filling the space.

“Carly Simon.” I grin. I know this one from my playlist. I lean back and sponge it up, her voice resonating somewhere inside, loosening things, loosening me.

“Music for your mood, for starting over. That’s what you’d said on the plane.” Anderson pours a Jack Daniel’s from the bar, while I am rapt, absorbed in the music.

“So today…that was unexpected,” he says, after a firm swallow.

It takes me a moment to come to, to pull myself from the melody. Finally, I answer: “Unexpected how? That my mother still harbors resentment for my dad or that she was able to mask it so well for all of these years instead of putting her daughters’ needs firsts?”

The truth is that I tried to call Peter at the retreat to rehash it, to make sense of it, and when I was sent to his voice mail, I tried to call Liv for an emergency session, but I haven’t heard back. So now I know damn well what he’s referring to, and it’s a relief to have a sounding board—whether the sounding board is my husband, or my therapist, or the guy whose life I may have saved who has helped me to save mine.

“I didn’t take it that way,” he says, making me a drink of my own. I shake my head no. “Take the drink,” he insists. “Trust me on this. You’ll need it. These things seem like fun, but they never are.”

I hesitate but, bolstered by the music, by the power it gives me, I do—both take the drink and trust him, and even with that first sip, I feel my insides warming, the steeliness of my anger unleashing.

“No, I took it that she was trying to protect you, like a mother bear or whatever the analogy is,” Anderson continues. “She didn’t want him coming back to wreak more havoc. Maybe she was putting your needs first.”

I take another gulp and consider this. I know that I should be more sympathetic, that these past few months should have shown me this. That there is no time in life for resentment and grudges. But I just can’t bring myself to do it. I just can’t get there, the new, fabulous me be damned. My mother is that mother who wants you to think she’s putting your needs first while wholeheartedly shuffling hers to the front of the line.

“You know, she’s the entire reason I gave Peter a second chance.” It feels strange to say this aloud, this guttural admission that I wouldn’t have thought to realign myself with the man who felt too big for me back when I opened my eyes in Iowa. That my honest instinct would have been to do entirely otherwise. “We sat outside the hospital and she swore to me that I’d be a better person if I learned to forgive him. Told me that I’d always been too black and white, that there were shades of gray.” I snort and drink another sip, then thrust my glass out for a refill.

“Okay, so what if that makes her a hypocrite? In the end, aren’t you glad that you listened?”

I blow out a deep bellow of breath. That part, I suppose, is true. Against all expectations, my marriage has rebuilt itself. Is it the world’s greatest love affair? Undoubtedly not. Is it doing okay considering his one-nighter and that my brain has been obliterated to the point where I have no history to lean on during our crisis? Well, for that, I’d say yes.

The limo coasts to a stop before I can articulate this. Anderson grabs my hand as I step to the curb. Around us, the flashbulbs explode, blinding me for a moment, sending my blood coursing through me, my heartbeat palpable within my chest cavity.

“Shit!” I exhale, and then I feel his hand on the small of my back, steadying me as we go.

“You okay?”

I’m not, but I shake my head yes. We can’t turn back now anyway. The lights are too bright, the screaming from the photographers too loud. And then I remember: it is like a giant macabre flashback of the crash. With Carly Simon still etched in my cerebral space —“We’re coming to the edge, running on the water, coming through the fog, your sons and daughters!”— I can intuit the horrifying squeals of the passengers around me, spiraling to their imminent peril; the searchlights from up above, dilating my pupils to the point of discomfort; the chaos and the haziness in the ensuing minutes, sifting through the smoke and the debris and the moving parts all around. My breath expands within my lungs, and for a sickening minute I can’t decipher which is real, this reality or the one from my past, the moment or the memory.

“You okay?” Anderson asks me again, and I see the genuine concern in his face, and because he literally has my back, Yes, I am okay, I say. I don’t need to ask him if this reminds him of the crash site because I already know that everything reminds him of the crash site. This is why he barely sleeps, this is why he’s had two Jack Daniel’s in the fifteen minutes on the way to the event.