Элисон Скотч - The Song Remains the Same

“Oh, give me a break,” Rory says, and I can’t believe for one moment that she is indignant. “We put up with you like that for years.”

“Don’t make this about me,” I shriek. If I had it in me, I’d slug her across those perfect cheekbones. “This is about the fact that I have no basis for who I am without you telling me as much. And you didn’t. You didn’t tell me. So what does that say about me? What does that say about you ?”

“It doesn’t say anything about you,” Anderson interjects.

“Don’t stick your nose where it doesn’t belong,” Rory shoots back at him.

“I’m just trying to help,” he says, not particularly kindly.

“Look,” Rory shouts. “I told you last time, okay? I was the one who told you. Not Peter. I found out and I came to you, and you never forgave me for it!”

“That’s ridiculous!” I shout back. “Why wouldn’t I forgive you for that?”

“Because you kicked him out but he was just waiting to leave,” she says flatly. “Looking for his excuse after a year with Ginger. And then you turned around on me— on me! —and said if I hadn’t told you, he never would have had a foot out the door! Like that makes any sense! Of course by the time he came to his senses and begged for you back, you were so angry with both of us that it didn’t matter anyway. Refused to see it any other way.”

“Total bullshit!” I say. The old me wouldn’t have absolved him. Or maybe I would have. Maybe I got comfortable making excuses for my dad, and so I found a way to make them for my husband, too. Who knows anymore?

“I don’t care what the hell you think it is! It was when everything changed—when you started pulling up everything that made sense in your life. And eventually, we weren’t even speaking because of it, so yeah, you better believe that I wasn’t about to rush to you now with this! Screw me once, shame on you, screw me twice”—her voice wavers here, calming—“well, you know the saying.”

“I don’t actually.”

“Shame on me,” she says. “Screw me twice and shame on me.”

“Nelly, listen, we should have told you,” Samantha says, the calm in the storm. “And I can only speak for myself, but I am very, very sorry that we didn’t.”

“The baby,” I say, finally tempering myself. “Did you both know about the baby and keep that from me, too? That you knew? What I was going to do with it? How I was coping?”

They shake their heads in tandem.

“I already told you, back in the hospital—I didn’t know. Like I said, we weren’t speaking,” Rory says.

“I swear on our friendship that I didn’t know, either,” Samantha echoes.

Well, that’s just goddamn pathetic, I think. And then realize that I’m thinking this about myself, at how I couldn’t reach out when I needed someone most. That the self-reliance I’d just discovered in the press line wasn’t the problem, wasn’t what I needed. It was just the opposite: letting myself lean when I thought I could hold up okay on my own. That martyrdom was never my deficiency. Vulnerability, well, yes, that one didn’t come easy.

But rather than acknowledge this revelation, I stomp over to the laptop and press Power. The screen bursts alive, the background image a shot from a vacation I don’t remember with generic-looking palm trees and two strangers squinting into the sun: Peter and me, before, before all of this.

“What are you doing, Nell?” Anderson says. “Come on, let’s not do this.”

I wave my hand as if to say shut up, and then click open Peter’s e-mail. My eyes run double from too much whiskey and wine, but not double enough that I can’t scan for intimate details of the yearlong fucking affair in which he chose her. Chose her! He showed up in the hospital and made me want him, made me want his baby, made me force myself to want a life with him again. He told me about Paris, he told me how we fell in love, he told me every goddamn thing about myself when I had nothing else to believe.

So I did. I believed him. No wonder I never chose vulnerable. Who would?

On first glance, there is nothing in his e-mail that betrays him—the fingerprints have likely long since been wiped clean, so I slam the laptop shut, scanning the room, looking for invisible evidence.

“Done? Feel better?” Rory says, and I can’t tell if she’s being empathetic or sarcastic.

“What is your problem?” I spin around and face her.

“What is your problem?” she says back. “I was asking, ‘Do you feel better?’ What could you have possibly interpreted from that?”

“Please, the both of you, stop,” Samantha says. “There are other times to air your issues with each other. This isn’t one of them.”

“You’re right.” Rory exhales, then chews her lip. “I’m sorry.”

“For this or for what you just said?”

“For both, okay? Can’t you just accept an apology and move on? Must you make it harder on everyone, always?”

“I don’t make it harder on everyone, always!” I reach for the wine too quickly, and it splashes on my waist, seeping into the eggplant dress, camouflaged like it was never there in the first place.

Rory gives me a steely look, and Samantha just sighs and stares into her lap. Do I? Do I always make it harder for everyone always? No, vulnerability was never my strong suit.

Eventually, I grow weary of their remorse and don’t want to rehash another second of this mess. I ask them to leave, and Rory does with her chin still high in the air, like she doesn’t have one thing to apologize for, like it might actually slay her to admit real culpability. She and my mother—I almost laugh out loud—cut from the same cloth and all of that. Samantha is more contrite, and hugs me tightly good-bye, her voice cracking under the weight of her guilt—that she didn’t tell me sooner, that she hasn’t done more to guide me wherever it is I need to go.

“You can’t guide me,” I say, despite the lessons of the hour. “This is my thing to do alone.”

“Don’t say that,” she pleads. “That’s who you were before. Alone. Independent. Even when you didn’t have to be.”

“Why were we friends?” I ask.

“I’m sorry?” She stutters. She is standing in the door frame, perched on the precipice between the hallway and my apartment.

“If I was such an Ice Queen, why were we friends?”

Initially, she looks confused, and then her face relaxes.

“For a lot of reasons,” she says. “Because you were the girl who would tell me to stop one shot before I puked in college. Because you were the girl who drilled me for the LSATs, staying up until we saw the sun rise at that crappy diner on my block with the inedible matzo ball soup, when you knew that I wanted to get into Harvard Law School. Because when I broke my nose skiing in Utah, you not only cleaned up my bloody tissues in the hotel room, but you subsequently talked me out of a nose job.” She touches a bump on the bridge of her nose. “You told me our scars give us character.”

“I said that?”

“You did.” She nods. “Which isn’t to say I didn’t make a few calls when we got back to town, but still, I’ve lived with it. I, at least, pretend that this bump makes me more interesting.”

She smiles now, a sad smile but a smile all the same.

“You should have told me about Peter,” I say.

“I know, but let’s not make that everything, okay? Before, maybe you would have never forgiven me.” She hugs me again and pulls back and looks at me, really examines me like she’s seeing me for the first time. “Now, let’s not make this everything.”

I wake early on Sunday, having slept only two hours and hungover in a way that I suspect I’ve never been before, the remnants of alcohol oozing from and dehydrating my cells. I check my phone to see if Liv has returned my call, but there are only two texts, one from Samantha, apologizing again, and one from Anderson, ensuring that I haven’t offed myself (or trudged to the Berkshires to off Peter) in the wee hours of morning.