Элисон Скотч - The Song Remains the Same

“And Rory? Is she coming?”

“No.”

He nods, getting it. That there are some things to let go, and others not to. There are lines to be drawn, and maybe this is my line. Maybe, even though I did indeed tumble from the clouds and slew the odds of surviving, it doesn’t mean that I can’t feel bruised when sucker punched, turn the other cheek and refuse to look back.

“Don’t be angry at her forever,” he says, turning the key, the engine responding with its hum.

“Says the guy with the emotional gravitas of a fly.”

“Says the guy who never let himself get too invested because it’s easier not to,” he says. “But easy isn’t always better.” I can tell that he is thinking of his old roommate, and how life was less complicated back then. Just the open road and the prospect of Los Angeles. And he is thinking how he’d like so much to pull into a truck stop with his old friend right now and not deal with the complications and the grief that this life has brought to both of us. What had Samantha said back in the hospital? Sometimes, I wish we could be twenty-one again. Only at twenty-one, I wasn’t who I wanted to be at all.

“So why not call your friend? It’s not too late.”

“Maybe I will. I lost track of everyone once things took off for me,” he says, clicking the blinker and turning out of the garage onto Broadway, then navigating over toward West End and the highway south. “Where exactly are we headed?”

“South. Just drive south.” The truth is I’m not entirely sure where we’re headed. Charlottesville. That I know. The rest, I’m winging. My phone buzzes in my back pocket, and I shift to pull it out.

“Jamie,” I say to Anderson, then click the Decline button, the country-western ring that Peter had customized for me swallowed up in an instant.

“I’m not going to say, ‘I told you so,’ in case you were waiting for it.” He smiles.

“You can say it regardless.”

“But I’m not. You trusted your hunch, went for it. You didn’t know. It was like sheep to the slaughter. He and Paige, they just knew better.”

“But my hunch wasn’t right.”

“That doesn’t mean that it was entirely wrong, either.” He veers onto the highway and flips down the sun visor. “He helped you get what you needed. Answers, whether or not they were welcome.”

“Well, once you get past the various ways he manipulated me, I suppose this is true.”

“So get past it,” he says. “There are other things anyway. Don’t give him your energy when you need it for so many other things.”

I squeeze his shoulder. “My own personal Buddha.”

“I’m trying,” he says, “you know, trying to be that better person we swore we would be.” He glances over his shoulder to change lanes. “And what about Peter? Word from him?”

I exhale. I so very much want to make this trip not about Peter, not have anything to do with Peter. If I could, I would pretend that he didn’t exist entirely, that I hadn’t betrothed myself to him, that I hadn’t carried his baby though no one was the wiser. In fact, I realize, I would very much like to forget him in the way that my amnesia has made me forget everything else. The irony isn’t lost on me, nor is the fact that Liv would be telling me that my desire to forget him is the very problem in the first place.

“No, no word,” I say quietly.

In fact, Peter will return to the apartment tonight to find the stack of his e-mails—I’d gone back to his laptop after promising Samantha that I would let it go—and discovered them deep in the bowels of his deleted files. His disgusting, love-professing, sex-stinking e-mails—printed in a concise stack on our dining table. He will find his closet empty—in a frenzied state of what Anderson deemed “terrifying, tornadic Zen” on Saturday night—I stuffed the bulk of his clothes down the garbage chute in the hall, and he would find a concise note in my handwriting, a pathetic summation of this whole debacle: the past few years of our marriage, the past few months of my life.

Dear Peter:

We’re done. I’ll be gone through Thanksgiving. Be gone when I’m back. That will give me something to be thankful for.

Nell

My phone rings again—that grating country-western clang—and I remind myself to change it. My mother. Rory has surely reported the carnage back to her by now.

I press the phone to my ear, immediately regretting it.

“I have been trying to reach you since yesterday!” she says, a little too hysterically. “Rory told me what happened, and I want to come into the city and talk about this.”

“There’s nothing to talk about, Mother,” I say. Anderson tweaks the radio down a volume peg, but I wave my hand at him, telling him to turn it the hell back up. This won’t take long. “And besides, I’m not in the city.”

“Well, where are you? I’ll come there, to wherever you are!”

“I’m on my way south,” I say. Enough of an answer that she’ll know, she’ll intuit it.

There is a long pause in which I imagine her screaming inside her brain, and I smile at the idea, of giving it back to her as good as she gave it to me. Even though I know that I can’t make this about everything. But as with Rory, yes, there are some things I need to make it about.

“How can you possibly think this is a good idea?” she says, finding her voice. “This can’t end well, and you shouldn’t go chasing skeletons who don’t want to be chased.”

“This isn’t about their skeletons,” I say. “It’s about mine. About getting the answers I should have asked for a long time ago.”

“Look, Nelly Margaret, I think that you’re fragile and unbalanced right now with the news about Peter, and I really do not think this is advisable! Have you spoken to your therapist about this? Thought about the consequences?” She is spiraling now. “Because these things can’t be undone! I’ve been there. Why won’t you listen to me? These things that you’re doing, they’ll change everything! And you have no idea what that means, what that’s capable of.”

“Mother, don’t you get it?” I say, when she has exhausted herself, knowing full well that she both gets it—that’s the part that haunts her—and doesn’t get it at all. “The change, the blowing everything wide open: that is the point entirely.”

My body, despite being virtually healed, can’t stay frozen for too long, so we break for the afternoon outside Washington at a roadside diner that Anderson says reminds him of his college trip.

“Only then, we’d order six beers and split the cheapest toast and eggs, and call it our meal for the day.”

“Other than the cheap toast, what’s different?” I say, scanning the menu.

His forehead wrinkles as he mulls this over.

“I’m trying”—he sets down his own menu—“trying to grow up. I think it might be time.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Twenty-eight is way too early to grow up,” I say, then grin.

“Another fair point. One more, and you’ll turn me into a monk for life.”

The waitress whose hair is overly crimped and who has saggy breasts and a sad-looking face that reminds me of a basset hound wanders over to take our order. She does a double take at Anderson the way that people do when they recognize you but can’t decide if they should publicly acknowledge it, and her cheeks turn even pinker under her unnatural swath of wet ’n’ wild blush.

I have the French toast, Anderson the waffles and fruit bowl, and then I pull out my father’s sketchbook. After I nearly destroyed it, tearing out the front half of the pages, I’ve barely even taken notice of it. I laid in wait, hoping that other people would deliver some sort of answer, some sort of salvation that was never going to come. Now, it’s time to dig deeper, peel back the skin on my own, even if it means incurring some scars.