Элисон Скотч - The Song Remains the Same

Something sparks within me, and it spreads like a flame of joy throughout my veins. And then I can see it, I can remember it—the music from both now and before, melting together, a swirl of past and present, memory and reality, now and then.

“Hey!” I hear a voice, startling me. Anderson is outside the open window.

“You’re already done?” I ask.

“It’s been half an hour.” He pokes his head closer. “What have you been doing?”

I stare down at the sketch, to the one thing that I’ve been running from maybe this entire time.

“Oh my god,” I say, peering closer, and then, yes, I remember. “I know where we’re going. Come on, get in. I don’t need directions. I know the way.”

Behind the house, there is a dock. This was what my memory had unlocked for me. This is what my ears—nearly disconnected from my brain—had sifted through the black noise for me.

I am in a pink bathing suit, with a stripe of flowers running up each side. My legs still are skinny, gangly, my hips haven’t yet formed a full curve, my breasts are mostly small buds. There is a glaring red scab on my temple. My arms are scrawny and bruised on the biceps, like the tomboy in me who maybe played tackle football with Rory that summer. There is a boom box on the dock, its volume turned up to full tilt. Van Morrison is singing “Into the Mystic,” just like he was in the car, his voice both aching and tender, from a mix tape that I have made for the summer. Journey, the Police, Jackson Browne, Van Morrison. They’re all on there. Of course. It’s so obvious, I nearly want to throttle myself for not seeing it sooner—that the music was the key. Always.

“Come in!” a voice shouts from the water. “Last one to the raft owes the other a Coke.” I look out and see a rash of sandy hair bobbing and weaving, arms lapping each other in perfect form. So I take off at a full sprint, hurling myself into the cool, dark lake, pushing my legs as fast as they can propel me under the silent water until my lungs demand air. I resurface and see him already up there—squirming up atop the wooden raft moored fifteen feet away.

“You owe me a Coke!” he yells, smiling, his dimples cratering into his cheeks.

“Over my dead body,” I shout back, sipping the lake water, spitting it back out as I paddle closer. “You got a head start. That’s cheating.”

I’m nearly at the raft when I hear someone calling me from shore. I turn and tread water, my pigtails wrapping around my neck like damp snakes.

“Nelly! Come on!” Rory whines. “You weren’t supposed to get wet again! You have to come in now.”

I turn and look back at the boy, his face a shadow of what it was just thirty seconds before.

“Come on. Now!” she yells. “Mom’s here. And she’s ready to take us home.”

“Seriously? You just listened to something…and remembered? And now you know where we’re going?” Anderson says.

We’re nearly there now—thirty miles or so outside of Charlottesville. I remember the roads, the smell of the fields, the pastures, and though I can’t pinpoint why, I know how to get there.

“Can you just drive faster?” I say, partially because I can’t articulate it myself, partially because it doesn’t matter: I do know, I saw something, and I want to get there as soon as possible to confirm it. Dr. Macht had expressed this way back when, almost four months and a lifetime ago, he explained that maybe there was a block, a straitjacket that I’d sewn myself into, and now, maybe I can find a way to set myself free from it, too. Everyone has told me that I’d always been a musician, always had that gift (“You got that from me!” my mother had said), but my father had pushed me toward art. And then when he left, I’d pushed it aside completely, barring the small gasps of bliss from the radio, a few binges of karaoke with Samantha, a stolen moment with Peter when we first fell in love.

And perhaps now, it’s the key to finding my way back. To what? To who I was before. To who I can be after.

“So is everything back? All of it, all of your memory?”

“Not everything.” I shake my head.

“But you’re close,” he says.

“Maybe,” I concede, watching the whoosh of the trees blend into each other as we speed by, wondering who the boy was, if he was my first love, if he loved me back. You owe me a Coke! What else did we owe each other?

“It’s strange that your mom wouldn’t have just flat out told you the address, told you about this place,” Anderson says after we’ve fallen into silence for a bit, the wheels and the engine our background noise. I turn up the radio, that same oldies station following us down the highway. “Wouldn’t she have thought to look here for him, your dad?”

“Who’s to say that she didn’t? That she didn’t find him, that she didn’t know?”

“True enough.”

“Who’s to say anything at this point?”

He goes quiet at this, and then quickly glances toward me.

“You think I’m wrong?” I say.

He shakes his head. “No. No, not wrong at all.” He wants to say more but thinks better of it.

“I don’t know,” I say, a non sequitur of sorts, talking mostly to myself. “He loved this place.”

On the radio, the DJ who has the evening shift clears his throat on air, detailing tomorrow’s weather, then reading a kitschy advertisement for a local car dealership. “Here’s your next set of oldies, coming to you commercial-free thanks to Dwayne’s Custom Chevrolet,” he says.

I don’t even recognize the tune until a minute or so in, right when the chorus is about to break. It’s following me, this song, this curse, this birthright.

“You know my parents named me for this song,” I say. “About the loneliest woman in the world. My dad, for a while, as cliché as this sounds, well, John Lennon was his muse. Until he outgrew that phase. But by then it was too late. I was already named.”

“I don’t believe that,” Anderson says. “No parent would do that to a child.”

“Ah Buddha, there you are again. It’s true. I looked it up on Wikipedia.”

Anderson laughs. “So no one has told you that you can’t believe anything you read on there?” He glances over to me. “Maybe he just really loved the name and then wanted to look cool by dropping the Beatles into it. You know, coolness by association.”

“You might know a thing or two about that,” I say.

“I might. We artists are afflicted with the desire for coolness by osmosis.” He reaches over and touches my arm. “Besides, it’s only a song.”

“But what if, as ridiculous as it sounds, it was my destiny? Who names their kid after the loneliest woman in the world?”

“So what if it is true. Parents do worse things,” he says, and we both nod, an acknowledgment that indeed they do. “And besides, I thought we decided that we don’t believe in destiny, that things don’t have to happen for a reason. That that’s all total bullshit.” He looks over at me now and smiles.

“But what if it’s not?” I don’t smile back.

“Yeah,” he says, “but what if it is?”

Anderson kills the engine in the driveway. A solitary light near the front door casts just enough of a glow to barely make out the house, which is dark but doesn’t appear deserted. There is a red-and-green Indian blanket strewn across the bench on the porch, trash cans outside of the garage, a rake leaning up against the side wood paneling: all signs of life inside.

“So you’re just going to go up and knock?” Anderson asks.

“Yes.” I exhale. “I am just going to go up and knock.”

“Listen.” His voice catches, and he folds his hand over mine. I tear my eyes from the front porch to meet his.