Элисон Скотч - The Song Remains the Same

“Earlier today, I heard something—a song—and remembered you,” she says. “Of you down at a dock, racing me to a raft, owing me—or rather me owing you—a Coke.”

His face glazes over for a moment, and then he grins, widely, like maybe he did when he was thirteen, too.

“Yeah, that was me.” He laughs. “You almost always lost, though not for lack of trying.”

“And we”—she hesitates, her forehead wrinkling in thought—“I’m sorry, were you, like, my first boyfriend?”

He lets out an honest-to-god guffaw before realizing that she isn’t joking, then buttons himself back up. “No, I’m sorry, you really don’t remember at all?”

“No.” She sits back on the couch, still watching, waiting for her answer.

“Okay, then,” he says simply, sitting down beside her. “We were hardly boyfriend and girlfriend.” He clears the phlegm from his throat. “I don’t know how else to say this, but, in fact, I’m your brother.”

If she is astonished from the revelation, she doesn’t betray it too much. Wes sees her wince, then her face goes totally ashen, and then, for a moment, he thinks she’s going to pass out.

“It’s a lot to take in, I know,” he says.

“This is the tip of the iceberg,” she says.

“Listen, it’s a big thing, what I’ve just told you, and it’s okay to kind of want to fall apart.” He watches her, wondering if she’ll cry, thinking that in the same circumstance, certainly, he would.

“I’ve done a lot of that lately,” she says. “Falling apart.”

“And?”

“And what?” she says. “And now, I’d like to put myself back together.” She squints and sees it then, the connection—that, in an odd sense, in the right light, he looks like Jamie. The blond hair, the creamy skin. Yes, of course, she can see it now. No wonder she had trusted him. It wasn’t that her instincts were so off, it was that they were blurred, misguided. She considers it a moment more: it wasn’t just that. No, she wanted to take that leap, be entirely different from who she was before, so while she can point to the connection—that Jamie shares an odd resemblance to her newly discovered brother—she shoulders some of the blame, too. Not blame, really. She shakes her head, deep in thought. Responsibility. She gambled. She wanted to roll the dice. She did. She lost. There needs to be an ownership in that.

A knock on the front door jolts them both, so Wes rises to unlatch it.

“I’m sorry,” Anderson says. “I was freezing out there.”

“Come in,” Nell waves. “Meet my brother.”

Anderson does a double take as Wes extends a hand.

“Half brother. And let me go get us drinks.”

Nell stands slowly and trails Wes to the kitchen, halting abruptly in the precipice, staring up at the painting over the farmhouse table.

“Your dad’s?” Anderson says, the same question that was posed so many weeks back in Nell’s apartment, back when she reentered her new life, frozen, skeptical, alone.

Déjà vu, she thinks, only now armed with the hindsight that comes with standing on the ledge, taking a leap.

“No, not his,” Nell says, before Wes can answer. Because she already knows. “It’s mine.”

“You left it behind when you guys left so abruptly,” Wes says, rolling out the wineglasses, pouring the cabernet too close to the rims.

“It’s of the same dock, isn’t it?” Nell asks. She’s gazing at it wide-eyed, unblinking. Finally, she reaches for her glass and swallows fully, leaving just a puddle toward the bottom. Like a ripple, Wes does the same, the wine loosening them almost immediately. Anderson watches them but sips slower, more deliberately.

“Your interpretation of the dock,” Wes answers, which seems self-evident, given the gray overtones, the wood planks that look more like daggers than anything ever originating in nature, how the water appears menacing with shots of light radiating in ways that the sun could never create. “When you left, I begged my mom to send it back to you, because I knew how much it meant to you, but she wouldn’t let me. Well, I mean, she made it clear that we couldn’t be in touch. That your dad had gone back to your family, and whatever was left behind was”—he hesitates, trying to articulate it—“well, whatever was left behind was a necessary casualty. The cost of their warfare.”

“She put it like that?” Anderson asks.

“No, my words, not hers.” He rises to refill the wine. “All of them—my mom, our dad, your mom”—he gestures toward Nell with the corkscrew—“it was like playing a giant game of Battleship. Sunk sometimes at our own expense. That’s how I remember putting it to my mom when you guys left: that she sunk my battleship. Well, that and a long string of swear words. I was angry through the entire fall.”

“It’s sort of a depressing piece for the space,” Nell says. “Or, maybe it’s just depressing that I’d paint something so bleak at thirteen.” She exhales. “Jesus.”

“Bleak or not, I liked that it reminded me of how things were before everything changed,” Wes says.

“Changed for good,” Nell says, a period to his sentence.

He looks at her, perplexed for a moment, and then half-laughs.

“You’re here. So nothing is ever changed for good, Nelly.”

She half-laughs back in response, and because she is trying to prove this theory correct—that there is nothing and no one that can’t be undone—she listens to her instincts and believes him.

J esus, I have had too much wine. The second glass was perfect, but the third was too much, and now the walls are moving, and the ceiling is cresting like a wave. I can see how quickly this can become habit, an easy slope to slip down into a numbed abyss, and I no longer blame Anderson for desensitizing himself to what feels like nerve endings that are too raw.

It’s eerie: this room. It smells like vanilla potpourri, and the walls are covered in stark portraits, like Victorian death paintings, of people I don’t recognize. They used to do that: paint someone after he died, eyes closed, the pallor already drained from his cheeks. I lie in bed, trying to ignore the macabre stares, and wonder what my own death portrait would look like: Who would draw it? How would I be remembered?

Wes has the house to himself, and it’s too big for one person. He hasn’t done much with it since his mom died. As he made up the bed, he mentioned that this was where Rory and I slept when we came that summer, the one that started me down this spiral. I stuff my head under the pillow and try to remember those days whispering late into the night, but of course there is nothing.

I slide out of the covers and off the bed. The floorboards moan when I tiptoe down the stairs, the kitchen light still on, the wineglasses dirtied and left on the table. I grab my jacket off the back of the chair and take a long inhale at the painting, jarred at how dark a thirteen-year-old can be. Jarred, really, at how dark I’ve been all along. Eleanor Rigby. Ice Queen . The shadow chasing me my life through.

I chew on my lip, the alcohol making me lucid in the way that alcohol can. This shadow, it feels like too heavy a weight to carry. Like it has drained me, sucked out life’s possibility. I want to slice it away, cut it from my existence, and emerge from its cocoon to see what else there might be. I tried before, with the new couch and the new sweaters and even that new beret. But there is more: that’s window dressing, nothing substantial, nothing substantive. I stare at the painting and consider this: maybe it’s not that we can’t change—that we can’t shed the inheritance of our destinies—it’s that to do so, we have to be brave enough to risk exposing ourselves, with the understanding that we might not like what we find. Maybe it’s just that the only way to evolve is to force yourself into the wind when you’d so much rather take shelter. Yes, I think, maybe that is it . Maybe I can walk into the wind, with Anderson, with Wes at my back. Maybe now, I am strong enough, brave enough.