Элисон Скотч - The Song Remains the Same

I sigh and shove my arms into my coat. My mind is tired from digesting. After so many months of digesting, digesting, digesting, I just want to cut the rope, even with this bait dangling so close I can nearly swallow it whole.

I swing the front door open, and the blackened outside air hits my face like a salve. I ease my hand along the wood siding to find the porch bench.

“Hey,” a voice says, and I jump.

“Jesus! You almost gave me a heart attack,” I say, my eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness, making out Anderson’s figure on the bench.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asks.

I shake my head.

“Me neither,” he answers, “though what else is new?”

I plunk down next to him and curl into his underarm, which smells a little like Speed Stick.

“I’m a little drunk,” I say.

“And I’m actually a little sober,” he says. “I stopped at one glass.”

“There’s a first for everything.” We both laugh.

We sit there, with only the air between us, for who knows how long. I can hear his heartbeat through his chest, slow, steady, calming, and for a moment, I wonder if he’s nodded off, finally finding sound sleep. But then I hear him sigh, and before I can think clearly, I turn my head, cradle his cheek, and kiss him, the alcohol my armor, protecting me if I royally fuck this up but illuminating things like I’ve never before seen them. He’s momentarily surprised, but then softens, and though I know he’s done this with a thousand girls before me, I close my eyes and pretend that this is fate, that the plane crashed, and that my husband cheated on me, and that my father screwed me over, and that it has all led up to this one moment, this moment that can change everything. I taste the cabernet on his tongue, and the firmness of his lips, and just as I am pretending this could go on forever, he gently pushes me away.

“Wait,” he says, then runs his fingers over my face, like he isn’t about to ruin everything. “This is too messed up.” He stutters for a moment. “I wanted to tell you before. I tried to tell you before—in the car, but now, before this goes any further, I need to tell you about Rory.”

I wake up with a jackhammer of a headache, my temples scolding me with every pulse at last night’s overindulgence. With my side serving of humiliation at mauling Anderson, it is enough to make me want to down a bottle of Tylenol PM and call it a day, a week.

“It’s not like I own you,” I said last night, when that cabernet was still floating on my taste buds, when I could still feel his heat electrifying my nerves. It’s not like I had a claim on you! Ha, ha! Don’t be ridiculous! I said, though my intestines were broiling, and the anger was rolling through me like a cannonball. But still! Was it too much to ask for a little loyalty from someone around here?

“Frankly,” he mumbled, “I’m a little surprised you made a move on me. We adore each other, Nell, but maybe we’re confusing things.” By we, I was certain he meant me.

And so I said, “I’m pretty sure that you have women throwing themselves at you all the time, you’re a little bit of a man-whore, aren’t you, so I can’t believe you’re surprised.” Which was a dig, of course, because I was so pissing mad that I’d made such a fool of myself, but he deflected it, because at its heart, it was also true.

So he replied simply, and maybe a little sadly, “Nell, I think we’re all pretty messed up right now. I mean, you left your husband twenty-four hours ago. And anyway, you’re the one true friend I have now— you’re the girl who saved my life —maybe we shouldn’t risk it.”

This morning, I roll over with my eyes still crusted shut, my mouth tasting like petrified grapes, and throw my arm over my face. I can feel the sheet marks on my cheeks, the burn of the old cabernet on the back of my throat. There is an incessant noise coming from downstairs that is making my veins throb, so I peel the covers off, toss my coat over my sullied clothes, and wander toward it. It sounds like disharmonious church bells until I realize that, in fact, it’s the doorbell. I check the grandfather clock in the hall. It’s 9:15 a.m. Anderson and Wes must still be asleep from the late night, the wine.

I push a glob of sleep from my right eye and roll my tongue over my teeth, wishing very much that I’d thought to use a toothbrush in the past day.

“Coming!” I stage-whisper. “Coming, coming, coming!”

I unbolt the lock, which Anderson must have flipped when he came in at whatever hour he finally retired, and swing the door open, a cool gust coasting in as way of greeting.

“Well, thank god!” my mother exclaims, her wrist bangles jangling as she flares her arms. “I found you in time to talk some sense into you and bring you home.”

She glides past me without invitation, and just as I’m about to slam the door tight, I notice Peter lingering just beyond the porch, and then Rory two steps behind. My mother, my goddamn mother, just can’t leave well enough alone. Not then, not before, not now. Nothing changes, even when it does.

I refuse to talk to any of them, and instead half-dress, and grab my music and headphones and bolt out the back door before anyone can reprimand me for doing something other than what it is they want me to be doing. Making amends with my husband. Apologizing to my mother for pursuing a history she wanted to long ago leave behind. Ignoring the fact that my sister had to one-up me in a game that I was no longer participating.

Well, fuck those expectations! I think, as my feet crunch on the near-dead grass down the slope to the water. Maybe they should walk a mile in my shoes, where there ARE no goddamn expectations because you have no idea what came before this, no idea what lies ahead.

Before I surrender to the pulse of the music, I pause and absorb the setting, letting the atmosphere sink into me like maybe I once did when I was thirteen. It’s eerily quiet out here—the occasional bird chirps, the occasional tree stirs, but other than my breath and the impact of my sneakers, there is nothing. Total silence. A coma. Back at the house, I’m sure that there is a cacophony of overzealous, sensational noise. My mom in pretending that her New Agey methods can temper this storm; Rory exploding at Anderson that he unfurled their secret; Anderson defending himself in a sincere, albeit actorly fashion.

Poor Wes.

The hell I’ve unleashed on him. Until I remember that he sent me a letter, offered me his keys—though in the confusion of it all last night, I forgot to inquire why: Why, after all this time, did he do so? Why didn’t I reply back then? I add these to my list of unending questions.

I reach a footpath enclosed by a thicket of trees. It’s steeper here, so I slow my pace, sidestepping down, hooking my insoles on the coarse roots that poke up through the soil. And then, without warning, the trees give way to an untouched, beckoning, Eden-like body of water. I freeze for a moment. I realize that I’ve stopped breathing, and that while I should be exhilarated at its beauty, what I sense instead is dread, fear, an undercurrent riding through me issuing warning that nothing is exactly as it seems.

Still, I force my lungs to find my breath and push on, down to the dock, which juts out fifty feet into the placid, unmoving water, the fog from the morning still hugging the low-lying posts that sink into the lake. The planks echo into the still air when I start down them— thunk, thunk, thunk —and I start to laugh at the melodrama of it all: it feels so much like a horror movie I’ve seen on cable recently, like someone might run out of the woods with a buzz saw and hack me in two. I reach the end, remove my sneakers, and plunge my feet in. It’s frigid, and I lose sensation in my toes almost immediately.