Элисон Скотч: The Song Remains the Same

I pop the headphones into my ear, pressing them in to vacuum out even the stoic silence of the woods and ignoring the pain of the icy water that is radiating up to my ankles now. I lie back, close my eyes, and allow myself to imagine where I was once upon a time, at thirteen, when nothing was what it seemed and before even that illusion was taken from me, too.

W es finds me there long after my toes have turned so dead-person white that I finally caved and tucked them beneath me, a flimsy attempt to warm them after instilling intentional damage.

I hear him coming from behind me— thunk, thunk, thunk —but don’t turn to greet him, so unsure as to whom it could be. My list of grievances with my supposed loved ones is long. Peter? Please kill me now. My mother? I might drown her in this lake. Anderson? Ask again later .

But then Wes taps me on the shoulder and says, “Hey,” and whatever is cramped up so tightly inside slowly uncoils, and I turn, blocking out the weak October sun with my right hand, and force a weary smile.

“I slipped out before they realized I was gone,” he says.

“I’m sorry to bring the circus with me.” I pause the music. “Obviously, I didn’t realize they were coming.”

“No one ever does.”

“I’m sorry? I don’t follow.”

“Family. They never give you much warning. That’s all.” He gestures toward the iPod, stating the obvious: “Music.”

“Rory gave this to me right after the accident.” I shrug. “Old songs from my old life. They’re starting to spark something, bring things back.”

“You were always good with that—making up songs to make fun of me, little lyrics to jab me when, you know, I’d kick your ass swimming out to the dock.” He smiles, and so do I. “So,” he says after a pause, “what do you want to know from me?”

I laugh, in spite of myself. “I’m done with people telling me their stories. Turns out, everyone has their own perspective of your life, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the right one.”

“You were always wise beyond your years. But I’m certainly happy to help. To, you know, fill in some blanks, if you can’t come up with it on your own.”

I grin at his kindness, and we ebb into silence, the trees settling in around us. I stare at him for a beat while he loses himself to something across the lake, and I can see it now, see it clear as this Virginia air—that those bluish hazel eyes, even with the ever-so-fine wrinkles that too much sun and two decades can bring, even with the flop of burnished blond hair that sweeps over his forehead to mask them—that those eyes are the same ones my father had drawn in his sketchbook. That they were watching over me, and that maybe my dad was sending me a message, even if that message was obscured through his murky encryption. It was his wayward code to let me know that someone was out there, that someone had my back, even when he couldn’t. My father couldn’t have known that the book wouldn’t make its way to me. My father couldn’t have known that when it finally did, I’d have lost the ability to remember what the message was about in the first place.

Or maybe not. I reconsider. Maybe none of this is as complicated as I’m making it. Maybe my dad just wanted me to have a piece of him once he was gone, his final act of infamy, and maybe I need to stop affixing everything, every aspiration, every goddamn breath on who he was to me, what he meant to me, and how I can ever capture both of those things again. Maybe, simply, it was his apology—for asking me to live up to expectations that I could never meet, for not cutting me from those expectations when he understood the toll that they were taking. For not freeing me to make the music that burned inside of me.

“Okay, so one question: Why send me the keys?” I say finally, and Wes subtly releases himself from whatever thought he was lost in.

“The two of us had a pact,” he says, brushing the hair from his eyes. “When your mom came and took you that summer, we promised each other right before you left—while she was downstairs waiting, and my own mother was going bat-shit crazy at your father for letting things spin this far out of control—but we made a pact.” A laugh forms somewhere deep in the back of his throat. “You’d just read Flowers in the Attic, and when things got really haywire in those last days, you were convinced that we had to stick together, so we did that typical angsty thing of pricking each other’s fingers and rubbing our blood together.”

“Rubbing blood together can never be a good sign.”

“I know—weren’t we the cliché.” He smiles. “But anyway, we rubbed our fingers together and promised to watch out for each other, to figure out a plan to be a family somehow.” He shrugs. “Then Dad eventually moved back in with you guys, and then he went off the reservation until a few years ago…”

“Until a few years ago?” I interrupt. “You’ve seen him?”

He pauses. “Before my mom died. She must have known how to contact him or known someone who did. He just popped up on Wednesday afternoon shortly after her diagnosis. I wouldn’t have been here—I run a graphic design company in town—but Mom wasn’t feeling well from the chemo…”

“Cancer?” I say.

“Isn’t it always?” he answers, then picks the cuticle on his ring finger with his teeth. “Anyway, he rang the doorbell and then used his key to let himself in—I guess Mom never thought to change the locks or maybe she didn’t change them on purpose, knowing that he still had a key—and I swear to god, it was the most surreal moment of my life: Francis Slattery standing in my living room as if he hadn’t been AWOL for the past two decades.”

As Wes is telling this story, my lungs feel smaller and smaller, tighter and tighter, like someone is suffocating me just slowly enough that I can recognize that I’m asphyxiating but quickly enough that I’m helpless to do anything about it. I wave both hands in front of my face.

“Please, stop.” I gasp for the clean lake air.

He looks startled for a moment, until he realizes that I’m running out of oxygen.

“Shit!” He moves to rub my back. “I’m sorry! Is this too much? Should I not be telling you this?”

I focus on my breathing, too embarrassed to admit that the realization that he came back for her but not for me has knocked the literal wind out of me.

Screw you, Father! I can’t believe that I’ve chased you all this time, and you couldn’t be bothered to chase me back. Not even for a plane crash and amnesia and the entire godforsaken disaster area that my life has become! It was exactly what my mom had predicted, exactly what I refused to accept, even in the wake of mounting evidence. And here I was, still chasing him. Screw you, new me! Screw you, old me! Who else is left for there to be now?

“Just go back,” I bleat. “Go back to what you were telling me before, about us, about why we lost touch.”

“Okay,” he says and hesitates, giving me a long once-over, his hand still forming concentric circles between my shoulder blades. He glances toward the house, wondering if he should go for help.

“I’m fine,” I say a bit more forcefully. “Please, go on.”

“Well, okay, so we made this vow to—god, this sounds so young and naive—but we made this vow to stay family.”

Naive? I think. It sounds kind of nice, nothing short of a miracle.

“And this was before e-mail, before Google,” he says. “Our parents weren’t speaking, much less letting us speak…I wrote you letters for a while.” He runs his hands over his face, and I readjust the scarf around my feet. Slowly, blood is starting to pool back in my toes. “Anyway, a year goes by, then another, and then, I just figured that life pulled you out into it, and it certainly had me by the balls—college was not my shining moment—I got suspended sophomore year, and then arrested my junior year for selling weed.”