Элисон Скотч: The Song Remains the Same

“Weed? Speaking of clichés.”

“Tell me about it.” He grins.

“Jesus, are we screwed up.”

“Not anymore,” he says.

“Speak for yourself.”

“Fair enough, but yours are due to extenuating circumstances. It’s not every day that you survive a plane crash and lose your memory.” We laugh together at this—at the truth of it, at the sadness of it, at the inanity of it. “So anyway, after all of that, so I let it—let the idea of us as a family—go.”

“And yet you sent me the keys.”

He sighs, heavy and purging. “My mom died.” He shrugs. “That changes you. Like, literally triggers something in you. And then I found your painting in the attic. It seemed like a good time to reconnect, to try to build something.” His voice drops. “I didn’t have anyone else, you know? The keys were an open invitation to coming back.”

“I wish I could remember why I didn’t respond.”

He raises his shoulders and lets them drop. “We had a complicated situation. I’m sure that part of you blamed us for the fallout.”

“You’re very levelheaded, you know. I can’t really believe that we’re related, not when I’m surrounded by all of this insanity.”

“Ah yes, speaking of which, your mother is currently in our kitchen about to blow a gasket.” He chuckles. “The dressing is different—last I saw her she was decked out in her best late-eighties tracksuit—but Jesus, isn’t she exactly the same.”

“Funny,” I say. “She’d say that there’s not much about her that hasn’t changed.”

“That’s the thing about self-perception,” he says, before rising to leave me be. “It’s a bitch.”

“I thought that was karma.”

He squints and assesses. “Who’s to say it’s not both?”

“Ramble On”

—Led Zeppelin

O nce I found the song—sought it out on the iPod, and forced myself to listen—once I heard the song and remembered it—it seems impossible that it didn’t come to me sooner. That the music was the key to finding the moment that set everything into motion.

A bud of anguish builds inside of me, not just for what happened that day, but that I sacrificed so many months of my childhood running both toward it and from it. An animalist cry spills out from the underpinnings of my belly. How long had I let him define me? Even when, as an adult, I pretended that he hadn’t. I grab a wayward twig and chuck it out to the water. It floats for a moment before inexplicably sinking. Forever. It seems that I had let him define me for just about forever. Whichever version of myself I was embodying at whichever moment, really, weren’t they all in reaction to him?

The song is still playing on my iPod—Zeppelin’s “Ramble On” stuck on Repeat. I turn away from the water and see it: my dad’s studio. It’s off to the left of the dock, tucked beneath the line of trees, with a clear view of the lake, which he claimed provided him serenity, but really, who the hell knows what ever provided him serenity? Booze? Sure, that. Cocaine? Occasionally that, too. But his deepest secret is that I think his pain, his anguish, the depression that he so sunk into, embraced even, is what provided him serenity. At thirteen, this was impossible to realize. But now, two decades later, it is impossible to miss.

I’d wandered into my dad’s studio that afternoon. Wes was at the dentist for a chipped tooth he’d gotten during Little League practice—an errant bat went flying—and Rory was inside napping off a sunburn. Without my mom around, no one tended to things like if we drank four Cokes a day or if we thought to apply sunblock, so just yesterday, she’d fried her shoulders like pork rinds. She cried all through dinner, and Heather broke some aloe from her garden and tended to it, but my dad excused himself to his studio and didn’t return. Rory’s wails gave us all headaches, but it was only my dad who couldn’t tolerate it. The rest of us forked at our pasta, and knew that those were the consequences of living rule-free. You got to drink four Cokes a day, but sometimes you burned the hell out of yourself.

So I was bored. On the dock, two decades later, I still can feel the listlessness running through me. I’d come down to spend the summer with him— I’d chosen him! —and he was never around, and when he was around, he was mostly snappish. That day, with Wes at the dentist and Rory asleep, I picked grass and threw it for a while, watching it flutter from my palm back to the ground, but then resolved to go see him, breaking one of the few rules that had been imposed. Don’t interrupt him, Heather had said early on. Not when he’s working. The three of us—Wes, Rory, and I—bobbed our heads in unison and understood the gravity of crossing this line, and then we ran outside in our pajamas to watch the fireflies.

But today felt different. I’d hardly seen him in days, with the exception of last night’s short-lived dinner, and I was thirteen and testing my limits, pushing up against what was expected of me, and goddammit if I didn’t want a little bit of his attention!

He was working with the stereo on: blaring Zeppelin so loudly that the guitar split my ears.

“Mine’s a tale that can’t be told, my freedom I hold dear. How years ago in days of old, when magic filled the air.”

He didn’t hear me when I came in, even though the door squeaked, and I kept shouting, “Dad, Dad?”

I snuck in closer and closer, and even then, he didn’t see me, or didn’t choose to see me. Finally, I reached out and tapped his elbow, which was frozen in midair, his forearms splattered with paint, his brush still aloft. I knew I was crossing some sort of boundary, I knew that I was popping the bubble of his private seclusion, but I just wanted him to turn around and see…me. That the color I’d gotten yesterday across my nose had already turned to freckles, that I’d braided my hair into long pigtails just like I used to as a kid, that I smelled like honeysuckle because Rory and I had spent the morning wading through the back bushes, embracing the freedoms that we didn’t have back in New York with our mom.

Instead, I tapped his elbow, and he spun around, dropping his brush, and there was blackness in his eyes. Even now, on the dock, I can remember that so acutely, that he was practically dead. Dead inside anyway. That his dark space had gone bleaker, which didn’t seem possible, knowing his spells, but that it was indeed possible. His pupils were dilated to saucers, the rims around the whites of his eyes pink like salmon, the circles under them black as soot. He can’t see me, I thought, he can’t see anything .

I realized my mistake, my brazen foolishness, almost immediately, but by then it was too late. Like disturbing a rattlesnake. Once you step on it, it’s not like you can pretend that you haven’t.

“What is the rule we have?” he erupted. “What is the one fucking rule we have, Eleanor Margaret Slattery?” His breath burned my cheeks. It was laced with bourbon and beer and god knows what else. He grabbed my biceps and lifted me, and that’s when my regret of interrupting him turned to fear. That he was so unhinged, so out of his mind in his depressive trance that he might actually hurt me. He started shaking me, slowly at first, and then faster, faster still, until I was flopping around like one of Rory’s Raggedy Ann dolls, and I started crying, and then begging for him to put me down. I could feel his fingers worming into my skin, pressing against my muscles, bruising them almost instantly.

I was sobbing when he finally—and violently—threw me against the couch, like I was so disposable that I was a pair of socks.