Элисон Скотч: The Song Remains the Same

We both froze for a second as reality sunk in, and I saw a flicker of humanity return to him, at the gravity of what had just transpired, that neither one of us could go back in time and erase it. Oh Jesus, do I wish that I could go back in time and never come down to his studio, that Rory wouldn’t have gotten sunburned, that Wes wouldn’t have chipped his tooth. Then I wouldn’t have been so bored, wouldn’t have thought to break the one rule I knew that I shouldn’t have. But then he turned his back, flicked the stereo on just a touch louder—“ Gonna ramble on! Sing my song !”—and grabbed the brush, which had fallen to the floor, marring the Oriental rug.

I finally found my breath and ran, as fast as my thirteen-year-old legs could carry me, down the rest of the hill, feet flying out beneath me, pebbles casting themselves away underneath. I was peeling my shirt over my head, preparing to launch myself headfirst into the balm of the water, when my ankle snapped under. Nineteen years later, I can still hear it: that pop, the searing tweak that radiated up the side of my calf, and then I was falling, spilling over myself mostly by accident, but also in my grief. The planks of the dock got close, then closer, and then the pain in my ankle gave way to an acute, anguished burning in the side of my temple, right where my head impacted the corner of a two-by-four on the dock. And then I felt the cool sensation—just for a fraction of a second—of my body plunging into the water. And then, I stopped feeling anything at all.

I find Wes in the kitchen. I tiptoe inside so as not to alert my mother or Peter or Rory that I have come up from the lake down below. Wes is typing on his laptop, his fingers flying furiously, the wrinkles on his forehead crinkling like a paper fan. I slide the glass door into place behind me, and he pauses abruptly, looks up, and smiles. And then, as if he knows me too well after so many years apart, he holds his pointer finger to his lips, rises, and ushers me to the back porch.

“Zeppelin,” I say, as if I need no other explanation.

“He had it on all summer,” Wes says back.

“And the lake, the water…” I gesture inside to the painting.

“You never truly trusted it,” he says. “You loved it, you forced yourself to love it, but you always took a while to warm up to it. Every summer.”

“But I’m a good swimmer,” I say.

“I’m not saying it was rational.” He shrugs.

“That day,” I say, turning to meet his eyes. “That day when I went under, you found me, didn’t you?”

He grimaces, then nods. “I got back from the dentist and went out looking.” He unconsciously rubs his jaw. “My face was still half-numb. Jesus, can you believe I remember that? That my face was still half-numb from the Novocain?”

“Who knows why we remember the things that we do?”

“Ah.” He wiggles his finger. “The easy way out, the metaphor to your problems.” He picks up the iPod, sticks an earbud in his ear, placing the other one in mine. We listen to Zeppelin together until he says, “I subscribe to the theory that we block out what we don’t want to see, but it’s always there, buried in our brains, waiting to be called up again.”

“Is this some sort of Big Brother intervention?” I turn toward him, and the bud drops out, hanging between us. “Are you saying that I’ve unconsciously buried a wheelbarrow of crap because it seemed easier?”

“I’m saying that I think we all wish we could forget those last few days that you were here. So it’s no surprise that you managed to.”

“But it was among the first things that also came back to me.”

“That’s not particularly surprising, either.” We stare out into the fading fall landscape of his childhood home, and he removes his earbud, refocusing. “Anyway, yes, I found you. You’d fallen into the water somehow on your back. Thank god. If it had been the other way…” He trails off, then collects himself. “I pulled you out, and checked your pulse, and you were still breathing, just unconscious, and so I ran to Dad’s studio to get help, but he’d locked the door by then. I knocked for a good three minutes until I realized it was pointless, so I ran to the main house to get my mom.”

I lean over the balcony now, waves of nausea cresting over me, and I wrap my palms around the railing to ensure that I don’t spiral over.

“My mom called an ambulance,” Wes says, “and by then, you’d come to. They did some tests at the hospital, determined it wasn’t anything more than a bad contusion. But the bruises on your arms—Jesus, they were these massive, purple welts, like tattoos or something—they didn’t really show up until we were headed home or else they’d have never sent you back with us.” He hesitates, wondering how to sum it up. “So that was that.”

“So that was that,” I echo.

“Dad didn’t even know about it until he finally came up to the house long after dinner. You were already asleep, but I was still up, watching TV. My mom confronted him, and insisted on calling your mom, who promptly—and rightly—demanded that you guys come home immediately. She got here, I don’t know, a day or so later. Of course, Dad reacted to the news in the only way that seemed fitting for our family—with visceral cries of pain that were so loud, I remember flipping off the TV, heading up to my room, and stuffing a pillow over my head.”

“And when I woke up the next morning,” I say, filling in the blanks, it all rushing back to me now, “he made us pancakes, kissed the top of my head, and we all acted like it hadn’t happened.”

Wes bobs his head. “It was his surest path to forgiveness.”

“Ours or his?”

“Both, I guess. We learned what we know from our parents”—he waves a hand—“or something like that.”

“Jesus, that’s depressing.”

“When he came back, when my mom was sick, it was the same thing all over again. Hat in hand but no real acknowledgment of his sins in the first place.”

“How long did he stay?”

“Off and on for a few months. I didn’t ask questions.”

“And then he left?” It’s an assumption phrased as a question.

“And then he left,” he says. “He and my mom made their peace, and she begged me not to hate him, and I swear to god, she believed it, she truly, honestly loved him. And because she was dying, and because I was so far past hatred by that point, I promised her that I wouldn’t. We never heard from him again.”

“Not even when she died?”

“I don’t think his forte was showing up during a catastrophe,” he says plainly. “He was never a man to rise to the occasion—good or bad, despite whatever his devout art-collecting followers believe about him.”

And yet, I worshipped him, too. Ignored all of those signs, all of the neglect, because when he loved you, for those rare glorious moments that he gave himself to you, it was all you ever needed. A drug in and of itself.

I think of that rumor that Tina Marquis passed on, a real-life, high-stakes game of telephone. Could he really have come back for something as simple as my high school graduation? Would he really have been there to mark the occasion, when all other evidence points to the contrary? No, probably not. Just another hallucinogenic that I swallowed up and hoped to somehow make a reality.

Behind us, something stirs in the kitchen, and we both turn in unison to see my mother gaping at us from behind the glass door, like we’re zoo animals. Her standard-issue muumuu has been replaced by age-appropriate dark-rinsed jeans, a robin’s-egg-blue oxford, and a tasteful ( tasteful! ) violet neck scarf. Her skin is blotchy and her eyes are swollen, and part of me breaks in half for her, because I can vaguely remember who she was before all of this came undone, and how difficult it must have been for her to swirl herself into someone she thought was entirely different than before.