Элисон Скотч: The Song Remains the Same

“She did come get you,” Wes says softly. “I know that she’s had her share of screwups, but through everything, she was actually the grown-up who always came to get you. Figuratively or not.”

I start to agree—the new me would want to agree with him, until I remember that she has held on to secrets for so long that they must be part of her, integral to her very being, like her blood or her liver or her heart. And that part of me that breaks for her seals itself all the way back up.

Before I can articulate an answer, there is a distorted crash from behind where my mother stands, out toward the front of the house. She swivels toward the noise, then rushes toward it, and Wes and I, after a moment’s hesitation, do the same. It’s a family trait, of course, rushing forward toward disaster.

“What the fuck, man?” Peter is yelling from the front porch. He is on his ass, barreled over, and nursing what appears to be a bleeding lower lip. He touches it gingerly, then winces. “Seriously, man, what the fuck?”

Anderson has backed off toward the corner of the porch, his left foot resting on the toppled bench, his arms folded, assessing the situation like this is some sort of movie shoot, and he is waiting for his close-up. His ever-so-perfect stubble frames his locked jaw. Oh my god, I realize, he thinks that he is fighting on my behalf. Like I need him to fight on my behalf!

“Jesus, Anderson, what happened?” I manage.

“ He confronted me, ” he says, throwing his palms in the air. Hey, don’t look at me, I’m innocent.

“What’s your problem with Anderson?” Rory says from behind me. She scoots beside me, and here we are all, gravitating around this mess.

“This asshole convinced her to leave,” Peter says, steadying himself and rising. The back of his hand never leaves his lip, and I can see the bright spread of blood washing across his wrist.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Anderson says. “Like I had anything to do with it!”

“He had nothing to do with it, Peter! Didn’t you get my note? Didn’t you see the Post ?” I say. Is he the one person on the planet who doesn’t read Page Six? “If you want to blame someone, blame yourself.”

“You didn’t want to leave until he started hanging around, started being there when I couldn’t,” Peter says, and for the first time in, well, ever, I start to pity him. Is this what we were like before the crash? Making excuses? Deflecting blame? Working so hard to avoid the obvious that the work itself became more exhausting than anything else? “I tried, you know! I tried to be there every step of the way until you got better.”

“I haven’t gotten better!” I gripe, and then I realize that maybe I have. Maybe I have gotten a hell of a lot better, and I’ve only been holding on to my amnesia because I’ve been working hard to avoid the alternative. The memories. The journey. But I am standing here now, strong, capable, and perhaps it’s time to accept where I’ve been, what I’ve gone through, what comes next. I step toward Peter, who looks so small now, cowering up against the front porch beams. “Besides, you’re forgetting,” I say, my voice quieting, “I kicked you out the first time, too.”

“But you forgave me .” He starts to cry now, knowing that it’s over.

“Don’t you get it?” I shout, and everyone startles, even Anderson, who has been practicing his best menacing brood, even Rory, who is shifting her weight back and forth, debating the details of what exactly has transpired between Anderson and me and what this means for her own confessions. Too late, I think. Too late for all of that. For everything.

“Don’t I get what?” Peter says, and I can see in him that he really doesn’t. That none of them do. Only Wes. They don’t get that I can remember now, that I’ve figured out how to guide myself back into my cerebral space, and that, despite their best efforts to stop me, I’m going to dredge it all back up.

“I know that you’re full of shit!” I say. “I know that I didn’t forgive you, that I never intended to forgive you!”

His eyes grow to orbs, and mine do, too. To be honest, I didn’t even realize that I had indeed remembered this detail—that, like Wes suggested just a moment ago, the history was tucked in my brain, waiting to be cajoled out. I can recall it so clearly now—Rory telling me about the disgusting mess, Peter professing his love for Ginger, his showing up on that one night when I was nursing my sadness with wine, and how we fell into bed together. And how I recognized, almost immediately, that taking him back was a cataclysmic mistake. And then there was baby…oh god, the baby—yes, I was going to keep it and raise it on my own.

I spin around to see the faces of my family who have led me too far outside of this pasture. “Don’t all of you get it? What this has taken from me? What all of you have taken from me?”

They stare back at me, and I can see that they don’t get it at all. And then I am crying, real and hard and purging tears. Mourning the months that I wasted after the crash trusting them, tuning my ear toward them, when I should have been listening to my own inner beat instead. Mourning, too, my own culpability in this: that it was so much easier to listen to them than do the heavy lifting that was actually required. If I’m to blame them, I must also blame myself. Though that does little to soothe anything, to make anything any better.

“We were trying to help,” Rory offers.

“Bullshit,” I say. “You were trying to help yourselves. ”

“Nelly,” my mom interjects. “Please.”

I shake my head at her— do not even think of saying anything else —and wipe the snot from my nose, before I turn to flee down the steps and out to the dirt road, away, for once, from catastrophe. As I fly down the steps, the sides of my ribs flare, a quiet reminder that I may have healed, but somewhere inside of me, there are still plenty of scars.

I find a quaint little coffee shop about thirty minutes later in town. In my haste, I hadn’t thought to bring my wallet, but the cashier, who wears a waitress uniform with the name Mimi sewn on in blue thread, gives me a once-over and says, “Hey, I know you. You’re Francis Slattery’s kid.”

“Yeah, I’ve been on TV.” I sigh, scooting out a chair, its iron legs scraping the tile floor. I think of Jamie, and how he duped me, and then I consider that part of me wanted to be duped. To believe that Operation Free Nell Slattery could be as simple as I thought it could be. That somehow pouring my trust onto this relative stranger could offer me answers that really only I had. I’ll call him when I get back, I resolve. Tell him that I wish him luck, even though we’ll never be friends, that he’ll never earn a morsel of my loyalty again.

“Yeah, I’ve seen you on TV,” she says, pouring me a mug of black coffee without my even asking. “But I remember you from when you summered here, too.”

“You do?” I say, squinting my eyes, wondering just how old is she anyway . She can’t be more than midfifties, with a round head of brown hair that looks like she wears a shower cap to bed. Her breasts are too large for her smaller frame, and her skin is leathery, but in a way that suits her. Mostly, despite all of these things, she looks content. Content. How far do I have to go to find that? I tried everything, it seems: embracing my childhood, running from it, pretending it never existed, and yet still. Content? No, I never found that.

“You and Wes, you were always causing some sort of trouble,” she says, cutting off my thoughts. “You were in town a lot, rode your bikes in for ice cream.”