“Enough for tonight,” my mom says, pulling the sheet up to my chest, tucking me in tighter, like I’m a toddler. She leans over and kisses my forehead, humming that same tune, like it might calm me, be the balm to cure me. “Enough for now. Let’s put you back together, back to how you were. Then we’ll have time to answer all of these questions.”
Yes, I think. Let’s put me back together, back to how I was. Then, there will be time for everything else.
2
A nurse is adjusting one of the tubes in my arms when my eyes drift awake. Though my mother is gone, she hasn’t left me alone. The walls are now covered with photos, the nightstand stacked high with albums that must contain remnants of my past, reminders of who I was before I ended up upside down and broken in a cornfield in Iowa.
“Hello, Nell,” the nurse says. “How are you feeling?”
“Tired. Thirsty. With about a million questions.”
She smiles, nods, and holds the sippy cup in front of me.
“We sent your mother to the hotel to get some sleep. She’ll be back in a bit. She left you these at the doctor’s request. I’ll page him. He’ll be in shortly—he can answer some of those questions for you.” She places one of the albums in my lap.
She shuffles out of the room, and here I am, alone. Alone with myself, a stranger to my own life.
I turn the first page. Shiny, gleaming faces peer out at me. That man, my husband—Peter—and me, where? In an ocean the shade of blue glass. Him with snorkeling goggles on his forehead, me in a purple bikini and a nose on its way to a sunburn. I turn page after page. Each photo is much the same: a wash of faces that I don’t recognize, arms slung around shoulders, hands toting mugs full of beer or glasses of margaritas in bars or beaches or crisp-looking apartments, none of which mean anything to me now. The women are pretty in a common way, in dark jeans and inoffensive tank tops; the men haven’t starting losing their hair or putting on too much paunch around their bellies. All in all, this life that I suppose is mine looks solid, content, not a bad one to occupy, if I could just somehow remember it, know that it is mine. I exhale and try to focus on something else—that I am a walking miracle, that I was tossed from the sky, and that the mere fact that I am here—to question these faces, to wonder about this wholly rounded life in the first place—is as much of a blessing that I can ask for right now. I drop my head back a touch. Who was I? An art dealer. An envied, well-heeled woman-about-town who was admired and revered and who sat on charitable boards and who helped mentor inner-city kids who had a speckle of their own artistic talent. Yes, that sounds right. That sounds simply fabulous.
Someone clears his throat in the doorway, and I float my eyes open, then shift them lower, to see a guy with a mess of blond-brown hair, the type you can gel into a just-ever-so-slight hipster Mohawk, in a wheelchair sitting in wait. He is wan and shrunken, but his cheekbones are perfect, the kind of facial structure you double-take on the street, and despite everything, I feel myself flush at his handsomeness, at the intensity of his stare.
“Excuse me, Nell, can I come in for a second?”
I nod, confused. A nurse wheels him to my bedside.
“It’s okay, Alicia, I can take it from here.”
“Press the call button when you’re ready for me,” she says over her shoulder on her way out, almost like she’s flirting with him. I squint. Why would she be flirting with him?
“I’ve heard that you probably won’t remember me,” he says.
“I’m sorry, I don’t.”
“That’s okay, it doesn’t matter.” He waves a hand, and I notice a flash of a tattoo on his inner wrist, a surprise against his skinny frame in a dishwater-colored hospital gown, folded into a wheelchair. “But I asked to see you when you woke up. It feels impossible that it’s been a week since…everything.” His voice breaks, and he swallows, then sews himself back up. “My name is Anderson Carroll, and even though you don’t remember me, you saved my life.”
“I’m sorry? I did?” I feel my forehead wrinkle, scanning my brain, but it feels like a muscle that’s been unused for too long, flaccid, impotent.
“We were sitting next to each other on the plane,” he continues. “I’d…well, I’d probably had one too many vodka tonics—I sometimes tend to do that while flying—and I’d zoned out for a few minutes. You woke me up when things starting going wrong, snapped me into my seat belt, told me to put my head down, curl up to steel myself against what was coming.” His words catch on themselves, his nose visibly pinching. “Look, I don’t know how we’re here, why we were the ones who made it. But I do know that I owe my life to you—I would have been tossed ten miles from that plane if you hadn’t strapped me in, had the clear sense to keep me calm.”
I stare at him for a beat and replay his words, my concentration lagging. I decide that I’d heard him right—that I’d saved him, that I’d been someone’s life vest, that in the horror of this situation, I’d come out of it a hero.
“You’re welcome.” I suck on the gash on my upper lip, trying to put the pieces back together. “How’d I do that? Keep you calm.” A small rush swells inside of me, that yes, I was that woman, that go-to gal-about-town, that I was the one who kept people calm! Of course I was. Of course I was. I already knew myself, even when I didn’t know anything else to know.
“Just talking to me, holding my hand. You told me to focus on something other than what was happening, so we started coming up with our favorite songs, our favorite lyrics…it was chaos, but…” He stops. “I mean, obviously, it was chaos, people screaming, lights flashing, smoke pouring in, and well, I don’t know how you did it exactly, but you made me not lose my mind during it all.”
“Who did I say?” I ask.
“Sorry?”
“My favorite band. Who did I say?”
“Oh.” He angles his head to think. “I don’t know, we were just naming names, throwing stuff out to keep going. To be honest, I can’t even remember a lot of specifics.”
“To be honest, I can’t, either,” I joke, unsure if I’m joking at all.
“If it matters,” he says, “you’re famous.”
He flips over a People magazine in his lap. There we are: him—when he was ripe and alive, healthy, perfect, the kind you do do a double take on the street—with his arm linked around the waist of some svelte model-looking type emerging from a nightclub; me, in a navy cardigan and pearl stud earrings, looking very much like I’ve never stepped foot in a nightclub in the first place, looking nothing like the girl-about-town. No, no, no. This can’t be me. I am the hero, the go-to gal.
“Survivor Stories!” the headline screams in bold print.
“Probably not the best shot.” He shrugs, as if he’s responsible for the way my mouth curls under like I’ve just bitten into a sour orange. “I kind of hate it—I think they pulled it from a website.”
“I look like I’ve never had fun for a second in my life.”
Anderson laughs, and I laugh, too, because, what the hell, I don’t really get the joke, but why not?
“What?” he says. “No, I meant me. But regardless, I’m indebted. Truly. For the rest of my life, whatever you need, I’ve got your back.” Somewhere in the base of my neck, a headache begins to spin up through me. I wince, and he detects it.
He starts to reach for the call button.
“So how badly are you banged up?” I say, stopping him, refusing to relent to the pain for now. Part of me is exhausted, but the other part of me is grateful for his easy company, that he’s not hovering, close to a breakdown at any moment like my mother or my husband.
“Fractured some vertebrae,” he says. “Any worse, and I’d have been in this thing for life.” His arms flop around the wheelchair.
“So, technically, we’re lucky.”
“Technically,” he says. “Though rehab for the foreseeable future may be construed as less than that. I was supposed to be on a set, but now, it’s Des Moines until fall.”
“A set?
” The wires connect from the news report. The moments of short-term cognitive clarity are unpredictable, coming and going at random. “Ah, yes. That’s right—you’re an actor?”
“I am,” he says.
“Like, big-time actor or a guy who says he’s an actor and actually waits tables?”
He laughs. “I was the worst waiter you’d ever seen, but yeah, I bussed my fair share for a few years. But now”—he clears his throat, suddenly ever-so-slightly self-conscious—“I guess I’ve earned my keep. Successfully retired my tip jar.” He shrugs. “A big TV show, some film stuff.” He smiles with his perfect teeth, and I can see it then: the movie star.
“Did I recognize you on the plane?”
“Maybe.” He shrugs. “We didn’t talk about it, and then, you know, I passed out.” I try to imagine it: the sour-faced me from that People cover chatting him up in first class. I can’t conjure it up, so I replace it with the fabulous me chatting him up in first class. Yes, that seems better.
I sigh. “I suppose I’ll be here for a while, too,” I say, “though I don’t think I have anywhere as glamorous as a movie set to be.”
“Don’t sell yourself short—you were on your way to meet with some new hot artist.” He shakes his head. “Again, can’t remember her name: Harmony, Faith something, maybe? Something hippie like that.”
My mother had hinted at something similar—the art gallery. I rattle it around in my brain: it seems reasonable enough. Not repellent, not a terrible fit, not something that the fabulous me couldn’t be doing to take the world on by storm.
“I promised you I’d come in and buy something the next time I was in New York,” Anderson says.
“A genuine promise or a promise by way of flirting?” I ask, and he bows his head faux bashfully and smiles. He’s an easy read already. I smile in return. “I’m married.”
He shrugs. “It sounded complicated.”
Complicated? I’m sorry, I don’t remember!
“Besides,” I say, “aren’t you, like, twenty-two?”
“Twenty-eight. I play young.” He exhales. “Listen, you look tired. Let me get out of your hair. I just wanted to come by and thank you as soon as I could.”
My eyes do feel heavy, so I let him go with the promise that he’ll come back tomorrow. The nurse returns to wheel him back to his own recovery, but not before he places the People magazine next to me, next to the photo album filled with disparate faces of strangers, and I’m left to wonder, just before I slip into slumber, how my life can be so well documented when I can’t recall one single second, one tiny sliver of an iota of the life that came before.
By my fourth day of consciousness and a week and a half since my plane split in two, I have submitted myself to every test possible—the MRI, the CAT scan, the interviews with the hospital shrink, an oxygen test, an I’m-not-sure-what-the-hell-that-was-for test, the how-many-presidents-can-you-name test (zero, but Peter kindly reminded the psychologist that I’d never been one for history), and we are no closer to assessing the cause behind my memory loss.
Physically, I am also an anomaly, an equation with no solution. The neck brace came off today, and my left wrist is fractured and splinted, and a few of my upper ribs are bruised, such that a sharp jolt of pain greets me when I try to shift too quickly, but for the most part—the welts on my face and the scabs from the surface wounds aside—I am remarkably in one piece. Other than my brain, of course. Other than that, I’m nearly perfect.
My mother has placed crystals by my bed—healing crystals, she says, as if she is wiser than the men armed with their degrees in modern medicine—and she has paraded an endless slide show of pictures in front of me. Still, nothing from my thirty-two years of experience has returned to my cerebral landscape. I ask about my father—where is he?—and am told only that we lost him when I was a teenager. That he was once a famous painter but now he is gone. My mom hushes me and says that she’ll explain it all when I’m stronger, when I’m ready.
Samantha, my slightly anorexic—but not in a diagnosable way—college roommate whose brown roots have been left untouched too long and whose cheeks are in much need of a blush brush, arrived yesterday: I recognize her only from the photos, of her standing beside me at my wedding, and of us in sorority T-shirts after two too many shots of god knows what, grinning ridiculous grins as if our whole lives were in front of us. Invincible. That’s how we looked. Untouchable. She sits beside me and tries not to cry but, like everyone else—Peter, my mom—mostly fails at the task, and so sniffles and gasps while trying to offer me a shoulder on which to lean.
My younger sister, Rory, who comes from a seemingly entirely different gene pool—with luminescent red hair, six extra inches, and eyes the color of ripe moss, shuffles in after Samantha. She is pretty in a way that makes my pupils pop, an immaculate blend of DNA that unites every once in a while to create something exquisite. She forces a smile and says that we run the art gallery together, and I forge a real smile back, at the idea of our fabulous selves tackling the world together, ascending the heights of New York City: the two of us, sisters. Strangers now, but sisters once. I bask in the idea of this, even without knowing her. Once I knew her. Once, way back when, when I had a life, and I’m comforted in the idea that we had a life together.
“It was my fault you went,” she says, pulling me from the moment. Her face muscles quiver like they’re too exhausted to function properly, and I can see her consciously trying to tame them, to abate the torrent of tears that will be inevitable. Her guilt clouds her perfect green eyes, darkening the glow of her obviously flawless skin. “I normally do the artist meetings, but Hugh had tickets to Springsteen before the holiday weekend, so I made you go.” Hugh, she explains in a sidebar, is her boyfriend of two years, and is back at their hotel. He flew out here with her for support—at least until he has to be back at work on Monday. She confides that this is a precursor to their engagement. But then she catches herself, as if there’s a rule against thinking happy thoughts in my company.
“It’s no one’s fault,” I answer, though maybe it actually is. Maybe it is her fault, and I have a million reasons to be furious with her. Who knows? Not me.
Samantha stops in two nights in a row before pushing back to Hoboken, back to her eighty-hour-a-week job as a big-firm lawyer, and back to her husband and his hundred-hour-a-week job at an investment bank. “Sometimes, I wish we could just be twenty-one again,” she says as she lays an old sorority shirt over my torso and snaps a picture with her iPhone, thrusting it close to me. The shirt reads GOLF NIGHT, and Sam explains that this was a mixer in which we went to our favorite fraternity and imbibed a different drink in each room.
“Like, a hole, a golf hole,” she says. “You were always the most levelheaded, stayed the most sober, but still it was our favorite party of the year. We always tried to get you to do a drink in every room, but you held your ground: too mature for us even at twenty-one.” She laughs, and even though I know she means this as a compliment, mostly it breaks my heart. I stare around at the hospital room and the gravity that life can bring and wonder why anyone would ever want to grow up too soon, take it all too seriously.
“How did we meet?” I say, suspecting I can get it right: that we stumbled into each other at an underground off-campus party, or that I was so dazzling in an art history seminar that she couldn’t help but introduce herself, or that I was strolling around the campus and simply had it, the magnetic it that everyone was drawn to. But even before she tells me, even before I’m done telling myself these things, I know this can’t be true. That the face on the cover of People, with the frown, with its matching commas that cratered into my chin, well, she wasn’t it. She may not have even know what it was in the first place.
“Oh, funny story,” Sam says. “We met the first week at school. In the breakfast line. Neither of us knew anyone else to sit with, and since we both reached for the Frosted Flakes vat, we chose each other.”
“Not exactly something to write h
ome about.”
“No,” she laughs. “But we milked ‘they’re great’ for the longest time after that.” I look at her blankly, and she tries to smile. “Inside joke. Tony the Tiger. Better told another time.”
Dutifully, every morning during this first week, Peter has come by to refill the vase on the windowsill with daisies.
“They’re your favorite,” he said the first time he arrived with a bouquet.
“Really?” I answered, because it seemed hard to believe that daisies could be anyone’s favorite.
“Well,” he conceded. “They weren’t, but I gave them to you on our first date, and then they sort of became our thing. Like, shouldn’t I have known better?” He laughed but it sounded more like a hiccup. “I probably should have known that you’d want something elegant, perfect, long-lasting. But you know, you being you, you just told me you loved them—didn’t want to be rude to this imbecile who showed up with cheap flowers, and didn’t tell me otherwise until a year later when you actually decided that you did love them.” He shrugged. “They were the only flower I could afford when we first met.”
“So what were my favorites? My real favorites?” I asked. I pictured it, or tried to anyway. Him: half a decade younger, without the pallor of grief on his face, wooing me with daisies. Me: also half a decade younger, no awareness of what life would bring, liking him enough to allow him to woo me with said daisies. I smiled. It was cute, almost, if you didn’t know what happens next. But even then, I reconsidered—it was still cute. His ineptitude with the flowers, and that I didn’t want to embarrass him over this ineptitude. I must have really liked him, really been smitten. And now, even though he felt too tall for me, like I’d have to stand on my tippy tiptoes to kiss him, and too broad, too, like he might crush me if he rolled over on me one night while I was sleeping too heavily to notice, I softened in the re-created, subjective memory of it all.
My husband. I wasn’t quite used to him, to the idea of him, but still, if my younger self loved him, I’d find a way to do the same.
The Song Remains the Same Page 2