Peter is next to me like lightning. “Here, sit,
sit.
” He guides me to a faded, plush golden couch that seems better suited for a Victorian old-age home.
“Erg, I’m okay. I just forgot for a second.”
He grins. “Well, for more than just a second.”
It takes me a moment to realize what he means.
“Touché.” I smile.
“Well, that’s a good thing, that you were able to forget about it.”
We fall silent.
“This is weird,” I say finally.
He laughs so violently, tiny shards of cashews spray onto the gilded sofa.
“I’m sorry!” He bats a hand in front of his face. “I’m nervous…I don’t know why.”
“Me, too,” I say, even though I’m not so much, but it seems to put him at ease. He has told me that he knows I am risking everything by taking a chance on him again, and I have thanked him for this acknowledgment, for realizing that there is work,
tangible work,
to be done on both our parts. That, even with my amnesia, I can’t just pretend to forget. Or remember.
“That painting right there.” I point to the one over the mantel, an abstract that is big and boisterous with red and gold concentric circles, and also sad and bleak with stark shards of black cutting through, evoking how the sun might look on its last day, right before it exploded and decimated the earth and its population. “My dad’s?”
“It was your favorite. The only one we have.”
“Just one?”
“Just that one,” he says.
“Huh,” I say finally, turning away. I look around and notice that the white walls are either bare or covered in black-and-white photographs. A bulletin board next to the kitchen pass-through is pocked with Post-its, small pieces of itemized papers, receipts, but it’s an organized chaos, meticulous almost. Where’s the bright blue wall from
Friends
? Where’s the joy? Where’s the color? Where is the
sectional that we all sink into after a shitty day at the office and nurse our cheap wine on?
I slide onto the couch, running my fingers over the faded fabric. “Please tell me this couch was also a hand-me-down from my mom.”
He laughs. “No, this couch was all you. I hated it. But you saw it at the flea market and insisted.”
“It’s sort of awful.” I push myself to stand, and he steadies me, both of us staring down at the monstrosity. “I can’t believe I insisted.”
“We’d just moved in together, and you were trying on your sea legs. I don’t know. You wanted ‘funky-chic,’ or something like that. I think it was a direct reaction to some fight you and Rory were in.”
“About what?”
“God, I don’t know, but the general nature of your fights seemed to be about your finding her irresponsible and her finding you tightly wound. So you got annoyed with her, tried to prove her wrong, and we ended up with this.” He raises his eyebrows.
“And that?” I gesture toward a faded black piano in the corner next to the television. “Yours for work, I assume?”
“Ours, actually. Well, technically yours.” He clears his throat. “I bought it for you as a wedding present. Hoped you’d play more, again. With me. Alone. Both.”
“And did I?”
The phone rings, surprising us, before he can answer. He steps into the kitchen and pulls it from the receiver.
“Yes, yes, no, yes. Can you call back tomorrow? We just got home.” He presses off and tosses it on the counter. “Media. They keep calling.”
I sigh and fall back—gently—on the sofa cushions.
“What can I get you? Should I run out and grab some food? Some groceries? A bowl of cereal?” He waves a hand. “I’m sorry,
I didn’t have a chance to stock up when I was home—I was either at work or asleep, and then I was right back to Iowa.”
“No worries, though a soda or something might be nice.” I hear him open the refrigerator, then the hiss of the liter opening, and then the cracking of the ice as he pours it atop. I push myself upward toward the piano, lifting the lid, delicately pressing one key, then another, my fingers sliding up naturally into a scale, like they already know what they’re doing. I close the fallboard and turn toward him.
He places the soda on the coffee table and carefully arranges himself on the couch. A beat passes between us, neither one of us sure what to say next. I wonder if I should ask again about Ginger but decide that the new me wouldn’t need further reassurances. That she would flip her (gorgeous) hair and laugh into the wind with confidence that when Peter told her—as he did a few nights earlier when he called the hospital from work—that he really and truly ended it (which gave the new me slight pause because the old me was certain that he had ended it months ago), and find a way to put it out of her mind entirely. That forgiveness, as my mom had said, will weave into me over time, and what I needed now was that time, not regurgitation.
“Why don’t I go get some Chinese food?” Peter says. He stands abruptly when neither of us finds a way to break the silence. “I’ll let you settle in, feel at home without me hovering.”
“I don’t feel like you’re hovering.”
“Still, though, let’s get some food.” He jerks toward his wallet on the pass-through counter. “I know what you like. Don’t worry.”
“Okay,” I say, though I’m not at all hungry. I wonder if I still like what I used to like but say nothing.
He bolts away, exiting quickly, like a dog startled, scampering from a room. I watch the door close behind him, and my relief puffs
up like a cloud. I stand and sniff around the apartment again, running my fingers over the mantel, stepping back and assessing the bookshelf, flipping on the stereo in the TV cabinet to keep me company.
I hobble into the bedroom. One nightstand—his, I assume—is barren but for a glass lamp. The other holds a collection of picture frames, a stack of
New Yorker
magazines with a thin film of dust. The walls are a cool but welcoming yellow, the only accessory an enormous mural-size mirror hanging over the bureau opposite the bed. I catch a glimpse of myself in the corner of it: fragile, that’s what Rory had called me weeks back, and that’s exactly how I appear. Tiny. Like a dehydrated prune. That’s what I remind myself of. Old and dried-up fruit. My limbs look breakable, my muscles are flimsy, my hair is a ratty mess with roots that betray the deep brunette of my childhood, a fact I know strictly from photo albums.
I slip onto the comforter, then slide onto my back and gaze up at the ceiling, adjusting an angora pillow under my neck. It’s less comfortable than I thought it would be. It’s itchy against my skin, so I tug it away and toss it on the floor. The speakers from the living room filter a song through the open door, and I hum along to Jackson Browne, a song I recognize from my iPod, from
The Best of Nell Slattery
. I can feel the harmony reverberate in my chest, behind my eyes, in my heart.
I exhale and push onto my elbows, but then something hits me—a sliver of
something, something ethereal but honest
—of a warm evening, of grass tickling my legs, of a little girl giggling beside me, and of a wide expanse of stars up above.
Think, goddammit, Nell! Think!
I press my brain into places I’m not sure it can go. I flex it, I stretch it, I squint, and I try to squeeze out something more.
The girl, yes, it is Rory. She’s wearing short pajamas with green stars on them and is drinking lemonade. There is a white house in the background, with a porch that looks like it belongs in Georgia—a swing and two loungers and a lantern by the door. It feels like there is jazz in the air, but maybe I’m just making that up. Maybe not jazz, but something else that makes my body feel electric. Maybe Jackson Browne, but maybe that’s just from the radio. It smells like honeysuckle, like summer, and I call out to Rory—“Rory,” I say, “come on! Stop wiggling around. Come sit beside me or else we’ll miss it.”
“I’m coming,” she responds. “Stop being such a turd. Geez, I’m coming.”
Then, just as quickly as it comes, it’s gone. I try to find more, more than that small snippet. I lie in my bed and I clench my jaw and press myself like a sponge, hoping that if I force it, another morsel will drip out.
There’s nothing more. I hear the front door slam, and Peter yells, “Chinese!” and I sit up too quickly so that my head spins with dizzy stars, and then I yell back, “Peter, get me the phone! I need to call Rory! I’ve remembered.”
Neither Rory nor
my mother can verify my account of a childhood summer evening.
I tell this to my newly assigned shrink, Liv, two afternoons later, when she makes a house call.
“Hmmm, maybe,” Rory had said when I reached her at Hugh’s apartment. They were planning to move in together, and from what I could tell in the few days since I’ve been home, they more or less already cohabitated. “It sounds familiar, but I might have been too young to remember.”
“Perhaps, dear,” my mom said when she arrived later the same evening I had the flash, with her own boyfriend, Tate, in tow—a published poet who took to wearing a scarf around his neck despite the swampy late-summer air—and whom I immediately disliked on sight. He kissed me hello and rubbed my back like we were old friends, and who knows, maybe we were, but all the same, he gave me the willies. “That certainly
could
have happened,” my mom said. “But our house doesn’t have a porch like the one you seem to remember. And I’ve never been a fan of jazz. Still though, darling, feel
proud
of yourself. You are working toward something here! Give yourself a pat on the back for that!”
Liv interrupts me here. “This is interesting, that this is the first thing you tell me. That this is how your mom still speaks to you.”
“Well, this is how she does,” I say. “And I should also add that this feels like her baseline—like this is the sort of thing she says often. Or said often. ‘Be
proud
of yourself, darling!’ God, we couldn’t be more different.”
Liv smiles and twists her long dirty-blond hair into a bun at the nape of her neck, securing it with an elastic from her wrist. She is young, my age maybe, give or take a few years, and easy to talk to, whether or not this is part of her job requirement. She makes a note in her file while I spin her name into a made-up melody—
Liv, Liv, how do I live? Livie, Livie, what you gonna give me?
She sets her pen down. “It’s nice to see, even though we’ve just met, that you still have humor despite what has happened. Joy is important.”
“I don’t know that I would characterize myself as joyful.”
“So how would you characterize yourself, then?”
I recline in my armchair and consider it.
“Well, I don’t know. But joyful isn’t the first thing that comes to
mind.” I think of my question to Samantha from weeks ago—
what made me happy?
Who knew? Who knows?
“So how about we make it a goal?” she says. “To figure out how you would define yourself. Who you are now.”
“You mean, who I was before.”
“No,” she says simply. “Well, yes. That’s part of the goal, too.” She unscrews the top of her water bottle and sips. “But they may not necessarily be the same. That’s important to know. Scary, too. But important.”
“But the stuff from before—I mean, my life. Will I remember that? Get that back, regardless of who I am now?” The idea of my brain being a whitewash forever is too terrifying to digest.
“Well, not to sound like your mother, but she’s right that having a memory at all is a
wonderful
step,” Liv says, placing the lid back on her water bottle, setting it on the floor by the leg of the couch. “It’s a breakthrough. It’s your brain trying to reconnect the wires.”
“But it might have connected wires that aren’t even there. Neither she nor Rory remembers anything like that!”
“Could be,” she says, “though I doubt it. You said it felt real, like a déjà vu. You shouldn’t second-guess yourself if it was that tangible. Perhaps it was pulling together pieces from disparate memories, but it was
something.
Don’t underestimate that.”
“I would say, given my life right now, that I don’t underestimate much.”
The phone rings, interrupting us, and the machine clicks on. Another reporter leaves a message.
“Sorry for that,” I say. “We get a call every few hours. I don’t know what part of ‘no comment’ they don’t get. Remind me the next time I’m in a plane crash and lose my memory to unlist my number.”
She laughs, then chews her pen for a moment. “So some logistics.
We’ll do this twice a week. Sometimes you’ll feel like talking, sometimes you won’t. Sometimes we’ll use different methods: guided meditation, free association…we’ll see what works and what doesn’t. Which is something for you to think about, too—what’s drawing out these ephemeral feelings? What work can you do on your own?” She smiles. “But you won’t be on your own. Even if you feel like you are, I’ll be here to help.”
“I wouldn’t mind a little help.”
“But I don’t want to give you the impression that this is going to be easy.”
“I’ve never had that impression,” I say. “Nothing about this gives me that impression at all.”
9
A
full week after I’ve landed back in New York, Rory opens the gallery—which has been booming thanks to public curiosity—for a reunion, a welcome-back party. I don’t bother asking welcome back to what, though the thought has certainly crossed my mind.
WELCOME BACK TO…NOTHING
! No, that banner wouldn’t be celebratory enough at all. I dot concealer under my eyes, flush my eyelids with a hint of brownish shadow that I’ve found in the vanity, and spike my lashes with mascara. I stare into the mirror and imagine it—the gallery, the pulse of the crowd, the huddle of troops who are rushing to rally for me. Maybe this is where the fabulous me was hidden. Maybe this was my element, the thing I did best, maybe this is where I cast off the dourness of that
People
photo and flitted about the art world, my deals, my acumen, as a spotlight.
Yes
, I think,
this is where I’ll finally uncover her, glimpse the road map to the new Nell, the hint of who I could have been all along
.