Scars give you character,
Samantha had said. Or I had said to her, and she then said back to me when I needed to hear it most. I flip over my palm and run my finger over the imprint from that night when I finally accepted that my dad was gone and wasn’t coming back. What other wounds had he carved into me that I couldn’t yet acknowledge?
“Have you made any sense of it?” Anderson nudges his chin toward the drawings.
“Not yet, but I feel like it’s the key to something, to where we’re going.” I giggle self-consciously. “God, that sounds ridiculous.”
“I went through a phase in my early twenties when I believed in all of that crap—that we’re all connected, that there’s a yin to every yang.”
“So you think this is crap?” I’m not offended.
“No, certainly, some things are connected, sure, but if I hear one more person tell me that
this happened for a reason,
I think I’m going to kill someone.”
“It makes people feel better.” I shrug, though I remember the vow I made to myself, to take this seriously, to spin myself into the fabulous me, or maybe even more accurately, the happier me. I’d settle for the happier me. “To try to tell us that there’s sense behind this. Liv even wanted me to discuss God.”
“God.” He laughs, and doesn’t even need to add,
Who’s that?
“I think I’m backing out of the Spielberg project,” he says after a beat.
“That’s insane. No one backs out of a Spielberg project.”
“In light of everything, it seems silly. Dressing up and acting out someone else’s words.”
“Don’t be idiotic,” I say, turning a page in the sketchbook.
“It’s not idiotic! I don’t feel like pushing myself right now. I want to…I don’t know, breathe! Drive to Virginia with the girl who saved my life!”
“I thought the whole point of this second chance
was
to push ourselves.” I can hear myself, chastising him like a mother would a child. “Don’t turn your back on something you’re actually pretty good at just because you worry you’re not up to the task. And don’t use me as an excuse for it, either. And breathing. What does that even mean anyway?”
“I never said I didn’t think I was up to the task. I said the task itself is meaningless.” He grabs a Splenda pack from the kitschy sugar holder and starts flapping it back and forth. A nervous twitch.
“Weren’t you the one who told me, on that night in the gallery,
that art isn’t meaningless? That it resonates and that’s what’s important?”
He wrinkles his nose, trying to remember. “Look, it’s just so much easier not to take it.”
“To flush a decade’s worth of work down the toilet because it’s so much easier? Who ever said anything about this being easy?”
Before he can answer, two brunettes in pencil jeans and turtlenecks bought in the children’s department swarm the table, breathy and wide-eyed at the prospect of meeting Anderson Carroll.
I listen to their over-the-top fawning, and then excuse myself, sketchbook in hand, to the bathroom. They slide into the booth exactly when I leave, a seamless transition that barely gives Anderson pause.
He’s never turning down Spielberg,
I think, waiting outside the restroom door,
even if it’s not easy for him.
I hear the toilet flush behind the door, and I flip the page to the drawing that mesmerized me the first time: a shattered face, a child’s. The eyes—something about them is familiar. They’re not Rory’s. They’re not mine.
The bathroom door swings open, and a disheveled-looking mother with a ratty ponytail escorts out her toddler, clutching his tiny little fist, navigating him back toward their table.
I watch them for too long, until the boy is settled back into his highchair, until he has knocked over his orange juice, and the mother, in her exasperation, has snapped at him to finish his eggs so they can get going already.
“Are you going in?” A woman taps my shoulder behind me, and I startle.
“Excuse me?” I say.
“The bathroom? Are you going in? ’Cause I really need to go.”
“No, no, go ahead of me,” I usher her in with a sweep of my arm, and she scurries past, bolting the door.
The baby. I have to deal with the baby. What I was going to do—get my answers. My intestines clench, and my appetite is strangled along with them.
“I’ll be in the car,” I say to Anderson, on my way to the parking lot. “When you’re done, come find me.” I trudge outside and cast my neck around at the landscape, like the answers might be tucked behind the pickup trucks, the minivans that litter the lot.
No,
I think,
not here
. If there are any answers to be found, I’m going to have to look a little harder to find them.
26
“Into the Mystic”
—Van Morrison
T
here is little to no reception on the car radio, barring an oldies station that every once in a while breaks up into static even though the car is unmoving. For the tail end of October, it is a glorious day. The fall leaves, in this desolate spot outside the nation’s capital, are bursting from the tree limbs: ruby red, golden yellow, a veritable feast of riches. The air smells like firewood, like nutmeg, and I wish, so very badly now—with the window down, the sun’s rays pressed against my cheeks—that
I could just remember.
Remember what it was like to inhale a fall day as a kid, remember dressing up for Halloween, or gathering gourds in my mother’s garden for an autumn feast. You don’t realize until there is an absence of it, but your memory is the foundation of
everything.
Your marriage, sure, there is that. But of so much more than that: your family, your self-perception, your ideals about the future. And here, in the driver’s seat of a rented SUV on my way to my father’s mistress’s home that I can’t recall, I am gutted by the fact that it might never happen: I might never remember those soccer games from the falls of
my childhood, of whether or not I sucked on frozen grapes, and whether or not I was a decent midfielder, and whether or not my dad showed up to cheer me on the sidelines. Who, really, are you, if you don’t know where you come from?
This entire time, I’d counted on that: those little shards of memory easing their way back in. But what if that’s it, there are only slivers, nothing in its entirety? The idea of failure weaves into my psyche, sweat pulsing from my underarms. What if this trip yields nothing? What if my father’s sketchbook means nothing?
I open his book once again in my lap, my fingers tracing those familiar eyes, the emotion behind them both resonant and haunting.
Think, Nelly, think! Who is this? What does it mean to you?
I try to force the circuits in my brain to connect, to somehow rewire themselves and magically grant me, after months of fumbling in the darkness, a light.
I ease the seat back and shut my eyes, trying again, trying harder, trying to knock down the walls to whatever it is that I’m protecting, refusing to let back in.
What else is there left to lose?
Nothing. There is nothing else to be taken from me, so by god, this is me at my lowest. I implore my will to relent.
Relent.
Because from here, there is nowhere else to go.
The static on the radio blares then fades, and then the music is back, swarming the car, swarming me. It’s a song that Rory has thought to include on my iPod, so the melodies, the harmonies are already part of me, the lyrics like a vision: Van Morrison, rusty and croaking and wonderful.
“When that foghorn blows you know I will be coming home, And when that foghorn whistle blows I got to hear it, I don’t have to fear it.”
Something sparks within me, and it spreads like a flame of joy
throughout my veins. And then I can see it, I can remember it—the music from both now and before, melting together, a swirl of past and present, memory and reality, now and then.
“Hey!” I hear a voice, startling me. Anderson is outside the open window.
“You’re already done?” I ask.
“It’s been half an hour.” He pokes his head closer. “What have you been doing?”
I stare down at the sketch, to the one thing that I’ve been running from maybe this entire time.
“Oh my god,” I say, peering closer, and then, yes, I remember. “I know where we’re going. Come on, get in. I don’t need directions. I know the way.”
Behind the house,
there is a dock. This was what my memory had unlocked for me. This is what my ears—nearly disconnected from my brain—had sifted through the black noise for me.
I am in a pink bathing suit, with a stripe of flowers running up each side. My legs still are skinny, gangly, my hips haven’t yet formed a full curve, my breasts are mostly small buds. There is a glaring red scab on my temple. My arms are scrawny and bruised on the biceps, like the tomboy in me who maybe played tackle football with Rory that summer. There is a boom box on the dock, its volume turned up to full tilt. Van Morrison is singing “Into the Mystic,” just like he was in the car, his voice both aching and tender, from a mix tape that I have made for the summer. Journey, the Police, Jackson Browne, Van Morrison. They’re all on there.
Of course.
It’s so obvious, I nearly want to throttle myself for not seeing it sooner—that the music was the key. Always.
“Come in!” a voice shouts from the water. “Last one to the raft owes the other a Coke.” I look out and see a rash of sandy hair bobbing and weaving, arms lapping each other in perfect form. So I take off at a full sprint, hurling myself into the cool, dark lake, pushing my legs as fast as they can propel me under the silent water until my lungs demand air. I resurface and see him already up there—squirming up atop the wooden raft moored fifteen feet away.
“You owe me a Coke!” he yells, smiling, his dimples cratering into his cheeks.
“Over my dead body,” I shout back, sipping the lake water, spitting it back out as I paddle closer. “You got a head start. That’s cheating.”
I’m nearly at the raft when I hear someone calling me from shore. I turn and tread water, my pigtails wrapping around my neck like damp snakes.
“Nelly! Come on!” Rory whines. “You weren’t supposed to get wet again! You have to come in now.”
I turn and look back at the boy, his face a shadow of what it was just thirty seconds before.
“Come on. Now!” she yells. “Mom’s here. And she’s ready to take us home.”
“Seriously? You just listened
to something…and remembered? And now you know where we’re going?” Anderson says.
We’re nearly there now—thirty miles or so outside of Charlottesville. I remember the roads, the smell of the fields, the pastures, and though I can’t pinpoint why, I know how to get there.
“Can you just drive faster?” I say, partially because I can’t articulate it myself, partially because it doesn’t matter: I do know, I saw something, and I want to get there as soon as possible to confirm it.
Dr. Macht had expressed this way back when, almost four months and a lifetime ago, he explained that maybe there was a block, a straitjacket that I’d sewn myself into, and now, maybe I can find a way to set myself free from it, too. Everyone has told me that I’d always been a musician, always had that gift (“You got that from me!” my mother had said), but my father had pushed me toward art. And then when he left, I’d pushed it aside completely, barring the small gasps of bliss from the radio, a few binges of karaoke with Samantha, a stolen moment with Peter when we first fell in love.
And perhaps now, it’s the key to finding my way back. To what? To who I was before. To who I can be after.
“So is everything back? All of it, all of your memory?”
“Not everything.” I shake my head.
“But you’re close,” he says.
“Maybe,” I concede, watching the whoosh of the trees blend into each other as we speed by, wondering who the boy was, if he was my first love, if he loved me back.
You owe me a Coke!
What else did we owe each other?
“It’s strange that your mom wouldn’t have just flat out told you the address, told you about this place,” Anderson says after we’ve fallen into silence for a bit, the wheels and the engine our background noise. I turn up the radio, that same oldies station following us down the highway. “Wouldn’t she have thought to look here for him, your dad?”
“Who’s to say that she didn’t? That she didn’t find him, that she didn’t know?”
“True enough.”
“Who’s to say anything at this point?”
He goes quiet at this, and then quickly glances toward me.
“You think I’m wrong?” I say.
He shakes his head. “No. No, not wrong at all.” He wants to say more but thinks better of it.
“I don’t know,” I say, a non sequitur of sorts, talking mostly to myself. “He loved this place.”
On the radio, the DJ who has the evening shift clears his throat on air, detailing tomorrow’s weather, then reading a kitschy advertisement for a local car dealership. “Here’s your next set of oldies, coming to you commercial-free thanks to Dwayne’s Custom Chevrolet,” he says.
I don’t even recognize the tune until a minute or so in, right when the chorus is about to break. It’s following me, this song, this curse, this birthright.
“You know my parents named me for this song,” I say. “About the loneliest woman in the world. My dad, for a while, as cliché as this sounds, well, John Lennon was his muse. Until he outgrew that phase. But by then it was too late. I was already named.”
“I don’t believe that,” Anderson says. “No parent would do that to a child.”
“Ah Buddha, there you are again. It’s true. I looked it up on Wikipedia.”
Anderson laughs. “So no one has told you that you can’t believe anything you read on there?” He glances over to me. “Maybe he just really loved the name and then wanted to look cool by dropping the Beatles into it. You know, coolness by association.”
“You might know a thing or two about that,” I say.
“I might. We artists are afflicted with the desire for coolness by osmosis.” He reaches over and touches my arm. “Besides, it’s only a song.”