The Song Remains the Same Read Free

years old. You live in New York.” She pauses. “Does…does any of this bring anything back?”
    I shake my head no.
    “And Peter? Peter is my husband?” I scrunch my face, trying to imagine a world in which I pledged myself to him, that man. I can’t see it. More important, I can’t feel it. Really? I think. Him?
    “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 calmme, 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 shadeof 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,