Free The Song Remains the Same by Allison Winn Scotch Page A

answer.
    “Work, I guess.”
    “Work, you guess?”
    “Well, I mean, the truth of the matter is, now that I’m really thinking about it, most of the time when we catch up, we’re…well, we’re bitching about something.”
    “Like what?” I asked. The face from the cover of People certainly looked like she had plenty to bitch about.
    “Oh, my mother-in-law, your mother. My sleep schedule, my workschedule. Your sister. Things like that.” She exhaled. “I never really thought about it until now—how little of our time we spend discussing the things that actually make us happy.”
    “What would I say about my sister?” I said, ignoring her prophecy on happiness. “What could I possibly complain about with Rory?”
    Sam laughed. “Oh god, see, and I don’t mean this to come out wrong, but in some ways, it’s probably better that you don’t remember. Clean slate and all. But you guys—you were always getting into it. You know, sister stuff. Competitive stuff. Driving each other crazy with gallery disagreements, nitpicky things. You were meticulous, she was less worried about the details. You were reserved, she was a show-off. Yin and yang, oil and water.”
    “I don’t see that at all,” I said.
    “Well, that’s the good thing about those clean slates,” she said, right before her brief came in and she had to run. “You don’t see what you just wiped away.”
    Shortly after Dr. Macht informs me that he has granted me freedom to fly back to my sister, to my husband, and to discover why I once made music for him, Jamie pops his head through the door frame.
    “News,” he says. “I have news.”
    “Me, too,” I say. “I also have news.”
    “You’re going home. I already know.” He grins, a little too self-importantly.
    “Of course you do.” I close my eyes.
    “It’s part of the job.”
    I hear him sliding a chair next to the bed, and I open my eyes to find him already seated.
    “So you already know mine. What’s yours?”
    “ American Profiles, ” he says.
    “ American Profiles ?” I say.
    “Yes, American Profiles .” He emphasizes both words like that will answer my question. “That show on Thursday nights?” I shake my head, still unknowing. “Well, they ‘profile’ all these amazing stories, amazing people. I think they might be interested.”
    “Interested?”
    “In us, in a story!” He claps his hands for emphasis. “I’ve been pitching it like crazy, and I think today they bit.”
    I busy myself wrapping the headphone wire around the iPod and consider it. My instinct—despite my initial zeal for Operation Free Nell Slattery, a zeal that has since waned, as these cockeyed ideas often do—is to burrow under the covers until the public loses interest. But the new me, the fabulous me, the one that conceived of OFNS in the first place, and the one I committed to as a penance for surviving the crash, implores my instincts to rethink this, to see it as an opportunity—for what, I’m not even yet sure. Maybe just to live on a grander scale, to fly down life’s zip line instead of standing beneath it, craning my head to see what was coasting by. Besides, Jamie is a means to an end—he’s out there, uncovering details, angling for information—and my new instinct, my new gut is telling me to trust him, telling me that there’s something here to believe in. Just last week, we did an hour-long interview that his station stretched over three nights, and viewers marveled at my voided memory and told us as much in e-mails.
    What I wouldn’t do to erase the memory of my lousy ex-husbands (three of ’em) and son-of-a-bitch boss, Clara from Iowa City wrote in.
    My heart goes out to this poor girl. What a loss—I have asked my church group to pray for her this Sunday, Eugenia from neighboring Wichita, which now received the show via satellite, told us.
    “Before you answer, I have these.” Jamie reaches into his bag and thrusts a pack of postcards in my hand.
    I finger