The Song Remains the Same Read Online Free PDF Page A

ease out of bed, slowly, delicately, self-conscious in my hospital gown, and embrace him the best that we can—with my bruised ribs and his wheelchair-folded body. He smiles the smile that likely made him a star. It’s magnetic, infectious, damn near hypnotizing. I’ve read his section of the People article, though, seen the clips on Access Hollywood. I know that he has spent the past few years bedding too many women for him to remember their names, being chastised for showing up drunk more than once on set. I know that he is immensely talented but that he is his own worst enemy: torpedoing a career that could be taken to a grander scale if he would only stop doing it in. I know all this, and so I both trust him and am wary. That smile. That goddamn smile is so absorbing that I want to hurl myself onto his wheelchair and bus to rehab with him, and yet, I suspect that I am just one of many women to feel this way.
    And also, of course, there is Peter. And my marriage. And my life before this. I feel myself blushing at my idiocy, at the fantasy of escaping this life with Anderson, even though there’s nothing—and yet everything—to escape from. Samantha wished that she was twenty-one again, but I don’t have twenty-one to wish for. I only have something else—make-believe—to dream of.
    “Give everyone else a chance,” Anderson says kindly, though not particularly like he wants me to hurl myself on his wheelchair and run with him, though not particularly like he doesn’t, either. More like confidants, which I suppose we’ve become. “Take it day by day. That’s the only way to deal.”
    “You’ve been in therapy, haven’t you?” I center myself, my thoughts, pulling back into the real world, into this, into the moment. “The shrink who comes by here every day keeps telling me the same thing.”
    “Years,” he laughs. “More years of therapy than anyone has the right to. Started at sixteen—my parents forced me when they heard I was doing whippets every day after school.”
    “What screwed you up?” I am prolonging it now, his exit.
    “Nothing screwed me up,” he says. “That’s the joke of it now. Nothing at all screwed me up—I had a perfectly decent childhood, perfectly wonderful parents. My dad is a dentist. I don’t know…I just was. Screwed up”—he pauses—“though now I need therapy for entirely different reasons. The nightmares, all of that.”
    “In some ways, maybe it’s better that I don’t remember.”
    “Catch-22,” he says.
    Neither of us knows quite how you say good-bye to the former stranger with whom you fell from the sky, so he hands me the new issue of People —we’ve been bumped from the headline to the corner cover story—and promises to e-mail or call as soon as he settles in.
    I’m glancing through the Star Tracks section of the magazine, when Rory and Dr. Macht, in blue surgery scrubs and a white lab coat, wander in. They are armed with the good news of the day.
    “Mom’s on her way,” Rory says, like I’ve asked a question. I smile at her because she has been so giving this past week, so available when I know she’s had other things to attend to: her life back home, the gallery she’s left to come take care of me. The old me didn’t seem like someone who needed taking care of, but Rory does it well all the same.
    “So there’s good news,” Dr. Macht says. “We’ve gone over your CAT scans, the MRIs, sent them to the best specialists out at UCLA, and it doesn’t appear that there’s anything permanent going on in your brain.”
    “So why can’t I remember anything?”
    “Could be a variety of things.” He clears his throat. “It could be psychosomatic…”
    “Wait, you think this is intentional?” I stutter. Of all the things that have occurred to me lying here through the endless hours, intentional amnesia wasn’t one of them.
    “No, no, nothing like that, not intentional. That wouldn’t be the word to use. But sometimes when people