The Remains (12 page)

I left the door open behind me.

The home was empty. The few pieces of
furniture that remained were covered in white bed sheets that over
the past ten years had turned yellow and gray. Dust and dirt
however had been kept to a minimum thanks to the cleaning my
carpenter gave the place once a month.

The layout of the house wasn’t all that
different from the Scaramuzzi’s, with the large combination
living/dining room making up the space to my right, while behind
the wall to my left was the big eat-in kitchen.

Standing alone inside the living room, I felt
the bone cold that can settle into a home when the heat is turned
off and no living soul occupies it. I stared at the big fieldstone
fireplace my father built by hand over a period of a dozen
weekends. I looked at the dark creosote-soaked railroad-tie mantle
that once upon a time acted as a ‘This is Your Life’ showcase for
the many framed family photos that were set upon it. Photos of
Molly and me as babies; as toddlers learning to walk; as little
girls standing squinty-eyed on a Cape Cod beach; as teenagers going
off to high school, our eyes not as bright and optimistic as they
should be. Because after all, Molly and I possessed a deep secret.
And the secret ate away at us, as much as we didn’t want to believe
it.

Turning away from the mantle, I made my way
to the center hall stairs.

I climbed.

Standing at the top of the stairs I looked in
on my parents’ bedroom, their marriage bed and wedding gift bedroom
furniture now long disappeared thanks to an estate sale conducted
weeks after their premature deaths. It chilled me to see such an
empty lifeless space. The very place I’d always imagined where
Molly and I were conceived. It chilled me to think about how it was
possible for a married couple to die of grief only three months
apart from one another, both of them passing away in their sleep as
if it had been scripted that way.

But then I didn’t have kids. I had no idea
about that kind of love; that kind of sadness. All I knew was the
memory of a man who lived in those woods behind this house. And
that memory had always competed with the desire to have children.
Or perhaps it killed that desire, made it impossible to
contemplate.

Further
down the hall was Molly’s room and my room just beyond it. No
longer did this upstairs vibrate to stereo systems cranked full
throttle with Aerosmith and Ramones records. There was no more
piped in laugh-track to the
Love Boat
, no more teary-eyed wails for GH’s Scorpio.

There was nothing. And that kind of nothing
was frightening.

I pictured my room with my paints and easels,
the place smelling of turpentine and fresh paint, every bit of wall
space covered with sketches, watercolors and oil paintings. I
pictured Molly’s room, always cluttered with dirty clothes strewn
about the floor, her hospital white walls bare of even the simplest
photograph, poster or painting, as if creating a fun personal space
unique to her own wants and desires was somehow undeserved or at
this point, trivial, unimportant and just plain useless.

While I withdrew into myself and my art after
the attacks, Molly did the opposite. She would sneak out at night,
meet up with some local boy, maybe go to a party or maybe just park
in some isolated place at the far end of the valley. Molly never
stayed with just one boy, never went steady, but always strung
along lots of boyfriends, while I preferred not to see anyone at
all. For me, seeing a boy was an absolute impossibility considering
how ugly I felt inside. I didn’t even like to see myself naked.

But Molly was different. She craved the
attention the boy’s so willingly gave her. To this day I’m amazed
that she never got caught when it came time to sneak back into the
house, never got nabbed red-handed by Trooper Dan. Just standing
inside that hall I could once again hear the pony-tailed Molly
climbing up onto the porch overhang and tapping ever so gently on
my window, waking me up out of a sound sleep. After climbing back
through she’d get in bed with me, and hold me, and run her hands
through my hair. She’d shush me back to sleep like a mother would a
baby. I’d drift away to her sweet scent and the sound of her
breaths, just the two of us cocooned inside the sheets and down
comforter, no different from the nine months we spent cuddled up
inside our mother.

Standing
inside the upstairs of that old home, I could almost feel Molly’s
arms wrapped around me. I could almost smell her breath. The
sensations made me want to leave and never come back home. Back
down on the first floor I thought about leaving for good, maybe
putting the place up for sale, getting the past out of my life
forever. But then something held me back. Something had been
holding me back for years now. Like I said, this place and the many
acres of land that surrounded it, was all that remained of my
history.
Would selling this place erase it?

Inhaling a deep breathe I once more made my
way across the length of the living room to the large double-hung
windows that made up the far window wall. I stood only inches away
from the glass, stared out onto the field and the dense foothill
forest beyond it.

I see myself walking behind Molly as she
enters the woods. I watch her disappear from view as the colorful
foliage consumes her like Alice through the looking glass. I find
myself standing on the edge of a sea of grass; on the edge of the
known and the unknown, the accepted and the forbidden. My heart has
shot up from my chest and lodged itself in my mouth while visions
of my father slapping us with a punishment so severe we won’t be
able to leave the farm for a year.

After a few seconds (but what seems like
hours) I hear Molly’s voice begging for me through the trees.

“
Bec, come on,” she shouts. “There’s a
waterfall.”

Curiosity pulls at my insides. It is
stronger than fear.

A waterfall.

A waterfall means a severe drop-off in the
landscape—a cliff of some kind. Maybe a deep pool at the bottom of
it. Is that why my father has forbidden us to enter into these
woods alone? I realize then, the prospect of his little girls
falling off of that cliff is reason enough.

Still, who can resist chasing a
waterfall?

I take a few steps forward in the direction
of Molly’s voice; toward the sound of rushing water. Ducking my
head I slip on through an opening in the trees, make my way into
the darkness…

A HOWLING WIND WOKE me from out of my
daydream. I felt a cold draft against the right side of my face.
Looking over my right shoulder I saw that one of the double-hung
windows had been left open. Not wide open, but open enough for me
to feel the breeze.

Shifting myself to the window, I reached out
with both hands, closed it. That’s when I noticed that the old lock
had been sheered as if someone had tried to force the window open
from out on the porch.

I had no choice but to investigate.

Outside on the porch I went to the window and
discovered that it had, in fact, been tampered with. Jimmied. Kids,
teenagers. It was the first thought that entered into my head.
Locals looking to do a little partying.

But then if that had been the case, there
would have been beer and liquor bottles tossed all over the living
room floor; maybe even the charred remnants of a fire in the
fireplace.

But the place was clean. No sign of foul
play, least of all a group of teen partiers.

I made a mental note to call the carpenter to
repair the window. I turned and started for the front door to lock
it back up. It was then that I spotted the photograph. A black and
white photo with a white border that was lying on the porch floor
as if it had slipped out of somebody’s pocket not ten years ago,
but just this morning.

Bending at the knees I picked the picture
up.

I felt the floor beneath me shift. The image
was of Molly and me. We couldn’t have been more than twelve years
old at the time the picture was taken. In the photo we had our twin
faces up so close to the camera lens our lips were practically
pressed up against it. We were playing for the camera, laughing,
smiling, really hamming it up for the photographer.

But this
is not what robbed me of my breath
and
my balance.

The real shock was this: the image in the
photo was identical to the one I had seen inside the basement art
storage space of Franny’s house. The same one his mother said he’d
painted back when he was still in his early twenties.

Had Franny been in possession of this
photograph? How would he have gotten hold of it? Did he plant it
here purposely for me to find it? If he did, how did he know that I
would be coming here?

I sat down onto the porch floor, my back
pressed up against the clapboard wall. I became convinced that
Michael had been right all along. It wasn’t Whalen who had me
spooked.

Franny was also doing a pretty good job of
it.

Autism or no autism, Franny was playing with
my head, my emotions. Somehow, I got the distinct feeling he knew
all about Molly’s and my secret. Somehow he’d managed to invade my
head, grab hold of my memories. Now he was toying with me, dangling
me by strings like a puppet.

Sweet, old brilliant Franny.

I stood
up, shoved the photo in my pocket, and took a three-hundred-sixty
degree look around. My fear replaced itself with anger.
Was I being
followed? Stalked? Did Franny have something to do with
it?

I needed answers and I needed them now.

First I locked the door. Then making my way
down the porch steps, I jogged my way across the lawn to the
Cabriolet. But before opening the door, slipping behind the wheel,
I took one last look at the field and the thick woods that covered
Mount Desolation.

“Up yours!”

THE STUDIO WAS SILENT when I arrived. If
anyone aside from Franny and Robyn had been there while I spoke
with Caroline Scaramuzzi, they were gone now. Setting my knapsack
on the coat hook and my jean jacket over that, I felt the
deadweight of two sets of wide eyes focused upon me. Breathing
deeply I made my way across the paint-stained floor toward Franny’s
corner with the same enthusiasm a condemned prisoner might face the
electric chair.

“Let’s see it Fran,” I said in the place of a
hello.

“Bec,” Robyn said, her face a painted mask of
awe and wonder. “I don’t know how—”

“Don’t,” I broke in. “Don’t try and explain
it.”

As I came around to face the canvas, Robyn
stepped off to the side, as if the corner wasn’t big enough for the
three of us.

“Don’t, don’t.” Franny mumbled to
himself.

“It’s okay, Franny,” I said, “I think I know
what’s happening now.”

Before
entering the art center just minutes before, I’d wanted to scream
at Franny.
What kind of game are you playing? Why are you playing
it?
I wanted to know if
he was the one who walked to my parents’ house, dropped the
photograph to the porch floor. I’d wanted to know if he was the one
who tried to break into the house. But looking at the newest
painting (the third in three days), I could only feel myself
breaking down. I felt my limbs tremble, my throat close up on
itself. I felt my heart lodge itself inside my sternum.

A tear rolled down my cheek.

“How is it possible to know these things,
Fran?”

Painted on the canvas, an oil portrait of two
blonde-haired girls, down on their knees at the edge of a stream.
They were surrounded by deep woods. To their left was the even
deeper forest. To their right, a waterfall bound on both sides by
an open cliff face. Beyond that, an open valley that led further
into the country. You saw only the backs of the girls, their long
blonde hair draped down their narrow backs like silk veils. The
girl to the left—Molly—had her hand dipped in the rushing stream
water as though about to take a drink. The girl to the right—me—was
looking down at the hand, curious but at the same time, afraid to
drink. At least, that’s the way it had happened in real life.

That’s the way I remembered it.

I stood back, pressed my spine up against the
wall, my eyes glued to the painting. I took a more focused look at
the woods, the girls and the stream. Inside the water I made out
the faintest of words: ‘Taste’.

I shifted my eyes to Robyn.

She appeared even more shocked now that she
could see that I was crying, her normally happy-go-lucky tan face
having turned pale, her expression tight-lipped and bug-eyed.

“Is that you and Molly back when you were
kids?” she softly posed.

I nodded, swallowed.

She raised her right hand, pointed to the
stream in the painting.

“T-a-s-t-e,” she spelled out. “I see the word
this time, Bec. I see the word.”

My eyes focused on her.

“Do you have a date tonight?” I
whispered.

“Yes,” she said, her eyes still focused on
the painting.

“There’re no more classes today,” I said,
wiping the tears from my face with the backs of my hands, composing
myself. “I’m going to close up shop for the rest of the day. Franny
and I need some privacy to talk alone.”

“Alone,” Franny softly spoke in rhythm with
his rocking. “Alone.”

Robyn shot me a pensive glance. Then, without
a word, she grabbed her jacket and her bag. Silently she walked the
length of the studio toward the exit. She turned, looked not at me,
but into me.

“Bec, what’s going here? Why is Franny making
these paintings for you?”

“I can’t tell you that now. But soon I’ll
tell you everything.”