The Remains (2 page)

Then, just like that, the dream shifts and I
see you kneeling beside me inside the dark, empty basement. I hear
the sound of your sniffles, smell the wormy raw earth, feel the
cold touch of a man’s hand. You turn and you look at me with your
solid steel eyes. And then I wake up.

We survived the house in the woods together,
Mol, and we never told a soul. We just couldn’t risk it. Whalen
would have come back for us. He would have found us. He would have
found mom and dad. Even today, I know he surely would have. He
would have killed them, Mol. He would have killed us. In just five
days, thirty years will have passed. Three entire decades and I’m
still convinced we did the right thing by keeping that afternoon in
the woods our secret.

When I see you in my dreams it’s like
looking in a mirror. The blue eyes, the thick lips, the dirty
blonde hair forever just touching the shoulders. My hair is finally
showing signs of gray, Mol.

I wonder, do you get gray hair in heaven? I
wonder if Whalen’s hair burned off in hell? I wonder if he
suffers?

All my love.

Your twin sister,

Rebecca Rose Underhill

Exhaling, the woman folds the letter neatly
into thirds and slips it into a blank stationary envelope, her
initials RRU embossed on the label. Running the bitter, sticky glue
interior over her tongue, she seals the envelope and sets it back
down onto the writing table. Once more she picks up the pencil,
bringing the now dulled tip to the envelope’s face. Addressing it
she writes only a name:

Molly Rose Underhill

The job done, the woman smiles sadly. Opening
the table drawer, she sets the letter inside, on top of a stack of
nine identical letters-never-sent. One for every year her sister
has been gone.

Closing the drawer, she hears her cell phone
begin to vibrate, then softly chime. Picking it up off the desktop,
she opens the phone and sees that a new text has been forwarded to
her electronic mailbox. Fingering the inbox, she retrieves the
message.

Rebecca.
Nothing
more.

Punching the command that reveals the name
and number of the sender she finds ‘Caller Unknown’. The sender’s
number has been blocked. Closing the phone back up, she sets it
down on the desk. That’s when the wind picks up, blows and whistles
through the open window.

“Mol,” she says, staring out into the
darkness. “Mol, is that you?”

I WAS IN NO mood to argue. Even with the one
person on earth I argued with the most: Robyn, my partner at the
Albany Art Center or, what we lovingly referred to as, The School
of Art.

“What do you mean you can’t see the word,
Rob? It’s right there spelled out in plain English.”

Here’s
the deal: the center’s most accomplished artist-in-residence,
Francis—autistic by clinical definition but a genius savant by our
definition—had completed a brand new canvas. A colorful, richly
textured, post-modern abstract on—get this—traditional landscape
that to me anyway, contained the word ‘Listen’ painted in faint,
flesh-colored letters deep inside its center. Or in the vernacular
of the job,
core
.

Maybe the faint word wasn’t entirely obvious
to the naked eye. Maybe it was difficult to see. But in my mind it
was centered and focused enough that the abstract collage of lines
and swipes laid out against green-brown grasses and distant forest
trees seemed to be painted not over the word, but around it.

L-i-s-t-e-n

“My eyesight is just as sharp as yours, Bec,”
Robyn barked. “We graduated the same day, same lousy school, same
useless MFA in Painting and I just don’t see the word.” She
abruptly held up her paint-stained hands like a politician about to
retract a statement. “Allow me to correct myself. I see the word
all right. That is, I force myself to see it. But it’s primarily an
abstract rendering for God’s sakes.” She tossed Franny a smile.
“And a darned good one too.”

“God’s sakes,” Franny mumbled, dark eyes
rolling around in their sockets like a blind man.

“Thanks for the back-up, Fran,” Robyn
exclaimed, holding up her hand for the artist to slap her five,
which he cautiously did. By that I mean, without making eye contact
with her. Brushing back long brunette hair, Robyn planted a
satisfied smile on her narrow face. “Seems to me, Ms. Underhill
needs a refresher course in Painting 101.”

“Refresher,” Franny repeated solemnly, as
though speaking for no one’s ears other than his own. He was seated
on a paint-spattered wood stool. The stool was set before an
equally paint-stained easel and situated in the far corner of the
classroom—far enough away from the other half-dozen private art
students who occupied the downtown former Catholic grammar school
now turned art center.

The fact that the emotionally distanced
man-boy sat for an extended length of time at all was a testament
to how absorbed he was in his work. From what his aging mother once
told me, getting him to sit still for even thirty seconds at a time
at home was a near miracle. Only when Franny finally collapsed into
a deep sleep did he become the perfect still-life.

“Earth to Rebecca,” Rob spoke up, crossing
her arms over her T-shirted chest. “Are we finished with the
‘Listen’ business, partner? Because I’d like to go home and shower
before my date arrives.”

Robyn was
currently ‘on the market’ as they say in the dating world. Since it
isn’t all that easy meeting men in bars and virtually impossible to
meet one while working at the School of Art, she’d become a devoted
disciple of online dating’s
Match.com
. That is, a patron of the
Match.com
dating philosophy of ‘Find, Mind, Bind’ which in
my loveless world tended to read more like ‘Find, Mind,
Bind,
Bail
…’

“Who’s the lucky victim tonight?” I posed,
sensing an organ slide of jealously in my guts.

Robyn grinned.

“Allen. Stockbroker. That’s all I know. But
very cute judging by the head-shot he posted on the website.” Her
smile turned foxy sly.

Pulling my eyes away from Franny’s painting,
I took a glance through the glass doors onto a busy downtown State
Street, the sidewalk filled with commuters making their lonely
exodus from the city to their suburban McMansions. Now that October
had arrived, it was getting dark out earlier. Cooler too.

“I’ll take care of the lock up,” I
offered.

By then the only artist left in the center
was Franny, the others having begun to quietly make their exit
while we’d argued over identifying a secret word not exactly hidden
inside Franny’s painting.

My partner leaned herself into Franny,
planted a peck on his smooth cheek. She then glided across the
room, grabbed her black North-Face vest from out of her personal
cubby and headed for the door.

“I’ll let you know how it goes tonight,” she
barked. “Keep your cell phone by your side.”

“Don’t call me after eleven,” I ordered.

“Get thee a life,” she added before springing
the door open, nearly pushing it off its hinges.

Just then I caught the image of my face
reflected in the wall-mounted mirror above my work table. I looked
into my own eyes—the same blue eyes I shared with Molly. The same
blonde hair, same face. Only difference now was that Molly would
forever remain thirty-two-and-under in my eyes, while as for
myself, I was looking decidedly paler, thinner and more tired than
a person should be for forty-two.

For a fleeting second I wanted to tell Robyn,
‘Take a good look around you. I’ve got a life.’ But she was gone
and I’m not sure I believed it myself. Neither did Franny it turns
out.

“
Get a
life,” he softly spoke to himself. Strangely, he smiled when he
said it. A rare event to be sure. He also came close to making eye
contact. Something he almost never did. Maybe it was just me, my
intuition knocking on the gray walls of my brain. But I sensed he
was doing more than just mimicking Robyn’s words. I sensed he was
trying to tell me something. Something more than just the catch
phrase ‘Get a life.’ It felt more like he was trying to tell me
to
Wake up!
There’s something you need to know!
Or, on another hand altogether, maybe I was
looking too far into a deep dark nothing. Maybe I was just feeling
old, passed over, worn out.

I worked up a smile anyway, scratched my
forehead with nail-chewed digits.

“Yeah, sure, rub it in Fran,” I jibed. “Isn’t
it enough that you can paint circles around everyone else in this
studio? Including Robyn and me?”

I stood in the middle of the old grade school
classroom floor, waiting for a response. But waiting for a response
from Franny was as stupid as it was unrealistic. Because I’m not
sure he understood a single word I’d just said. Rather, he
understood my words. But from what little I knew about his
condition, his autism acted like a barrier that could selectively
block out almost anything I said.

I made my way back over to him, stood by his
side and took another look at the new canvas. One last look at the
crazy red and green Pollack-like squiggles and spatters that
surrounded a large field of tall grass and beyond it, a dark wood.
To combine the abstract with traditional landscape made for a
daring composition, even for the most gifted of painters. But
Franny was able to pull it off and then some. My eyes peeled to the
painting, I knew that if I were made to interpret the piece for the
studio arts course I taught every spring, I would have called it a
dream. Rather, this is what it looked and felt like to wake up from
one of my own dreams—the abstract brain waves somehow combining
themselves with a realistic portrait of a field and a forest.

I looked
deeper into the painting. Once more I recognized the word ‘Listen’.
The truth is that the word didn’t exactly shoot out at you. You had
to look for it, not unlike staring up at a random cloud formation
and seeing the shape of a dog or maybe a lion. But on the flipside,
the word was spelled out as plain to me as the track-lighting
mounted to the ceiling.
So why had it been so difficult for Robyn to see
what I was seeing?
I
might have thought up a sensible answer to the question had it not
been for the three quick honks of a pickup truck horn.

Franny’s ride, right on time.

This much I knew: consistency was very
important to the gifted painter. He was about to head home to his
mother’s house in the country, not far away from where Molly and I
grew up.

The horn sounded again.

Franny jumped up from the stool like a little
kid being called for ice cream. But then he was no kid. He was a
forty-eight year old man. He was short. Shorter than my
five-feet-five even, but far larger in the middle. A regular
four-by-four. His roundness seemed to fit him well however. It gave
him this cherubic look that along with his smooth red cheeks, made
him appear more like a child than a middle-aged man.

His condition—his emotional void; the fact
that he could block out almost all sensory perception yet produce
such vivid, sensual works of art… I wondered if it somehow made him
immune to the aging process. Or did having no real knowledge of
aging make you exempt from growing old?

I thought about some of the other, more world
renowned autistic artists I had studied over the past few years. I
thought about Larry Bissonnette and his colorful geometric patterns
based on existing cityscapes. I thought of his own short, stocky
build—a physique similar to Franny’s. I thought about Mark Rimland
and Roby Park, both of them savants able to capture an existing
scene or building or a specific pattern of lines while, at the same
time, finding it impossible to create them solely from
imagination.

If Franny was no different, then might I
assume that his newest painting was a reproduction of an existing
landscape? Were the abstract squiggles and lines a reproduction of
a wild pattern that already existed? If so, where?

Grabbing hold of his tattered portfolio bag,
covered in fading SpongeBob SquarePants stickers, he took off for a
metal and glass door that led directly outside the studio to the
north parking lot. As he moved spastically toward the exit, he kept
his baggy blue jeans from falling around his ankles by grabbing
hold of his belt and hiking the pants way up over his waist.

Before he let himself out, I called out to
him.

“Franny, what about your painting?”

He stopped and turned.

“Your painting, Rebecca,” he said, voice low
and mumbled, wide eyes planted on the floor.

Although he wouldn’t look me in the eye, I
swear I saw a hint of a grin forming on his round face. He was
about to turn back for the door when I called out to him again.
Although I could clearly see where he’d signed the canvas in his
distinctive finger-paint-like F-over-S style, he hadn’t mentioned a
title. None that I recalled anyway.

“What do you call it?”

I half expected a mumbled reply. Something
spoken out the corner of his mouth, his eyes aimed not at me but
the tops of his shoes.

But that’s when something strange
happened.

When the horn blasted for a third time,
Franny didn’t seem the least bit fazed. He stood stone stiff,
portfolio bag hanging over his shoulders, hiding most of his lower
body like a portable piece of wall. His cherubic child-like face
lost its pink on pale flesh color. It formed neither grin nor
frown. With that new, odd, straight face, he laser-beamed a gaze
directly into my own eyes.