The Remains (5 page)

To some people, these lines, circles and
squiggles might seem an annoyance or, at the very least, a kind of
self-indulgence on the part of the artist. But to me they
represented something more. I’d been having more than my fair share
of dreams lately. Dreams that involved Molly and me; that involved
our walking through the field to the dark woods, despite our father
strictly forbidding us to do so. Those abstract lines made me feel
like I was entering into the dream once more, only not in the sleep
state. They made me feel like I was dreaming while I was awake. For
an added third dimension, the word ‘Listen’ was buried in the
painting’s center. A word not everyone saw. Not without my tracing
it for them.

Questions flooded me.

Why would Franny decide to give me a painting at
all?
Especially when the
payday for one of his pieces pretty much equaled what I might make
in three months working at the Albany Art Center.

Under the
circumstances of Franny’s autism, he might not have cared the least
bit about giving up the money. But then he had never before gifted
me one of his paintings.
Did Franny’s mother know that he’d slipped me a
ten-thousand dollar present? And why did he call it ‘Listen’ when I
was the only person who clearly recognized the word in the first
place?
Or so it seemed.
That is, judging by the argument waged that afternoon by Robyn and
myself inside the center studio. With the word ‘Listen’ being flung
all over the place, had Franny made the spontaneous decision to use
the ‘L’ word as the title of his masterpiece? Or, what was almost
too freaky to contemplate, had ‘Listen’ been the title all
along?

Seated on the couch in the silence of the old
apartment, I once more pictured Franny’s face. Pictured it go from
round, rosy and animated to pale and serious, as if for a few
seconds, the boy-like autism stepped aside to reveal the hidden
man.

I ran my hands over my face. It surprised me
to know that I was crying. Exactly why was I shedding tears in the
solitude of my apartment?

In a way, I’m not sure I wanted to know. But
then the thirty year anniversary that would arrive on Friday and
all the memories and dreams it conjured up, might have been reason
enough for tears. And now this painting from Franny—a painting that
was playing with my head and heart.

A tingle erupted in my stomach, along with a
dull ache in the center of my brain. I stood up, felt the dizziness
that accompanied the suddenly downshifting blood. Slowly making my
way into the kitchen, I retrieved a wad of paper-towels from off
the cabinet-mounted roller above the sink. Back in the living room,
I got to work cleaning up the spilled water.

While I cleaned, I thought about Michael and
his date. I wondered how it was going. I thought about Robyn and
her date. I thought about Franny, if he was up inside his attic
studio painting the rainy evening away. I wondered if he would
paint anything else just for me. I prayed to God he would not.

Outside
my apartment the rain fell steady and never ending.
What to do with the
rest of my night? Maybe head to the gym for a weight training
workout? Maybe head outside for my usual five mile run?

I just didn’t have the energy or the will.
Besides, it was still raining.

I went to bed without dinner.

Alone.

THAT NIGHT I DREAMT.

Molly and I come to the edge of the field of
tall grass behind our house, the thick, second-growth forest
standing like a dark impenetrable wall only a dozen feet away from
us. There is something forbidden and ominous about these woods. So
much so that I have difficulty even looking directly into them, as
if they have the ability to look directly back at me. I try and
focus my attention on Molly’s narrow back, her blonde hair that
sways from shoulder to shoulder, until she turns to me with that
mischievous smile of hers, shouting “Come on, Bec. Let’s do
it.”

My stomach is tied up in double-knots.

Molly has no fear. Not of the woods, not of
what we might find inside them, not of our father who has forbade
us to ever enter them. But then I harbor enough fear for the both
of us.

Molly turns, shoots me a smile. She begins
to step across the invisible barrier between field and woods.

“
Don’t!”

But it’s too late. She is already entering
into a place from which there is no return…

I awoke to the sound of my cell phone
vibrating atop the nightstand. At the same time, I heard a voice.
The cell phone and the voice pulled me out of my dream, away from
the open field, away from the danger that lurked there.

“Rebecca.” A whispered voice.

In my half-awake, half-asleep state, I heard
the deep, raspy, guttural voice. The voice of a heavy smoker. In
the darkness of the bedroom I found myself lying flat on my back,
eyes open wide, gazing onto a black ceiling. Although my heart
pounded, my body was paralyzed. I could not move my arms or legs. I
could not breathe.

The
windows were closed to the rain and the wind. The voice had to have
come from inside my head.
How could it possibly have come from anywhere
else?

But it sounded so real, so close. As real as
the cell phone. Real enough to make me awake. But then not awake at
all. More like caught up in a state somewhere in between conscious
and out cold.

I lay in bed unable to swallow, unable to
move, unable to speak. I felt the urge to pee. But the down
comforter had become my protective steel cage. No way I could
attempt to get out from under the covers.

Directly behind me, the rain came down ever
steady outside the window. If only I could have reached out for the
nightstand, grabbed hold of the cell, opened it, and heard the
voice of Robyn or Michael. The voices might have snapped me out of
my trance, saved me from a nightmare too vivid for words. There was
nothing I could do.

No choice
but to lie on my back and
listen.

I WOKE UP EARLIER than usual. The rain had
stopped but the sun hadn’t fully risen over the Berkshire Mountains
to the east. Before crawling out of bed, I reached out for my cell,
checking to see who had called in the middle of the night.

I
scrolled down to
Missed Calls
.

The last call was from one of my Art Center
students—a nineteen year old college freshman and aspiring Picasso
by the name of Craig. He’d called me at three-fifteen that
afternoon to tell me he’d have to cancel his tutoring appointment
for later that day. In all likelihood, I’d missed his call since
Robyn and I were so consumed with arguing over Franny’s painting
and its inclusion, or lack thereof, of the word ‘Listen’. After
that, I hadn’t missed any calls. The odd ‘Unknown Caller’ text I’d
received a couple of hours later hadn’t constituted a missed call
since I’d quite obviously received it.

Remember

So then, how did I go about explaining last night’s
experience of hearing my cell phone ring and at the same time,
hearing a man’s voice?
No question about it. I had been dreaming. Dreaming in that
half awake, half asleep state where dreams can be their most vivid
and most frightening.

Dragging myself out of bed, I decided to put
the whole night and its nightmare drama out of my mind, greet the
brand new day like I was entering a new life. It’s exactly what
Molly would suggest I do.

In the kitchen I made the coffee, poured a
glass of orange juice, popped a One-A-Day, and ate a small bowl of
shredded wheat and skim milk. Taking refuge in my morning routine
would help me forget about the immediate past. About paintings that
spoke to me. About ambiguous texts. About voices that came to me in
my dreams.

As the new sun shined bright inside the
kitchen window, the grass in the common glistened from the rain
water that still clung to the blades. For a quick second or two I
gave serious thought to heading into the spare bedroom I’d
converted into a painting studio. If I could paint, I could forget
about life.

But it had been a while since I’d painted
anything. Aside from the occasional ten minutes here, ten minutes
there, it had been almost ten years since I’d produced any art of
consequence. That is to say, anything I considered finished and
ready to go to market.

So why the hesitation?

While painting could indeed help me forget
about things for a while, it could also have the reverse effect. It
could actually provoke too much thought. There had been a time when
the act of painting or drawing was my sole refuge. My art began for
me almost immediately after Molly and I were ambushed in the woods
all those years ago. Since we’d been sworn to secrecy, I had to do
something to express the torment I physically felt inside my body,
the same way Molly must have felt her cancer years later. Although
each and every bit of wall space in my Brunswick Hills bedroom was
covered with landscape watercolors and hand-study sketches, I
couldn’t very well produce a large canvas with Whalen’s gaunt face
plastered on it. My mother and father would surely take notice.
What would they say? How would they react to such an awful, ugly
face rendered with such bitter anger with every brush stroke?

But
whether it happened consciously or not, I found myself
pencil-sketching his face inside the blank margins of the
novel,
To
Kill a Mockingbird
. The
reality of it is that in the fall of 1978, Molly and I had entered
the seventh grade. Harper Lee’s story about little Scout, her
righteous lawyer father, and the mysteriously frightening Boo
Radley had been assigned to us by our English teacher, Mr. Hughto
(Mr. Huge-Toe, as Molly dubbed him). While Molly dismissed the
story as ‘sentimental slop’, it nevertheless hit home with
me.

Why?

Because
we had our own Boo Radley living in our midst. The mysterious
Francis Scaramuzzi was a man/boy who lived on the neighboring farm
and, like the scary Boo himself, never came out of his house. I
also lived with the tenacious, gutsy, fearless Molly. In my mind,
Molly and Lee’s adventurous and precocious character, Scout, was
one and the same person.
To Kill a Mockingbird
did not only hit home with me, I felt as if Harper
Lee had written the story for me and me alone.

I read
the book for school, then read it again for myself, again and
again. After the attacks, I never let the book leave my side. I
began to secretly sketch inside the margins, and when I ran out of
room, I sketched on little pieces of white notebook paper and
stuffed them inside the novel’s printed pages. Whalen’s gaunt face
was my sole subject. That cartoon face was both a product of
reality
and
imagination.
Had I really taken the time to get a good look at
my attacker during those frightening minutes down inside the dirt
floor basement of his house in the woods?
I had been too afraid to look closely into his
face; into his eyes. Yet I still knew what he looked like. And I
could reproduce him detail for detail.

So what then possessed me to compulsively
sketch the face? Do it for my eyes only?

For some unknown reason it gave me comfort to
draw him; to be able to compartmentalize him like that; to be able
to control him. Therein lay my refuge in a world where I had no one
other than Molly to cry to and to cry with.

Taking my coffee with me, I opened the back
door and stepped out onto the stone terrace. I breathed in the
sweet smell of a rain-drenched morning that now warmed itself by
the new sun. A bright, breezy, cheerful day loomed large. Even if
it killed me.

For a
brief moment I finally succeeded at forgetting about Whalen. I
looked out across the large expanse of green grass, large oak
trees, wrought iron benches, neatly trimmed paths, and the old
four-story brick buildings, the green ivy running up the sides to
the slate roofs. I was a student at Princeton, Yale or Harvard.
Gazing up at the white wispy clouds, I felt like I had become a
character in an Impressionistic Monet. Maybe
Boats Leaving the Harbor
or my favorite,
Sunrise
. I
sipped the still too hot coffee and I felt my body shiver from the
morning chill. Something Monet characters never did.

The white dreamy angels that floated above
me… Every one of them bore the name Molly.

A second cup of coffee later, I was showered
and dressed in my most comfortable Levis, black Nicona cowboy boots
and black turtleneck sweater. Hair pinned back, I put on sunglasses
to mask tired, wired eyes. Throwing my knapsack over my shoulder, I
went to leave the apartment the usual way. Via the back door.

But Franny’s painting stopped me cold.

It tugged at me, pulled me in with its
invisible tractor beam. I stared down at the many lines and
patterns but even now the main focal point came in the form of the
word ‘Listen’.

Was the painting Franny’s way of
communicating with me? If it was his was of communicating, what
exactly was he trying to tell me? Listen? Listen for what
exactly?

Bending at the knees, I picked up the
painting by its border, turning it around so that it faced the
bookcase. Then I left the apartment for what I prayed would be an
uneventful day at work.

SOMEHOW I KNEW THAT the day would be anything
but uneventful.

Something was happening inside me. I wasn’t
in any pain. I didn’t feel queasy. I didn’t have cancer, God
willing. I just had this feeling that I was no longer guiding
myself; that the events of my life were being guided by
circumstances beyond my control. Maybe this explained why instead
of passing by the Saint Pious Roman Catholic Church like I had day
in and day out for the past ten years, I acted on impulse, turned
into the empty lot, pulled up close to the church doors and killed
the engine.