The remains

Chapter 8

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.