The remains

Chapter 16

A half-hour passed. Or had it been half the night? Only when I had nothing more to reveal did I realize that Michael hadn’t touched his beer. It occurred to me that I hadn’t touched mine either.

Michael’s face wasn’t pale. It had turned bed-sheet white.

We occupied the living room, him seated on the Providence College desk chair, me on the arm of the couch. Barely three feet separated us. He pressed open hands against his face, rubbed them up and down over stubble and white skin as though it better helped him absorb the truths about myself, Molly and a dead man named Joseph William Whalen. I knew then that he was trying to hide the fact that he was wiping away tears.

“You never told me,” he whispered. “All the years, months we were together. The three years we were married. You never said a single word about it.”

For an instant I thought he might try and hold me. Comfort me. But I was glad somehow when he didn’t. Instead he fisted his now warm bottle of beer, drank the whole thing down in one swift chug.

“What exactly do Franny’s paintings have to do with Whalen’s attack on you and your sister?”

I stood up from the armrest. I went to the paintings, repositioned them side by side against the bookcase so that they could be viewed together beneath the light from the stand-up lamp.

“At first I didn’t make the connection. It just seemed strange to me that I could clearly see the word ‘Listen’ in the center of the first canvas and other people-even Robyn-had to be coaxed into seeing it.”

“But the design is an abstract Pollack sort of thing.” He wiped his eyes again.

“Not abstract enough for me to see through the abstraction,” I explained.

Michael perked up his eyebrows. “In the same way a colorblind person can pick out certain words in a pattern that a person without colorblindness cannot,” he suggested. “Or vice-versa. Are you colorblind, Rebecca?”

I shook my head.

“Not that I’m aware of. But then I don’t think what’s happening has anything to do with colors and how they’re put together to make an image.”

“So what do you think?”

I swallowed a deep breath, exhaled it.

“I think Francis Scaramuzzi is trying to connect directly with my mind.”