The remains

Chapter 2

I drove out of the city along Route 9, south, toward the suburbs. The weather was coming in from across the Hudson River. Light rain strafed the windshield of my twelve year old Volkswagen Cabriolet-the fire-engine red convertible that had been a personal gift from Molly weeks before she died. I was feeling a little unsettled inside my own skin, knowing that on the back seat resided Franny’s ‘Listen’ canvas. He’d never before gifted to me a single piece of his art. Maybe I was more than honored to accept this one. But I couldn’t help wondering why he’d chosen this day on this particular week to give it to me. Since I couldn’t possibly answer my own question, at least not at this point, I decided to try and think about something altogether different.

I tried to think about nothing, focusing my eyes on the broken line-stripes that shot beneath the speeding Cabriolet like quick brush strokes of vivid yellow.

But I didn’t really see them.

Instead of doing the right thing and thinking of nothing, I made the mistake of doing the wrong thing: thinking of Franny’s painting-the large field and the dark woods-and how it somehow reminded me of Molly. That’s all it took for the memories of three decades past to take over…

Just ahead of me Molly is walking through the tall grass far behind my parents’ farmhouse, toward the thick woods on the field’s opposite side. She’s wearing cut-offs and a red T-Shirt sporting a ‘Paul McCartney and Wings’ logo on the front, a list of dates for the ‘Wings Over America’ tour printed on the back. The bangs of her blonde hair are bobbing like a pendulum against her shoulders as she walks, just like my own hair.

It’s warm.

Unusually warm for an early October day. What Trooper Dan calls ‘Indian Summer’. Molly is whistling ‘Band on the Run’. She is forever ahead of me in more ways than one-a happy, carefree, fearless facsimile of myself. The closer we come to the woods on the opposite side of the grassy field, the more my stomach cramps up, my heart beats, pulse soars.

“ I don’t think we should go any further, Mol,” I say, recalling Trooper Dan’s strict rules.

But Molly being Molly, she will not be deterred. She defiantly holds up her right hand, waves me on like John Wayne does the cavalry…

But then the daydream suddenly shifts to a hospital room’s top floor, Hospice Center. It’s twenty years later. The hospital room is not a place for healing. In Molly’s own words, it is a place for ‘checking out’. The room is dark and cool, shades drawn, baby blue curtains pulled back. The walls are not your basic hospital white. Serenity is the word of the day here. The smell of the day is worms. The walls are covered in dark, faux mahogany. Because dying can take a while, there is a small kitchenette complete with hot-plate and mini-fridge. There’s a private bath and a wall-mounted hand-sanitizer dispenser. There’s a ceiling-mounted television for passing whatever time Molly has left and curiously, not a single mirror to be found anywhere inside the room.

“ Stand by your sis,” Mol weakly sings to the tune of that old familiar country song. Somehow substituting ‘sis’ for ‘man’ has a better ring to it.

I work up a smile, pick up her hand, squeeze it. But not too hard. This same hand was once strong enough to yank a chunk of Patrick Daly’s hair out when he stuffed a Daddy-Long-Leg down my tank-top in the eighth grade. But now the hand is as bony and frail as a bird’s wing.

This is my blood womb sister. But that hand, like the twin sister I once knew, is already long gone, even if the portable Siemans-97T Heart Rate monitor says otherwise. What was once a head-full of velvety, dirty blonde hair is now a fuzzy scar-tissue scalp. What were once highly defined cheek bones, pouty lips and ocean-sized blue eyes have now given over to a steroid injected face-lips dry, cracked and too thin; the eyes the color of old skim milk. For the first time in our existence, Molly and I look nothing alike.

But despite the cancer that ravages her body, my sister sings and in a word, waves a defiant fist at death and the pale horse he rode in on.

“ Stand by your sis…”

She’d probably pound a couple of Coronas if only I had the nerve to sneak in a six-pack. But here’s what I know from Molly’s careful observations: in each of these Hospice rooms lies the body of the near dead. Taken on average, the hospital will lose three before the sun sets on this very day alone.

Molly is also full of fun facts about the terminally ill.

Did you know that life-long atheist Carl Sagan spontaneously made the sign of the cross only seconds before exhaling his final breath? Did you know that Winston Churchill drank a half-quart of gin and smoked a cigar on his death bed?

Exactly one floor below us is the birthing center where, coincidentally, Mol and I first slid on into this world some thirty-three years prior. Every time I come here now, she reminds me of this fact, as if in the end is the beginning and in the beginning is the end and all that great-circle-of-life stuff. But then, Molly isn’t joking. She’s still the boss; after all, she’s 45 seconds older than me. Before I leave, she insists that I lay the left side of my head down flat onto the mattress, so close to her I can smell her sour, bottom-of-the-lung-barrel breaths.

“ Can you hear them?” she whispers.

“ Hear what, Mol?”

“ At night,” she says, “when I’m alone, I press my head against the mattress and listen to the cries of the newborn babies.”

Then the blast of a horn and the flashing of bright halogen lamps through the pouring rain. Blinded by oncoming headlights I was the lost doe aimlessly wandering out onto a busy highway. A quick turn of the wheel to the right and Molly’s old Cabriolet was back on the right side of a road that I apparently owned.

“Drive much?” a snickering Molly asked, her ghost image plainly visible beside me in the shotgun seat.

“Drop dead,” I barked. But then realizing what I just said, I couldn’t help but laugh. Molly was already dead.

My heart pounded. So rapidly I considered pulling off onto the soft shoulder. But for now I just wanted to get home, get something to eat and go to bed early.

‘Listen,’ I heard Franny mumble inside my head.

“Listen for what?” I said aloud.

The word filled my ears with every swipe of the windshield wipers.