The Ashes (The Rebecca Underhill Trilogy Book 2)

by Vincent Zandri

  “Thanks, Aunt Rebecca,” she says, her face so happy it almost hurts to look at it. “You are the best.”

  I hand her the bag, and she runs off with it to the house, no doubt to tease Michael by telling him she’s got a full lunch while his is already gone. But not to worry, little Molly and Michael Jr. are close. They might not be blood relatives, but they most definitely consider themselves brother and sister. They’ve hardly spent a single day apart in their respective eight years on God’s good earth.

  Someone else joins the party. Robyn makes her way across the lawn to where I’m standing by the car.

  She digs in her pocket, pulls out a tube of Vaseline Lip Therapy, runs it across her Botox-injected lips. When they are satisfactorily hydrated and succulent, she returns the tube to her pocket, crosses her arms over her ample Wonderbra-supported chest.

  “Must you feed that crap to my one and only daughter, Bec?”

  “They’re only kids once, Mom,” I say. “Lighten up. When you were a kid, you couldn’t go two days without a Quarter Pounder. Now that I think of it, you couldn’t go without them in MFA school and beyond, either.”

  “Useless MFA school,” she says, adjusting the strap on her farmer’s overalls, which she wears over gladiator sandals and a white, long-sleeved T-shirt. “If you recall, we didn’t have a pot to go piss in back then, babes.”

  Robyn and I first met at Tyler School of Art in Philly more than twenty years ago now, and we’ve been best buds ever since. We were both studying painting and drawing for which we both received our coveted Masters in Fine Arts. A degree that cost us around forty thou a piece, and turned out to be good for nothing when they proved useless in snaring a teaching gig at a prestigious university or even a community college.

  But back then, we weren’t even thinking about teaching.

  Robyn was going to be the next de Kooning, and I was going to be the next Lee Krasner. How were we to know that, even after nailing some fairly prestigious shows at the Mid-Hudson Regional and even The Tang at Saratoga’s Skidmore College, people actually had to purchase our paintings for us to make a living? So, if we couldn’t snare a real teaching job, we decided to do the next best thing. Start our own school. Thus, was born, the Robyn Painter and the Rebecca Underhill, School of Art.

  I close the door on the Jeep, grip my keys in the palm of my hand.

  “Well, you said in your text you had something for me regarding Dr. Cuther,” she says Dr. Cuther in this deep, old guy, gravelly throated accent, her imitation of the Einstein look-alike child psychologist with the strange, stiff face is borderline uncanny.

  I tell her everything while standing there on the gravel turnaround. About the Boogeyman. About little Mike seeing the ghost of his father by the cornfield. About a little hairless man named Skinner, or Mr. Skinner, living in the corn. Or is he living in Mikes mind? About the drawing depicting it all.

  “Skinner,” Robyn says. “That’s kind of creepy. Makes me kind of want to rent a hotel room for the rest of my life.”

  “Thanks for the reassurance,” I say. “And I’m sure it’s all absolutely nothing.”

  She smiles, reaches out, pats my arm. “I’m sure it’s all in Mikey’s mind, Bec. He’s missing a father he never knew. Mothers bring love to a little child’s heart. Father’s bring security.”

  I kick at the gravel with my boot tip. “I kind of thought of myself as having done a pretty good job at providing that much-needed security.”

  “You are, hon. No one is saying you haven’t. But we . . . you and me . . . we can only do so much for our children. Molly’s imagination is running away with itself too. It might be different if we had more men in our lives.”

  “Who needs a man?” I say, not without a chuckle. “We do, that’s who.”

  “Maybe Dr. Cuther can move in with us.”

  “He did agree to see us on a late Sunday morning. He’s very agreeable that way. Imagine, a man willing to adjust to a woman’s needs and wants.”

  Robyn purses her lips. “But I’m not so sure Sam would like to hear that Dr. Cuther is suddenly the dominant male alpha in your life.”

  My heart jumps. I gaze at my Mickey Mouse watch. “Oh Christ, I totally forgot. Lunch with Sam. I was supposed to meet him forty-five minutes ago. Where the hell is my head these days?”

  “In the cornfield,” Robyn says. “Better than being up your ass.”

  “Trust me, it wouldn’t fit.” Then, “You okay with the rug rats for a little bit?”

  “What if I were to say no?”

  “No problem. I’ll call and cancel. He’s probably angry with me as it is anyway.”

  “And risk you losing the best thing that’s happened to you in years? You go and have a great time with Sam. He’s handsome, rich, and he loves your aforementioned tight little ass like no other. Now . . . go, get, skedaddle.”

  “Skedaddle?”

  “That’s what all the farm girls say in the movies.”

  I open the Jeep door while Robyn takes a step toward the house. But then she suddenly stops in her tracks.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” she says, reaching into the pocket on her overalls.

  “Forgot what?” I say.

  When she pulls her hand back out of her pocket, I can see the little blue plastic packet gripped between her index finger and thumb.

  “Perfect,” I say. “A condom. I just stood up the guy I’ve been dating for three months, and I’m to present him with a condom as a conciliatory offering.”

  “Works for me every time.”

  “The men you date never bother to get out of bed.” I go to hand it back to her.

  “Keep it,” she says. Then, peering up at the brilliant blue, fall sky. “It’s a beautiful day. Something tells me you’re going to get lucky today, Underhill.”

  I stuff the condom in my pocket and blow her a kiss.

  “Lucky,” I whisper to myself as I slip back behind the wheel. “When was the last time I got truly lucky?”

  The Skinner needs to feed.

  When he feeds, he does not hop in the car and head to the nearest grocery store. He does not make the trek to the McDonald’s or Burger King or Subway sandwich shop. He does not forage through the freezer for a Banquet TV dinner or the cabinets for some Kraft Cheese and Macaroni. What Skinner does instead is hunt.

  Lifting the lid on the manhole, he pushes it aside and slithers out of the round hole onto the hard earth. The thick, now dead, corn stalks hiding his naked, hairless body from anything human. But then, in this country, there are never any human eyes, except those of his friends, his little kittens, his posies, his gentle little weightless ashes, Molly and Michael.

  But even they are too far away from him to know that he has re-emerged from his home in the bowels of the earth. His home in the corn. His home away from the home he shared with Joseph inside the cramped cell at Green Haven Maximum Security Prison. The home before Joseph left him and he had no choice in his despair but to feed on the corrections officer after flaying him from clavicle to caudal. It was a good meal, but it would lead to his moving once more. This time to the Mid-Hudson Psychiatric Facility where, suddenly, he was no longer considered an inmate or a rabid animal, but, instead, a patient.

  They were wrong, you know, he tells himself. I am an animal.

  Having shed his human clothing and having changed his face, he maneuvers from down on all fours, scooting through the openings in the stalks, his smooth, narrow body able to fit between the tightest gaps. His breathing controlled, his heartbeat elevated, pulse steady, he finds the deer trail precisely where he expects to find it: on the far edge of the cornfield, where it meets the deep woods.

  He stops for just a moment, sniffs the cool October air like a rabid dog hunting down a bitch in heat. He smells the sweet aroma of the animals in the woods, locks on to the scent of a deer. A doe, judging by the sweet scent of her sex. His heart now beating rapidly, his glands producing excessive sweat, his bladder emptying of its thick yellow urine,
he growls and scoots off along the trail, into the woods.

  Sam Goodman is my next-door neighbor. Which means, he lives on the farm that abuts my own property. In terms of upstate country living, he’s a short one and a half mile drive up the road from Robyn and me. But right now, the distance might as well be 100 miles since I can’t get there fast enough. As I drive, I break the law of the road by checking my cell phone. Sure enough, I spot two text messages from him that I must have missed earlier.

  Waiting for you babe.

  And . . .

  Coming soon? Food getting cold

  Once more my stomach sinks. How could I have been so stupid? So forgetful? I have no excuse. Or, on the other hand, maybe my anxiety over Mike and his imagination is more than a good enough excuse. It depends on where your priorities lie.

  I put the pedal to the metal, as they say on the old Dukes of Hazard reruns my dad used to watch, hoping one of the Sheriff’s deputies isn’t hiding in some speed trap in the trees off the side of the road. I motor past open fields and a small cemetery that must be one hundred fifty years old. Michael . . . my late ex-husband Michael, that is . . . is buried in that cemetery. Whenever I pass it, I can’t help but think one day I might be buried beside him. Sure, we were divorced, but before he died, we became lovers again. He saved my life and gave me life in the form of Mike Jr., and, to this day, I consider us having been more married than most people who have the legal certificate to prove it. What we had together was not only true love but a love that grew out of forgiveness. The “U” word . . . we had it. Unconditional love.

  I still love him with all my heart and therein lies my problem with Sam. How is it possible for me to fully love him just as unconditionally when Michael is always in my head?

  When I pull into Sam’s driveway, I find him out front where he’s working on building a brand-new set of wood porch steps. Good with his hands is putting it lightly. Sam can build a set of porch steps or deck or he can build you a house from the ground up. He’s a master carpenter. But he wasn’t always a blue-collar kind of guy. Educated in the best private schools in Manhattan thanks to his parents, both of whom are surgeons, and later earning a degree in Business Administration at Babson College in Boston, he went on to enjoy a lucrative career on the stock exchange trading floor down on Wall Street. By fifty, he was retired and looking for something as far away from city life as he could get. So, when the farm that my good friend, Carolyn Scaramuzzi, owned until her death from a broken heart some years ago, went on the market, he snatched it up. Never having married or fathered any kids due to his crazy eight-days-a-week schedule, he finally decided to settle down a little and maybe allow himself to fall in love. At least, these are the things he’s revealed to me thus far in what has been a slow going, but thoroughly enjoyable three months of dating.

  I kill the power on the Jeep, inhale a deep breath, and open the door. As I step out from behind the wheel, Sam slowly stands tall, hammer gripped in hand, his six-feet-two-inch frame appears hulking and youthful for his age. Or, what do they say? Fifty is the new forty? Maybe in Sam’s case, fifty is the new thirty.

  As I make my way along the driveway to the concrete walk that leads to the porch, I bite down on my bottom lip. In my heart, I wish to never hurt Sam. He is as sweet as they come. But in my head, I can’t help but hear Michael’s voice.

  I still love you, Bec. I’m sorry for leaving you all alone . . .

  “Not now,” Michael, I respond in my brain. “I’m already in enough trouble as it is.”

  Okay, Bec, just take it easy. Give it time. Don’t do anything rash . . .

  “Well, if it isn’t Rebecca Right-on-Time Underhill,” Sam says, glancing at his wrist watch, then focusing his big brown eyes on me. Rich brown eyes that match his delicious coffee-brown skin. “You know what? If you weren’t so beautiful, I might actually feel hurt.”

  He presses his lips together to form a grin. A sad grin that, taken with the thin, well-trimmed mustache on his upper lip, makes him all the more handsome, and my heart, all the more broken.

  “I am soooo, soooo, sorry, Sam,” I say. “Will you ever forgive me?”

  He chuckles. “I got a choice?”

  His face is clean shaven, other than his trimmed mustache. But despite the smooth skin, his concave cheeks are rugged and athletic. His black closely cropped hair is graying at the temples, but still thick. Not that he needs to comb his hair, but if he possessed straight hair, he’d be the type to simply run his hand through it when he stepped out of the shower in the morning. Because after all, this is the country. City slicker values don’t apply up here.

  “No, sir,” I say, leaning into him, giving him a peck on the lips. “You most certainly do not have a choice. But I do have a good excuse if you want to hear it.”

  He sets the hammer back into the slot on his tool belt and unbuckles it, settling it on the new, unpainted, pine tread. He’s wearing worn Levi jeans, a button-down denim work shirt that’s unbuttoned down past his sternum, revealing a black T-shirt that says, Ludwig Drums on the front. Drums are another one of Sam’s passions. He’s got a basement full of them. Sometimes, when I’m walking through the woods, I can hear him playing, the pounding snare and tom toms reverberating across the valley.

  “Tell you what,” he says. “I’ll heat us up a late lunch, and we can make a picnic of it if you like.”

  I smile and feel the warmth oozing off his body and into mine.

  “I would love nothing more,” I say.

  He hops up onto the porch, careful not to step on the under-construction treads. Holding out his hand for me, he tells me to “Grab on.”

  I do it, and the feel of his big, warm hand wrapped around my own is enough to make me dizzy. When he pulls me up onto the porch, he gives me a hug that makes me want to melt. Could it be that I am actually falling for Sam Goodman whether I want to or not? Could be. But I won’t allow myself to fall too deeply. Not just yet. Not when Michael speaks to me so often. Speaks to our boy. Appears for him, like a ghost from heaven.

  We carry a blanket and a picnic basket outside with us and up to the back acreage of Sam’s property. Behind us lies the cornfield that stretches all the way to my own property and, beyond that, the woods and the mountain overlooking it all. If we’re very quiet, we can hear the waterfall that runs heavy off Mount Desolation in the fall as it empties into the stream. It’s a magical sound that sang me to sleep so often as a child on those nights where I would leave the bedroom window wide open and the sound of the forest — the crickets, the birds, the cicadas, the dogs, the owls — were all my own.

  Sam opens a bottle of white wine while I slice little pieces of baguette and set them on our plates. I also slice some fresh sausage and parmesan cheese, set that onto our plates. For as big and manly as he is, Sam knows his way around the kitchen. That’s the cultured, New York City part of him. And today he’s prepared a quiche with cheese, bacon bits, and broccoli. A favorite of mine. I slice two good-sized triangles and set them on the plates.

  Pouring the wine, Sam lifts his glass, smiles.

  “To you,” he says. “My friend . . . My girlfriend, Rebecca Underhill.”

  I raise my own glass.

  “Is that what I am to you, Sammy?” I ask. “The girlfriend. Is it because of my body or my brains or my unsurpassed artistic talents?”

  A cool breeze blows. I can feel my hair flowing with it. Feel it soft against my face. It’s then I realize, I’m blushing. Blushing like a school girl. Sam has that effect on me.

  “All of the above, Bec,” he says. “And then some.”

  He leans in to me, presses his mouth against mine, and, for an instant, I am inside him, and he is inside me, and the horror that occurred in the woods behind me never happened at all. There is only Sam and me, and what’s growing inside my heart. Our hearts.

  It’s okay to love another man, Bec, Michael says. I want you to be happy. To make someone else happy. The way you made me happy for so long. If you’re going
to insist . . . stubbornly I might add . . . on keeping the family house and the family acreage, even after what’s happened there, then I want you to have someone around who will protect you, protect Mike.

  Michael, trying to make me happy even from beyond the grave.

  When Sam pulls back, I take a moment to breathe, then steal a sip of wine. I find myself wishing this moment will never end. That life will go on pause at this very moment in time, and Sam and I will forever be sitting on this picnic blanket on this sunny, cool day in the fall with good food on our plates, wine in our hands, and love in our hearts and souls.

  But I know that the precious moment won’t last forever. Which is why it’s so precious. That it’s time I came clean with Sam about my son.

  Don’t be afraid to tell him everything, Bec . . .

  “I won’t be afraid, Michael. I just don’t want to alarm him unnecessarily. He loves the little Boo. He would love to be a father to him one day. The father you never had the chance to be.”

  Nothing wrong with that, Bec. Nothing wrong with that at all . . .

  “Earth to Becca,” Sam says, snapping his fingers. He drinks some wine. “Thought I lost you for a minute. You drifted off to a dimension far far away.”

  “My humblest apologies, Good Man,” I say, using the nickname I chose especially for him. I pick at the quiche, bringing it to my mouth. It’s still warm and tastes delicious. “Lot on my mind these days.”

  “Mikey,” he says. “What happened this morning? You wanna talk about it, Under Hill?” And he of course, has gifted me with my rather obvious nickname.

  “Yes and no.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Yes, in that I want to tell you everything. Keep nothing from you, Sam. No, in that you’ll think I’m being paranoid. Overprotective in any case.”

  “You won’t know what I think unless you tell me.”

  The pressure in my belly tells me maybe I should take it easy with the eating. It also tells me to be honest with Sam and to entrust him with what’s happening to little Mike, both inside his head and out by the cornfield’s edge.