The remains

by Vincent Zandri

  “What do you call it?”

  I half expected a mumbled reply. Something spoken out the corner of his mouth, his eyes aimed not at me but the tops of his shoes.

  But that’s when something strange happened.

  When the horn blasted for a third time, Franny didn’t seem the least bit fazed. He stood stone stiff, portfolio bag hanging over his shoulders, hiding most of his lower body like a portable piece of wall. His cherubic child-like face lost its pink on pale flesh color. It formed neither grin nor frown. With that new, odd, straight face, he laser-beamed a gaze directly into my own eyes.

  “The painting is called, ‘Listen’.”

  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.

  Chapter 3

  I knew it was going to be a long night from the second I pulled into my apartment building parking lot. I attributed the pessimism to a fire-engine red Toyota pickup that occupied my designated space. Which of course meant that I would have no choice but to park in the visitor’s lot on the opposite side of the common.

  It wasn’t the occupied parking space that irritated me. What irritated me was knowing that the Toyota belonged to my ex-husband, Michael.

  I killed the Cabriolet engine and pulled the keys from the ignition. I would have gotten out immediately and braved the rain had my cell not begun to vibrate. I pulled the phone out of my knapsack and flipped it open. A new text had been forwarded to me. Thumbing the OK button, I retrieved it.

  Remember

  It struck me as odd. Did I remember who or what exactly? Baffled, I shook my head, reading the question again and again as if the answer would somehow reveal itself. But each time I read it, the question stayed the same. No answer appeared.

  Thumbing OK once more I searched for a caller ID. A name, a phone number. I found neither.r />
  Truth is, this wasn’t the first time I’d received a text that from some out of the blue Unknown Caller. Over the past few months I’d probably received two or three of them. Only difference was that in each of those, only my name appeared.

  Rebecca

  No caller ID. Only Unknown Caller and no phone number displayed, ever.

  It felt more than a little creepy having only your name appear as a text, especially when you had no way of knowing who the sender might be. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but think that Robyn was up to one of her tricks. Playing games with my head purely out of boredom, even if she was getting ready for a date. If that was the case, I was not about to afford her even an ounce of satisfaction by responding to the messages or, for that matter, acknowledging their receipt in the first place.

  So why not call the cops?

  A very strange and irrational part of me could not help but think that maybe, just maybe, Molly could be trying to communicate with me. In all my grief, I could not help but think that maybe she was sending me texts from, well, let’s call it the ‘great beyond’.

  As the rain steadily tapped the windshield I felt myself smiling-happy but sad at the same time. I closed the cell, chose to remain seated behind the wheel, tear-filled eyes staring out the windshield onto a brick apartment building. The rain and the tears obscured my vision, turning the stately buildings into something out of a Salvador Dali painting. Why was I just sitting there? Why did I feel like smiling and crying at the same time? I felt like I needed to breathe, get my act back to something resembling reality before facing Michael.

  Remember

  “I remember everything, Mol.” I whispered, as I shifted my eyes up toward the Cabriolet’s fabric top, as if I could see through it to heaven itself.

  Wiping my eyes with the backs of my hands I exhaled, resolved myself to facing the reality of my ex-husband. I opened the car door, stepped out into the rain. Moving as quickly as possible, I pulled up the seat-back, grabbed hold of the knapsack and Franny’s canvas. Then, sliding out of the car, I made the mad dash across the green to my first floor garden apartment.

  Chapter 4

  I entered the ground floor apartment by way of the back terrace door. As expected Michael was seated at an antique wood desk that was situated up against the living room’s far wall. His round, mustached and goateed face buried in his laptop, left hand click-clacking away, right hand raised high overhead in the classic gesture of ‘Silence please’, but that I immediately interpreted as ‘Shut Up!’

  I set Franny’s ‘Listen’ canvas down, leaning it up against the floor-to-ceiling bookcases to my left. Exhaling with serious attitude, I wiped the rainwater from my face, crossed my arms over my chest, and awaited permission to speak.

  And waited.

  When finally Michael came down on the Return key with a pile-driven index finger, I knew he’d completed his final sentence of the day. You could almost see the relief that seemed to pour out of his head like smoke through the ears. He sat back in a black chair that bore my undergrad crest: Providence College. He flexed his muscles as if he’d just gone three rounds with a young Mike Tyson instead of having completed a few new pages to his latest opus. Brushing back thick black hair, he then smoothed out his facial hair with thumb and index finger.

  “Plenty hard writing today, Bec,” he spoke, baritone voice imitating big Papa Hemingway. “Best work ever though. Maybe beat up old Shakespeare with these words.”

  Rolling my eyes, I retreated into the kitchen, grabbed two cans of Pepsi from out of the fridge and opened them. I headed back into the living room, setting Michael’s soda directly beside his laptop.

  He rolled the sleeves up on his thick arms.

  “Plenty good timing,” he said before taking a deep, slow, appreciative drink. “No more biting the nail until tomorrow. Dawn sharp.”

  Biting the nail…

  For anyone not in the literary know, that’s Hemingway-speak for ‘writing’. Or should I say, the agonizing, all consuming, existential, winner-take-nothing process of writing. In fact, my ex-husband Michael could be so full of Hemingway it made me want to run back out to the Cabriolet, rain storm and all. The only reason I put up with it was because taking on the guise of a long dead hero was Michael’s only means of coping with reality; i.e., as a teenager he was John Lennon. It occurred to me on more than one occasion that if he dumped the disguise he might actually write something truly profound.

  But then who was I to come down on my ex? At least he still worked at his art. I’d all but abandoned any hope I ever had for making it as a world class painter. Given it up for the position of studio director for the Albany Art Center.

  Sitting myself on the end of the couch, I took a small drink.

  “You want to read me something?” I exhaled.

  He shook his head and stood up, his five-feet eight inches staring me in the face.

  “Book isn’t ready for tasting. Another week of slow, steady nail biting, then maybe.”

  “Tell me again why I allow you to use my place as a writing studio?”

  “You already know the answer to that.”

  He was right of course. I knew the answer all too well. The unmentionable truth: since our thirty-six month marriage folded, Michael, being perpetually and rather hopelessly unemployed, ‘Hemingway never took a job!’, had moved back in with his parents. As a result, he felt far more comfortable biting the nail in my two bedroom apartment.

  Why?

  Because no way he could write with his retired mother and father hanging over his shoulder forever asking him, “When are you going to find gainful employment?”

  But then, I think there was more to it than that. At the risk of tossing him a compliment, Michael was not a failure as a novelist. His first published novel, The Hounds of Heaven, received rave reviews. It was an auspicious start for the young novelist. Problem was, Michael decided for himself that he was now in line for the Pulitzer, which gave him the right to drink and snort away whatever money he made in advances and royalties.

  The ultimate result?

  An extended bender landed him unknowingly in Key West passed out on the steps of Hemingway’s house where he was diagnosed with nervous exhaustion. It was then I decided, “Enough is too much.” One month in a Poughkeepsie institution, Four Winds, the dissolution of our marriage and one personal bankruptcy later, Michael went right back to biting the nail as though he’d never skipped a beat. While he still imbibed in a daily beer or two, his drinking was kept very much in check. Usually by yours truly.

  Back to my original question: why did Michael insist on working at my place? Despite his setbacks, he was determined to be a bestseller. That meant a return to his roots, going back to what made him a success in the first place-writing in the presence, or proximity anyway, of me. And even though we were no longer husband and wife, if I could act as some sort of human good luck charm for him, then what harm could it possibly do?

  Besides, when Michael was happy, so was I.

  “Where’d you get the cool painting?” he asked, the Hemingway guise thankfully abandoned.

  I turned, locking my eyes onto the two-by-two canvas leaned up against the bookcase.

  “Franny gave it to me.”

  Michael’s eyes went wide.

  “Franny,” he said, like a question. “I thought his stuff sold in the tens of thousands of dollars?”

  I nodded. “Strange isn’t it,” I agreed. “He could easily get ten or fifteen thousand for it from some collector down in Chelsea, yet he just gives it to me out of the blue.”

  Setting his Pepsi down, Michael got up and walked the few steps to the bookcase. He picked the painting up by the borders and, as if it were a mirror, gazed directly into it, studying it at eye level under the light of the stand up lamp.

  “Ten or fifteen grand, huh?” he posed in a scheming voice. “If only writing were that easy. Looks like some kindergartner on a sugar high went to town on somebody’s landscape wi
th a set of Sharpies.”

  That’s when it hit me.

  Getting up from the couch arm, I set my Pepsi onto the coffee table, taking my place beside my ex. The painting was positioned between us, below the lamp light, in Michael’s hands.

  “Can I ask you a question? Get an honest opinion?”

  Although we were standing shoulder to shoulder, I could see out the corner of my eyes that Michael was smiling, obviously pleased that I’d chosen to tap into his cultural and artistic expertise.

  “When you look into this piece, when you eye it directly in the center, do you notice anything odd?”

  He took a moment to gaze at the painting’s center point, alternating between pulling the canvas closer to his face and pushing it away for a more peripheral view.

  He bit his bottom lip.

  “Like I said, some sugared up, psychotic five year old and a Sharpie.”

  My eyes laser beamed on the bright red, green and yellow pastel dashes and the pastoral landscape behind them. I picked out the word ‘Listen’ painted in tan letters.

  “You don’t see a word spelled out in the center?” I pressed.

  “What word?”

  I reached out with index finger extended and spelled out the word.

  L-I-S-T-E-N.

  He bit his bottom lip again, making a funny light-bulb-shining-over-his-head squint.

  “You see ‘Listen,’” he said. “I see ‘S-E-X.’”

  There you have one of the essential differences between Michael and me.

  He laughed.

  I didn’t.

  “I’m serious. You don’t see ‘Listen’ at all?”

  “It’s not that I don’t see it, Bec. Because when you map it out like that I definitely see the word or at least a word that resembles ‘Listen’.” He paused, chomping down once more on the lip.

  “But?” I said, pushing, pressing.

  “But I also see the word ‘Sex.’”

  “Michael.”