The Remains (3 page)

“The painting is called, ‘Listen’.”

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.

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.

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.

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?”