The Remains (16 page)

“Rebecca?” he called out from the bedroom.
“What time is it?”

I grabbed a second mug from the cabinet.

Michael would need a good jolt of coffee
before he started biting the nail.

AN HOUR LATER, I was getting out of the
shower when the buzzer sounded on the front door. Michael was at
his writing desk in the living room. I heard him curse as he got up
from the table and tended to the interruption.

While I towel dried my hair, I heard him open
the apartment door, then head up the small set of concrete stairs
to the building’s main entrance. From where I stood before the
mirror I heard the door open.

No words exchanged. At least, from where I
stood in the bathroom, I didn’t hear any.

After a few seconds, Michael came back into
apartment, closing the door behind him.

I stepped out of the bedroom.

With one towel wrapped around my body,
another wrapped around my head and hair, I saw him standing in the
small vestibule, a thin square-shaped package held in his hands.
The package looked a whole lot like a canvas wrapped in brown
butcher’s paper.

Standing beside Michael I began to feel the
now too familiar blood pressure increase; the usual dry mouth.

Michael just stared at me, the package
gripped in his hands. Neither one of us had to say a word to know
what it was.

“Open it,” I said.

“How about I just chuck it out?”

“Open it. We can’t just ignore it.”

He
exhaled, stuck a finger through the paper, tore into it, and pulled
it away from the painting. Immediately, even before all the paper
was torn away, I recognized the scene. It was a house in the
woods.
The
house in the
woods. The one from my dream; the one from my past. Whalen’s house.
The house my sister found some weeks before me while on one of her
secret expeditions into the forbidden woods. The house I remembered
so well; a house that appeared not to have been built from wood,
brick and stone, but that appeared to have grown up in the forest
out of nothing at all; a house that to me had sprung up from the
ground like a thorn bush but that to Molly seemed like a
miracle.

The painting was a realistic rendering of
that old, long forgotten farmhouse. The house was set in the middle
of a second growth forest that had grown up all around it, consumed
it for its own once its original owners had died off or simply
abandoned it.

Pulling the rest of the brown paper from the
piece, Michael stared down at the image. My eyes began to tear. I
took a tentative step forward toward my distant past, stood not
beside my ex-husband but up against him. My unfocused eyes viewed
Franny’s painting, but I did not see a static rendering of brown
tress or overgrown pines or the heavy brush or the gray-brown
clapboard house that stood in its center. My eyes instead saw the
real events of that day, like watching a real-time film that
somehow was being broadcast on the canvas itself.

Molly leads me through the woods,
bushwhacking our way through the thick growth, twigs and branches
slapping at our exposed faces, at our bare arms and legs, making
our eyes tear from the sting. When we come upon the old two-story
farmhouse it is like a vision or an illustration out of an old
storybook—Little Red Riding Hood maybe; a secret place in the
forest that would be entirely familiar to the Big Bad Wolf. It is a
long-abandoned farmhouse, the farm having given over to nature;
nature in turn devouring any semblance of humankind.

But the closer we come to the dilapidated
and rotting clapboard house, the more I can smell a foul odor. It
is an odor I sometimes recognize when walking over a sewer
grate.

Molly turns to me, seemingly unaffected by
the smell (or perhaps used to it by now?). She clothespins her nose
and nostrils with the forefinger and thumb of her right hand; does
it more for show than for the need to block out the rancid
smell.

“
It’s the old septic system, Bec,” she
exclaims while coming upon a front porch that has all but collapsed
into the earth from rot and neglect.

“
God, how did you find this place, Mol?” I
ask her, careful to breathe through my mouth instead of my
nose.

“
It’s always been here,” she smiles. “The
house just kind of found me.” Holding up her hands as if to say
Voila! “It’s our place now; our secret fairytale castle in the
forest; our hideaway home away from home.”

I find myself just staring at my sister who
is me in every way, but so different at the same time. I’m not sure
what I’m more amazed at: her or the discovery of this house and the
possibility of having it all to ourselves. But then, unlike Molly,
I’m half scared out of my wits. There’s a reason our father does
not want us in these woods. At first I blamed the stream, the
waterfall and the sudden drop off in the hill-side. But now I blame
this old decaying house set in the middle of nowhere.

Molly goes up to the front door and tosses
me another one of her irresistible John Wayne ‘Move ‘em out’ waves.
She sets her right hand on the old blackened knob and, shifting her
shoulder like a running back about to take on some linebackers,
shoves the door open…

“Rebecca,” Michael barks. “What is this
place?”

But I couldn’t answer him yet; couldn’t find
the words inside my brain or my heart. I didn’t have it in me to
speak. Instead I looked at the trees and the house and I saw it all
in my mind like it was only yesterday: our entry though the front
door into the dark home, the spider-webbed interior, the horrible
stench that I tasted more on my tongue than I smelled though my
nose.

Lifting my left hand, I touched the home with
my fingertips, running the pad of my index finger along the five
red-brown letters that made up the word ‘Smell’, each individual
letter tattooed along the side of the house like graffiti.

“Smell,” Michael read, the word pouring like
acid off his lips.

He could see the word clearly. It told me
that Franny no longer felt the need to hide their titles. The lack
of subtlety told me that Franny was screaming at me now. On Monday,
when no one but me could recognize the word in his painting, he’d
been whispering. Now that everyone could see the word, he was
screaming. Screaming for me to use my senses, to pay attention, to
watch my back.

“What. Is. This. Place?” Michael
repeated.

I swallowed. He knew all about my secret. He
knew exactly what this place was. He just needed to hear it from
me; from my mouth.

“It’s the house in the woods,” I said. “It’s
where Whalen took Molly and me.”

Confirming his worst fear, Michael cocked the
painting over his head and threw it across the room.

IT WAS UP TO me to calm Michael down. It
didn’t matter now how much I tried to preserve the happiness of the
previous night, Franny’s painting, his warning, had ruined the
moment.

My ex-husband was sitting on the edge of the
couch, hands pressed against his face, muttering something about
tearing Franny ‘a new one.’

“
It’s not
his fault,” I exclaimed. “Franny is simply doing what Franny does.
I know without a doubt now that he’s
talking
to me Michael; not tormenting.”

Michael lifted his head. He was sporting a
three day shadow to go with his mustache and goatee.

“
Then why
does it
feel
like
torment?”

I made my way to the painting and picked it
up off the floor. Unzipping my art bag, I slipped the painting
inside, out of sight, out of spinning mind. I fully intended to
personally deliver it to Harris, just like I fully intended to
reveal the texts.

Michael wiped both eyes with the backs of his
hands.

“What’s going on here, Bec?” he insisted.
“Why would Franny drop the painting off to the apartment instead of
leaving it at the art center? That was the whole point behind your
taking a couple of days off.”

“I don’t know,” I exhaled. “But I’m about to
find out.”

Drawing in a deep breath, I pulled my towel
tighter over my chest. I walked barefoot into the bedroom to get
dressed. After that, I was going to call Robyn and find out why she
gave Caroline and Franny permission to make a surprise drive-by to
my home.

MICHAEL STOOD BY MY side while I speed-dialed
Robyn’s number and waited for a pick up. For the third time in a
row I was greeted by her answering service.

My pulse
picked up. This was so
not
like Robyn.

The fact that Franny and his mother made the
effort to deliver the fourth painting directly to my door told me
that Robyn had not showed up to open the art center that morning.
Otherwise Franny would have simply left the fourth painting there
for me.

There was only one thing left to do. I dialed
the number for the center. I waited for a pickup but instead got
the answering machine and my own digitally recorded voice.

“
You’ve reached the Albany Art Center. No
one is available…”

My call waiting kicked in.

Pulling the phone away from my ear, I took a
look at the number displayed on the readout. The number did not
immediately catch my attention. But the caller ID did

Albany Medical Center.

With trembling fingers, I clicked over to
receive the call.

She spoke to me in a hesitant whisper, almost
like she was being held hostage. The whisper and the hesitancy were
both punctuated with sobs.

Robyn’s mother, June.

“Rebecca,” she cried, “I… have… some…”

She let the sentence hang, as though to
complete it was simply too painful.

Michael was staring at me. His shadowy face
had gone pale. He opened his mouth as if to say something. But I
quickly raised my open hand and pulled my eyes away from his,
stopping him cold.

“June,” I begged. “What’s happened?”

I tried to keep my voice steady, even. I’d
known Robyn’s mother almost as long as I’d known Robyn. I’d never
heard her so upset, so devastated.

“Albany Medical Center,” she exclaimed. “ICU.
Please come.”

I dry swallowed.

“Is she alive, June? Is… Robyn…alive?”

“She’s alive,” June whispered.

Then she hung up.

Wide eyed, Michael gazed expectantly into my
face.

“Something bad has happened to Robyn,” I
explained. “I have to go.”

“You get your stuff together,” Michael said.
“I’ll wait for you out in the truck.”

He took
me by surprise. There had been a time in our lives when no
emergency, big or small, would have kept him from his daily word
quota. As he gathered his jacket and beret and headed out the front
door to his pickup, I had to ask myself,
who is this man?

Acting on instinct, I picked up Franny’s
‘Smell’ painting from up off the floor, tucked it under my arm, and
exited the apartment by way of the back door.

THE ALBANY MEDICAL CENTER ICU was brightly
lit. It was filled with doctors and nurses competing for floor
space with the portable gurneys, monitors, hand carts, wheeled IV
units, desks, counters and chairs.

The nurse at the counter pointed Michael and
I in Robyn’s direction. Like all the beds in the unit, hers was
hidden behind a sea blue curtain. From beneath the curtain I could
make out June’s sneaker-covered feet, and the tattered cuffs on her
gray slacks. The feet were planted stone still and unnaturally on
the vinyl tiled floor. A gauze bandage had been tossed on the floor
not two or three inches from her feet. The bandage was stained with
blood.

My heart was pounding so fast I was having
trouble keeping my balance. Michael took hold of my arm. I reached
out for the curtain. But I wasn’t sure if I possessed the strength
to pull it aside.

“Rebecca,” Michael whispered.

“It’s okay.” I swallowed. I slid back the
curtain.

Her face was swelled and bruised, her eyes
puffed up and closed shut; her lips bruised and blistered. I didn’t
dare look for any missing teeth.

Robyn’s beautiful face.

It came
as a relief that she’d been sedated.
What in God’s name would I say to her?
What could I say?

A clear plastic tube had been run up her left
nostril. Her left arm and hand were positioned atop the bed beside
her, palm up. An intravenous line was needled into her vein. Hooked
to the hospital bed’s plastic railing, a translucent plastic bag
collected the catheter drippings.

Robyn’s mother hadn’t shifted her gaze from
her daughter’s face when I pulled back the curtain. But somehow,
she knew it was me.

Michael slid his hand down from my arm to my
hand. He held it tight, his warmth doing nothing to quell the
coldness in my palm. Together we stood shoulder to shoulder at the
foot of the bed.

“She called me just before she left,” June
said, her words meant for me, but her eyes still locked on Robyn’s.
“It must have been her third blind date in a row.” She shook her
head bitterly. “I warned her, told her she was seeing too many men;
too many strangers; that it would all catch up with her one
day.”

I
recalled Robyn bragging about a stockbroker. But now I knew she’d
been lying. That she’d been seeing more men than just the
stockbroker. That she’d been playing with
Match.com
like it was some kind of game that didn’t involve
real people; real strangers.

The tall, brown-haired, middle-aged woman
sniffled, fighting back the tears as best she could. But I knew it
had to be a losing battle. She inhaled and set her right hand on
Robyn’s forehead, running trembling fingers down through dirty
blonde hair.