Vincent Zandri - The remains

“Yes,” I said. “And no.”

“Which is it, Bec?”

I gazed down at the painting, used extended index finger to point to a specific area of tall grass that appeared to be swaying in the wind.

“There’s a word in there,” I said. “See… S-e-e.”

He stood back as though to gain a different perspective. It was not unlike the way someone might look at their own image in a funhouse mirror. He dug into his pocket for his Chapstick. He uncapped it, ran it across his lips, capped it back up and returned it to his pocket.

“Ah, don’t you think you’re stretching it a little?”

He thought I was bonkers. No two ways about it.

I started to cry.

Setting the ‘See’ canvas back down against the ‘Listen’ canvas, I stormed into the kitchen, pulled a paper towel off the rack, dried my eyes, and blew my nose.

I heard Michael doing something out in the living room. Was he looking at the ‘See’ painting? I could only guess that it had to be the case.

After about a minute, he met me in the kitchen and placed his now empty beer bottle in the sink. He stood over me, looking me in the eye.

“In the tall grass,” he said. “The rays of sunshine, burning patterns into the grass. You look close enough, you make out the word ‘See.’ It’s not completely obvious, but it’s there.”

I felt a spark of hope. But then, maybe he was just playing along with me. Making me feel better.

“No kidding,” he said. “You have a keen eye. That’s your job after all. I see it. More than I saw the word ‘Listen’ yesterday.”

He leaned into me, wrapping his arms around me. First time in a long time.

“You’re not nuts,” he said. “But…”

It was one of those ominous dangling ‘Buts.’

“But what?”

He released me and looked into my wet face.

“We’re not married anymore, but I still love you. Because I love you and still want to be near you, I also know you’ve been holding out on me.” He crossed his arms over his chest, brown eyes peering down at the floor. “Truth is Bec, I’ve sensed for a long time that you’ve been holding out on me.”

Drying my eyes again, I bit down on my bottom lip. Oh God Mol, what do I do now?

I wanted her to talk to me, send me a sign, let me know it was okay if I revealed the secret to Michael. For a second or two I waited for my cell phone to chime. But that was stupid. There would be no text messages from heaven. The decision to tell Michael everything would have to come from me and me alone. It had been thirty years since the assault on Molly and me. Thirty years that I-we-had held onto a secret that by now had bored a hole in my heart. Now that secret was consuming me with paranoia, making me nuts.

Molly was gone now.

So were my mother and father.

Who would it hurt if I spilled everything to someone I trusted?

No one.

Not a soul other than those who had already vanished from my life.

My decision made, I looked up at my ex-husband and gave him a glare that might have melted those brown eyes if only they were made of ice.

“You’d better plan on staying for dinner tonight.”

A half-hour passed. Or had it been half the night? Only when I had nothing more to reveal did I realize that Michael hadn’t touched his beer. It occurred to me that I hadn’t touched mine either.

Michael’s face wasn’t pale. It had turned bed-sheet white.

We occupied the living room, him seated on the Providence College desk chair, me on the arm of the couch. Barely three feet separated us. He pressed open hands against his face, rubbed them up and down over stubble and white skin as though it better helped him absorb the truths about myself, Molly and a dead man named Joseph William Whalen. I knew then that he was trying to hide the fact that he was wiping away tears.

“You never told me,” he whispered. “All the years, months we were together. The three years we were married. You never said a single word about it.”

For an instant I thought he might try and hold me. Comfort me. But I was glad somehow when he didn’t. Instead he fisted his now warm bottle of beer, drank the whole thing down in one swift chug.

“What exactly do Franny’s paintings have to do with Whalen’s attack on you and your sister?”

I stood up from the armrest. I went to the paintings, repositioned them side by side against the bookcase so that they could be viewed together beneath the light from the stand-up lamp.

“At first I didn’t make the connection. It just seemed strange to me that I could clearly see the word ‘Listen’ in the center of the first canvas and other people-even Robyn-had to be coaxed into seeing it.”

“But the design is an abstract Pollack sort of thing.” He wiped his eyes again.

“Not abstract enough for me to see through the abstraction,” I explained.

Michael perked up his eyebrows. “In the same way a colorblind person can pick out certain words in a pattern that a person without colorblindness cannot,” he suggested. “Or vice-versa. Are you colorblind, Rebecca?”

I shook my head.

“Not that I’m aware of. But then I don’t think what’s happening has anything to do with colors and how they’re put together to make an image.”

“So what do you think?”

I swallowed a deep breath, exhaled it.

“I think Francis Scaramuzzi is trying to connect directly with my mind.”

It was a bold statement, admittedly. And I’m not sure Michael knew how to react to it. He stood stone stiff, eyes wide open, unblinking. He’d gone silent.

“Let me get this straight. You think an autistic guy like Franny is trying to send you subliminal messages through his work.”

“Except there’s nothing sublime about them. I can read them just like I can read a stop sign. Even you can read them when pushed.”

“Let me ask you a question,” he jumped in. “When was the last time you had a conversation with Franny that lasted more than a few sentences?”

“That would be never.”

“But he has the ability to paint secret messages or at least words inside his design of his paintings.”

“That’s the question, isn’t it? Is Franny purposely putting words into those scenes? And if he is, how can he be sure I’ll recognize them?”

Michael cocked his head.

“Maybe it’s something he feels compelled to do. You know, like instinct.”

I grabbed my beer and, like Michael before me, took a very long drink. Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I said, “This is what I believe: come Friday it’ll be thirty years since Molly and I were abducted. Maybe thirty years bears some larger significance than say, twenty-nine years for instance.”

“Why?”

“Because for weeks now I’ve been having these vivid dreams about Molly, Whalen, the attack in the woods, the events leading up to it.”

“Vivid dreams.” Michael nodded. I got the feeling I was losing him.

“Yes, vivid dreams. And I also think that somehow Franny, despite his autism, has somehow found a way to turn his emotional disconnectedness around. Whether he’s aware of it or not.”

“So what are you saying, Bec?”

“I guess what I’m saying is that Franny knows something I don’t. He’s somehow perceived something. The future maybe. Now the only way he can warn me about it is through these paintings.”

Michael shook his head.

“Franny has a sixth sense?” Yet another question.

“From what little I know about savants, I know that they use their brains differently than you and me. They’re able to tap far deeper into certain wells of talent and yet not at all in others. Thus his unusually gifted talent for painting, for creating images, for putting together colors.”