The remains

  The remains

  Vincent Zandri

  The remains

  Vincent Zandri

  “Many nights in a row now I’ve been woken up by the past.”

  C.S. Barter, “Drawing”

  “Three little kittens they lost their mittens, and they began to cry.

  ‘Oh mother dear, we sadly fear that we have lost our mittens.’

  ‘What! Lost your mittens, you naughty kittens!

  Then you shall have no pie.’”

  Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme, 1843

  Prologue

  March, 2008

  Green Haven Prison

  Stormville, New York

  The guard sergeant stands at the base of a four-tiered iron cell block, the angelic orange-red rays of the early morning sun shining down upon him through the top tier chicken-wire windows.

  Cupping his hands around his mouth, he shouts, “Joseph! William! Whalen!”

  Inside a dark cell, inmate Whalen inhales his final wormy breath inside D-Block. He stands before the vertical bars. So close, the hooked nose on his hairless face and head is nearly pressed against the iron.

  “Cry, cry, cry,” he chants quietly to himself. “Cry, cry, cry you naughty kittens.”

  An abrupt electric alarm sounds. Metal slams against metal. The noise echoes throughout the concrete and steel prison block. But no one-not inmate or screw-notices it. When the barred door crashes open, the shock reverberates inside Whalen’s chest. It is the sound of freedom.

  “Step forward,” shouts the guard sergeant.

  There to greet him are two uniformed correction officers. They will escort him along the gangway, down the four tiers to the first floor.

  Having descended the metal stairs to a place called ‘between gates,’ Whalen proceeds through a series of opened and closed barred doors, until he comes to Intake/Release.

  A female correction officer stands protected inside the barred window of the small brightly lit cubicle.

  “Name,” she exclaims, voice detached, but sprinkled with anger.

  “Joseph William Whalen,” speaks the inmate, not without a smile that exposes gray-brown teeth.

  Bobbing her head in silence, the CO turns and locates the prepackaged materials that sit out atop her metal desk. Setting the plastic bag through the small opening beneath the bars she reads off a neatly typed inventory. “One wallet containing ten dollars cash, thirteen cents in coins. One necktie, one ring of keys, one pocket-sized Holy Bible, one black-and-white photo.”

  Slipping his hand inside the clear plastic bag, Whalen shuffles around the items until he comes to the white-bordered three-by-five inch photograph. He pulls it out, examining the faces of two pre-teen girls. Identical twins. In the picture they are smiling and laughing, as though playing for the camera.

  “Friends of yours,” the CO jibes, acid in her voice.

  “My little kittens,” exhales Whalen.

  As the final gate opens, the suited, middle-aged superintendent comes forward to greet the now former inmate Whalen.

  “Do yourself a favor,” the super says. “Keep a low profile in Albany. It won’t be a pleasant experience for you. Even after thirty years, people have a way of remembering.”

  Whalen bows his bald, scarred head, big brown eyes peering down at the painted concrete floor.

  “Cry, cry, cry,” he murmurs.

  “Excuse me?” the super demands. “What did you just say?”

  But Whalen falls silent.

  Clearing his throat, the superintendent bites down on his tongue. Holding out his right hand, he offers it up to the now free man.

  “God speed,” he says through clenched teeth.

  Taking the hand in his, the former inmate gives it a long, slow, loose shake. Releasing the fleshy hand, Whalen makes his way out one final set of metal doors, beginning the trek toward the bus stop and the ride that will take him north to Albany.

  As the door closes back up on the prison, the superintendent glares down at his open hand. His palm is cold, sweaty, clammy. He wipes the hand off on his pant leg before turning his back on the past, making for the set of metal stairs that lead back up to his office.

  “Cry, cry, cry,” he finds himself quoting from an old nursery rhyme he knew as a child. “You naughty kittens.”

  October 2, 2008

  Albany, New York

  In the deep night, a woman sits down at her writing table. Fingering a newly sharpened pencil, she focuses her eyes upon the blank paper and brings the black pencil tip to it.

  She begins to write.

  Dear Mol,

  I’ve been dreaming about you again. I don’t think a night has gone by in the past few weeks when I haven’t seen your face. Our face, I should say. The face is always in my head; implanted in my memories. The dream is nothing new. It’s thirty years ago again. It’s October. I’m walking close behind you through the tall grass toward the woods. Your hair is loose and long. You’re wearing cut-offs, white Keds with the laces untied and a red T-shirt that says ‘Paul McCartney and Wings’ on the front. You’re walking ahead of me while I try to keep up; but afraid to keep up. Soon we come to the tree line, and while my heart beats in my throat, we walk into the trees. But then comes a noise-a snapping of twigs and branches. The gaunt face of a man appears. A man who lives in a house in the woods.

  Then, just like that, the dream shifts and I see you kneeling beside me inside the dark, empty basement. I hear the sound of your sniffles, smell the wormy raw earth, feel the cold touch of a man’s hand. You turn and you look at me with your solid steel eyes. And then I wake up.

  We survived the house in the woods together, Mol, and we never told a soul. We just couldn’t risk it. Whalen would have come back for us. He would have found us. He would have found mom and dad. Even today, I know he surely would have. He would have killed them, Mol. He would have killed us. In just five days, thirty years will have passed. Three entire decades and I’m still convinced we did the right thing by keeping that afternoon in the woods our secret.

  When I see you in my dreams it’s like looking in a mirror. The blue eyes, the thick lips, the dirty blonde hair forever just touching the shoulders. My hair is finally showing signs of gray, Mol.

  I wonder, do you get gray hair in heaven? I wonder if Whalen’s hair burned off in hell? I wonder if he suffers?

  All my love.

  Your twin sister,

  Rebecca Rose Underhill

  Exhaling, the woman folds the letter neatly into thirds and slips it into a blank stationary envelope, her initials RRU embossed on the label. Running the bitter, sticky glue interior over her tongue, she seals the envelope and sets it back down onto the writing table. Once more she picks up the pencil, bringing the now dulled tip to the envelope’s face. Addressing it she writes only a name:

  Molly Rose Underhill

  The job done, the woman smiles sadly. Opening the table drawer, she sets the letter inside, on top of a stack of nine identical letters-never-sent. One for every year her sister has been gone.

  Closing the drawer, she hears her cell phone begin to vibrate, then softly chime. Picking it up off the desktop, she opens the phone and sees that a new text has been forwarded to her electronic mailbox. Fingering the inbox, she retrieves the message.

  Rebecca. Nothing more.

  Punching the command that reveals the name and number of the sender she finds ‘Caller Unknown’. The sender’s number has been blocked. Closing the phone back up, she sets it down on the desk. That’s when the wind picks up, blows and whistles through the open window.

  “Mol,” she says, staring out into the darkness. “Mol, is that you?”

  The City

  Chapter 1

  I was in no mood to argue. Even with the one per
son on earth I argued with the most: Robyn, my partner at the Albany Art Center or, what we lovingly referred to as, The School of Art.

  “What do you mean you can’t see the word, Rob? It’s right there spelled out in plain English.”

  Here’s the deal: the center’s most accomplished artist-in-residence, Francis-autistic by clinical definition but a genius savant by our definition-had completed a brand new canvas. A colorful, richly textured, post-modern abstract on-get this-traditional landscape that to me anyway, contained the word ‘Listen’ painted in faint, flesh-colored letters deep inside its center. Or in the vernacular of the job, core.

  Maybe the faint word wasn’t entirely obvious to the naked eye. Maybe it was difficult to see. But in my mind it was centered and focused enough that the abstract collage of lines and swipes laid out against green-brown grasses and distant forest trees seemed to be painted not over the word, but around it.

  L-i-s-t-e-n

  “My eyesight is just as sharp as yours, Bec,” Robyn barked. “We graduated the same day, same lousy school, same useless MFA in Painting and I just don’t see the word.” She abruptly held up her paint-stained hands like a politician about to retract a statement. “Allow me to correct myself. I see the word all right. That is, I force myself to see it. But it’s primarily an abstract rendering for God’s sakes.” She tossed Franny a smile. “And a darned good one too.”

  “God’s sakes,” Franny mumbled, dark eyes rolling around in their sockets like a blind man.

  “Thanks for the back-up, Fran,” Robyn exclaimed, holding up her hand for the artist to slap her five, which he cautiously did. By that I mean, without making eye contact with her. Brushing back long brunette hair, Robyn planted a satisfied smile on her narrow face. “Seems to me, Ms. Underhill needs a refresher course in Painting 101.”

  “Refresher,” Franny repeated solemnly, as though speaking for no one’s ears other than his own. He was seated on a paint-spattered wood stool. The stool was set before an equally paint-stained easel and situated in the far corner of the classroom-far enough away from the other half-dozen private art students who occupied the downtown former Catholic grammar school now turned art center.

  The fact that the emotionally distanced man-boy sat for an extended length of time at all was a testament to how absorbed he was in his work. From what his aging mother once told me, getting him to sit still for even thirty seconds at a time at home was a near miracle. Only when Franny finally collapsed into a deep sleep did he become the perfect still-life.

  “Earth to Rebecca,” Rob spoke up, crossing her arms over her T-shirted chest. “Are we finished with the ‘Listen’ business, partner? Because I’d like to go home and shower before my date arrives.”

  Robyn was currently ‘on the market’ as they say in the dating world. Since it isn’t all that easy meeting men in bars and virtually impossible to meet one while working at the School of Art, she’d become a devoted disciple of online dating’s Match. com. That is, a patron of the Match. com dating philosophy of ‘Find, Mind, Bind’ which in my loveless world tended to read more like ‘Find, Mind, Bind, Bail

  …’

  “Who’s the lucky victim tonight?” I posed, sensing an organ slide of jealously in my guts.

  Robyn grinned.

  “Allen. Stockbroker. That’s all I know. But very cute judging by the head-shot he posted on the website.” Her smile turned foxy sly.

  Pulling my eyes away from Franny’s painting, I took a glance through the glass doors onto a busy downtown State Street, the sidewalk filled with commuters making their lonely exodus from the city to their suburban McMansions. Now that October had arrived, it was getting dark out earlier. Cooler too.

  “I’ll take care of the lock up,” I offered.

  By then the only artist left in the center was Franny, the others having begun to quietly make their exit while we’d argued over identifying a secret word not exactly hidden inside Franny’s painting.

  My partner leaned herself into Franny, planted a peck on his smooth cheek. She then glided across the room, grabbed her black North-Face vest from out of her personal cubby and headed for the door.

  “I’ll let you know how it goes tonight,” she barked. “Keep your cell phone by your side.”

  “Don’t call me after eleven,” I ordered.

  “Get thee a life,” she added before springing the door open, nearly pushing it off its hinges.

  Just then I caught the image of my face reflected in the wall-mounted mirror above my work table. I looked into my own eyes-the same blue eyes I shared with Molly. The same blonde hair, same face. Only difference now was that Molly would forever remain thirty-two-and-under in my eyes, while as for myself, I was looking decidedly paler, thinner and more tired than a person should be for forty-two.

  For a fleeting second I wanted to tell Robyn, ‘Take a good look around you. I’ve got a life.’ But she was gone and I’m not sure I believed it myself. Neither did Franny it turns out.

  “Get a life,” he softly spoke to himself. Strangely, he smiled when he said it. A rare event to be sure. He also came close to making eye contact. Something he almost never did. Maybe it was just me, my intuition knocking on the gray walls of my brain. But I sensed he was doing more than just mimicking Robyn’s words. I sensed he was trying to tell me something. Something more than just the catch phrase ‘Get a life.’ It felt more like he was trying to tell me to Wake up! There’s something you need to know! Or, on another hand altogether, maybe I was looking too far into a deep dark nothing. Maybe I was just feeling old, passed over, worn out.

  I worked up a smile anyway, scratched my forehead with nail-chewed digits.

  “Yeah, sure, rub it in Fran,” I jibed. “Isn’t it enough that you can paint circles around everyone else in this studio? Including Robyn and me?”

  I stood in the middle of the old grade school classroom floor, waiting for a response. But waiting for a response from Franny was as stupid as it was unrealistic. Because I’m not sure he understood a single word I’d just said. Rather, he understood my words. But from what little I knew about his condition, his autism acted like a barrier that could selectively block out almost anything I said.

  I made my way back over to him, stood by his side and took another look at the new canvas. One last look at the crazy red and green Pollack-like squiggles and spatters that surrounded a large field of tall grass and beyond it, a dark wood. To combine the abstract with traditional landscape made for a daring composition, even for the most gifted of painters. But Franny was able to pull it off and then some. My eyes peeled to the painting, I knew that if I were made to interpret the piece for the studio arts course I taught every spring, I would have called it a dream. Rather, this is what it looked and felt like to wake up from one of my own dreams-the abstract brain waves somehow combining themselves with a realistic portrait of a field and a forest.

  I looked deeper into the painting. Once more I recognized the word ‘Listen’. The truth is that the word didn’t exactly shoot out at you. You had to look for it, not unlike staring up at a random cloud formation and seeing the shape of a dog or maybe a lion. But on the flipside, the word was spelled out as plain to me as the track-lighting mounted to the ceiling. So why had it been so difficult for Robyn to see what I was seeing? I might have thought up a sensible answer to the question had it not been for the three quick honks of a pickup truck horn.

  Franny’s ride, right on time.

  This much I knew: consistency was very important to the gifted painter. He was about to head home to his mother’s house in the country, not far away from where Molly and I grew up.

  The horn sounded again.

  Franny jumped up from the stool like a little kid being called for ice cream. But then he was no kid. He was a forty-eight year old man. He was short. Shorter than my five-feet-five even, but far larger in the middle. A regular four-by-four. His roundness seemed to fit him well however. It gave him this cherubic look that along with his smooth
red cheeks, made him appear more like a child than a middle-aged man.

  His condition-his emotional void; the fact that he could block out almost all sensory perception yet produce such vivid, sensual works of art… I wondered if it somehow made him immune to the aging process. Or did having no real knowledge of aging make you exempt from growing old?

  I thought about some of the other, more world renowned autistic artists I had studied over the past few years. I thought about Larry Bissonnette and his colorful geometric patterns based on existing cityscapes. I thought of his own short, stocky build-a physique similar to Franny’s. I thought about Mark Rimland and Roby Park, both of them savants able to capture an existing scene or building or a specific pattern of lines while, at the same time, finding it impossible to create them solely from imagination.

  If Franny was no different, then might I assume that his newest painting was a reproduction of an existing landscape? Were the abstract squiggles and lines a reproduction of a wild pattern that already existed? If so, where?

  Grabbing hold of his tattered portfolio bag, covered in fading SpongeBob SquarePants stickers, he took off for a metal and glass door that led directly outside the studio to the north parking lot. As he moved spastically toward the exit, he kept his baggy blue jeans from falling around his ankles by grabbing hold of his belt and hiking the pants way up over his waist.

  Before he let himself out, I called out to him.

  “Franny, what about your painting?”

  He stopped and turned.

  “Your painting, Rebecca,” he said, voice low and mumbled, wide eyes planted on the floor.

  Although he wouldn’t look me in the eye, I swear I saw a hint of a grin forming on his round face. He was about to turn back for the door when I called out to him again. Although I could clearly see where he’d signed the canvas in his distinctive finger-paint-like F-over-S style, he hadn’t mentioned a title. None that I recalled anyway.