The remains

by Vincent Zandri

  I nodded. It was worth a shot.

  She sat back, both hands wrapped around her mug, deep eyes peering into it as though it were a crystal ball that revealed the past instead of the future.

  “Not long after Franny was born he was diagnosed with retardation,” she said in an almost exasperated tone. “As harsh as that sounds even today, I can’t begin to tell you how devastating it sounded almost a half century ago.”

  “I thought he was autistic?”

  “They didn’t know what autism was. Back then, they often confused it for insanity. In those days, the most my husband and I could expect for Francis was for him to perhaps live a relatively comfortable existence inside a facility. Or what they used to refer to as an asylum back in the day. But that would have been a disaster. Autism was only one of his problems. He was also affected by heart and lung problems. Congenital ailments that still plague him and force the daily intake of blood thinners.” She paused, eyes still focused on her tea. “In all honesty, Rebecca, Franny is not long for this world.”

  Her revelation hit me like a punch to the belly. Franny had always seemed so healthy to me. I also could not imagine a world without him.

  “In any case,” she said, “I- we -resolved to raise Francis here, on the farm. Give him as normal a life as possible, for as long as his life lasted.” Finally she raised her face and looked me directly in the eye. “And thank God we did. Because it didn’t take long for us to discover that the doctors had been all wrong.”

  I wasn’t sure I understood her, so I asked her to explain. But she got up from out of her chair.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ve got something to show you.”

  I stood up, began to follow her.

  “What exactly did the doctors have wrong?” I asked while being led to an old wood door at the far side of the kitchen.

  She brushed back her long hair, opened the door to reveal a dark basement. Reaching out for the string that ignited an exposed overhead light bulb, she said, “Francis might have been different, but he was far from retarded. Down in this basement is the evidence.”

  Turning, she wiped away a spider web and began to climb down the old wood plank stairs.

  Ever the cautious twin sister, I followed.

  Chapter 22

  With its exposed damp dirt floor surrounded by fieldstone foundation walls, the basement felt more like a cave than the foundation for an old farmhouse. A single overhead light bulb sprayed a dull beam on the gray-brown dirt. The smell of old raw onions and mold permeated the moist air. Caroline led me across the length of the open floor to a large closet-like room that had been built out of plywood, its walls covered over with clear plastic over Styrofoam boards. Protruding from out of the side of the room was a long section of rubbery ductwork that snaked itself all the way up to an opening at the top of the foundation wall.

  This was a room built inside a room-a space independent from the house that contained it and that maintained its own atmospheric ventilation system. As an artist, I wasn’t ignorant of such specialty rooms. Lots of artists and art collectors had them built inside their homes and galleries in order to better preserve their precious treasures. Because after all, art never decreases in value, no matter what.

  When Caroline opened the door to the room, I could immediately see that she possessed quite the collection. The brightly lit space was stacked full with original art pieces. Every bit of wall space in a room I estimated to be twelve by twelve feet was covered with paintings, sketches, and black and white drawings, the largest of which was a full-sized self portrait of Franny himself. The artist was dressed in his usual uniform of baggy jeans, Converse high-tops and a fire-engine red T-shirt. In the painting, his face was noticeably younger, but just as round, just as smooth and chubby. His hair was thicker but mussed up. Thin arms hung down straight at his side, almost like a toy soldier standing at attention.

  The expression on his face was nothing less than stunning. The piercing gray eyes cut holes in my chest. The image seemed so real to me, so life-like and vivid, I half expected him to open up his mouth and speak.

  Caroline must have taken notice of my amazement.

  “Francis painted that ten years ago,” she explained, breaking me out of my spell. “Some of these paintings he did as early as three years old.”

  That’s when she reached out, took hold of my hand and led me to a small, post-card-sized pastel drawing of a hobby horse. Its execution was as detailed and photographically rendered as a Saturday Evening Post, Rockwell, but as distorted, distant and disturbing as a Van Gogh.

  “He was three?” Had I heard her right the first time?

  “Three,” she said. “It was an exciting time for us. Because we knew then for certain that Franny was no idiot. He was gifted.”

  “The G word,” I said. “I don’t use it often. Never at the art center. Except for one very special artist.”

  Caroline pursed her lips, nodded.

  “Tell me something, Rebecca, how much do you know about Savant Syndrome? Autistic Savant Syndrome in particular?”

  I shook my head, breathed in the room’s strong scent of paint, turpentine and alcohol. “Other than what I’ve learned from my direct contact with Franny over the years, not a whole lot.”

  Crossing her arms, Caroline focused her eyes not on me, but on the eclectic pieces of art that covered the wall behind me.

  “In layman’s terms,” she went on, “autistic savants are born with miss-wired neurons. In a few scattered cases, this miss-wiring affords them extraordinary gifts.” She raised her hands as if to say, Just take a good look around at all these gifts.

  “Not long before Francis painted that hobby horse, we were told that he would never be cured. Francis would never be mainstreamed and would for the duration of his life require constant care.”

  I looked over her shoulder at Franny’s face, looked into eyes that seemed to lock on mine from wherever I stood inside the small square-shaped room.

  “Not the most optimistic of outlooks.”

  “Until he started painting,” she said. “That’s when everything changed.”

  “But how exactly?”

  “Maybe he can’t communicate with us the way we want him to. Maybe he can’t stand loud noises or closed in spaces. Maybe he can’t look us straight in the eyes. But one day he picks up a pencil and paper, he starts to draw like an artist ten times his age. My husband and I were floored, to say the least.”

  “We showed his drawings and sketches to his doctors at the Parson’s Center in Albany. They in turn found them remarkable and immediately labeled Francis a savant, which was a new word for the time. Francis possessed an unusual gift. This wasn’t the era of PET scans where doctors are able to see computer pictures of someone’s brain. But they did subject Francis to a grueling series of diagnostic tests. At the end, it was determined that because of his autism, Francis was able to use far more of his creative mind than normal people like you and me could ever hope for.”

  “Francis hadn’t been burdened with a handicap,” I said, “he’d been given a rare gift.”

  “Nowadays we know that savants tap into areas of the mind that function sort of like super computers. The computers process a massive amount of data from the senses and in turn create their own unique working model of the world.”

  “Thus the world class artwork.”

  I thought about my own childhood, how Molly and I had become fully aware of a boy named Francis who lived on a nearby farm. A boy who was older than us, but a boy who some of the other kids at school referred to as a ‘freak’, even if I thought of him as Boo Radley. I hated to admit it, but there had been more than one occasion when Molly, myself, and some of our friends had snuck onto the Scaramuzzi property to get a quick look at Francis, only to be frightened away by a dog or by Mr. S himself. Standing in the basement of their home all these years later, I suddenly felt very ashamed of myself.

  Still, one question loomed large in my mind.

&nb
sp; “Caroline,” I said, “if Franny possesses the ability to tap into portions of his brain you and I can’t even touch, is it possible he might possess a sixth sense? A kind of ESP?”

  She looked at me with wide unblinking dark eyes. “You mean, can Francis predict the future?”

  I shook my head. “Not the future necessarily,” I clarified. “But would it be possible for him to simply sense an event that is to come?”

  She cocked her head and pursed her lips. “I believe it’s possible. Francis has more abilities than even I am aware of, so if he is giving you signs of something-if that’s one of the reasons you have come here, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit.” She paused for a beat. “Is there something you’re not telling me, Miss Rebecca? Something specific?”

  I thought about Whalen; about his having been released from prison; his living somewhere in Albany County. I thought about all the ways of telling her about it. But I knew I couldn’t. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Instead I looked at my watch as if to shift my attention to something else.

  “I should be getting back to the studio. Thank you so much for your time.”

  She gave me an open-eyed look before turning for the door. The look froze me. My eyes locked on her smooth face, her long gray hair, her deep eyes-eyes that read me more than looked at me. Her closed mouth expression spoke to me better than words. It told me she knew I was hiding something. Caroline had spent the better part of a lifetime trying to communicate with a genius son who had virtually no communicative skills other than his painting. Certainly Caroline knew better than most how to read a face. I guess it would have been stupid for me to believe I could fool her.

  Call it politeness or sensitivity or both, but she chose not to push me.

  “You’re welcome here anytime,” she whispered after a pause. “I miss you; your sister; your mother and father. Even though you lived a few miles away from us, it felt good to have such sweet neighbors.”

  There they were again: the forks of guilt stabbing at the insides of my stomach.

  “We weren’t always great kids,” I confessed.

  She laughed, set a hand on my shoulder.

  “You mean all those times you tried to get a sneak peak at Boo Radley?”

  I felt of wash of pure humiliation pour down my back. At the same time, I thought about the ratty novel that to this day sat on my nightstand; all those sketched faces inside its once blank margins.

  “Well allow me to let you in on something, young lady. We used to get such a kick out of scaring you kids. Francis especially enjoyed it. It was the only time you’d hear him laugh.” For the first time since I arrived, I sensed her holding back a tear. “In a real way, you were his only friends.”

  I turned for the door. But before I stepped out, something caught my eye. A small black and white sketch I hadn’t noticed when I walked in. The sketch was of Molly and me, back when we were about twelve years old, around the time of the assaults.

  My God, Franny was drawing us back then.

  “You and your sister,” Caroline said. “Beautiful girls, beautiful painting. Francis must have been about twenty-one or two when he did this.”

  I swallowed, because now it was me who was holding back a tear.

  “Come on,” Caroline said, turning off the light. “Francis is waiting for you at the school of art.”

  Chapter 23

  Caroline was right. Franny was waiting for me. But instead of hooking a right at the end of her driveway, I turned left, drove deeper into the heart of the country. The road was more narrow and winding than I remembered it. It followed the up-and-down contours of the foothills instead of plowing right through them like in the suburbs.

  After about a mile, I was able to make out Mount Desolation situated beyond the woods and the fields that I now called my own. The mountain was covered in the most beautiful array of autumn reds, oranges and yellows. As it grew larger and closer, I began to feel that tingle inside of me. It was an itch that I used to often feel. The itch that signified the urge to paint. Had I brought along my easel, I might have set up outside my parents’ house and reproduced that small mountain and the dark forest that surrounded it; reproduced it for the canvas, not unlike Franny had just days ago.

  But I wouldn’t stay there long.

  Pulling up into my parents’ circular driveway, the urge to create something gave way to the urge to split the scene. But that wouldn’t be right. The three-story farmhouse and its wraparound porch was all that remained of my family history. I had to at least make sure the place was being well cared for.

  I parked the Cabriolet at the top of the drive, got out. Making my way to the front porch steps, I began to feel my heart beat. Not a frantic pounding, but a speedier than normal pulse that drummed inside my head. I slipped the key into the lock and, twisting the knob, opened the door to that old familiar creaky hinge noise. I stepped quietly inside, as though not to wake the ghosts of my family.

  I left the door open behind me.

  The home was empty. The few pieces of furniture that remained were covered in white bed sheets that over the past ten years had turned yellow and gray. Dust and dirt however had been kept to a minimum thanks to the cleaning my carpenter gave the place once a month.

  The layout of the house wasn’t all that different from the Scaramuzzi’s, with the large combination living/dining room making up the space to my right, while behind the wall to my left was the big eat-in kitchen.

  Standing alone inside the living room, I felt the bone cold that can settle into a home when the heat is turned off and no living soul occupies it. I stared at the big fieldstone fireplace my father built by hand over a period of a dozen weekends. I looked at the dark creosote-soaked railroad-tie mantle that once upon a time acted as a ‘This is Your Life’ showcase for the many framed family photos that were set upon it. Photos of Molly and me as babies; as toddlers learning to walk; as little girls standing squinty-eyed on a Cape Cod beach; as teenagers going off to high school, our eyes not as bright and optimistic as they should be. Because after all, Molly and I possessed a deep secret. And the secret ate away at us, as much as we didn’t want to believe it.

  Turning away from the mantle, I made my way to the center hall stairs.

  I climbed.

  Standing at the top of the stairs I looked in on my parents’ bedroom, their marriage bed and wedding gift bedroom furniture now long disappeared thanks to an estate sale conducted weeks after their premature deaths. It chilled me to see such an empty lifeless space. The very place I’d always imagined where Molly and I were conceived. It chilled me to think about how it was possible for a married couple to die of grief only three months apart from one another, both of them passing away in their sleep as if it had been scripted that way.

  But then I didn’t have kids. I had no idea about that kind of love; that kind of sadness. All I knew was the memory of a man who lived in those woods behind this house. And that memory had always competed with the desire to have children. Or perhaps it killed that desire, made it impossible to contemplate.

  Further down the hall was Molly’s room and my room just beyond it. No longer did this upstairs vibrate to stereo systems cranked full throttle with Aerosmith and Ramones records. There was no more piped in laugh-track to the Love Boat, no more teary-eyed wails for GH’s Scorpio.

  There was nothing. And that kind of nothing was frightening.

  I pictured my room with my paints and easels, the place smelling of turpentine and fresh paint, every bit of wall space covered with sketches, watercolors and oil paintings. I pictured Molly’s room, always cluttered with dirty clothes strewn about the floor, her hospital white walls bare of even the simplest photograph, poster or painting, as if creating a fun personal space unique to her own wants and desires was somehow undeserved or at this point, trivial, unimportant and just plain useless.

  While I withdrew into myself and my art after the attacks, Molly did the opposite. She would sneak out at night, meet up with some local boy, maybe g
o to a party or maybe just park in some isolated place at the far end of the valley. Molly never stayed with just one boy, never went steady, but always strung along lots of boyfriends, while I preferred not to see anyone at all. For me, seeing a boy was an absolute impossibility considering how ugly I felt inside. I didn’t even like to see myself naked.

  But Molly was different. She craved the attention the boy’s so willingly gave her. To this day I’m amazed that she never got caught when it came time to sneak back into the house, never got nabbed red-handed by Trooper Dan. Just standing inside that hall I could once again hear the pony-tailed Molly climbing up onto the porch overhang and tapping ever so gently on my window, waking me up out of a sound sleep. After climbing back through she’d get in bed with me, and hold me, and run her hands through my hair. She’d shush me back to sleep like a mother would a baby. I’d drift away to her sweet scent and the sound of her breaths, just the two of us cocooned inside the sheets and down comforter, no different from the nine months we spent cuddled up inside our mother.

  Standing inside the upstairs of that old home, I could almost feel Molly’s arms wrapped around me. I could almost smell her breath. The sensations made me want to leave and never come back home. Back down on the first floor I thought about leaving for good, maybe putting the place up for sale, getting the past out of my life forever. But then something held me back. Something had been holding me back for years now. Like I said, this place and the many acres of land that surrounded it, was all that remained of my history. Would selling this place erase it?

  Inhaling a deep breathe I once more made my way across the length of the living room to the large double-hung windows that made up the far window wall. I stood only inches away from the glass, stared out onto the field and the dense foothill forest beyond it.

  I see myself walking behind Molly as she enters the woods. I watch her disappear from view as the colorful foliage consumes her like Alice through the looking glass. I find myself standing on the edge of a sea of grass; on the edge of the known and the unknown, the accepted and the forbidden. My heart has shot up from my chest and lodged itself in my mouth while visions of my father slapping us with a punishment so severe we won’t be able to leave the farm for a year.