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 go 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
