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.
“What do you call it?”
I half expected a mumbled reply. Something spoken out the corner of his mouth, his eyes aimed not at me but the tops of his shoes.
But that’s when something strange happened.
When the horn blasted for a third time, Franny didn’t seem the least bit fazed. He stood stone stiff, portfolio bag hanging over his shoulders, hiding most of his lower body like a portable piece of wall. His cherubic child-like face lost its pink on pale flesh color. It formed neither grin nor frown. With that new, odd, straight face, he laser- beamed a gaze directly into my own eyes.
“The painting is called, ‘Listen’.”
Chapter 2
I drove out of the city along Route 9, south, toward the suburbs. The weather was coming in from across the Hudson River. Light rain strafed the windshield of my twelve year old Volkswagen Cabriolet-the fire-engine red convertible that had been a personal gift from Molly weeks before she died. I was feeling a little unsettled inside my own skin, knowing that on the back seat resided Franny’s ‘Listen’ canvas. He’d never before gifted to me a single piece of his art. Maybe I was more than honored to accept this one. But I couldn’t help wondering why he’d chosen this day on this particular week to give it to me. Since I couldn’t possibly answer my own question, at least not at this point, I decided to try and think about something altogether different.
I tried to think about nothing, focusing my eyes on the broken line-stripes that shot beneath the speeding Cabriolet like quick brush strokes of vivid yellow.
But I didn’t really see them.
Instead of doing the right thing and thinking of nothing, I made the mistake of doing the wrong thing: thinking of Franny’s painting-the large field and the dark woods-and how it somehow reminded me of Molly. That’s all it took for the memories of three decades past to take over…
Just ahead of me Molly is walking through the tall grass far behind my parents’ farmhouse, toward the thick woods on the field’s opposite side. She’s wearing cut-offs and a red T-Shirt sporting a ‘Paul McCartney and Wings’ logo on the front, a list of dates for the ‘Wings Over America’ tour printed on the back. The bangs of her blonde hair are bobbing like a pendulum against her shoulders as she walks, just like my own hair.
It’s warm.
Unusually warm for an early October day. What Trooper Dan calls ‘Indian Summer’. Molly is whistling ‘Band on the Run’. She is forever ahead of me in more ways than one-a happy, carefree, fearless facsimile of myself. The closer we come to the woods on the opposite side of the grassy field, the more my stomach cramps up, my heart beats, pulse soars.
“ I don’t think we should go any further, Mol,” I say, recalling Trooper Dan’s strict rules.
But Molly being Molly, she will not be deterred. She defiantly holds up her right hand, waves me on like John Wayne does the cavalry…
But then the daydream suddenly shifts to a hospital room’s top floor, Hospice Center. It’s twenty years later. The hospital room is not a place for healing. In Molly’s own words, it is a place for ‘checking out’. The room is dark and cool, shades drawn, baby blue curtains pulled back. The walls are not your basic hospital white. Serenity is the word of the day here. The smell of the day is worms. The walls are covered in dark, faux mahogany. Because dying can take a while, there is a small kitchenette complete with hot-plate and mini-fridge. There’s a private bath and a wall-mounted hand-sanitizer dispenser. There’s a ceiling-mounted television for passing whatever time Molly has left and curiously, not a single mirror to be found anywhere inside the room.
“ Stand by your sis,” Mol weakly sings to the tune of that old familiar country song. Somehow substituting ‘sis’ for ‘man’ has a better ring to it.
I work up a smile, pick up her hand, squeeze it. But not too hard. This same hand was once strong enough to yank a chunk of Patrick Daly’s hair out when he stuffed a Daddy-Long-Leg down my tank-top in the eighth grade. But now the hand is as bony and frail as a bird’s wing.
This is my blood womb sister. But that hand, like the twin sister I once knew, is already long gone, even if the portable Siemans-97T Heart Rate monitor says otherwise. What was once a head-full of velvety, dirty blonde hair is now a fuzzy scar-tissue scalp. What were once highly defined cheek bones, pouty lips and ocean-sized blue eyes have now given over to a steroid injected face-lips dry, cracked and too thin; the eyes the color of old skim milk. For the first time in our existence, Molly and I look nothing alike.
But despite the cancer that ravages her body, my sister sings and in a word, waves a defiant fist at death and the pale horse he rode in on.
“ Stand by your sis…”
She’d probably pound a couple of Coronas if only I had the nerve to sneak in a six-pack. But here’s what I know from Molly’s careful observations: in each of these Hospice rooms lies the body of the near dead. Taken on
