The Remains Read Online Free PDF

either. Of course
there was always the cell phone and Robyn. But I couldn’t exactly
call her while she was on a date.
    From across the room I stared at Franny’s
painting. The word ‘Listen’ peered out at me from the center of the
canvas like a laughing, heckling hyena.
    That’s when I got the most incredible cramp
in my stomach. It felt as though some invisible creep had
sucker-punched me in the gut. Now I definitely knew what I was
going to do next.
    I sprinted for the bathroom.
    Moments later I was back on the couch,
stomach cramps no longer an issue. But I felt drained. My forehead
was pasty with sweat, my limbs were shaking, my mouth was dry.
Turning my attention to the coffee table, I discovered that in all
my sudden hurry to make it to the bathroom, I must have tipped over
a glass of water because now I was left with a puddle of water that
extended from the tabletop onto the hardwood floor below.
    That
spill became the perfect metaphor for my day. You’d think I might
attend to it right away. But Franny’s painting was doing its magic.
It’s black magic. It
was calling me again. Not only the image of the grass field and
dark woods beyond it—a landscape that now was very much mimicking
the one of my youth; the field and the woods that Molly and I
accessed from outside the back door of our farmhouse—but also the
crazy, colorful abstract lines that were hastily painted over the
scene.
    To some people, these lines, circles and
squiggles might seem an annoyance or, at the very least, a kind of
self-indulgence on the part of the artist. But to me they
represented something more. I’d been having more than my fair share
of dreams lately. Dreams that involved Molly and me; that involved
our walking through the field to the dark woods, despite our father
strictly forbidding us to do so. Those abstract lines made me feel
like I was entering into the dream once more, only not in the sleep
state. They made me feel like I was dreaming while I was awake. For
an added third dimension, the word ‘Listen’ was buried in the
painting’s center. A word not everyone saw. Not without my tracing
it for them.
    Questions flooded me.
    Why would Franny decide to give me a painting at
all? Especially when the
payday for one of his pieces pretty much equaled what I might make
in three months working at the Albany Art Center.
    Under the
circumstances of Franny’s autism, he might not have cared the least
bit about giving up the money. But then he had never before gifted
me one of his paintings. Did Franny’s mother know that he’d slipped me a
ten-thousand dollar present? And why did he call it ‘Listen’ when I
was the only person who clearly recognized the word in the first
place? Or so it seemed.
That is, judging by the argument waged that afternoon by Robyn and
myself inside the center studio. With the word ‘Listen’ being flung
all over the place, had Franny made the spontaneous decision to use
the ‘L’ word as the title of his masterpiece? Or, what was almost
too freaky to contemplate, had ‘Listen’ been the title all
along?
    Seated on the couch in the silence of the old
apartment, I once more pictured Franny’s face. Pictured it go from
round, rosy and animated to pale and serious, as if for a few
seconds, the boy-like autism stepped aside to reveal the hidden
man.
    I ran my hands over my face. It surprised me
to know that I was crying. Exactly why was I shedding tears in the
solitude of my apartment?
    In a way, I’m not sure I wanted to know. But
then the thirty year anniversary that would arrive on Friday and
all the memories and dreams it conjured up, might have been reason
enough for tears. And now this painting from Franny—a painting that
was playing with my head and heart.
    A tingle erupted in my stomach, along with a
dull ache in the center of my brain. I stood up, felt the dizziness
that accompanied the suddenly downshifting blood. Slowly making my
way into the kitchen, I retrieved a wad of