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 paper-towels from off the cabinet-mounted roller above the sink. Back in the living room, I got to work cleaning up the spilled water.
While I cleaned, I thought about Michael and his date. I wondered how it was going. I thought about Robyn and her date. I thought about Franny, if he was up inside his attic studio painting the rainy evening away. I wondered if he would paint anything else just for me. I prayed to God he would not.
Outside my apartment the rain fell steady and never ending. What to do with the rest of my night? Maybe head to the gym for a weight training workout? Maybe head outside for my usual five mile run?
I just didn’t have the energy or the will. Besides, it was still raining.
I went to bed without dinner.
Alone.
Chapter 7
That night I dreamt.
Molly and I come to the edge of the field of tall grass behind our house, the thick, second-growth forest standing like a dark impenetrable wall only a dozen feet away from us. There is something forbidden and ominous about these woods. So much so that I have difficulty even looking directly into them, as if they have the ability to look directly back at me. I try and focus my attention on Molly’s narrow back, her blonde hair that sways from shoulder to shoulder, until she turns to me with that mischievous smile of hers, shouting “Come on, Bec. Let’s do it.”
My stomach is tied up in double-knots.
Molly has no fear. Not of the woods, not of what we might find inside them, not of our father who has forbade us to ever enter them. But then I harbor enough fear for the both of us.
Molly turns, shoots me a smile. She begins to step across the invisible barrier between field and woods.
“ Don’t!”
But it’s too late. She is already entering into a place from which there is no return…
I awoke to the sound of my cell phone vibrating atop the nightstand. At the same time, I heard a voice. The cell phone and the voice pulled me out of my dream, away from the open field, away from the danger that lurked there.
“Rebecca.” A whispered voice.
In my half-awake, half-asleep state, I heard the deep, raspy, guttural voice. The voice of a heavy smoker. In the darkness of the bedroom I found myself lying flat on my back, eyes open wide, gazing onto a black ceiling. Although my heart pounded, my body was paralyzed. I could not move my arms or legs. I could not breathe.
The windows were closed to the rain and the wind. The voice had to have come from inside my head. How could it possibly have come from anywhere else?
But it sounded so real, so close. As real as the cell phone. Real enough to make me awake. But then not awake at all. More like caught up in a state somewhere in between conscious and out cold.
I lay in bed unable to swallow, unable to move, unable to speak. I felt the urge to pee. But the down comforter had become my protective steel cage. No way I could attempt to get out from under the covers.
Directly behind me, the rain came down ever steady outside the window. If only I could have reached out for the nightstand, grabbed hold of the cell, opened it, and heard the voice of Robyn or Michael. The voices might have snapped me out of my trance, saved me from a nightmare too vivid for words. There was nothing I could do.
No choice but to lie on my back and listen.
Chapter 8
I woke up earlier than usual. The rain had stopped but the sun hadn’t fully risen over the Berkshire Mountains to the east. Before crawling out of bed, I reached out for my cell, checking to see who had called in the middle of the night.
I scrolled down to Missed Calls.
The last call was from one of my Art Center students-a nineteen year old college freshman and aspiring Picasso by the name of Craig. He’d called me at three-fifteen that afternoon to tell me he’d have to cancel his tutoring appointment for later that day. In all likelihood, I’d missed his call since Robyn and I were so consumed with arguing over Franny’s painting and its inclusion, or lack thereof, of the word ‘Listen’. After that, I hadn’t missed any calls. The odd ‘Unknown Caller’ text I’d received a couple of hours later hadn’t constituted a missed call since I’d quite obviously received it.
Remember
So then, how did I go about explaining last night’s experience of hearing my cell phone ring and at the same time, hearing a man’s voice? No question about it. I had been dreaming. Dreaming in that half awake, half asleep state where dreams can be their most vivid and most frightening.
Dragging myself out of bed, I decided to put the whole night and its nightmare drama out of my mind, greet the brand new day like I was entering a new life. It’s exactly what Molly would suggest I do.
In the kitchen I made the coffee, poured a glass of orange juice, popped a One-A-Day, and ate a small bowl of shredded wheat and skim milk. Taking refuge in my morning routine would help me forget about the immediate past. About paintings that spoke to me. About ambiguous texts. About voices that came to me in my dreams.
As the new sun shined bright inside the kitchen window, the grass in the common glistened from the rain water that still clung to the blades. For a quick second or two I gave serious thought to heading into the spare bedroom I’d converted into a painting studio. If I could paint, I could forget about life.
But it had been a while since I’d painted anything. Aside from the occasional ten minutes here, ten minutes there, it had been almost ten years since I’d produced any art of consequence. That is to say, anything I considered finished and ready to go to market.
So why the hesitation?
While painting could indeed help me forget about things for a while, it could also have the reverse effect. It could actually provoke too much thought. There had been a time when the act of painting or drawing was my sole refuge. My art began for me almost immediately after Molly and I were ambushed in the woods all those years ago. Since we’d been sworn to secrecy, I had to do something to express the torment I physically felt inside my body, the same way Molly must have felt her cancer years later. Although each and every bit of wall space in my Brunswick Hills bedroom was covered with landscape watercolors and hand-study sketches, I couldn’t very well produce a large canvas with Whalen’s gaunt face plastered on it. My mother and father would surely take notice. What would they say? How would they react to such an awful, ugly face rendered with such bitter anger with every brush stroke?
But whether it happened consciously or not, I found myself pencil-sketching his face inside the blank margins of the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. The reality of it is that in the fall of 1978, Molly and I had entered the seventh grade. Harper Lee’s story about little Scout, her righteous lawyer father, and the mysteriously frightening Boo Radley had been assigned to us by our English teacher, Mr. Hughto (Mr. Huge-Toe, as Molly dubbed him). While Molly dismissed the story as ‘sentimental slop’, it nevertheless hit home with me.
Why?
Because we had our own Boo Radley living in our midst. The mysterious Francis Scaramuzzi was a man/boy who lived on the neighboring farm and, like the scary Boo himself, never came out of his house. I also lived with the tenacious, gutsy, fearless Molly. In my mind, Molly and Lee’s adventurous and precocious character, Scout, was one and the same person. To Kill a Mockingbird did not only hit home with me, I felt as if Harper Lee had written the story for me and me alone.
I read the book for school, then read it again for myself, again and again. After the attacks, I never let the book leave my side. I began to secretly sketch inside the margins, and when I ran out of room, I sketched on little pieces of white notebook paper and stuffed them inside the novel’s printed pages. Whalen’s gaunt face was my sole subject. That cartoon face was both a product of reality and imagination. Had I really taken the time to get a good look at my attacker during those frightening minutes down inside the dirt floor basement of his house in the woods? I had been too afraid to look closely into his face; into his eyes. Yet I still knew what he looked like. And I could reproduce him detail for detail.