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 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.

After a few seconds (but what seems like hours) I hear Molly’s voice begging for me through the trees.

“Bec, come on,” she shouts. “There’s a waterfall.”

Curiosity pulls at my insides. It is stronger than fear.

A waterfall.

A waterfall means a severe drop-off in the landscape—a cliff of some kind. Maybe a deep pool at the bottom of it. Is that why my father has forbidden us to enter into these woods alone? I realize then, the prospect of his little girls falling off of that cliff is reason enough.

Still, who can resist chasing a waterfall?

I take a few steps forward in the direction of Molly’s voice; toward the sound of rushing water. Ducking my head I slip on through an opening in the trees, make my way into the darkness…