The Remains by Vincent Zandri Page A

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