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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