Forsaken - A Novel of Art, Evil, and Insanity Read online

  Her cigarettes lay hidden in the back of the drawer beside the sink, the drawer that housed old candles for birthday cakes, thumb tacks, refrigerator magnets, rubber bands, and other items that didn’t belong in any single drawer. Thus, they found their way into what the kids called the ‘junk spot.’ Linda fished the cigarettes out, knowing they were safe as both the kids and Dan lacked reason or motivation to even open the drawer, let alone reach to the very back.

  She lit up, stale smoke filling her, relaxing. She needed this, this one bad vice. She hadn’t had a craving in weeks but by noon she felt exhausted. Her mother had called, tipsy and talkative again before three her time in Greenwich, wanting to gossip about some celebrity meltdown and how Linda’s aunt was going in for a biopsy. Earlier, at school, Jessica had clung to Linda’s leg and she had to carry her daughter all the way to the classroom, promising that she would stay in the car outside the school and wait for her until two thirty. It had been a lie, of course, and she felt a pang of guilt when she drove home to do the chores.

  More valuable than the cigarettes, which she had bought two months ago, was her father’s lighter. It was an antique silver Zippo with inlaid mother of pearl. She had seen him use throughout her entire childhood, a constant click for an after dinner smoke, yet she had never considered asking where he had gotten it. When she found it among his items at the hospital after the cancer did its final duty, only then did she realize she never would discover its origins. Had it been a gift? Perhaps from some other daughter, some other princess in his life? Etched into one side in antique font sat his initials, yet her mother dismissed the object as meaningless with a wave of her hand. That lighter, it was a painful reminder of how little she had truly known her father, and yet how much she missed him in the two years since he died.

  His death had been peaceful and quiet, at least according to Dan, who was the only one present in the room when he passed away. She had been outside, smoking a cigarette while her mother slept in a diazepam haze in the waiting room and Dan kept watch over the old salesman. She had missed her father’s last moments, returning to find Dan in the hall, shaking his head. She didn’t cry, just listened and nodded as the doctor explained that the old salesman had expired.

  Expired. How she hated that word. Hated how it reduced her father’s memory to some object past its purpose and shelf life; a carton of milk, a gym membership, or some batteries, all thrown away after use. He had expired, but the lies had remained. Lies that she thought about whenever she saw that silver lighter of his. Lies that had crushed her once, long ago, but could no longer hurt her.

  The scent of fresh earth on her hands and roses on the windowsill cleared her memory and filled her, for a brief moment, with a sense of purpose, a sense of calm that, for all the dreams and goals she had now replaced by hobbies, there was no shame in finding happiness in roses and children and this little house of theirs, this little family, this home, free of lies.

  She exhaled another satisfying cloud of smoke, staring out the window into the front yard. A few of the leaves fell from the beautiful maple out front. Beyond the tree a small figure moved down the sidewalk. Yellow hair bobbed beyond the hedge, shuffling, one foot before the other as if injured.

  It was a child.

  Her daughter.

  Jessica.

  She ran across the front yard, calling her daughter’s name, and the yellow hair stopped at the gate, its form hidden behind the wrought iron fence and box hedges. She found herself, in the few seconds before she reached the gate, scared of what she would see beyond it. A broken frame, or a shambling mess, or her father, crawling across the pavement like when he had collapsed in their driveway on Tommy’s fifth birthday. “Feet just went out from under me, funny thing,” he’d chuckled between bloody lips.

  “Honey, is that you?!” Linda screamed.

  She flung the gate open and saw Jessica standing there. Her eyes were swollen as tears leaked down her cheeks and she wasn’t sobbing so much as stuttering between words too thick to escape her throat, gagging on her own speech.

  “I...”

  “Honey? What happened? Oh my God are you all right?”

  “I... couldn’t...”

  She ran her hands over Jessica's face who trembled as if electrified by the touch.

  “What happened? Why aren’t you at school?!”

  “I couldn’t... I... could-duh-duh...unt...”

  Jessica held out her shaking hands. In them sat a small object wrapped in napkins, the same napkins Linda had packed in her daughter’s lunch box that morning. They had been white this morning, but were now blotted red.

  “Honey? What is this?”

  “I couldn’t make them stop poking it.”

  Linda unfolded the napkin. A bird, a blue jay with those same strange spots she’d seen a day ago, lay dead in the napkins. Its small talons were curled back on sticklike legs. A few wayward feathers gave it a disheveled, pathetic look. Its eyes were glazed over, staring far beyond them, beyond the magnolias that lined the street, perhaps into the sky above.

  “Oh sweetie,” said Linda, and she took her daughter in her arms. Jessica's whole body shook as a sob escaped from her lips that was far too loud and pained for a child of her age.

  They buried the bird in the garden, beneath the rosebushes.

  Jessica found a shoebox and lined it with cotton balls and Linda placed the blue jay inside. They hadn’t been able to find a lid, but Jessica didn’t mind, opting to cover the bird’s body in leaves gathered from beneath the maple tree out front.

  Linda scooped the last of the dirt into the grave and tamped it down. Jessica put a cross made of popsicle sticks into the ground, then smiled and patted the damp soil a final time.

  Then, she turned to her mother. “Why did they hurt it?”

  According to Jessica the bird had struck the first grade window during recess and, with the teacher gone, kids took turns poking it with sticks as it flopped about in the bush on broken wings. Jessica had told them to stop, and they did stop, but not until after the bird...

  Had what? Linda thought.

  Had expired.

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “Sometimes, kids don’t know their own strength. They don’t know how much is too much. And sometimes, kids are just mean.”

  “Will it go to heaven with grandpa?”

  Linda smiled. “Yes honey, I’m sure it will.”

  “Good,” Jessica gave a solemn nod, and repeated. “Good.”

  Seed

  THE TEARS STOPPED five minutes ago and now Karina’s head rested on her hand, palm covering her mouth, staring at the carpet in Dan’s office. The building had been cleared by the fire department, the students and faculty allowed to return. With the exception of the morning’s spectacle, the only remaining evidence of the fire lay two floors above behind locked door, or lingered in the air as an acrid, chemical aftertaste. And here, in his office, in the form of a student who sat on his couch, mute, after her hysterics had subsided.

  “Karina, listen, everything will be okay, all right? You’ll get your grades, I promise.”

  She blinked. It was the first time she’d blinked in minutes. It was if her mind had gone into some loop, like a computer, and had now finished rebooting. Her forehead wrinkled in disgust.

  “My grade?” she asked, her words spilling out in rapid fire, like Morse code. “My grade? Of course I’ll get my grade, I don’t give a fuck about my grade, Dan!”

  “Karina, please.” He held up his hands. A sign of peace, anything to get her to relax and not relapse into another dramatic tangent. He knew the procedure all too well.

  “Everything! Everything I worked on this year was in there. All of it!”

  “I know, I’m sorry,” he nodded.

  “No, you don’t know! The Lorenzetti, the Yate, Christ the stupid Thomas Cole I hated. All of them. Fucking. Gone. So tell me: how am I supposed to find work when I’m done? What do I say? ‘Oh, I spent the winter working on a Verduchi but no
you can’t see it because it’s a pile of ash?!”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Stop apologizing! Get my grade...” she laughed. “Pleeease. Of course I’ll get my grade Dan, or else everyone, including that frigid bitch you sleep with, will know about our little ‘arrangement.’”

  Her fingers curling into air quotes around the word ‘arrangement’ sent the glass into spastic vibrations. “You watch your mouth,” he snapped.

  Her expression stiffened in an instant, as if she’d seen a ghost. He backtracked. Hands up, white flag.

  “Just... don’t take this out on me Karina. Don’t.”

  His words had come off stronger than intended, in part because he grew tired of playing therapist to her for the last forty-five minutes. But also because he resented that she didn’t understand the immense pressure he, and the department, would be under as a result of the blaze. Fire investigators would be followed by insurance investigators, all of whom would pick apart every detail and moment of the program. They would analyze and scrutinize every mistake, every oversight and inconsistency, that led to the moment millions of dollars of art his department was responsible for went up in smoke. It was a nightmare, for everyone, and most of all for him. How could she not see this?

  “I’m sorry, I really am.” He softened his tone and reached out to touch her shoulder, but she put up her hands, palms out. The message was clear: don’t touch me.

  “I just, I have to think about some things right now.”

  She grabbed her satchel, the one he had bought her in the spring that bore her initials, K.F.C. Then she left, slamming the door on the way out, no different than Tommy in the throes of a tantrum. He leaned back in the chair and rubbed his temple.

  Seven months ago they had been sitting on that very couch when Dan realized that he was attracted to more than her talents, her keen eye, and the debates she often started over their differences of opinion about what constituted art.

  She had brought him a book of Mark Ryden prints, Anima Mendi, and the two of them had sat on the couch for over an hour looking at the bizarre pictures, the fusion of the cute and the demented. Candy colored pictures depicted strange scenes, like a boy running to a meat truck driven by a skeleton holding a puppet, or children sitting in sections of a toy train driven by a somber looking Abraham Lincoln.

  Dan was familiar with the artist, in fact there were few contemporary artists he didn’t know by sight. A few days earlier he had made an off the cuff comment to the class, a joke really, and said that time would forget Mark Ryden. It was a comment that Karina had latched onto and returned to challenge him on that rainy Tuesday.

  In that hour they had only looked at twelve paintings in that book and yet each time Karina had defended her thesis that provoked Dan’s original dismissal of Ryden. She pointed out the similarities between other artists of the absurd, drawing a long line from Dali to Warhol to Goya, with a half dozen stops along the way. There was a determination to her opinions, a lucid and specific logic that surprised him in its maturity. He felt less like he was talking to a student, and more like he was engaging his equal. And perhaps, with time, his protege. Her enthusiasm and strong opinions sparked his interest, as well as the way her hand brushed his thigh when she turned the pages of the book and he wondered: was it an accident she sat so close?

  “I’m so sorry professor,” she said as she closed the book. “As much as I’d love to keep proving you wrong, I haven’t eaten since breakfast. I might go face first into the rug if I don’t get some chow.”

  She stood up, slinging her ratty backpack over her shoulders. As she turned his eyes fell to where her backpack caught her shirt and lifted it, revealing a colorful tattoo that hugged her hips and disappeared behind her lower back. The shirt fell, like a curtain, hiding her inked skin, and his eyes snapped back up her body as she turned to him. He held out her book and said: “Well, you’ve certainly made a persuasive argument, I’ll grant you that.”

  “It’s not an argument if I’m right,” she quipped, those bright eyes of hers, that confident smile of a twenty-three year old girl that knew exactly how attractive she was. “Keep it,” she said. “Maybe it’ll change your mind about him.”

  “Thank you. Who knows? It just might...”

  Then she walked to the door. “Bye, Professor.”

  “Karina,” Dan called out, butterflies growing in his stomach for the first time in years. In that silence, as she turned back to him, he was aware of a great divide, a line between where he stood and where he was moving toward. Like a deep breath, a nervous step in a direction he’d never considered until he’d seen part of that tattoo and realized he wanted to see it all. Then the words left his mouth before he could stop himself. “Do you want to, I dunno, maybe get dinner together? Continue this debate?”

  “Have you heard of the Caracci Institute?” he asked her.

  “No,” she answered, laying her head across his chest as she ran her fingers across his stomach. They had slept until noon again, awoken by the lazy sunbeams that spilled through the window overlooking the vineyards.

  The sex had been, as always, exquisite and exhausting. She did things to him, let him do things in return that he had joked about with Linda years ago until they were dismissed as too kinky and never discussed again. She wasn’t that kind of woman, his wife. But Karina was, and it was a violent act between the two of them, an act of sheer physical domination that often lasted well into the early hours and left them both sore and short of words.

  “There are women and there are wives,” Linda's father had once mumbled through scotch soaked lips as he smoked his cigarette on the porch after Tommy was born. “It’s best not to confuse what we can do with each,” he laughed and gave Dan an uncomfortable slap on the shoulder. Perhaps the old man, in a moment of clarity between the fog of libation, had seen a bit of his own wayward tendencies in his son-in-law.

  “The Caracci Institute.” Dan cleared his throat. “It’s a program in Italy, government funded. An old friend runs it. The idea is students work hands on doing restoration all around the country. Places of historical value that, for whatever reason, can’t afford to fix up their frescos and what have you. They get cheap labor, students get hands on credit. Win win.”

  “Sounds nice,” she said, laying her head on his chest. “I love listening to your heart. I can hear it go pitter pat.”

  “The reason I ask is, well, he contacted me, just the other day actually. He asked if I knew anyone worth sponsoring for the program. And I do.”

  She lifted her head, face furrowed with confusion. “What are you saying?”

  “Chance of a lifetime. For someone of your talent, it’s a no brainer.”

  “Italy huh?” She drummed her fingers on his chest, biting her bottom lip.

  “It’d be a small team, ten or so students, all hand picked, full academic credits and, of course, full acknowledgement of the work done.”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come on boo bear, fully funded, a semester in Italy, credit, there has to be a catch.”

  “Well, I guess there is.”

  “So? What is it?”

  “It’s a not a semester.”

  “It’s not?”

  “It’s a full year.”

  “A year?”

  “Summer to summer. It starts in June.”

  She lifted her head, those two thin eyebrows arching into small spires. “This June?”

  Dan nodded. “This June.”

  She sat up in bed, eyes fixed on her feet, fingers tapping.

  “I don’t know, that only gives me a month to decide,” she said, but he knew that the seed had been planted. Now all it needed was some water.

  “He’s already filled nine spots. He wants to know by the end of the week.”

  She sat there, monk-like and lost in contemplation. His finger slid down the tattoos that he found so exotic, so enticing in the first days and weeks of the affair. An
d there, in that hotel room, something he hoped he would soon see no more.

  There would be doubt, of course. He knew this. She loved him, or at least, she thought she did in that way that most first loves feel absolute. She also loved art, and she knew with confidence that she was better than all the other students in her class. If the seed took he could have his life back. He could undo the mistake, cover the lie he had lived for the last few months no different than a small blemish on a painting.

  “What do you think I should do?” she asked, and he realized that for all her strong opinions, for all the times she’d been the sole voice speaking up in class, for all the fire behind her eyes, there was still a confused and scared girl in there.

  “I think,” Dan said, choosing his words with care. “I think, opportunities like this come around once, maybe twice a decade.”

  His fingers ran down the curve of her spine again, but she no longer purred to his touch or grew goosebumps. Instead, she stared off, eyes focused perhaps on the future, and he sensed that seed had begun to grow roots.

  Home Work

  “DO WE REALLY have to keep it here?” Linda asked, wrinkling her nose. She stood before it, the unknown painting, that enormous mismatched beast which had, until moments ago, sat beneath a cotton sheet and tarp. It was in a state of being unwrapped, like a hideous present placed at the end of the study in their house.

  “Just for now,” Dan answered. “We could move it off site but then, well, it’s off site. Personally, I don’t feel like driving a few miles to sit in a cold warehouse.”

  Mr. Glass whistled and when Dan considered it he realized it had been an untruth. He had left the university intending to deposit the painting off site at the private storage unit he kept. But as he studied the painting he felt a strange compulsion, a familiarity with the artist perhaps, or some of the clues. And that card stock note that bore those four words, a title perhaps, challenging him. Sure, he could have left it at the storage locker, in the dark and next to other half forgotten projects he would remember once a semester when it came time to submit a report. Yet he didn’t. And if pressed why, like Linda had, he simply preferred to say that he enjoyed taking his work home with him, which was as true and as good a reason, he supposed, as any other.