Shades of Eva, page 10
Yes, things were beginning to clear up. Amelia was talking about my kind of justice. The monetary kind!
“What’s your plan?” I asked Amelia, trying again to get a straight answer to a crooked question. “How much you want to take Ully for?”
Amelia seemed amused. “For someone who hasn’t answered my question,” she replied, “you expect an awful lot of answers to yours. Are you coming home or not?”
“I want to know what the hell you got up your sleeve!”
“Mitchell, you’ll need to come home and see some things for yourself, first. There is a trail, and there are some assets to be redistributed. But you’ll need to come home.”
“I want to know what you know!” I demanded. “I want to know who this friend of Ully’s is!”
“His name is Fred Levantle.”
“Where is he then?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Well, I assume you—or one of your contacts—are close to finding this asshole. You’ve checked out Ully, and you’re here.”
“It’s your guy,” Amelia responded rather quickly. “It’s your mother’s past. But from the sounds of it, if he doesn’t have any money, then what’s the point of finding him?”
With that, Amelia hit me right where she should have. Did I want to return home to bring these men to justice for what Amelia believed they did, or did I just want to get my hands on some of Ully’s money? And did I really care about Fred Levantle? Did he have anything to offer me except a new face to put to a new name in a very old mystery?
I wasn’t sure of the answers to those questions right then, but I was curious. “Please tell me you know where this guy is!”
“I can’t, because I don’t.”
I shook my head. I was at a crossroads. It was yes or no, and I didn’t know what to say. Even after the reference to Ully’s money I wasn’t on board with going home. In a way, in a pitiful way, I was asking about Fred Levantle because I thought I was expected to. I was a lumberjack, a drifter, not a PI—not even close to it. I was the opposite. Amelia hunted people and I hid from them. What the hell would I do if I encountered two old men who did some bad things in their youth anyway? I’m sure the statute of limitations was up on rape; killing them wouldn’t bring anyone back. Though revenge might be sweet, it would just land me in jail; and I was already in a form of self-imposed prison.
If I seemed apathetic, or completely disorganized, I was to a point, despite my newfound curiosity and the mention of a hell of a lot of money. My disorganization is typical of us drunks. My apathy stemmed from the apparent futility of returning home. That money was probably locked up. Ully wasn’t just going to hand over one-million dollars—or one-hundred dollars even. Mom was dead. According to Amelia, so was my baby brother, Elmer. As I said, we weren’t bringing anybody back.
“And even if we found this friend of Ully’s,” I added, sarcastically, “it isn’t like we can get a rape kit and go swab my mother’s—”
“Have some respect!”
“Fine. Then how? How do you prove Mom wasn’t deluded? How do you know she wasn’t just getting back at this neighbor kid Fred Levantle for teasing her, or lying to her or something? What makes you think anything you found in that house has any validity to it? The whole family sounds mad! Hell, I’m evidence of that! What good can finding this Levantle do anyway, or confronting Ully? They aren’t going to help us! They aren’t going to confess to any crime! Mom might have had consensual sex with this guy, and the courts aren’t even going to look at this. It’s too old. Mom had too many problems!”
Amelia just sneered at me. “I’ve read what Eva wrote, and you haven’t. We can find out the truth if you care to look into it, and I didn’t say anything about a court!”
“No court? As in we do this ourselves?”
“That’s right.”
“As in under the radar!”
“Right.”
Again I just shook my head. “It sounds like you want to hunt these guys down and punish them. That’s not justice—that’s revenge, and I’m not a mercenary.”
“Punishment has crossed my mind,” Amelia replied, “but it’s not my mother.”
There was an implicit expectation in the way she said that, as if a violent response was the only response a true son should have having been given information like this.
“Say I come back with you and we deal with this; say we find this Fred Levantle. Say Ully confesses. What do you suggest we do with them?”
“It’s not up to me,” Amelia said, repeating herself. “That’s your call. Whatever I’d do doesn’t matter. But your mother deserves justice! Under the radar or otherwise! Elmer deserves a proper burial! This guy deserves finding, and you deserve closure—and dare I say an inheritance. You deserve a proper—”
“I know—a proper station. And you’ll help me get there?”
“If you’ll help me!”
“Help you? What can I offer you?”
Amelia only smiled that coy smile I was starting to like, extinguished her cigarette, and nodded again. “Is that a yes?”
I thought I’d answered her, but perhaps I never said the word.
***
Chapter 12
Recorded 911 call from December 12, 1970
Operator: 911, what’s your emergency?
Mitchell: It’s my mommy. I think she died.
Operator: What’s your name, honey?
Mitchell: Mitchell.
Operator: Where is your mommy, sweetie?
Mitchell: She’s in bed. She’s on her side.
Operator: Is she breathing?
Mitchell: No.
Operator: I want you to put a hand on her heart. Tell me if you feel a heartbeat, Mitchell.
Mitchell: I can’t.
Operator: You can’t feel a heartbeat?
Mitchell: I can’t touch her.
Operator: Honey, it will be okay. You have to do that.
Mitchell: I can’t. She’s purple. She won’t let me.
Operator: Mitchell, listen to me! Do you know CPR?
Mitchell: (no response)
Operator: Mitchell, I need you to roll your mother onto her back and plug her nose; and I need you to blow into her mouth.
Mitchell: I can’t. I can’t touch her. She’s…there’s something…she won’t let me!
Mom’s eyes were never more emerald than when she told me Dad had left, that we were alone, now. Just ten weeks after the shooting, Dad could take no more. He had left Mom the burden of single-motherhood and a phone number to the nearest welfare office. He left me his key to the toolshed, a fifth of Jameson inside, and a note. I’ve carried that note over every rail I’ve ever ridden to this day, not on paper, but in my head. It read:
Mitchell, you’re the man of the house now. Be the man I need you to be. Be still, but be on the lookout for tiny details. It’s the details that matter in this life. ~Dad
When I was done reading, I opened the toolbox and saw that the revolver was gone. Dad had taken everything: the peacemaker, all of the tools and the bicycles even, save a fifth of rotgut he’d left me in the HAMMERS drawer. I closed the door of the toolshed, returned the lock to its place, and then left. That was the last time I ever entered that shed.
Those last nights with Mom were haunting. She made up stories to tell me in those few remaining evenings together, just her and I. She talked about fairies and princes and heroic little boys who stabbed dragons in the heart with silvery magic swords. She read me books, some of the Oz Chronicles by L. Frank Baum: Tik Tok of Oz, the Tin Woodman, and Glinda the Good Witch. She read me the Scarecrow, Patchwork Girl, and then the Wizard of Oz, her favorite. She showed me the Oz movie with Judy Garland, and she told me how courageous she thought I was, courageous like the lion in the movie, and how she loved me like no other mother could ever love a son.
Mom had read me those books before, but she hadn’t remembered that. To the new personality she was after the lobotomy, those books were as new as the house was to her, as new as single-motherhood was to us both. I didn’t let on that I knew all the Oz stories. I liked them; I liked hearing her read to me. It was a reminder of the way things used to be, and stories were all we had in those days.
Mom was somehow sweeter after Dad left. She seemed to forgive more easily, which was out of character for her, but welcome to me. Maybe it was a side-effect of the lobotomy. She seemed not to want to fight the pain around her, nor the pain of her mother’s death, even. She was accepting. After that long, mournful cry when she learned of her mother’s passing, she seemed more willing to accept life’s hand of cards, as if she knew what was about to come, as if she were trying to make the most of her last days.
I remember the last rock that came through the living room window. It nearly hit me in the back of my head. I screamed out as I always did, stunned by the sudden explosion of glass behind us. It sprayed us both before we knew what happened. The rock settled itself on a spot on the floor just across the room from us and lay there, taunting us like a tossed grenade on the verge of explosion.
It was midwinter, and the air that sailed in behind that rock was as ice cold as the neighborhood was in those days. I stood up and ran to the hallway to get out of the room, out of the cold. Mom stood up and retrieved the stone, walked slowly to the front door, opened it, stepped out into the still, cold night, and tossed it nonchalantly into the junipers. If there was a message written on the rock, Mom didn’t say—she wouldn’t say.
I was expecting a furious outburst from her, a banshee-like scream into the icy air, which had been her customary response to such vandalism. But she was calmer now. She closed the door without screaming, without combing the landscape for a perpetrator, and turned back into the room to survey the damage. And then she smiled.
I saw that smile from behind a wall in the hallway, my hiding place. It gave me pause. I could actually feel my heart slow its pace because of that smile. She sat down on the couch in front of the broken window; a cold breeze lifted her hair and she smiled at me, again, as she patted the sofa next to her. It was a ghostly image that I can’t seem to forget no matter how hard I try because it was a beautiful image, as bittersweet as any image could be. My mother was never more inviting, and the night was never as cold.
I was afraid I might get hit by another stone if I sat by her, but Mom continued her gentle tapping of the seat beside her, a seat sparkling with slivers of shiny glass, offering me the reticent promise of momentary peace by arguing no one would throw another stone, at least not for a little while.
Mom took off her sweater and spread it out over the cushion to cover the glass. Goosebumps grew up on her skin, but she ignored them. I gathered my courage and sat down on the sweater beside her and tucked myself into her side. She held on to me tightly. We sat rocking in the silence of the room feeling the air of River Bluff roll over us, listening to the hum of the wind and the cars fleeting by, listening to the distant barking of dogs and children laughing somewhere down the block.
That night, Mom’s heart beat its last beat. She was but thirty-four-years-old. It’s a hard night to recall, because the night she died in her sleep, I had fallen asleep in her arms.
I see flashes of it all every now and then, usually in shades of purple. I remember wrestling myself free of her hug. It was a smothering, rigor-mortic embrace, but now what I wouldn’t give to be caught in her arms, again, if only for a moment. I remember trying to rouse her beneath the lavender quilt where we had lain. I remember a purplish pool of blood that had collected in her downside cheek, and purplish eyes that wouldn’t open. I remember the jolt of electricity from the shock of it all; a sensation that felt, literally, as if I’d touched a live electrical wire. It was similar, yet more intense, to the repulsive fury I’d felt from her the night of the Elms shooting.
I knew enough to call 911, but hadn’t the courage to cross the room and perform something they called CPR on her. She was so cold, and so purple, and her energy was telling me to leave her alone. It was the last thing I remember of that house, a memory I would like to have forgotten, but never could. Now I can’t quite seem to remember it well enough.
***
Chapter 13
Shadow Journal,
Entry 42 August 26, 1995
Amelia didn’t have to search for me. Her mother just asked her to look into a few things. She didn’t ask her to do what we ultimately did. She didn’t ask her to hurt anyone. Amelia wanted some artwork her aunt created, and wouldn’t you know, it was as hard, if not harder, to find that art than to find Fred Levantle? But Amelia had nothing to lose…she’d lost almost everything.
April 20, 1995
We got my things together, which weren’t many: a wallet, keys, and bloody clothes, and found our exit from Neah Bay General at eight o’clock that morning. I’d been blessed with fresh bandages for my stitches, a wrap for my bruised ribs, and a wish-you-well from the attending nurse. She also gave me a few over-the-counter Tylenol, which I tossed into a wastebasket on my way out the door. I had a better painkiller in a bottle back at my cabin.
We proceeded to Amelia’s rental car. She clicked the automatic unlock to a golden Grand Prix. We threw our gear into its back seat, climbed in, and sped off toward the coast.
I had agreed to return to River Bluff, but I could have changed my mind at that point and let the whole thing go. A part of me wishes that I had just let it go. But I couldn’t. I didn’t. My uncle’s fortune was sitting with me like an eyelash that tickles the eye.
This whole thing was more of an annoyance at that point, but one laced with a hint of promise, and one I couldn’t ignore. If I let things go, something told me that eyelash wouldn’t fall away, that there’d be no end to the itch, save the end as perceived by my rich, fat uncle, sipping drinks overlooking Lake Michigan, laughing at the memory of his teary-eyed nephew who never bothered to inquire as to how he really afforded such a lifestyle.
Amelia and I spent the next few hours touring along the coast and essentially breathing. Sometime around noon, we stopped at a seaside pub called The Pearl and went in.
Amelia seemed to relax easily, at least more easily than me. Her mind seemed to work opposite mine. She seemed present, as if focusing on one thing at one time was easy for her. She listened to me. She gave me thoughtful answers to my questions despite my detached concern. She worked at eye contact, something I’d never given much thought to do. And she didn’t mince words.
I was the opposite. I struggled to form a sentence, lived in the past and worried about the future, split between those two dimensions of time like two drifting sheets of torn paper falling through space. Sure, I’d shed my name and moved 2500 miles away to forget, which should have been the break that spawned my healing, but distance and things like aliases don’t seem to bring about healing—they don’t seem to heal anything.
That was the nature of my ignorance in those days—I wandered away to find myself and I ended up a man who lived in two realms, seldom if ever present in either, and numb to them both, one who’d found little but the bottom of a thousand empty whiskey bottles in his travels.
Even in conversation with Amelia my mind roamed to different ages. She noticed, and with the patience of a learned teacher she waited for me to return from wherever or whenever it was I had drifted. I returned to order a shot of whiskey, straight up, and then another, followed by a Whiskey Sour, and retreated to the universe of drunkenness my father had shown me so many years ago. I intended to drink until the anxiety and the memories Amelia seemed to stir in me all but wandered away.
But she wouldn’t allow me the pleasure. “Mitchell?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m miles away when I should be here with you.”
“I won’t hold it against you.”
“Why’s that?” I asked her.
“I read a book once called I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, by Joanne Greenberg. This girl, Deborah was her name, had an entire made-up world going on in her head: tribes, political hierarchies, her own archaic language, economic classes. She carried on conversations, debates, even wars, all in her head—very complicated schemes—all entirely imagined. Her parents ended up committing her to a state asylum, much like your mother and my aunt were committed.”
“Was this girl dangerous or something?”
“No. That’s just it,” Amelia replied. “She was only twelve-years-old or so. Fantasy was an adjustment she made—a way of coping with her reality. Kind of a retreat.”
“A retreat, huh?”
“She had a tumor removed from her uterus as a little girl,” Amelia explained, “and the surgery didn’t go so well. She was in a lot of pain, bled a lot, got infections, developed nightmares and insomnia, the whole ball of wax. She was about as dangerous as a butterfly. It was a beautiful, intricate world she created, but no one appreciated it. I’ve always found it fascinating that some people tend to destroy the things they don’t understand; and those who are misunderstood often try to destroy themselves for lack of understanding. Do you understand?”
“I think so.”
“The more they fought her, the deeper this girl entrenched herself into this made up world.”
“Do you think that’s what I’ve done?” I said.
“Escape?”
“Yes. Do you think I’m a coward for it?”
Amelia didn’t answer right away. “The little girl held onto her make-believe world as a form of rebellion,” Amelia offered. “She was strong in that sense.”
“But I’m not?”
“I think your uncle and your father beat the make-believe out of you, Mitchell. You ran from your dreams. You fight them. You haven’t constructed anything beautiful out here—anything protective by running away and drinking. You’ve created a box and you’ve climbed inside of it, but you’re sliding down a cliff, and I’m not sure you even realize it.”
