Shades of Eva, page 37
It wasn’t important exactly how Mitchell’s mother died, or what Mitchell had done or not done. Boys are naturally insensitive, naturally unintuitive, unobservant, and naturally defiant—particularly when fathers are absent. So the best response to Mitchell’s self-abasement was the most obvious response, and I told him so in those five simple words: “You were just a boy!”
To every argument he mustered, I countered, you were just a boy! To every hint of criticism, you were just a boy! And to every unimportant fact, true or otherwise forgotten, you were just a boy!
“I fainted in the shed, Ben.”
“You were just a boy.”
“But when I was writing, my mother’s voice came to me and she told me something. She told me something that I had forgotten all of these years.”
“You were just a boy!”
“She said that I handled it! My mother did not shoot my rapist—I did!”
He paused, and then I paused. At that instant, something wasn’t right. There was something in that phrase that you were just a boy didn’t apply to.
Who this shooter was, was an epiphany, and one of remarkable importance, perhaps, and one I could not ignore—for it wasn’t an excuse, and it wasn’t an unimportant fact. If Mitchell did shoot his rapist, then that shooting could be understood as a powerful, self-affirming event. He was not helpless. He acted. He protected himself. It was the answer to the question I had been asking him all along. What did you do to help yourself?
And on the flipside—there was the Critic’s perspective—and I knew it was coming. “Mom was crying,” Mitchell said, “and her words just poured out onto the pages like tears. It wasn’t…it wasn’t even my own handwriting.”
“Mitchell!”
“I killed a man and my mother was punished for it.”
I shook my head. “No!”
“It’s my fault! I shouldn’t have—
I cut him off. “You did not do anything to your mother, Mitchell! If she took the blame for that incident, she took the blame of her own free will. She did it for you.”
“But I killed him! And because of it, her personality was ripped out of her.”
Again, I said, “You were just a boy!”
Mitchell fell silent. I did not know what more to say, or if I should say anything more at all. I watched him for another five minutes, he staring blankly into his fog, and I, miserably into mine, wondering if this realization was true, if it would resolve anything at all, or if I had somehow damaged my client with my own journaling exercise.
Suddenly retirement seemed a little bit further away.
I had the results of his DES in my desk drawer, concealed for the time being. I didn’t need a psychiatrist to corroborate his scores. Mitchell had four, maybe five subpersonalities inside of him. His mother was likely one of them, and that was not just a wee bit disturbing. It was downright terrifying given the threats of revenge I remembered Eva making. Her sons were going to kill her rapist and burn down the mental institution where she slept. His uncle and father were two other personalities, and their voices seemed downright obvious. I reckoned his missing brother was another alter, and his grandparents, others.
This was not a multiple personality disorder per se—this was a representation of a schizophrenia, or perhaps some odd combination between the two disorders—perhaps a schizophrenia undifferentiated, or as we used to say in his mother’s day: Schizophrenia NOS—Not Otherwise Specified—and it was as salient a case as I’d ever seen.
He had brought his family back to life by imagining them back to life, and he was carrying them with him in a most tortured way. They were his congregation. It just wasn’t the time to tell him.
As it turns out, I probably should have. I could have pushed the envelope. It might have cued him to get started on some medication and to comply with my directions to seek more expert assistance. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t have the opportunity to tell him—at least not that day. He—or whomever he was at that time—stood up, wobbly with something like inebriation, grabbed his bomber jacket from the coat rack, and slid feverishly, I might say wormishly, out the door.
***
Chapter 39
Wednesday: 10:10 a.m.
I left Ben Levantle’s office that morning feeling as if I were half asleep. It had been twenty-four hours since my last Valium or Dilaudid, and four days since my last drop of alcohol. I knew something was wrong with me because when I drove away from Ben’s office, I didn’t know where I was going, and I couldn’t remember where I was supposed to be.
Fact was I had a shift at Coastal State to attend to at noon. I was supposed to locate the art gallery, but it was a shift I wouldn’t make.
My phone was off and by the time I realized Amelia had been trying to reach me, it was 6:00 p.m. I was six hours late for work, and I’d lost almost eight hours of time. I hadn’t a clue as to what I’d been doing since I’d left Ben’s office.
It was around seven that evening when the Impala wound up at Grandpa Virgil’s river house. Amelia was there, thankfully. She seemed relieved when she opened the door to let me in, but she was not happy.
“Where have you been?” She almost hollered, grabbing me by the jacket and pulling me inside.
I think something in my eyes answered for me, or gave me away. She let go of me and her mood mellowed. I saw sadness in her eyes, or maybe sympathy. Maybe it was disgust. It was hard to tell.
And then Amelia asked me a strange question. She said, “Who are you?”
I just shook my head. I wasn’t sure how to answer that.
Amelia took my hand and walked me through the dining room and led me out into the back yard. She had a strange look on her face. That’s when she told me that things had taken a sideways turn. She said that Ully had flipped his lid. I asked her what she meant by that—but somehow I knew. I’d been suspecting Ully would turn on us all along.
Amelia was angry. She was pacing almost frantically. “He’s told them about you…and about me. He told them I tortured a false confession out of him, and that you did, too. He told them that we sent him to the Asylum to point out Elmer’s grave—a grave that didn’t exist. Police are looking for us, Mitchell.”
I called Ully a couple different names, but Amelia didn’t seem to hear me. She seemed lost in her thoughts. Ully had a three-day pass and all he had to do was to cooperate with us. All he had to do was lead us to the spot where Elmer was buried and keep his mouth shut about the rest until we had Elmer and the art. That was it. If he could do that then he’d keep ninety percent of his money and walk.
But that wasn’t all Ully had done.
Amelia looked me in the eyes and said, “He’s killed someone, Mitchell. He killed my best friend, and now he’s going to pay.”
Before I could ask specifics on who this friend of hers was and what had happened to him (or her), or what we were going to do about her aunt’s artwork, Amelia was asking me where I’d been all day.
I told her I didn’t know…that I’d just been driving.
Thankfully, Amelia let it go at that. She seemed to understand what had happened to me, at least in part.
Amelia took my hand and led me to a tire swing that was hanging from an aging maple near the bank of the river. She took a seat in the tire and began slowly twirling herself.
I sat down in the grass beneath the tree and just watched her for a time, waiting for Amelia to relax and explain what in the hell Ully had done to her friend.
She finally spoke. She asked me, “How was your session with Ben?” Her friend and just gotten killed and she was asking how my counseling session went.
“Police are after us, then?” I responded, ignoring the question.
“Yes. They want us both, Mitchell.”
“Does Ben know about this?”
“Yes, they called Ben.”
“So they’re looking for Fred?”
“They’re looking for answers—and they’re looking for you—and for me.”
“Well what did Ben say?”
“That he doesn’t know where Fred is! Or you.”
“What else did Ully tell them?”
“Ully told them who I am. He told them you’d taken an alias and together we’d infiltrated the Asylum to recover the remains of your missing brother. He told them you were crazy, Mitchell. He told them we cut an oak tree down trying to get to Elmer and that we were looking for Fred Levantle.”
“So Ben knows what I’ve done.”
“Yes. They told him Ully’s story, and your name came up of course. Ully was, after all, your uncle. Ben knows you were just using him, Mitchell. It’s over.”
I was shaking my head. Any chance we had at locating Fred seemed suddenly to have vanished.
“You said Ully killed your best friend. What happened?”
“I sent someone to cash out the account in the Caymans. But someone else was there.”
“Who?”
Amelia began crying. “I’m not sure who he used, but he killed—
Amelia didn’t finish her sentence. For some reason she still couldn’t tell me who this friend was.
“The money’s gone, Mitchell.”
“Please tell me, Amelia. I need to know what happened there. I don’t care about the money.”
Amelia just shook her head and wiped at her eyes. She cried for another minute and then seemed to turn angry again. She kept repeating, “That motherfucker is going to pay! That motherfucker is going to pay!”
“Where is Ully? Is he still at the Asylum?”
Amelia sniffed and wiped some more tears away, and gathered herself. She was nodding. “Yes. He’s still there until tomorrow.”
“Have they connected the Cayman account to you?”
Amelia was shaking her head. “Not yet, but they will. They haven’t yet identified—
Again, she cut herself off. This was obviously someone very special to her.
“He was moved into the prison wing, Ward C, this afternoon because he wants more protection. He’s going to line up a private security team to guard him when he gets out. He’s surrounded right now. It’s virtually impossible to get to him.”
Amelia had taken her Beretta out of its holster and had begun to look down its sightlines. She was aiming the gun at some arbitrary point in the distance out over the water, and then she pulled the trigger. There was no bang. It was not loaded.
Amelia turned around to face me, holstered her gun, and changed her expression. “This is a good thing, Mitchell,” she began, taking hold of the tire swing’s rope again and sitting down in the tire. “They’re looking for your mother’s rapist, even if it is just to warn him. It might be the only chance we have at finding him.”
I couldn’t match her effort at optimism. Police were looking for Amelia and I with the same vigor, if not more. Optimism was not something I was feeling. I was feeling sick, and my limbs were starting to tremble again.
“I’m just glad they didn’t find you in this condition,” Amelia said, staring at me from the swing. “Ben’s worried about you, and so am I. We’re going to have to get you some help. I don’t think your detox is going so well.”
But detox was the last of my concerns. I was a phone call away from going to prison, and Amelia was, too. “I’ll be okay,” I told her. “I just need a good sleep.”
“You’ve quit drinking cold turkey! You have to have some medication when you do that! I have to get you some more pills.”
My head was swimming. All it seemed I could see were the tiny bones of my dead baby brother in my hands, prison bars, and Mom’s shiny coffin hovering over a big empty hole.
Amelia must have sensed my despair; but if she did, she didn’t comment on it. She simply walked over to me, picked up a couple stones from the river’s edge, handed one to me, and with a certain gesture we tossed them out over the water and listened to them skip mindlessly across the sheer surface of the St. Joseph. When I heard the last dance of our stones clap peacefully against the water, I tried one more time. “Who was your friend?”
Amelia looked at me and nodded, then hung her head and turned away to walk back toward the tire swing. “Her name was Sophia. But right now I want to swing.”
We walked back to the tire that hung from that old maple and I told Amelia to get in, and she did. I began to twirl her. I spun her for a minute and then picked up my pace until I had her rotating so fast she was about to fall out. Amelia began laughing and I remember her hollering out, “You’re going to make me throw up.” She screamed, but she had raised her feet and threw back her head with all of the playfulness of a little kid and continued to swing.
I loved that about her—that bipolar nature of hers. It was so real.
She was happy one instant, then intense as all hell. She was real, like my mother was real—a bipolar kindred spirit dropped from the heavens into my world, and for a moment, this bipolar beauty was mine. I loved that laughter—I loved her laugh. It felt good to laugh with her if only for a moment.
I sat down on the grass after a few minutes of spinning and watched her twirl about and watched the tire come to a slow halt.
Amelia rolled out into the grass and lay there staring up at the evening sky and reached an arm out inviting me to lie beside her.
I moved over and sat down on the grass next to her, then laid down, offering myself as a humble substitute for the one she must have truly wanted. I listened to her talking on as she caught her breath, watching all the while the sky turn a sort of pale yellow, wondering all the while who Sophia was. So I asked.
“She was with me in the Army,” Amelia said. “She’s the one who found you in Neah Bay.”
As Amelia began to explain, the earth began to spin. The more she talked, the quieter things became until at once I could neither hear the river flowing, nor see Amelia or that pale yellow sky.
I had the sensation that I was being watched from someone or something inside the house. Maybe it was my grandfather’s ghost watching me, or perhaps that of my teenage mother. I looked to the back of the house, to the back porch and then up to my mother’s window, but I saw no one, just a cat sitting in the window sill—but something wasn’t right. There was no cat inside that house, yet there was one sitting there, staring at me. Its eyes seemed to be alternating a bright, glowing white, and then black. It was crouching in fear, not really sitting, and it was watching me as if I didn’t belong in the yard, as if I were trespassing.
Then I heard Amelia say, “You’re swinging, again,” or maybe it was Mom calling to me, warning me not to do that. She used to say there were doctors in white coats who watched for such things. And then someone asked me if I could hear her.
I tried to say yes, but I could barely speak, and then my trembling intensified. I’m not sure how long this lasted, but when my body finally seemed to calm, and I was finally able to speak, I was apologizing, and for what, I did not remember.
I thought I heard someone say something about a seizure, but I wasn’t sure. I opened my eyes and I was in another part of the yard and Amelia was hefting me to my feet. “I am sorry that it has to be this way,” she was saying as she led me into the house. “We don’t have to continue with this.”
“No!” I said. “I’ll be alright. I’m going to see this through. We’ll find him! We’ll get your aunt’s things.”
I gathered myself together as best I could. I shook my head to clear the cobwebs as if I was stifling a sneeze, and then I walked inside. With Amelia’s help, I climbed the stairs to my mother’s bedroom. I lay down on the old boxed springs that may have once been Mom’s and drifted into an uneasy, post-convulsive sleep.
Amelia threw a blanket over me sometime later, and I heard her whispering, but she didn’t seem to be whispering to me. I heard her say, “He had a seizure. We need to get him some medicine.”
She seemed to be talking to someone else. Maybe it was one of her contacts. I tried to look to see, but I couldn’t muster the strength to open my eyes. It was as if the gravel that had once claimed my voice had returned in the form of cement to claim my vision. I couldn’t see and I was so tired.
“We will do that,” a voice said, responding to the whisper with one of his own. “I will help you.” It was a man’s voice, and a familiar one. And then he said, “I’m in. What do you want me to do?”
I didn’t hear Amelia reply to his question. I only remember a fan coming on and a cool breeze wash over me. Amelia—I think—planted a kiss on my forehead and left me to rest, leaving me with the sound of not one, but two sets of footsteps leaving the room.
Not long after, I felt someone place a pill in my mouth and pour cool water over my lips. I drank the water and swallowed the pill. And as the night wore on, I heard someone turn the fan off. Then I heard the prying of metal on wood, and a window pop open. I felt a breeze. The cool air of a Michigan summer night filled the room with the familiar scent of a distant bonfire and my eyes began to open.
Amelia had taken a seat in a chair beside my bed. The moonlight was just enough to illuminate her face. She was asleep in an armchair. It was Neah Bay General all over again, except in Neah Bay, I was dreaming about a little girl lying in a bed like this. This time, it was me in that bed.
I could finally see again, and for that I was relieved. The cobwebs were beginning to clear, as well.
After a few minutes of watching the moon outside work its way across the window, Amelia stirred. I looked at my wristwatch and hit its tiny light to illuminate it. It was close to midnight. I’d been asleep for almost four hours.
I called Amelia’s name, and she awakened.
“Are you okay,” I asked her.
“I’m okay,” she responded. She stood up, walked over to the edge of the boxed springs and got into bed beside me. She put her head on my chest.
I let her rest for a few minutes, but I had to know. “Who was that you were talking to earlier?”
“The voice you heard was your father’s, Mitchell.”
