Shades of Eva, page 9
Fear wasn’t all I was feeling, though. There was something else. Mom’s reaction made me angry at Ellie, and Ully, too—not just at Dad. A rage began to emerge in me to compliment the fear and the resentment I was starting to feel. Where had they been my entire life? Why hadn’t they come to visit us? Why had I remembered so little about them? Why didn’t Ully call on Mom when Ellie was sick, and had he even bothered to call Mom when she was at the Asylum having God knows what done to her? Had Dad? Had anyone been there to hold her hand while the doctors put the eyelid retractors in place, while the leukotome cutter worked its way through her orbital sockets and then well into her brain?
And why hadn’t anyone been there to say, Welcome home!
But if I was angry at my father, Mom put a stop to that. “Don’t be mad at Daddy,” she had said, remembering, somehow, the smallest and oldest piece of their marital history, as well as a piece of our entire family’s. “He is sick. We are all sick, Mitchell. We always have been, and we probably always will be.”
I tried to forgive my father, but I couldn’t. What good does forgiveness do for someone who isn’t there to receive it?
And Mom had an answer for that, too. “Forgiveness is for you, Mitchell—not for the forgiven.”
Maybe it was another form of reverse psychology—Dad’s leaving. Maybe he knew I wanted him to leave. Maybe he left so that I’d learn to appreciate him, and if I begged him enough, or promised to play his games the right way, maybe he’d come back to us. But it didn’t work. No pleas. No promises. No I’m sorrys worked with Dad.
All I knew was that Mom and I were alone. Despite the stones soaring through the windows and the bitter coldness of a fatherless house, I could take comfort in at least one thing: Mom and I were finally able to speak again.
***
Chapter 10
Shadow Journal entry
August 20, 1995
Amelia had an interesting take on dreams. Most people think dreams are a sort of moving picture your brain creates to make sense of experience. Amelia said that was one way to look at it. Another way was to imagine your dream as a window into someone else’s reality—not a way of making sense of your own past, or your own intentions, but an actual recollection of an event that actually happened in an ancestor’s life. She called this genetic memory. I thought she was crazy. Now I’m not so sure!
“Tell me about your dream, Mitchell; the one about the house on the river.”
“You wouldn’t want to know,” I said. “Hell, I don’t want to know.” But Amelia said to try her, so I did.
“There’s this old country home, a big two-story house near a frozen river. It’s winter I guess.”
“Thus the frozen river,” Amelia smiled.
“Yes, a frozen river! There’s a young girl lying in her bed. I’m standing in her room. She’s maybe twelve, and that’s about how old I am. I don’t belong there; I’m just there.”
Amelia shifted in her chair as if she somehow disagreed with me not belonging there.
“The girl’s ceiling is gray and her paint is peeling. The paint around her window is peeling, too; and there aren’t any curtains in the window. Her window is black, somehow, like it’s been painted that way—or maybe it’s just night-time.
“Her room’s ice cold. I can see frost forming on the window and her breath is, like crystallizing. She lays there, shivering, watching for something, or maybe she’s listening. I don’t know. She’s scared of something, or sad. She has teardrops frozen beneath her eyes, glistening like little tiny diamonds.
“Then she hears something. Her eyes open wide. There is a noise like someone’s in her closet—like a thumping. There’s a weird laughing somewhere in the walls and then she grabs a stuffed rabbit and tries to bury herself in her covers, and then the closet door opens.”
There was a pause.
“And then what?” Amelia said.
“The little girl screams. That’s when I always wake up.”
“That’s when you scream, too,” Amelia said. She sat back and smiled a thankful smile.
I nodded.
“It’s not an accidental dream, Mitchell.”
“What are you talking about?”
Amelia withdrew another smoke and lit it. “Have you ever seen your grandparents’ home…where your mother grew up?”
“The one you rent?”
“Right.”
“No I haven’t.”
“Well, you just described your mother’s bedroom. You even described the way your mother’s—
Amelia stopped mid-sentence, which wasn’t like her. “The way—
Again, she paused.
“The way what?”
“The way her rapist used to get to her.”
Again, I gaped at her. I was describing a random dream about a random girl, and now Amelia was connecting that dream to my mother.
“What are you talking about?” I said.
Amelia stared hard at me and then took in a deep draw of smoke. “That friend of Ully’s! The friend who helped him kill your brother. He raped your Mom in a room like that. This was a memory, Mitchell, not a dream!”
Amelia called my dream a genetic memory, an hereditary remembering of an event that actually happened. She called it genetic because she believed the experience had been passed down to me somehow—down from that little girl, in fact—a little girl Amelia believed was my mother, raped in the very house Amelia had been renting.
I was astounded. One: that this private investigator had taken the extraordinary step of actually renting my mother’s childhood home on her mother’s request that there was something in my mother’s life to explore. Two: that she actually appreciated the dream, didn’t judge me for dreaming it like Uncle Ully used to. And C: I was astounded by the idea that memories had anything to do with heredity. I’d never considered memories—or dreams for that matter—anything but mental imagery, intangible and entirely abstract energy, completely confined to one person, to one mind at one time, and principally useless.
Nothing Amelia said or did was ordinary. That was a reality I would have to suffer. She spoke so confidently about her genetic memory theory that it scared me a bit; a lumberjack in the Pacific, a bar room brawler, scared by an idea. What she was suggesting was insane, if not downright supernatural: hereditary dreams. And it was personal. Somehow, I felt transparent. If these were the answers from the ghost of Christmas past, I didn’t like the answers I was being given, or how they were coming about.
I felt like Amelia had an eye in several generations—or maybe Mom had that eye—as if they were each capable of time travel or something and were simultaneously watching me, one from the present and one from the past.
It would have been easy to attribute something otherworldly to this stranger, or to consider her something like an angel, even. It would be easy to drift back into sleep content with the idea that I was now brain-damaged and just accept this new nightmare as part of that damage. That dreamscape was more acceptable to me than dealing with the reality of the ghosts of my family’s past or Amelia’s present.
The simple fact was: Amelia was a PI—this was what she did. She hunted people. She investigated lives. She made correlations. She drew conclusions. She just happened to have rented Mom’s childhood home because her mother made a deathbed request, and she just happened to have sensed something familiar about what I dreamed in that home. And I was an alcoholic assault victim on the verge of delirium, probably brain-damaged if not brain-dead. Those were the only answers I was comfortable with right then.
But I was curious. “Have you actually slept in my mother’s room?”
“Yes, I’ve slept in your mother’s room, and it remains just as you describe it in your dream, right down to the peeling paint.” Amelia leaned forward. “Mitchell, your mother has been calling out to you. Don’t you see that? Something extraordinary is happening here.”
I was shaking my head. Our time together had moved from fortunate to irritating to downright creepy.
“You don’t believe me!” Amelia said, leaning back in her chair. “You don’t believe your dream actually happened.”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “Not like you’re framing it.”
She took in another draw of smoke. “Even if it isn’t genetic,” Amelia said, “it might be a representation of information that you’ve heard, or overheard, or something you’ve imagined because of stories she used to tell, or stories others have told. We all have the capability to remember what our ancestors experienced. Sometimes we remember from the clues around us.”
“What clues?” I said. “My mother was lobotomized. She didn’t remember anything, and Dad was quiet as a pimp in synagogue.”
“But there are others who did remember, and maybe they talked to you. Maybe they talked around you. Maybe you read something that you’ve forgotten. We piece these things together to form a picture of people, of their experience. It’s one way we can truly remember people.”
I wasn’t buying this. I was that skeptic who demanded proof, and this esoteric theory of Amelia’s was just plain spooky. I wasn’t ready for innuendo of this nature. It was a hard thing to fathom, the idea that one’s dead mother had called out to you before you were ever born, or let alone dreamed something that she passed on to you like hair color or a facial feature. It was difficult to imagine that I had somehow pieced together this recurring dream from facets of information taken over the course of a life—and not my life—as if I were somehow stitching together incidental pieces of a quilt that had already been stitched together by someone else.
I changed the subject to something that I did understand: my reservations for returning to River Bluff. It was hard to have to face the memories of what happened there. It was hard to imagine facing the truth of what your family, what your uncle, your father, and your grandparents had become. Who wants to do that when the past means nothing but pain?
There was little to be gained, as far as I was concerned, in facing mine or my mother’s past. Things like justice and dreams were still just intangibles to me, abstractions with which I found little use, and littler interest.
And then I remembered something else: Ully used to hit me for dreaming; specifically, for dreaming about the river home and that little girl. I told Amelia so, and she asked me what I meant.
I told her that after my mother died I was made to move in with Ully in Gary. I told her that’s when the dreams started. I told her that’s when the whippings began. I told her the first beating was the worst because it was the least expected. I told her that when I finished telling Ully about the little girl and the thumping in her closet, that Ully suddenly took off his belt and started beating me with it. I told her that he flogged me near senseless and finished my punishment with a simple command. Stop dreaming that dream!
I was entirely at a loss as to how to prevent dreaming about this little girl. How does anyone keep from dreaming? A dream is something that comes over you. I didn’t know any way to stop that little girl from entering my head any more than I could avoid catching a cold.
What I did do was to stop telling Ully about it, and to try to stop myself from crying out in the night. But that’s hard to do. Every month with the regularity of a lunar cycle, this girl appeared. Every month like clockwork I erupted with the dreamed spent fury of Old Faithful—and every month, Ully noticed. How he used to color my ass red for those dreams! He wasn’t so much concerned with why I was crying out, let alone what he could do to help me acclimate to life as an orphan child. He was concerned with why I kept dreaming that dream in spite of his command, as if my dreaming and that crying out were nothing more than blatant defiance to his authority, or worse, evidence of the same mental illness the family once saw in my mother.
She used to cry out, too.
Maybe I was mentally ill. Maybe this was what uncontrolled passion was truly like. Maybe I was headed for the Asylum, the same place my brother was born into, the same place from whence he disappeared into the oblivion I was now beginning to crave.
But Amelia disagreed. She believed that Ully colored me red, so to speak, because what I dreamed was a genetic memory—a recollection of something Ully bloody knew about—and he bloody knew it. It had nothing to do with mental illness, and everything to do with the past. Amelia said what he was doing was trying to whip the memory out of me, if not the Mom out of me, because I was the only one holding onto it—the only one holding on to her.
He was beating me like I beat myself for remembering—like I was beating myself now in the bars trying to forget—trying to forget her. Amelia called my confessing of that dream courageous. She called it noble. She called it a glimmer of hope and a first strike back, as if the fighter who she’d just rescued had never thrown a punch at all.
She promised not to laugh, or judge, or ever punish me for dreaming, any dream, and especially that one. She thanked me for telling her about it. Thanked me for remembering my mother. “Thank you,” she said, waiting for life to alter my blank expression; waiting for me to return from wherever or whenever it was I had just retreated.
That place of retreat was the thought I had had so many years ago, of how strange it was for a mother to forget a son’s name. I had done just that, yet in the reverse—I had forgotten Mom, and on purpose. And that, Mom said, was just like killing someone.
But with those two words—thank you—Amelia took the sting out of a life’s worth of beatings—and some out of the beatings I’d been inflicting on myself. But those words had a double meaning: they brought me back to remembering my mother, to remembering parts of her and times of her life I’d long since forgotten or never even considered, and they brought me right back to my mother’s smothering arms, and right back to the toolshed.
Before I could say yes, that I would return to Michigan and look into these things, I had to find out what else Amelia meant by inheritance. What I truly wanted was incentive, and of the monetary variety. Amelia knew it and I knew it. As thankful as I was for Amelia’s sympathetic ear, and her sentimental respect for the past, sentiment and things like justice weren’t things that moved someone like me to act. Not back then.
I remember seeing the sad recognition of that sad truth in Amelia’s eyes as I stalled and offered her my thousand unspoken excuses. That recognition made her eyes blaze green-hot with disappointment, as if the color of fire wasn’t really orange or white or red, or some combination therein, but a piercing emerald color. I remember the downcast look on her face and the effort she must have been mustering to simply tolerate the superficiality of Eva’s son. I remember the look of regret, too, that painted her face. It was a look not unlike that on a child’s face when she can’t quite reach a wanted toy on a shelf.
Intangibles weren’t mattering to me, and that was mattering to Amelia. It wasn’t that she had no evidence of a crime. She had an attic full of it with names, dates, and locations. Her disappointment came from the realization that it wasn’t evidence that I really wanted, but the promise of money.
I hadn’t even asked the first name of Ully’s friend, the so-called friend who allegedly used my mother’s closet as a portal into her room, a portal to a room where he could rape her, where it was possible that a baby could be conceived over the course of weekend pass from the loony bin. I hadn’t even bothered to ask.
“What would bring you home, Mitchell, if not justice? Is it a money inheritance that you want? What would you really like to inherit, Mitchell?”
“Something besides more pain,” I said, which must have sounded selfish, but at least it was honest. “You know, if you want to make a difference then offer me something besides more complex. Can you do that?”
“What if I told you that I knew why your mother was committed? What if I told you that she wasn’t crazy? What if I told you that she threw your grandfather down a flight of stairs because she was defending herself?”
I didn’t know she’d done that.
“And she was defending you in that toolshed. You owe her, Mitchell. She doesn’t owe you.”
I sat thoughtless and motionless.
“You have more inheritance than you realize,” Amelia said.
I was expressionless.
“You are such a fool, but I can suffer you because this has all been forgotten for way too long. And it’s not all your fault.”
I sneered at the thought of someone suffering me. That was an old theme, too—and nothing, truth be told, had been forgotten. The past lingered like that word on the tip of the tongue—like that cancer in the marrow of the bones, like a gene imprisoned in the DNA of one’s cells threatening its inevitable breakout. Lobotomies couldn’t destroy the past. Hell, death wasn’t even a barrier as far as Amelia was concerned. Nothing had been forgotten; the past was just hidden away, just lost for a little while waiting to be dreamed again.
And that’s when the money came into play.
“If money is all that moves you,” Amelia said, shaking her head, “then perhaps one-million dollars will get you on a plane.”
***
Chapter 11
“One-million dollars? Are you kidding me? Where the hell did that come from?”
“Question is,” Amelia replied, “where the hell is it going?”
“What?”
“What do you know about your uncle Ully?”
“He was a real estate agent down in Gary, Indiana. Not much else.”
“Well, he’s a little bit more than that, and he’s done pretty well for himself. About $10-million well.”
Amelia took a seat in her armchair and lit up another cigarette. With those kinds of numbers out in the open, and the way Amelia seemed to be smiling, things seemed to come into better focus. Ully had the million-dollar lakefront home in Gary, and the forty foot sailboat docked on Lake Michigan. My uncle, who wouldn’t front a nickel for a counselor for me when I could have used one, the same uncle who couldn’t drop a dime to give my mother a call, was now the uncle who had supposedly helped kill Mom’s baby—my brother—and was living off an estate valued at roughly ten-million dollars.
