Shades of Eva (13 page)

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.”

***

“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.

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.

***

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.