Shades of Eva (11 page)

I had been taken to the police station
because no one could find my father. That’s when the questions
started. What happened? Who shot who? And why were you in the
toolshed, little Mitchell?

I couldn’t think of anything to say to these
men. I couldn’t think of anything except spaghetti, so I didn’t
answer them. That’s what Elms looked like: a spaghetti dinner. He
was lying in a sauce-like pool of blood. Cordlike, whitened strands
of nerves or tendons peeked through the ravaged flesh of his thighs
like long, hidden spaghetti noodles.

But that was stupid.

They asked me what I was doing outside in
the dark, and why I had alcohol on my breath. I didn’t know that I
did. I didn’t remember drinking much beyond a couple sips. I didn’t
want to get Dad in trouble, so I didn’t answer. They told me to
straighten up. They told me to speak up and to quit lying, and then
Dad came in and told them all to back off.

I remember Dad yelling. I remember the
police put him on the floor. I remember he spent the next few
nights in jail, and I spent the next few days in a foster home
trying to answer more of those odd questions from the softer voices
of ladies with nametags and high heels. Why, what, and how
questions? Who, where, and when, little Mitchell?—trying to clear
the shameful, confusing sludge forming in my throat, trying to
answer the teary-eyed pleas of these women who called themselves
social workers, offering them nothing more than a guttural I’m
sorry, but even that didn’t come out as words, just a grunt, as if
I were the animal these people seemed to suspect I just might
be.

So I quit opening my mouth, and I quit
trying to answer all those questions. I simply gave in to the
restlessness that comes from forgetting, a similar restlessness
that comes from having been forgotten.

Dad was released and I was sent home to be
with him. Mom was still at the hospital—at the Asylum as Amelia was
calling it—being evaluated. Dad wasn’t the same. He was quiet. He
matched my muted state silence for awkward silence. It was a
contest of wills I hadn’t expected, and the punishment I assumed it
was did little but cement the coarsening silence that had overtaken
my tiny spirit. He never said a word to me until Mom came home a
few weeks later.

Sometime after Mom’s return, when I was
finally able to speak, and Mom was finally able to answer me, I
would ask her why Dad had ignored me in those days after the
shooting.

She would tell me that the doctors had told
him to use something called reverse psychology with me. She would
say they told him to ignore me when he brought me home, that
perhaps that would spark my willingness to speak again.

The explanation was supposed to make me feel
better, as if Dad’s ignoring me had some component of affection to
it, but it didn’t ease me. I would take it as Dad’s way of telling
me he didn’t give a damn; I couldn’t believe other adults would
tell him to do such a thing, anyway. I would tell Mom that it made
things worse, and then I asked her what psychology was.

"Psychology is a mind game, Mitchell. That’s
all it is, so don’t be mad at your father."

But before my voice returned, before Mom
could answer me or Dad, before any of that ever took place, Mom had
to find her own voice. She came home from the Asylum a different
person. She’d been lobotomized. She didn’t seem to remember
anything, and she wasn’t talking—not about the shooting or anything
else. Like me and like Dad, she wasn’t talking at all. It was as if
the noise in her head had been quenched, like a terrible thirst,
and without noise there was only nothingness and nothing to say. It
was as if her spirit had been flipped inside out, as if her
personality had somehow shifted to an altered version of itself, a
quiet, confused and contemplative version, as if her tape of
knowledge had been suddenly, and inexplicably, erased.

She slept twenty-two hours a day for some
time. I’d look to Dad, he’d look to me, and then we’d each look
away in a sort of stunned silence. But with time and contemplation
comes the nagging sensation of regret and a remote feeling that
something’s wrong, that there’s something on the tape after all,
something barely audible, but there that needs hearing, or needs
repeating. I think it was the shadow of erased memories emerging in
her, much like an alligator surfacing in a quiet pond where all the
alligators were supposedly exterminated.

Such was the hell of wondering that brought
her out of her malaise, and back into the land of the verbal. And
once Mom started talking, she wouldn’t shut up. How? What? Why? How
did things come to be this way? What happened to the neighbor next
door? Where is he? Have I done something to him? Why are the
neighbor kids throwing rocks through our windows? Rocks with words
painted on them like:
murderer, bitch, killer
, and
nuts
!

Mom had forgotten what she’d done. She’d
forgotten everything.

And the more Mom talked, the more Dad drank.
It was then when Dad’s drinking lost its secrecy. He wasn’t afraid
Mom would find out anymore, so he brought his stash into the house
and turned our house into his new speakeasy. That’s when he started
talking to me again. That’s when the doctors visited us. That’s
when he and Mom started fighting again, and life was beginning to
feel a little more normal.

I remember Dad holding a bottle out to me
one night as if it were a candy bar, saying something like, Son; I
know you want a little nip. Just say something to me and you can
have some.

The bribe brought about a backlash of
cusswords from Mom, and Dad took his brew to his room and slammed
the door. It was a bribe that turned coercive when the bottle game
turned into our last game of Russian roulette a night later, and
the bribe turned into another game of reverse psychology:
Tell
me to put the fucking gun down or I’m going to pull this fucking
trigger! Talk to me son, and I won’t kill you! I’m pointing this
gun at you because I love you, don’t you understand?

Mom used to cry out sometimes in the night,
and I’d hear Dad asking her what was wrong. One time I heard her
say, “I can’t remember my mother’s name.”

Mom’s forgetting moms! It was as sad as moms
forgetting sons—or as deluded. I lay there in bed staring at the
ceiling and then out into the night sky, thinking how crazy it was
for a mom to ever forget her mother’s name. It was as Dad said
demented. “I can’t remember my mother’s name,” she was saying, over
and over again.

But I remembered her name! It was Ellie, and
how I wanted to say that name—to scream it at the top of my lungs.
If I could only tell Mom who her mother was, then maybe, just
maybe, things would be okay.

Ellie became the word that moved me to
finally break the concrete in my throat. I lay there in bed those
nights chiseling away at that cement until it finally cracked. I
chiseled some more until the cries and the babbling that I had been
uttering to myself became words, as if I were an infant learning to
speak all over again, and then suddenly, with a child’s desperate
effort, I said a word: Ellie. I said it quietly, and no one heard
me—but I heard it.

That morning, I surprised Mom and Dad. I
spoke. For the first time in nine weeks, I said something. I told
Mom that I remembered her mother’s name.

Saying Ellie’s name was like offering my
mother a golden ring or a dandelion bouquet. Her eyes filled with
wonder again, and her heart seemed to sing with delight. I’m not
sure if it was because I said something, or because of the
something I said—but I didn’t care. Those emerald eyes held a
reflection of me, and Mom was smiling again—and so was I. She
hugged me. It was as if I had spoken the word that was stuck to the
tip of both our tongues, a word that meant everything to us if one
of us could only verbalize it, if we could only hear it spoken. And
now we had.

“I remember her! And I remember Ully!” I
said, startling each of them with my addendum as if I’d just
knocked a China cabinet over. These were among the first words
spoken of my recovery—and they were an outright lie.

I didn’t remember Grandma Ellie, and I’d
never met the brother she called Ully. Not at age five. But I said
otherwise, offering something of Ellie and Ully that my mother
could cling to, purging myself of some of the guilt for having done
this to her by entering that toolshed, by defying her calls to come
in, and by failing Dad’s tests. I lied. I said I knew Ellie and
Ully, and it felt good.

I painted a picture of them as vivid and as
bright and hopeful a picture as in any Oz book. The pictures I
created were illusions, like stories out of a child fantasy, and
Dad knew it, but to Mom the fantasies were as good as reality. At
least she acted as though that were true. Ully was successful,
happy, had several children, and lived up north. Ellie was safe and
sound and would be calling soon.

But how Dad laughed! How that laughing still
rings in my ears! Ully didn’t live up north—he lived south in
Indiana—and he never had kids. And oh by the way, Ellie is dying
Dad told me, but I didn’t know that—not until Dad pulled me into
the shed and swore me to secrecy.

Neither he nor I could muster the courage—or
the effort—to tell Mom that her mother was at death’s door. We
didn’t tell her because we were trying to protect her—so I was
told. It was the same reason he didn’t tell her Ellie’s name to
begin with—or her firstborn son’s name. It was for her own good,
and I had better keep it that way lest she be taken again back to
the nuthouse.

And when Ellie died a few weeks later, we
kept that news to ourselves, too—and true to form, Ully never
called.

Dad had given me no narrative to echo, no
oral history to recount, no fatherly wisdom by which I might offer
Mom some solace after Ellie died. Although I’d given my mother her
mother’s name, and that had made her happy, it wasn’t enough. It’s
never enough, Dad had said. It will never be enough, and you should
have never opened your god damned mouth!

I had nothing to say to Mom’s new pleas.
Where is Ellie? Where is my mother? All I could offer her was an
apology. I’m sorry I told you, Mom, I won’t do it again.

“Misleading people isn’t a smart thing to
do,” Dad would say. I had given Mom hope when there was no such
thing as hope in our house. Hope was like an apology; it was a
weightless stone tossed at a steel house, as useless as the words
I’m sorry were to a madhouse doctor.

He said it was always smarter to say
nothing. He called that kind of withholding mercy, and I wondered
if he had ever really wanted me to talk again at all. He called my
story about Ellie malicious, and told me we’d be better off just
forgetting her, and to forget Ully, as well.

But wasn’t forgetting just like murder?

Because of his silence—and mine—I had lied.
That was the difference between me and Dad, and it was a difference
I had to remember, Amelia would say. I would rather lie than keep
quiet, and sometimes that isn’t a bad thing. Remembering was as
important as knowing. Amelia reminded me that something inside that
little boy told him that his mother needed to remember, and that
she needed to know what she had done, and who her mother was, and
who her son was.

How far I had come from that little boy! The
drifter Amelia was watching now was nothing like that brave little
boy with the kind heart. He was hopeful. He was generous. And that
little boy was gone!

Within weeks, Dad left Mom and that little
boy, and therefore Dad left the decision to break the news of
Ellie’s death to me.

I told my mother that her mother died some
time later, maybe days or weeks later. I don’t know. I couldn’t
tell time well in those days. When I did tell her, it had the
impact I feared it might. Mom cried very jagged tears. She cried
like I’ve never seen a human being cry, and I cried with her, out
of fear mostly. Mom’s tears carried with them some very brutal,
very tempestuous screams, and it was frightening.

I’d never known my grandmother and I didn’t
realize how powerfully upsetting losing a mother could be. I
wouldn’t understand that for at least two more weeks.

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.