Shades of Eva (12 page)

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.

***

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.