Shades of Eva (21 page)

Armstrong’s rental house was the last on the
winding block, and furthest north, not visible from the road. Once
we drove the driveway back to the house, it appeared behind a bank
of elm and weeping willow trees, hiding as if it were a child
playing peek-a-boo. It was a modest two-story country house with a
deep front yard situated atop a high bank, precariously close to
the river. It wasn’t big. Palatial? I couldn’t tell in the
dark.

As we drove further in and stopped the car a
few feet from the front porch, the decrepit nature of the place
became apparent. I was a bit disappointed. It resembled more a
miniature version of the Bates mansion from the movie Psycho then
anything I’d imagined for my mother or told her in some made-up
fantasy about the place. We were modestly home. Palatial it wasn’t.
Clean, I couldn’t tell from outside.

The clapboard siding was peeling. It seemed
covered with a mossy growth of grime and mildew. That much I could
see in the moonlight. Clean it wasn’t—at least not on the
outside.

The paint on the trim around the windows
seemed to be fraying, too. The grass and shrubs in the front yard
were overgrown. The porch, perhaps the biggest eyesore,
dilapidated. Its planks looked as rickety as they sounded once
Amelia stepped foot on them.

I stood motionless in the front yard just
absorbing the place, just trying to get a feel for something at all
familiar. It all felt foreign, and I felt foreign. The only thing
that felt familiar was the sound of the river out back flowing
gently across its banks. It was a sound I remember from the
recurring dreams I had of the little girl alone in her room. It was
odd that I’d make that connection, because in the dream the river
was frozen, and the bedroom’s lone window was blackened and sealed
shut. It would be hard for anyone to hear a river flowing fifty
feet beyond the back of the house from that room in those
conditions—but I heard it. It was as if there was something
important about that river.

“Why does the house look so decrepit?” I
called to Amelia.

“It’s been run down since your grandparents
sold it. They put a lot of work into it, but that was forty years
ago.”

Amelia reached into her backpack and removed
something. “Here!” she said, and handed me something black and
tubular. It appeared to be a flashlight.

I took it up and studied it in the
moonlight. There was a lanyard attached to its tailcap. There was
no button to turn it on, though. Amelia was watching me and seemed
to be enjoying my confusion as to how to light the damn thing.

“You have to twist it,” she said,
demonstrating with one of her own. I did as she did, and mine came
on. For its size the beam it cast was intense. It wasn’t your
garden variety hand torch. It was sleek, almost military in its
appearance.

“What kind of flashlight is this?” I said,
throwing the lanyard around my wrist and then sweeping its bright
beam about the perimeter of the yard.

“It’s a tactical flashlight. A xenon
nitrolon combat light. Waterproof. My compliments.”

“Thanks,” I mustered.

The neighboring house was shielded by a row
of overgrown thickets and pines extending from the river up to the
street between the properties.  The house was far enough away
that one might not hear a scream if it was uttered from one house
to the next, unless one was listening for it. To that extent it was
like my cabin in the woods in Neah Bay: a bit secluded, but not so
far removed that one couldn’t crawl his way to help if the need
presented itself.

I remained in the grass in the front yard,
shining my light at the center of a small, octagonal attic window.
It was cut into the side of the house high above the porch. I had
the feeling that there was something, or someone, waiting there
behind it, waiting for me. I took my light off the window and the
sensation disappeared.

The last thirty-six hours with Amelia
Hawkins was presenting a certain challenge to my solitary nature.
She was attractive, and not just physically. I wanted to be with
her, as a friend, and I wanted to know more about her. What made
her decide to go into the Army? Why the Military Police? Where had
she served? And what circumstances had caused her to have to take
so many lives? Was it simply the routine of war, or had there been
lives outside of the Army she’d had to take?

Those were some of the questions I had, and
I had a hundred more lining up like first-graders in a hallway. I
guess the answers to those questions would have to wait, however.
Amelia hollered out that old familiar question, interrupting yet
another of my many daydreams. “Are you coming or not?”

We left the shaky porch and stepped
inside. We cast our lights about the room in front of us—what was
intended to be a dining room, I presumed. There was no table and
chairs and no China cabinet, but the space was readily
identifiable.

There was a staircase leading to the upper
floor to our left, and a small room adjacent to it. The kitchen was
deeper in and a door to another room was on our right. I moved to
the foot of the stairs and peered upward to the darkness of the
second floor landing, trying to come to grips with the stupidity of
having accepted this so-called challenge in a sober state as my
hands began to tremble.

Looking up toward that landing, I felt a bit
as if the floor was vibrating beneath me. Perhaps it was just that
odd sensation one gets when revisiting a mother’s long lost home,
or looking at old family photographs of dead grandparents, or in
visiting their graves.  There’s an odd sense of disconnection,
odd because these were your ancestors, odd because they’re gone yet
their blood still winds its course through you, odd because you
can’t do a damn thing about any of it. Another sensation is regret
for never having known many of these people. Another part is the
tangible reality of your own mortality, for if they died, it
becomes all too apparent that you will die, too. It all leaves you
on shaky ground.

And maybe it was just the DTs.

I looked around the barren front rooms.
Either Amelia had not bothered to furnish the place, or she didn’t
plan on staying. The reality was both. I moved to a doorway that
led into the kitchen. No appliances. No kitchen table. No curtains
in the windows, just wooden floors, rough-hewn and lacerated, and
cabinetry shedding its paint and flaking like the clapboard siding
outside.

Clean it wasn’t.

Amelia followed a couple steps behind me,
waiting patiently, eerily quiet, watching me, listening attentively
to my complaints: there wasn’t enough color in the place, and there
was no pride, no craftsmanship, new or old, just the bare bones of
a dying house. The grayness of it was oppressive, draining really;
so I asked Amelia to turn a light on.

“These are it,” she said, shining her
flashlight at the defunct chandelier above us in the dining room.
“There is no electricity in the place. Won’t be until
tomorrow.”

I continued surveying the lower level. “It
feels haunted in here,” I said, sweeping my light across the
ceiling as if that’s where the ghosts would be, shaking my head in
disapproval at the cobwebs that seemed to be devouring the
place.

I moved toward one of the doors to my right.
I opened it and looked in, trying to allow my eyes to adjust to a
deeper level of darkness. A sudden vertigo came over me again, and
I almost fell. I caught myself on the door’s jam, and that’s when I
saw him—or it.

I must have scared Amelia with the cry I let
out, and stunned, I almost fainted. “What is it?” Amelia hollered
from the dining area.

The silhouette of an old man gave form
inside the room, which appeared to be a bedroom, alongside the
room’s lone window where he was standing. He seemed to be staring
out toward the river in a sort of spectral, luminescent glow. I
thought someone was literally there, but as my eyes adjusted, he,
or his aura, began fading and his silhouette all but disappeared
before me like evaporating breath on a mirror.

Amelia had moved in behind me. She shined
her light into the room alongside mine. The more my eyes adjusted,
the less of him I saw, and when I could see nothing but the walls
and the window and our flashlight beams, I could see him no
more.

“By the window,” I said. “I saw
something.”

I thought Amelia had played some sort of
trick on me, but she hadn’t. It was the specter of one of the
voices in my head. I was almost sure if it, for before he vanished,
I heard the faint echo of his laughter, a laughter that had
followed me from the toolshed to Bozeman to New Orleans and on to
Neah Bay. That laugh was always there, though muted to a certain
degree by the alcohol I had always consumed, and now I knew where
at least one of the laughing voices in my head had come from…it
came from this house and that apparition in this room. And more
frightening than that realization was the clear recognition that
sobriety seemed to be feeding the laughter’s return.

“I don’t know what you saw, but I believe
you saw something,” Amelia said. “Let’s go upstairs.”

Amelia had turned to ascend the
staircase
to the upper floor. I was shaking my head because
something was telling me not to go up there. Fear I suppose. It
talks to a man that way sometimes—silently, through his emotions. I
shook my head some more, this time trying to rid myself of it. I
moved to the foot of the staircase and watched Amelia climb the
first of the fifteen steps before us, and tried to gather my
courage.

She had removed those knee-length boots back
at the airport and had exchanged them for some emerald green
flip-flops that matched her eyes, and a dark-green tank top to
compliment them. She had a white pair of shorts on that showed off
a beautiful pair of legs. Even though our pursuits were labored
with the essence of wintry darkness, when I was with Amelia it felt
like summertime. She was made for that kind of outfit, and for a
moment, I was happy simply watching her climb those stairs.

I forgot all about my dizziness and the
trembling. For a moment I forgot where we were and what it was we
were doing. I let things drop at the foot of those stairs, if only
for a moment, and let my mind wander to that land of possibility
where one sees himself happy and clean, where he dances with his
lover in some far off place with happy people as the music plays,
sane and still people, where questions have been answered, where
the skin-tearing pull of curiosity is all but vanquished.

I had hardly noticed what she wore in my
preoccupations that day. I found myself wanting to chase her into
the rooms above and relieve her from the burden of her clothing,
what little of it she wore, and the desperation she must have felt
in showing a prodigal son his ancestral grounds, but I digressed.
I’d thought of kissing her once before, back in Pearl’s Pub in Neah
Bay, but that was before I knew she was widowed and recently
daughterless.

I took my eyes off of her out of respect, I
suppose. I hadn’t offered her my condolences, not in any real
sense. I stood quietly, not moving, my eyes roaming the floorboards
about my feet in ignominy, as if I’d just seen something inside a
nun’s dress that I wasn’t supposed to see. I hadn’t meant to
neglect the condolence, but Amelia didn’t seem keen to sympathy, at
least not for herself. I wanted to question her more about the hit
and run shooting, and, specifically, what she did to those men in
the wake of Joe’s and Amy’s murders.

I was curious, and beyond that, it was as if
there was something undone in the universe that begged completion.
I longed to know, as friends often do, those sad and forlorn bits
of information that make their friends’ lives interesting, or at
least, understandable. I wasn’t sure she’d done anything to her
family’s killers at all; not the sort of heinous things that I
thought deserved doing to men who killed innocent men and innocent
little girls, but for some reason I had a feeling that she had.
Strangers who’ve lost someone important to them don’t come 2500
miles to find you, locked and loaded with a Beretta semi-automatic
pistol in hand and spouting vengeance poems, for no reason.

I actually wanted to know something about
someone, something more than how painful a punch he could deliver,
or something more than how strong a woman’s thighs could squeeze,
and that, too, my newfound curiosity, and its pangs for answers,
felt good.

I took my first step up the staircase and my
thoughts turned, once again, to my father. I’d heard of people who
had lost everything and never again spoke of their losses. He was
like that. According to Amelia he’d lost his mother to a car crash,
and his father to suicide. According to Dad, the firstborn son whom
he fathered had been abducted and killed. Despite those losses, Dad
simply wanted to move on, as if you could ever move on simply from
things like that.

Move on was all that he wanted from himself,
and from me. Don’t worry about your brother, he would say. Don’t
worry about him, as if the simple question of where that baby boy
might be, or how he might be, implied worry. It was sheer
curiosity, as much mine as it was my mother’s.

To Mom, her firstborn was alive—she just
didn’t know where he was. The mystery of where he might be must
have felt to her as if she had a word on the tip of her tongue she
couldn’t quite verbalize. And again, in true fashion, I was
understating it. It was more than curiosity, more than a failure to
remember. Mom’s questioning was evidence of a much deeper longing,
the type of yearning only mother’s who’ve had a baby stolen from
them can ever begin to understand.

I didn’t understand it. I couldn’t.
Curiosity surely couldn’t explain it, and Mom’s grief was never
tended to. That much I had come to realize. For that, I felt that
deeper, familiar pain of regret hovering about me once again, a
regret for never having validated that grief by choosing Mom’s
side. The importance Mom gave to remembering her losses was
evidence of a demented mind in our house. One simply didn’t seek to
remember such pain; it was as if remembering was akin to
self-abuse. It seemed delusional, but whatever her circumstances of
her life were in those days, she simply wasn’t validated.