Shades of Eva (50 page)

Amelia turned around to face me, holstered
her gun, and changed her expression. “This is a good thing,
Mitchell,” she began, taking hold of the tire swing’s rope again
and sitting down in the tire. “They’re looking for your mother’s
rapist, even if it is just to warn him. It might be the only chance
we have at finding him.”

I couldn’t match her effort at optimism.
Police were looking for Amelia and I with the same vigor, if not
more. Optimism was not something I was feeling. I was feeling sick,
and my limbs were starting to tremble again.

“I’m just glad they didn’t find you in this
condition,” Amelia said, staring at me from the swing. “Ben’s
worried about you, and so am I. We’re going to have to get you some
help. I don’t think your detox is going so well.”

But detox was the last of my concerns. I was
a phone call away from going to prison, and Amelia was, too. “I’ll
be okay,” I told her. “I just need a good sleep.”

“You’ve quit drinking cold turkey! You have
to have some medication when you do that! I have to get you some
more pills.”

My head was swimming. All it seemed I could
see were the tiny bones of my dead baby brother in my hands, prison
bars, and Mom’s shiny coffin hovering over a big empty hole.

Amelia must have sensed my despair; but if
she did, she didn’t comment on it. She simply walked over to me,
picked up a couple stones from the river’s edge, handed one to me,
and with a certain gesture we tossed them out over the water and
listened to them skip mindlessly across the sheer surface of the
St. Joseph. When I heard the last dance of our stones clap
peacefully against the water, I tried one more time. “Who was your
friend?”

Amelia looked at me and nodded, then hung
her head and turned away to walk back toward the tire swing. “Her
name was Sophia. But right now I want to swing.”

We walked back to the tire
that hung
from that old maple and I told Amelia to get in, and she did. I
began to twirl her. I spun her for a minute and then picked up my
pace until I had her rotating so fast she was about to fall out.
Amelia began laughing and I remember her hollering out, “You’re
going to make me throw up.” She screamed, but she had raised her
feet and threw back her head with all of the playfulness of a
little kid and continued to swing.

I loved that about her—that bipolar nature
of hers. It was so real.

She was happy one instant, then intense as
all hell. She was real, like my mother was real—a bipolar kindred
spirit dropped from the heavens into my world, and for a moment,
this bipolar beauty was mine. I loved that laughter—I loved her
laugh. It felt good to laugh with her if only for a moment.

I sat down on the grass after a few minutes
of spinning and watched her twirl about and watched the tire come
to a slow halt.

 Amelia rolled out into the grass and
lay there staring up at the evening sky and reached an arm out
inviting me to lie beside her.

I moved over and sat down on the grass next
to her, then laid down, offering myself as a humble substitute for
the one she must have truly wanted. I listened to her talking on as
she caught her breath, watching all the while the sky turn a sort
of pale yellow, wondering all the while who Sophia was. So I
asked.

“She was with me in the Army,” Amelia said.
“She’s the one who found you in Neah Bay.”

As Amelia began to explain, the earth began
to spin. The more she talked, the quieter things became until at
once I could neither hear the river flowing, nor see Amelia or that
pale yellow sky.

I had the sensation that I was being watched
from someone or something inside the house. Maybe it was my
grandfather’s ghost watching me, or perhaps that of my teenage
mother. I looked to the back of the house, to the back porch and
then up to my mother’s window, but I saw no one, just a cat sitting
in the window sill—but something wasn’t right. There was no cat
inside that house, yet there was one sitting there, staring at me.
Its eyes seemed to be alternating a bright, glowing white, and then
black. It was crouching in fear, not really sitting, and it was
watching me as if I didn’t belong in the yard, as if I were
trespassing.

Then I heard Amelia say, “You’re swinging,
again,” or maybe it was Mom calling to me, warning me not to do
that. She used to say there were doctors in white coats who watched
for such things. And then someone asked me if I could hear her.

I tried to say yes, but I could barely
speak, and then my trembling intensified. I’m not sure how long
this lasted, but when my body finally seemed to calm, and I was
finally able to speak, I was apologizing, and for what, I did not
remember.

I thought I heard someone say something
about a seizure, but I wasn’t sure. I opened my eyes and I was in
another part of the yard and Amelia was hefting me to my feet. “I
am sorry that it has to be this way,” she was saying as she led me
into the house. “We don’t have to continue with this.”

“No!” I said. “I’ll be alright. I’m going to
see this through. We’ll find him! We’ll get your aunt’s
things.”

I gathered myself together as best I could.
I shook my head to clear the cobwebs as if I was stifling a sneeze,
and then I walked inside. With Amelia’s help, I climbed the stairs
to my mother’s bedroom. I lay down on the old boxed springs that
may have once been Mom’s and drifted into an uneasy,
post-convulsive sleep.

Amelia threw a blanket over me
sometime later, and I heard her whispering, but she didn’t seem to
be whispering to me. I heard her say, “He had a seizure. We need to
get him some medicine.”

She seemed to be talking to someone else.
Maybe it was one of her contacts. I tried to look to see, but I
couldn’t muster the strength to open my eyes. It was as if the
gravel that had once claimed my voice had returned in the form of
cement to claim my vision. I couldn’t see and I was so tired.

“We will do that,” a voice said, responding
to the whisper with one of his own. “I will help you.” It was a
man’s voice, and a familiar one. And then he said, “I’m in. What do
you want me to do?”

I didn’t hear Amelia reply to his question.
I only remember a fan coming on and a cool breeze wash over me.
Amelia—I think—planted a kiss on my forehead and left me to rest,
leaving me with the sound of not one, but two sets of footsteps
leaving the room.

Not long after, I felt someone place a pill
in my mouth and pour cool water over my lips. I drank the water and
swallowed the pill. And as the night wore on, I heard someone turn
the fan off. Then I heard the prying of metal on wood, and a window
pop open. I felt a breeze. The cool air of a Michigan summer night
filled the room with the familiar scent of a distant bonfire and my
eyes began to open.

Amelia had taken a seat in a chair beside my
bed. The moonlight was just enough to illuminate her face. She was
asleep in an armchair. It was Neah Bay General all over again,
except in Neah Bay, I was dreaming about a little girl lying in a
bed like this. This time, it was me in that bed.

I could finally see again, and for that I
was relieved. The cobwebs were beginning to clear, as well.

After a few minutes of watching the moon
outside work its way across the window, Amelia stirred. I looked at
my wristwatch and hit its tiny light to illuminate it. It was close
to midnight. I’d been asleep for almost four hours.

I called Amelia’s name, and she
awakened.

“Are you okay,” I asked her.

“I’m okay,” she responded. She stood up,
walked over to the edge of the boxed springs and got into bed
beside me. She put her head on my chest.

I let her rest for a few minutes, but I had
to know. “Who was that you were talking to earlier?”

“The voice you heard was your father’s,
Mitchell.”

“Dad was here?”

Amelia sat up and then stood. She walked
across the room to the window to stare out into the night. After a
minute, she said, “Let’s go back outside,” almost playfully. “There
are some things happening tonight that you need to know about, and
I made a fire.”

***

It was a quiet midnight save the gentle
whishing sound of the river brushing the banks. Amelia had built a
bonfire of semi-arid elm wood and a bundle of pine branches that
smelled good. It was a quiet night much like the nights I
remembered in Neah Bay, and it almost made me miss the simplicity
of ignorance I had found there. Amelia tossed some pine needles and
some sugar cubes into a pan and set it over the fire, bringing it
to a boil. After a few minutes, she poured some of it into a cup
and handed it to me. “This is pine needle tea,” she said. “We used
to drink it in boot camp. It’s full of vitamin C. Have some.”

I took the cup and thanked her. It tasted
good, somewhat sweet and somewhat earthy. “What the heck happened?”
I asked her. “I remember sitting by the swing, and then the world
just sort of went black.”

“You had a seizure. I’d been trying to warn
you.”

“A seizure? I’ve never had a seizure.” I
took another sip of my tea.

“I gave you an anti-convulsive to relax you.
You need to stay on them for a little while until you dry out. I
shouldn’t have given you those other pills. I should have gotten
something else for you. I’m sorry.”

I just shook my head. I was done arguing
about pills. I changed the subject. “Tell me about my father. What
was he doing here?”

“I brought him here. I went to see him
today.”

“You went to see him?”

“Well, you didn’t think he’d find us, did
you?”

I was shaking my head. Instead of asking if
Dad cared where I was, I asked her if he wanted to see me. That was
a different question. It was hopeful.

“Yes, he did want to see you, Mitchell. I
told you before that he regrets the past.”

“Why did you bring him here?”

“He’s part of plan B. And I told him you
were sick. I didn’t make him come here.”

“Where is he? What’s he doing?”

Amelia poured herself a cup of tea. “Brad
checked into the halfway house a few hours ago at the Asylum. He’s
already located some of Emily’s things.”

“What?” I nearly hollered.

Amelia dropped two sugar cubes into her brew
and said, “He’s found some of Emily’s art.”

I couldn’t believe what I just heard
.
I’d spent an entire day in that place and hadn’t an inkling where
any patient art archive might be. I had barely located the
blueprints to the place, and hadn’t even set foot in a tunnel. Dad
had checked in a couple hours earlier and had apparently found the
freaking gallery?

“I thought he might know something about the
art,” Amelia went on, “so I asked him. He knew exactly what I was
talking about. And we’re helping him,” she added. “He needs to know
what Ully did, and he deserves the chance to confront him.”

I nodded and took another long drink.

What Dad was going to have to confront was
the realization that Ully had abused his first wife, and quite
badly, and that Mom was not lying about that abuse—or Elmer’s
murder. He was also going to have to confront his own infidelity,
for I was sure Amelia had told him about Ully’s confession and the
inheritance Dad never received because of that infidelity. I was
failing to see how Dad was going to work through that sort of
information peacefully, seeing as Ully had now turned on all of
us.

“I wish you could have seen the look those
two exchanged,” Amelia said, sipping her tea and smiling. “For the
ages!”

“Ully and my father? They saw each
other?”

Amelia was nodding. “Doc Norris had them
both in the main boardroom, with three or four attendants standing
guard, of course. It’s all on tape. Watched it inside while you
were sleeping! It was quite a reunion.”

“And Dad didn’t try to rip Ully’s head
off?”

“Your Dad accused him of murder, but Ully
denied everything…the rapes, being at the Asylum with Fred, and of
course ever burying a toolbox. Typical Ully.”

“But you told my father the truth…about what
he’d confessed to you, right?”

“Yes. I told him. I did more than that,
anyway. I showed him.”

“You showed him?”

“I showed him the video; the one of you
talking to Ully in the halfway house yesterday. The transmitters
were working perfectly. He heard everything. I showed him the
toolbox, Elmer’s remains, all of my paperwork. He knows everything
we know, Mitchell.

“I tried to prepare your father. I told him
not to overreact to Ully’s lies.” Amelia was grinning as she said
so, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking out over the
water again to about the same spot of air she’d fired a couple mock
rounds at earlier.

“So what came of the meeting in the
boardroom, then?”

“Brad accused Ully of killing Elmer and
burying him. Ully accused your father of working with us. Said it
was likely why Brad had checked in, in the first place. He told
Anna who I was and what I wanted. They just bantered back and
forth.”

“So then how is it that Dad was able to get
into a gallery if Anna was tipped off?”

Amelia shook her head and stared at me.
“There is no gallery, Mitchell! The Asylum is the gallery. The
whole place is one big fucking gallery, and I didn’t even know it!
Your Dad did, though. All he has to do is to keep his cool, roam
the place, and gather Emily’s things. He’s already retrieved some
of them.”

“You’re telling me Emily’s stuff is out…as
in on display?”

“Like a bunch of drawings hung on a
refrigerator in plain sight.”

I was shaking my head again, which was
becoming quite a habit.

“We’re heading there tonight,” Amelia
continued, dumping the last of her pine needle tea on the ground
beside her. “I’m going to get Emily’s artwork. Then we’re ending
this.”