Shades of Eva by Tim Skinner

She
called her mother the same for her absence. She’d accused them both
of forgetting—all of us—and more importantly of forgetting her
firstborn baby—accused them each, therefore, of murder.
    “Do you want to know what happened to
Elmer?” Amelia said, standing up to pace the floor in front of me
as if she were about to deliver a lecture.
    I turned my head away. “If he’s dead, what
difference does it make? Dad was right and Mom was deluded.”
    Amelia shook her head and flicked some ash
into a cup. “He was murdered, Mitchell. And what if I told you that
your uncle Ully knows who murdered him, and that he was probably
there when it happened? What if I told you that your grandmother
Ida and your mother’s sister were trying to stop your grandfather
Virgil from transferring Elmer away from your mother to the
Marquette Institution?”
    I gaped at Amelia, and then I shook my head.
Ida was my father’s mother. I hadn’t heard Ida’s name in many
moons. And I had never heard of any maternal aunt that I might have
had. I knew my mother had a brother, but I’d never heard of any
sister.
    “Ida died in 1965,” Amelia went on, as if I
hadn’t just left the conversation. “Same year you were born.
Dorothy died two years after that.”
    “Dorothy?” I murmured.
    “Your aunt’s name was Dorothy Biggs. She was
a half-sister to your mother, anyway. You haven’t heard of
her?”
    I shook my head. I sat in stunned silence,
and also a good bit of embarrassment. I should have known these
things. First of all, I hadn’t given pause to consider my
grandfather’s opinion of what happened with my mother’s baby. In my
world, a child, and what happened to that child, was up to its
mother—but that wasn’t my mother’s world. She apparently had no say
in her baby’s fate!
    Amelia then asked me, “How about Oren’s
suicide?”
    Again, I just gaped at her. Oren was my
father’s father, and if I could recall, Dad said he died of cancer.
“Grandpa Oren died of bone cancer—not suicide!” I spoke heatedly,
almost hopefully.
    Amelia just laughed and said, “Did your
Daddy tell you that, too?”
    I nodded, weakly. He had.
    “Well he’s a liar! His father killed himself
after Ida died. It’s on his autopsy report!” Amelia blew more smoke
at me and stood there smiling as if she were somehow enjoying the
lesson she was giving me.
    I was still shaking my head. “Dad said his
father died of cancer,” I repeated, stubbornly.
    “Not unless they’re calling a shotgun blast
under the chin cancer these days!” 
    “You’re telling me my grandfather Oren
committed suicide after his wife died, after my mother’s brother
helped a friend kill her baby? What the hell does all this have to
do with an inheritance?”
    “I think you have a right to know what
happened to your family, and who slaughtered your brother and your
mother—and you have a responsibility to them. That’s part of your
inheritance, Mitchell; although, you might not want to accept
that.”
    She was right about that last part. That
information was something most sons might want to know about—but I
wasn’t in the most receptive of moods—and did she just say that I
needed to know who killed my mother? Mom wasn’t killed! She died in
her sleep, and I found her! That much I knew for sure.
    “Mom was not killed!” I said, fervently.
    “Your mother was most definitely killed,
Mitchell.”
    Amelia spoke as if she’d been there in the
room with me when I found my mother’s body, and then extinguished a
half-smoked cigarette in a cup as if to punctuate her statement
with the sizzle it made. “The sooner you come to admit that, the
sooner you can start healing.”
    She took her seat again and sat there
staring at me.
    I was starting to think Amelia was as crazy
as her aunt probably was. I was beginning to think she was as bad a
liar as she just told me my father was. Hell, did Dad even tell her
Elmer’s name, or had she just pulled the name