Shades of Eva by Tim Skinner Page A

Elmer out of the
air?
    “I didn’t ask you to come here!” I said.
“And as for responsibility, I don’t have a responsibility to
anybody!”
    “Your mother didn’t deserve to be thrown
into that snake pit for seven years, either!” Amelia replied,
tossing her cup of ashes into the garbage.
    I thought about it. Mom may not have
deserved to be institutionalized, but then again, I didn’t know why
Mom was put there. I didn’t know why Mom cried so much. Maybe
Amelia was talking about a metaphorical killing—a killing in the
proverbial snake pit.
    Before I could respond, Amelia added, “And
she didn’t deserve to have her baby taken from her, either. And she
didn’t deserve to be raped!”
    There it was! All I could do was all I had
ever done, just close my eyes and endure this stranger like I used
to have to endure everyone from back home.
    I should have been appreciative. Amelia did
just save my life. But I wasn’t. Not right then. You see rape was a
hard fact of my childhood—and Mom’s, too, if her side of the story
was the correct side. Family meant rape—not just pain and complex,
and rape wasn’t a subject I wanted to revisit having just been
laced up like a football, no matter what happened to us, no matter
what Amelia knew.
    Amelia, however, didn’t seem to care what I
wanted. “I know about the toolshed, Mitchell. I know that your
mother shot and killed a man who was raping you there. And I know
it was traumatic for you. It must have been traumatic for your
mother, too. These aren’t secrets, and neither of you have anything
to be ashamed of. You deserve a chance to get even and to reclaim
your proper station in your family. Isn’t that what you’re really
trying to do in these stupid bar fights—claim some station within
your little fighter family?”
    Get even? Get even with whom?— I was
thinking.
    I never had the sense that I was
bar-fighting for anything noble, like status, but maybe I was.
Maybe I did, deep down, want respect—or deeper still—answers. Maybe
I’d made Jake Meade and all of the other goons I’d been using and
abusing since River Bluff a sort of pseudo-family. Fighting might
have been nothing more than a distraction from remembering, from
seating myself at their dysfunctional table, an ignorant attempt to
belong and to ignore making sense of the world, sense of my life,
and Mom’s life.
    And then again, maybe I was just trying to
kill myself. Maybe Amelia knew me better than I knew myself.
    But if she understood me so well, then she
couldn’t condemn me for getting the hell out of Dodge, and I told
her so. Of course she told me that my time for running was
over.
    “You have a place at the Rennix family
table, Mitchell. Your family isn’t in Washington. Your name is at
stake. You have decent people in your ancestry who deserve justice.
Their spirits are depending on you. You need to come home.”
    I laughed a nervous laugh. The only spirits
I knew were a congregation of faceless sadists who rang in my ear
if I didn’t drink, and I wanted no part of them, their
pseudo-inheritance, or their hometown.
    What Amelia was suggesting was far more than
I could handle at the time. In one breath she was suggesting that
my family was not only a family of misfits and gatekeepers—she was
suggesting I had a family of kidnappers, killers, and whatever the
noun is for people who shoot themselves under the chin. In another
breath she was suggesting I had decent people back there, people
who were counting on me. Problem was the decent folk were dead and
I didn’t believe in ghosts, at least not decent ones, let alone
feel any obligation to any dead people, family or otherwise.
    All of that was almost manageable, but the
next thing she said was right up there in the clouds. “I also know
what you and Baby Elmer were supposed to do. That poem of your
mother’s isn’t quite complete, you know. There is another line or
two.”
    There always seemed to be another line.
Amelia repeated