Free Shades of Eva by Tim Skinner Page B

when I asked about the
contact who found me.
    “Maybe I can guess,” I pressed. “Your
mother—or your aunt—knew what happened to my brother. You’re here
because he might have some money, right? Or you think you know
where he might be.”
    Amelia just shook her head. “So full of
presumption, aren’t you? Your brother had a name, Mitchell. Didn’t
your daddy ever tell you that?”
    I shook my head. He hadn’t. No one had ever
mentioned this baby’s name. I didn’t even think he had a name.
    “Your mother called him Elmer,” Amelia
explained, “and he’s dead! He never had any money, Mitchell! He was
murdered when he was just a baby!” 
    I never knew my brother’s name. Mom
didn’t remember it, and Dad said he was dead anyway, so what
difference did a name make in the grand scheme of things. The
inference: dead babies are just a pile of nameless bones.
    I used to press my father as to what this
baby’s name was, feeling deep within that he did know, but was just
withholding it. Dad just said it wasn’t worth talking about.
    Mom must have sensed Dad’s withholding, just
as I did, and it infuriated her. I think what infuriated her more
was that she’d forgotten Elmer’s name, and also who’d named him in
the first place. Whatever his name, Mom said he was alive, and
furthermore would return to her someday and avenge his
abduction.
    I, of course, was left to choose the truth
on my own. Was he alive or was he dead? And whose baby was he in
the first place? Dad’s, or some unnamed rapist’s?
    I chose to believe Dad’s side of things,
that this baby was a dead baby, and his. I chose to believe this
because Dad said he was dead, and he said he was his. That
sounded…noble. And I believed in Dad’s poem. Mom was triple-D, and
she was also sentimental to use another of Dad’s words. Not a bad
thing in and of itself: sentiment. On my best days I wax
sentimental; on my worst I wish that I could. But back then,
sentiment was unappreciated in our house, and worse, ridiculed.
    “What mother wouldn’t want her baby to come
back?” Dad was musing, painting Mom’s wish for reunification with
her firstborn son as if it was evidence of her so-called dementia.
“That’s a woman’s nature,” he claimed. “They always want what they
can’t have. They’re sentimental like that.”
    I remember recounting that disaffected
rationale to Amelia. I remember her shaking her head. I remember
her blowing smoke straight at me with a pace of enhanced velocity,
as if I was the incarnation of Dad’s misogynistic logic, as if my
restating of my father’s opinion was but a lame attempt to detract
from my own indifference. 
    I used to think that Dad was somehow
protecting my mother in a weird sort of way, by telling her that
her baby’s disappearance had ended fatally, by withholding his name
and all those other small, yet important details that make a person
a person. I thought he was prompting her to move on and to stop
dreaming of…of some sort of reunion. In that sense, the sense that
Mom needed to accept her baby’s disappearance, I couldn’t fault Dad
for his withholding. It was almost…merciful.
    In response to Dad’s silence, though—or
mercy, or to whatever you want to call it—Mom responded as she
always did—with invective. She called Dad abusive. She then called
him a murderer. She called him cruel, sadistic, and a killer.
    I remember the words.  She called me a
killer too, one day, I think on the day she sensed that I had sided
with Dad. I’ll never forget it. She looked me square in the eyes
and said, “If you believe your father, then you’re a killer,
too!”
    She believed forgetting someone was
tantamount to killing someone. “What could be crueler than
forgetting a person?” Mom said. “Outside of pulling the switch on a
man, there’s not much more you can do to hurt someone!”
    And she called her brother, Ully, a killer,
too, because he wouldn’t visit us. He wouldn’t visit her.