Shades of Eva (63 page)

Ward C was an inferno, just like Mom had
predicted. Aging dignitary though she was, she burned. She burned
with the unspent fury of a forty year old dream whose fuse had been
lit in this very place.

I thought for a moment about Ully’s
beatings: to the blood red welts he used to leave on me, and to his
indifference, to me and to Mom. I thought back to his admonitions:
Still sons are sick sons, and don’t poke a bear in a cage because
the bear might poke back!

I thought of my mother’s money and to Tom
Quail, the limo driver, whose name was still comforted by my
uncle’s silence, but none of that meant a thing right then. All I
could think about was Abby, and I never felt more love for anyone.
I also never felt more alone. It was all a flashback to the
toolshed. I remember arms enrapturing me. I remember the flashing
lights of the patrol cars and the awe-struck faces of all the
others there that night, some familiar and some not so familiar,
who, like me, didn’t quite understand what had happened. That’s the
way it was when I was five-years-old. That’s the way it was that
night at the Asylum. That’s the way it’s been ever since.

***

Mitchell

I got a chance to see what transpired when
those six minutes in ward C were up during my pre-indictment
hearing three weeks later. The hearing took place in the main
boardroom at Coastal State. It was a convenient location for me.
The Coastal State Institution had become my residence for the time
being.

The hearing was conducted by William
Kalwitz, a district attorney with the Owen County prosecutor’s
office. He was accompanied by a secretary. I was facing two charges
of fraud: one for the impersonation of an armed security officer,
and one for infiltrating a medical establishment. I was also
looking at two counts of felony grave-tampering: one for conspiracy
to exhume human remains, and another for tampering with exhumed
human remains. Lastly, I was facing a charge of extortion in the
amount of $1.2 million from my uncle Ulysses’ estate.

Detective Ramsey from River Bluff PD was
there. Ben Levantle was there, and so was Superintendent Norris.
Two of the Institution’s attorneys accompanied her. And Dad was
there. His lawyer, Margaret Inslow, accompanied him. A public
defender by the name of Lou Davis was assigned to my case. He was
sitting attentively beside me ready to offer my pleas should it
come to that.

We were watching the images of the corridor
cameras from the night of Abigail’s attack projected onto a large
screen at the east wall of the boardroom. It was smoky in the
corridor, but Abigail and Ully were reasonably visible. On one half
of the screen was the camera capture of Abigail; on the other half,
Ully. Abigail had placed her Beretta 9 MM pistol on a ledge in the
bean slot in Ully’s cell door, and she had taken a few steps
backward.

Ully was ignoring my pleas for him to give
us the name of Sophia’s assassin. It’s all Abby was really asking
of him at that point. Instead, he chose the gun. He picked up the
weapon, put it playfully to his head, gave me a rueful glance, then
pointed the weapon at Abby and fired.

I knew the bang was coming. It sounded like
a small canon had just went off. There was a collective gasp in the
boardroom as more bangs followed. At that point, it was hard to
tell if these were rounds spent from the M9 by my uncle, or flash
bangs tossed by SWAT into the corridor.

That was about the last thing I remembered
that night before being pulled out of there. What I wasn’t allowed
to see was what happened immediately after SWAT blew those doors
in. The screen showed Abigail flailing backward. Ully had shot her.
The bullet knocked her into the cell door behind her as if she’d
just been kicked in the chest. That’s when I saw her right herself
and then pull a second pistol from her waistband and return fire on
Ully.

That’s about the time each of them fell.
Ully had shot Abigail in the chest, and Abigail had shot Ully in
the forehead. The M9 Abby had given Ully was not empty, as I
thought it might have been. But then again, I never was good at
predicting which guns were loaded and which ones weren’t. I’d just
witnessed my uncle Ully shoot the only woman I’d ever loved.

Abigail lay motionless on screen
, as
was Ully. There was a collective, respectful silence on screen, as
well as in the boardroom. SWAT officers seemed not to know what to
do. They stood there much as we were sitting there, in stunned
silence. There was no perpetrator to restrain, no suspect to
corral, and no rooms to sweep. There was only the screaming blare
of the fire alarm, and stillness.

My attention was on the weapon that had
fallen from Abigail’s hand.

I’d never seen her carry two guns. I felt
Dad’s hand on my left shoulder. He squeezed ever so gently; it was
as if he were telling me what that other weapon was. Police had
once asked him to get rid of that gun, and so had Mom. It was his
peacemaker—the revolver he used to keep in the toolshed. He must
have given it to Abby. It was the gun that killed Fred Levantle.
Now it was the gun that killed Ully McGinnis.

I could feel every eye in that room on me. I
turned to look at Ben. He seemed to be stunned. I turned back to
the screen. The peacemaker had disappeared into the smoke, or maybe
a SWAT officer had kicked it aside. Medics had entered the hallway.
They began working on Abby as SWAT unlocked Ully’s cell. Some of
the medics then turned their attention to him. That’s when those
who knew CPR did CPR.

My uncle was dead on arrival at Brickton
Methodist Hospital. Abigail was taken to surgery.

Once the failed security measures
Abigail had exposed were attended to, the pump house repaired,
smoke damage cleaned, and water restored to the facility, patients
were allowed back into the Institution. This took about three
weeks. Fifty evacuees from the Coastal State prison, and me, had
spent those three weeks in the Calhoun Penitentiary fifty miles to
the east of River Bluff. Abigail spent two weeks in ICU recovering
from her gunshot wound under enhanced security. A bullet from her
own pistol had cut her aorta and punctured her lung. She was very
lucky. One week ago she was released into Anna Norris’s custody to
await trial.

She was looking at two counts of homicide,
one count of felony extortion, and several counts of fraud. Because
of the circumstances of Greer’s gang membership and the Southwest
Mafia’s open threat of retaliation, the matter of Abby’s location
(and mine), and the status of our cases, were gagged by the
prosecutor’s office. I suppose Coastal State was as good a place as
any for Abby and I. No one would think to look for us in the very
place we’d just infiltrated, and had apparently tried to
incinerate.

Our new residence was my mother’s house of
adolescence. It was a sad, if not comical, irony. It wasn’t an easy
time for me, but knowledge does often come at a price. We’d found
Elmer, and we’d found Fred Levantle using the only means of
persuasion we knew of. So for all of those things, and for all of
that knowledge, I had to be willing to pay.

Abigail must have agreed. She turned the
toolbox coffin complete with Baby Elmer’s disassembled remains over
to Detective Ramsey. She turned the audio-video tapes that she’d
collected over. She turned over every bug we’d placed, and every
pinhole camera. Every piece of surveillance equipment she had,
including the satellite phones and even the xenon flashlights, the
PCs and the car trackers. She turned it all in. She even turned
over the tapes that captured Ully’s confession to me when I’d
confronted him in the halfway house. She turned it all over and
gave in to the fate of the systems we’d been fighting for so many
days.

Drs. Norris and Levantle were contributing
their opinions to the DA’s office on the matter; and for the most
part, I had placed my trust in their hands. I was hoping for
leniency, but I wasn’t expecting it. You don’t treat people the
likes of these doctors and these officials like fools and then
presume leniency, let alone amnesty. Nature just doesn’t work that
way.

Abigail and I weren’t allowed
contact
with each in those three weeks. It was a hard time because of that
separation. It wasn’t as if Abby and I had a nexus of relatives to
lean on for support. We had become isolated, and in that shared
isolation we’d come to need one another much as two close friends
do in tough times who don’t have anyone else.

We each, Abby and I, had to heal,
irrespective of any criminal charges. We each had to come to terms
with who we’d become—as individuals—and only then as friends to one
another.

We were addicts to different forces in those
days. That was the first thing I had to admit. I had become
addicted to grief, much like I had become an addict to alcohol.
Grief Addiction is a strange thing; you can carry around a lot of
pain and not even realize it. You deny that pain, yet you come to
depend it. Pain comes to define who you are, and in that sense, you
come to need it much like you need air to breathe.

Abigail’s predicament wasn’t as easy to
describe. Her pain was relatively short-lived, unlike mine, which
had been a ball and chain I’d been dragging around behind me for
years. Her trauma was more recent. Her imprisonment in Iraq was
only four years ago. The deaths of her parents, of her husband and
daughter, had taken place, for the most part, in the last few
months. Abigail’s predicament—if you want to call it that—was acute
and her reactions very direct.

She didn’t waste time running away from
anything. She gathered information and she made decisions. It was
the violence of those decisions she was now going to have to
address, much like her victims had just been forced to address the
consequences of their actions. In as much as I went along with
Abby’s direction, I was going to have to address that, as well.

For Jackson Greer, the consequence was
swift. He didn’t live a week beyond killing Joe and Amy. For Ully
time was a bit more generous. He lived a fairly long life, as
Abigail had said, reaping the benefits of life in the wake of Eva’s
suffering.

Anna had given me a dual diagnosis
of
Chronic Alcoholism, which is an Axis II diagnosis, and
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, an Axis I mental illness.
Without getting into the distinctions of what psychiatry’s
diagnostic axes are, suffice it to say that my alcoholism was
secondary to the PTSD. I drank because of the pain I was carrying
around, which had everything to do with those traumas I’d suffered
as a child. Any hallucinations that I experienced, auditory or
otherwise, and the same goes for the seizure I experienced, were as
related to those traumas as they were to the hallucinosis of
quitting whiskey cold turkey.

I asked her about Rape Trauma Syndrome as a
diagnosis, and also Schizophrenia NOS. Anna said that rape was a
significant element in my condition, but not the determining one.
Having come to understand the entirety of my history, Ben had to
agree. As far as schizophrenia was concerned, I just didn’t meet
the requirements.

I always thought PTSD was a disorder
reserved for military veterans like Abby, so I was a bit surprised
when Drs. Norris and Levantle told me that I was suffering from it.
PTSD has its origins in combat fatigue. Anna and Ben would explain,
however, that there are wars fought on battlefields with mortar
fire and bombing runs and IEDs, and there are wars fought in homes,
where the fighters in those wars are often not trained to fight,
and are often children. Sometimes it’s a parent who provokes the
war; sometimes it’s a neighbor; sometimes the war takes the form of
sexual assault; sometimes it’s a natural event, like traumatic
death. Sometimes, as in my case, it’s a mix of all of these things.
But in any case, the brain of a child doesn’t make the distinction
between the traumas of governmental war and those suffered in one’s
own home. There is little difference to him.

As I lay there in my cell in Jackson
Penitentiary, watching the spinning ceiling above me in the
delirium of alcohol withdrawal minus the narcotics, awaiting my
indictments, holding tight to the cot beneath me that provided me
no solid anchor in this new sea of attrition, those sounds and
those illusory voices were never as real. I saw faces I was finally
able to pin names to, and others I wasn’t so familiar with. I
formed them into the imagined faces of aunts and uncles, missing
brothers, and to sisters who were never meant to be, and
grandparents whom I’d never met. I seated the voices in those
faces, and I gave them words to talk to me with—and how they
talked!

They assembled around me and they cried over
me and laughed at me and some wrung their hands in frustration at
who I had become. Others rejoiced! In my detox, Anna encouraged me
to watch them, to listen to what they were saying, just as Ben had
encouraged me, and she, too, encouraged me to write these things
down.

So I did. And what I came to discover was
that as the alcohol and the medications I’d been abusing slowly,
yet violently, worked their ways out of my system, my body began to
calm, and the voices began to fade, much as the images of the faces
attached to these voices began to fade. They were fading because I
was not fighting them anymore by trying to drink them away.

They each had a voice: from my brother to my
mother to my grandfather Virgil and to his first wife, Emma, whose
pictured face I kept in a frame beside my cot with Anna’s
blessing.

Virgil was an angry man at first; then he
became a fearful man…and then a sad one. He was a man who didn’t
know how to handle the prying eyes and pressing questions of two
daughters who represented to him a past he wanted desperately to
forget. He had no way to respond to my mother, save responding to
her in the way everyone around him had always responded to prying
eyes and defiance—by putting her away.