Too Many Lunatics

by Lucy Taylor

So it’s snowing like doomsday, and god only knows where my sister Fiona is—in jail for another DWI or shooting up in a dope house? Passed out in bed with some lowlife or frozen to death in her car?

She doesn’t answer her cell—not that I expect her to, but I keep trying. Fiona’s thirty-one now, four years younger than me, but she acts like a tantrum-prone ten-year-old. No boundaries and no self-control, just appetite and self-will run riot, as they say in the self-help rooms. Erratic. Last summer, out of the blue, she stopped speaking to me, refused to answer my calls and texted that I’d ruined her life and hell would be too good for me.

Nice.

If trying to rescue my sister means I fucked up her life, then hell yeah, guilty as charged. Sure, I admit I enabled her, which I regret now. I gave her money and paid for her rehab, found her a cashier job at the Kroger I work at, where within two weeks she was caught on tape stealing. Even after that, like an idiot, I gave her a key to my apartment, which she’s never bothered to return. Probably tossed it in a dumpster.

Meantime, the snow piles up in drifts while I pace my living room, wondering where she’s sleeping and if this frigid winter night will be her last.

When the weather app on my phone flashes a warning that the temp will be zero by midnight—stay home and get all your pets inside—I bundle up and head out, then scurry back to retrieve the Smith & Wesson .9mm I keep hidden in the gap between the refrigerator and stove. Maybe silly to take a gun, especially on a night when no one in her right mind would be out, but my first stop will be Quincey’s Place, a homeless shelter that sits catty-cornered to Richmond’s Monroe Park, where panhandlers prowl and a drug dealer named Ozzie Strand was murdered last summer.

Once on my way, I’m glad I brought a weapon. The way the snow spirals and gusts in every direction makes the night feel chaotic and frenzied, the kind of wild weather that dismantles the natural order of things and brings out the unbalanced and predatory. Better safe than screwed, as Daddy used to say when he laid out strict rules for where Fiona and I were allowed to go. World’s full of sickos, he once said. Two pretty girls, you’re red meat for the psychos and lunatics.

Did I mention I’m vegetarian?

Still, I figure that was one of the few things Daddy got right. Before a bum liver did him in, he was a claims adjuster for a major insurance company. An obese, boisterous man who appeared to gush confidence, he was hounded by a sense of impending calamity—as though at any moment life would crash down on him like the rotted beams of the condemned buildings he appraised.

He fell apart after Mom left, turned into a barfly with a yen for porn and my sister. Yeah, Fiona. Which I always figured was what drove her to quell her own demons with booze and drugs and back-alley sex.

Quincey’s Place is a shoebox-shaped eyesore surrounded by a ten-foot wrought-iron fence, its finials and spirals now aglitter with ice. The building used to be a warehouse, until a local tobacco magnate bought it and turned it into a homeless shelter in memory of his grandson, who died homeless and strung out on the street. A handful of people huddle outside, grabbing a smoke or walking their dogs, which are kenneled in back of the building. Rules say you have to be clean and sober to get in, but I know Fiona has friends here who’ll make sure she gets three hots and a cot no matter what shape she’s in.

Inside, a skinny Latino is mopping up puddles of snowmelt on the cement floor while others shove their backpacks and plastic trash bags full of belongings into cubbies along the wall. The smell makes my jaw clench—unwashed flesh and damp dogs and the greasy scent of garlicky stew coming from the dining hall.

The bearded guy at the desk is Cal Smitts, a one-armed Desert Storm vet with a glossy gray ponytail and a belly so massive he could use a wheelbarrow to shove it ahead of him. He hands a locker key to a teenage girl with ebony bangs and a nose ring and says without looking up, “Sorry, Claudia, Fiona ain’t here.”

I’m surprised he remembers me, but maybe I stand out for some reason. “You got a packed house tonight, Cal. She might’ve came in and you missed her.”

“Nope. Can’t get in without goin’ past me.”

I can see he wants me to move along, but I hold my ground. “Who else is on duty tonight?”

“Just me’n Jesus.” He refills a Styrofoam cup from the coffee pot next to him. Makes a point of not offering me any.

“So has she been in lately? When’s the last time you saw her?”

“When’s the last time you seen her?”

“Too long.”

“Ever wonder why that might be?”

I ignore his attempt to bait me. “So does she still hang out at J.J.’s? Or has she gotten 86’d from there by now?”

He pulls out a cheap metal coin like the ones Fiona used to collect. “See this? I got twelve years clean and sober, so how the hell would I know who’s got kicked out of what bars? Damnit, Claudia, it’s snowing like the dickens. Why don’t you just run along?”

“And why don’t you just—” I stop and remind myself that making a scene won’t help Fiona. But I put his name on a mental to-do list.

As I join the crawl of cars up East Broad Street toward J.J.’s, the snow’s blowing sideways, blinding me. I take a detour into the sprawling parking lot shared by Big Five Sporting Goods and Piggly Wiggly. Fiona once bragged she had an arrangement with the security guard here—sex in return for not getting hassled about parking overnight. I don’t see the guy—lucky for him, because my brakes aren’t tip-top and what’s to keep me from plowing right into him?

No sign of Fiona’s mustard-colored Subaru, but at the Piggly Wiggly loading dock I see a human-shaped bulge under a tarp. As I drive past, a head pops up and shakes off the snow. It’s not Fiona, so I go on.

I tried it myself once—you know, sleeping in my car. Just to see what it was like. I took blankets and a thermos of hot tea and parked behind Spoonbread Bistro on West Grace, rolled back the seat, and tried to sleep. By midnight, the cold cleavered through me like I was a side of prime beef. No position was bearable. Nearby glass shattered and footsteps approached. A man puked copiously while two others screamed at each other over who’d stolen a bottle of rotgut. Someone grunted and swore and they zombie-shuffled away, still arguing.

The tea was an error. Soon I found myself crouching behind a hedge, wondering what lurking pervert might be watching while my bashful bladder released only the thinnest streams. I’d forgotten to bring toilet paper. Thighs still wet, I catapulted back into my car and sped home.

I’d lasted less than five hours.

J.J.’s parking lot is almost deserted, but red neon screams OPEN from behind dark glass etched with frost flowers and vines. Before going in, I stop at each sedan-shaped mound and clear off enough snow to determine the color. No yellow Subarus, but Fiona might have come here with a friend, so I go in anyway.

“Who?” asks the blond barkeep whose hair looks like it was trimmed with a machete.

I take out my cell and pull up a photo. “Her name’s Fiona. Has she been in today?”

Her glance is so brief and dismissive I’m convinced she not only recognizes my sister, but probably knows her all too well. “Dunno. Place has been a zoo all day. Everybody wantin’ to get a buzz on before Snowmageddon.”

“She drinks Stoli with cocktail onions, if somebody’s buying. Beer if they’re not. Used to hang with a guy named Ozzie Strand, but he died.”

“Condolences,” she smirks, rolling her eyes as she leans tatted-up arms on the bartop. “Look, hon, you wanna drink, I can serve you. Information, not so much. What’ll it be?”

“Diet Coke,” I say, heading over to check out the john. Only one woman’s in there and she’s shooting up in a stall.

I throw down a few ones and get out.

A gangly guy with eyebrows thick as matching mustaches intercepts me just inside the door. He reeks of gin and desperation and keeps glancing over his shoulder like he’s scared the bartender will see him chatting me up.

“Heard you say you’re Fiona’s sister?”

Did I? I can’t remember.

He leans close, exhaling alcohol fumes in my face while scratching the side of a nose speckled with blackheads. “Yeah, I see her in you. The green eyes. Tortoiseshell eyes.”

“We’re just half sisters,” I blurt out for no reason. Maybe I’m trying to make it clear that Fiona and I are very different and that our connection is more tenuous than full siblinghood, but instantly I’m annoyed at myself for lying. What do I care what this lush thinks of me?

“Fiona and I go way back,” he confides, “but she ain’t got time for me now. Only parties with her new besties.”

“Yeah? And they are . . . ?”

He props his chin with a hand, mimes deep thought. “Well now, my brain’s fogged. Might need another shot or three to boost my recollection.”

I pull out a twenty, then another when he scorns the first offer. Feigning reluctance, he recites an address in the Fan District. “Travis and Mona’s place.”

“Is Fiona there now?”

“Can’t say. Could be. She hangs with ’em sometimes. Travis, he’s a movie buff, you get my drift.” In case I don’t, he hinges at the waist and bares a sad conglomeration of discolored teeth. “Fiona, she likes to get high and eat pussy. Travis likes to watch. Invites his buddies over to enjoy the show and partake. How ’bout you? You like to eat pussy?”

He snakes a hand toward my crotch. I jump back, hands balled into fists, but in the thick gloves I’m wearing, how much harm can I do? Still, something in my stance or expression frightens him, because he backs away and calls out as I leave, “Hey, I take it back. No way are you like Fiona. She’s hot!”

* * *

The address on Floyd Avenue isn’t far, but in the whiteout I take a wrong turn and wind up on Monument Avenue at the statue of Jeb Stewart, blanketed in white like an equestrian wraith. I’m driving too fast. When I hit ice, I forget everything I know about winter driving and slam the brakes. The car careens into the oncoming lane. I overcorrect, bounce off the curb, and shatter the headlight of a parked SUV. The energy of the collision bangs through my unbelted body and slams my forehead into the dash.

Stars flare and black bars frame my vision. I’m drifting between two places and times, unsure which is real, my memories strewn haphazardly like odds and ends from a pilfered purse. My stomach heaves and there’s a fruity-sick burn in my gorge—Daddy’s Beam swigged on the sly. The head-jarring whomp the whiskey delivers releases a surge of rage and bravado. A choice must be made—what will it be?—and when that fifteen-year-old girl I used to be looks down at her hands, she’s more thrilled than shocked to see her choice is the claw hammer.

Guns abound in this house, of course, for hunting and defense, and the kitchen offers a seductive array of knives. But the claw hammer has its own allure—it’s brutally, unequivocally male. As I heft it, I wonder if this is what men feel when they get a hard-on, when they swagger into a bedroom to fuck.

In Daddy’s room, I stand above him and wonder if this primitive power is what he feels as he enters my sister’s room—enters my sister. Spent now, he snores and snorts, a bull pawing the sod in his sleep. I raise the hammer—where to start, the crease between the heavy brows or the crooked bridge of the nose, the fleshy, flapping lips that frame a cavernous mouth?

Then a presence heretofore unnoticed or ignored soundlessly usurps my mind, and it commands all my attention. It’s me and not me, this voice of sanity and reason. It reminds me of the price I’ll pay: a lifetime caged in prison or a mental ward, the girl who killed her daddy, all freedom lost, hope gone.

I leave my father’s room and never venture there again. No one but me ever knows what I almost did.

* * *

Violent shivering shakes me awake. The headlights illuminate an SUV impaled upon my bumper, but the street is silent, eerily pristine. No one’s come outside to confront me, and I take this as an omen. Uncoupling the two vehicles with as little scrape and complaint of metal as possible, I soldier on.

Travis and Mona share a row house with a handsome pedimented porch and snow frosting the spindlework and eaves. I pound the knocker until a blurry figure ghosts behind the beveled glass and a male voice snarls, “Whozit?”

“I’m Fiona’s sister. I’m here to take her home.”

A long pause, then: “She’s left.”

“Where’d she go?”

“Don’t know.”

“I was told she’s here.”

“You were misinformed.”

He’s lying, I’m sure of it. Fiona may be passed out drunk or OD’d. She may be held against her will.

“Look, I need to talk to you. I don’t want to call the cops to do a wellness check on her, but if you don’t let me in—”

He curses colorfully and loudly before opening the door, a short, paunchy man too puny for his sportscaster’s voice who glares at the windblown snow as though personally offended. “Fuck, this shit’s still coming down.” Turns his bleary gaze on me. “So you’re Claudia?”

He knows my name. That’s good. It means Fiona’s spoken of me.

“I need to see my sister. She’s not answering her phone.”

“And I told you she’s not here.” He gazes into the white, swirling sky, tugs at the waistband of his baggy sweats. “Damn this snow.”

“Travis, let me come in. I’m freezing out here.”

“What the fuck, she told you my name? Big mouth she’s got, your sister. Course, that’s sometimes to my advantage.”

With the creep gloating over Fiona’s oral talents, I try to dart into the house, but he plants a palm on my chest and shoves me back. Slams the door so hard that snow showers down from the frame.

This time when I bang on the door, he ignores me.

The wind bullies and whips me as I stumble back to the car. It’s only because I’m using the parked vehicles for balance that my hand brushes a cascade of snow off a fender, revealing the distinctive mustard-colored paint job. I check the license plate. It’s hers.

My hunch was right. She’s in there.

This time, rather than knock, I try the knob. The door opens, but before I can get ten feet into the house, Travis comes charging up the hall, red-faced, flailing his arms. “Who said you could come in here? Get the hell out!”

“Fiona’s car’s outside! She’s here!”

“So what? She had someplace to go. Her piece-of-shit car wouldn’t start, so I let her take my wife’s.”

“I don’t believe you. Where would she go in a snowstorm?”

“Why is it any of your damn business?”

“It’s my business because you feed her drugs and pass her around for your friends to fuck and because she’s too sick to understand you’re using her!”

Except for a twitch in his upper lip, he’s very still, but when he speaks, his voice is infused with a new level of malice. “Fiona told us all about you. She warned us you’re dangerous. She hates you and never wants to see you again. Why don’t you leave her alone?”

I’m as stunned as if he’d bludgeoned me with a brick, but I know he’s lying, and that gives me courage. I yell Fiona’s name and bolt for the stairs with him right behind me. Halfway up, he grabs me and spins me around, which compounds the force when he hooks a fist into my jaw.

My head snaps to the side. My knees liquefy and I plop down on the stairs. He looms over me, fist drawn back to punch me again, so I pull out the .9mm and fire a shot at his face.

The world implodes. He bares his teeth, and his eyes blaze black murder as he lunges for my throat. In despair and disbelief, I realize I’ve done the impossible—missed a target three feet away.

Then his mouth jerks askew, and he folds up like laundry—knees, waist, and neck—before doing a face-plant on the step below me. A tooth flies from his mouth and lands in my lap. Blood burps from the hole in his back.

Above me, a woman screams like the love of her life has just died. I look up to see a woman I presume to be Mona, coal-eyed and keening, clutching the bannister and flopping down the steps in a bra-and-panty set that’s seen better days. This time, I aim. One side of her face shears off from her skull and she crashes past, landing with her thighs spread over her man’s head in a tragic parody of cunnilingus.

I find myself wondering if she’d have worn better undies had she known she was going to die in them today.

Stepping carefully around the blood, I race upstairs to find Fiona.

My worst fears are confirmed.

She’s not there.

* * *

The journey home is a careening, sliding, stop-and-skid ordeal. Streetlights blink mindlessly. Ditched cars block intersections, their feckless drivers gone. I drive over curbs and plow across lawns.

When I finally make it home, I’m horrified to discover my living room is a shambles. I’ve been burglarized, and to judge from the noises coming from the back of the house, it’s still going on. In the kitchen I surprise a trench-coated figure in a black woolen cap with one shoulder planted against the refrigerator, trying to muscle it away from the wall.

In the most commanding voice I can muster, I yell, “Hold it right there!”

The intruder whirls. “Shit, you’re home!”

“Fiona?”

She yanks off the cap. Bleached hair with brown roots tumbles around her thin face. Her blue eyes dart wildly. She looks cornered and feral.

“What the hell are you doing?”

She whips out a key on the end of a plastic fob and waves it in front of me like a priest warding off evil with a minuscule cross. “You gave me this, remember? You said to stop by anytime.”

“I didn’t say to ransack my house!”

Rather than explain or apologize, she goes on the attack: “What are you doing back so soon? Cal called me from Quincey’s and said you were there looking for me, that you were making the rounds. I thought the snowstorm would slow you down.”

“Why would Cal—” But I know, of course, and the weight of that feels like an avalanche crashing onto my shoulders. “You told him to call if I showed up, didn’t you? Why would you do that, Fiona? Is it because you hate me and never want to see me again?”

She bounces on her feet, all manic energy. “That’s a weird question.”

“Travis told me that’s what you said. Is it true?”

“It’s—wait, what? How do you know Travis? Have you been following me? Christ, tell me you didn’t just show up at his door, ’cause if you did, you’ve got me in a world of hurt. Somebody violates Travis’s privacy, he can get mean.”

“Oh, I think I violated more than his privacy.”

“You were at his house? Shit, now he’s gonna think I gave you his address. What did you say to him? Did Mona see you? Fuck, I’d rather have Travis pissed off at me than her.”

“Yeah, Mona saw me. We didn’t talk, though.”

“Thank god for that at least. Damnit, Claudia, you’ve got no right harassing my friends.”

I look at the mess she’s made—drawers emptied out, oven door open, broken crockery. “Fiona, what were you looking for here? What did you think you’d find behind the refrigerator?”

I already know the answer, of course, but it’s amusing to watch her mentally trying out lies before, defeated, falling back on the truth. “Look, I know you have a gun. I figured you’d hide it someplace obvious like in the bookcase or the closet. Then I remembered how Daddy used to always stash a bottle or two behind the refrigerator at home until you got wise to him and threw them out. So it came to me, hey, I bet that’s where you’d hide your gun. I was wrong. You’re not that stupid. You probably pitched it in the James River. Hell, that’s what I woulda done.”

It takes me a moment to get my breath back so I can speak. “Why would I do that, Fiona? I don’t understand.”

Whether it’s exhaustion or pharmaceutical disinhibition, she rattles on, “You’d’ve had to get rid of the murder weapon, wouldn’t you—after you killed Ozzie. You followed him into the park that night and you shot him. I can’t prove it yet, but I know you did. Travis has some experience with this kind of stuff. He told me if I could find the gun, the cops could match it to the bullets that came out of Ozzie.”

“What do you care who killed Ozzie? He beat you. He was a violent, abusive scumbag.”

“He loved me.”

“He deserved whatever he got. Just another piece of shit. Like Travis. Like Daddy.”

She gapes at me like I just spit on God.

“What, you thought I didn’t know why he went to your room all those nights, what he was doing?”

She starts to cry—big, ugly sobs. It’s a disgusting performance, but when she’s finally able to talk, I hear her out.

“It wasn’t like that! For fuck’s sake, he was reading me bedtime stories at night, because you were too old for them and because he knew I had bad dreams. And sometimes he cried too, and I comforted him, because he knew he was an alcoholic, but he couldn’t stop, and he hated himself for it. But he never touched me the way you think. You’re wrong about that, just like you were wrong about Ozzie!”

Even now, after all this time, Fiona’s capacity for denial, her ability to rescript history, never ceases to stun me.

“The only thing I ever wanted was to protect you and keep you safe. Why is it so hard for you to believe that?”

So I tell her about the one thing I swore I’d never tell anyone: that night when I snuck into Daddy’s room and raised the hammer over his head, trying to decide what part of his face I would smash first. I tell her how the voice in my head stopped me from going through with it. “You’re the only person I’ve ever told.”

When I finish, she isn’t crying. Her eyes look like chips of blue ice, colder than anything I’ve seen in my life that was still drawing breath.

“I’ll tell you a secret too, Claudia. Ozzie drove for Travis and sold product out in Henrico and King William County. He was important to Travis’s business. Him dying was a gut punch to Travis. Finding who killed him was important too.” She pulls out her phone.

“Fiona, don’t. We can talk about this. Don’t call the cops.”

“Who said anything about the fucking cops?” She turns away and starts speaking into her phone. “Hey, Travis, it’s me. Coupla things. First off, I apologize about my sister coming to your house. I had no idea, swear to god. Second, I was right. She as good as confessed. You know where she’s at, so when you get this, do what you have to. She killed Ozzie. I don’t give a shit what happens to her anymore.”

She ends the call. Looks surprised but not especially alarmed when she sees I’m pointing the gun at her. “Shit, you had it on you the whole time. I shoulda known.”

I don’t say anything, because I know silence frightens her.

Pretty soon she starts getting antsy and has to talk: “Oh come on, Claudia, put that away. I was just trying to pay you back for what you said about Daddy. That wasn’t Travis I called. I was just pretending . . . Claudia? C’mon, Claudia, talk to me.”

She doesn’t understand that I’m waiting for the voice of sanity and reason to stop me before I pull the trigger. But it hasn’t got a goddamned thing to say.