The Town Crazy

by Suzzy Roche

  “I didn’t mean to be heard. It was nothing.”

  “Two lies, right in a row.”

  “I’ve been having difficulties,” said Lil.

  The nun narrowed her eyes and peered at Lil. “Aren’t you Alice’s mother?”

  “Yes, you know who Alice is?” said Lil.

  “I know all the children. And I know you, too, Lil O’Brien.”

  “Well, they’ve taken Alice. If you knew me better, I suppose you’d think it was for the best, but it’s not right.”

  “Who took Alice? I saw her in the playground yesterday.”

  “Clarisse McCarthy has taken her because I’m sick.”

  “You look okay to me,” said Sister A.

  “I’m not okay.” Lil lowered her head. “I’ve been on drugs and I can’t think straight.”

  “Clarisse McCarthy? The good-deed-doer? That would worry me. Why are you on drugs?”

  “The doctor prescribed them. I’ve been depressed, unhappy, angry!”

  “I’m sure you’re not the first person in Hanzloo to get the blues. Why does that mean Alice moves in with Clarisse McCarthy? Where’s your husband in all this?”

  “They say that the boy Felix Spoon, I don’t know, molested Alice in the cafeteria and Alice won’t tell me what happened. I fear it may be true. And maybe it’s my fault because, look at me. My husband says Alice deserves a better mother.” Lil looked at the nun urgently to see what she would say.

  “Felix Spoon did what?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he did nothing, but who can tell?”

  “Has anybody asked him about it?”

  “I haven’t, I don’t even know the Spoons.”

  “But didn’t I see the four of you walking away from the schoolyard together yesterday?”

  Lil sighed. “I’ll be explaining that for decades. It was an accident, nothing.”

  All she wanted to do was go home now.

  Sister A. fell silent for a minute. She took hold of her rosaries, idly fingering them. “Do you even know what’s bothering you?”

  Lil turned away.

  “I never understand why people in this town won’t talk to me like I’m a human being. It’s frustrating,” said Sister A.

  “I’ll tell you why. It’s just … that you live in a vacuum,” said Lil, raising her voice slightly. “You have no idea what it’s like to have a child, a husband, a real life. The church may be run by the priests, but you nuns do the dirty work, making sure the kids stay frightened and ashamed so they will grow up and follow in their scared and ashamed parents’ footsteps.”

  Lil feared she had gone too far. Sister A. dug into her pocket and lifted her handkerchief to her one good eye, dabbing what looked like the wetness of a tear. Just a few harsh words were all it took.

  The nun shook her head. “These crummy allergies. My eye is like a waterfall,” she said, as she stuffed her handkerchief back down into her pocket. “That was quite a mouthful, but don’t presume to know me. Don’t be fooled by the fact that I only have one eye. I see things, believe me.”

  “Look, I shouldn’t have said what I said. You haven’t done a thing to me.”

  “Don’t be sorry. You might wind up thinking you’re lucky you met me. If you find yourself wanting to talk, I suppose you know where I’ll be. The convent receives visitors, you know.” The nun stood up. “I’d advise you to take care of yourself. Your daughter is an interesting child. How do you think she feels?” The nun pulled out her pocket watch. “In the meantime, I’ll find out what happened with Felix Spoon and Alice.”

  “But you won’t tell the priest, will you?” asked Lil.

  “I’ll do what I have to do,” said Sister A. “And let’s hope that it’s a good idea.”

  “But if something like that, well they could take her from me forever. They might, you know!” Lil’s eyes filled.

  Sister A. seemed to lose her tolerance. “Who do you care about, Lil? You have to ask yourself that.”

  Lil had no response, in part because she wasn’t really sure what Sister A. meant. She watched the old nun make her way back across the pew and up the center aisle. Sister Annunciata stopped momentarily in front of the altar. She reached her hand to the railing and, with difficulty, knelt and bowed her head. Shortly, she stood again and called over to Lil. “Yes, I suppose it feels good to yell in church.” Her voice rose way above a whisper, breaking the silence. With that, Sister A. disappeared behind the baptismal, into the inner sanctum of the sacristy.

  SIXTEEN

  EARLIER, WHEN LIL entered the church the sun had been bright and high, but now, as if it were an entirely different day, a cold rain poured down on Hanzloo. The sky had turned purple and, in some places, black. Making her way toward Mundy Lane, she stepped through puddles in flimsy flats, now as wet as sponges. Wind tore through the trees, blowing off the autumn leaves. In the distance, thunder rumbled, and flashes of lightning stabbed the horizon. As gusts blew at her from all directions, she headed home, and though it wasn’t far, it might as well have been a million miles away.

  By the time she passed Pine Street, her thin coat was soaked through. Leafy branches, ripped off by the wind, were strewn across front lawns and sidewalks, and small rivers rushed down the pavement and slithered into the sewer drains like silver snakes. Lil passed two small bicycles leaning by a curb, perhaps abandoned in haste by kids who had been caught by surprise when the storm broke.

  The streets had the eerie feel of a deserted town.

  In the wind and rain, Lil became fearful. Sister Annunciata would go to Father Bruno about the children—of course she would—that’s what nuns do. And the police would come, and someone from the government, and they would take Alice, and their lives would be like dominoes falling upon each other.

  Lil made a split-second decision to turn right on Pine and headed toward the Post Road to Luke Spoon’s house, determined to find out what had happened to Alice. Alice had said it was nothing, but then why couldn’t she tell what happened? Lil had to know the truth and had to take charge of things before the nun could intervene.

  She ran down the street, with the rain stinging her face, and when she finally reached the old Ross house, it stood before her, dreadful and forbidding.

  With the full force of her fist, Lil pounded on the front door, and Felix Spoon, as if he’d been standing there waiting for her, opened it wide. He was sucking on a lollipop, rolling it around in his mouth so that his cheeks bulged, and he looked up at her, surprised.

  He called over his shoulder, “Luke! Alice’s mother is here. She’s sopping wet!”

  “May I come in?” said Lil.

  Felix stepped away from the door and backed into the hallway. He was wearing a white man-sized T-shirt, spattered with paint. The T-shirt reached below his knees and his feet were bare. He went over to the staircase and yelled again. “Luke, I think you better hurry. Something’s happening down here.”

  Lil took a good look at the boy. He was spindly, skinnier than she’d remembered, and his eyes were hollow and deep. What had he done to Alice? The question made her mad, and she stepped to the side, losing her footing slightly.

  “Mrs. O’Brien. Maybe you should come in here,” Felix said, gesturing toward another room. “I guess it’s okay if you sit in Luke’s chair,” he added. Felix showed her to his father’s chair, and Lil sat there, looking around. Her teeth chattered like someone in a cartoon.

  Felix went over to the staircase and yelled again, “Alice’s mother is all wet down here!”

  “Who?” Lil could hear Luke’s voice from the top of the stairs.

  “Look,” Felix said, pointing. “She’s just here. I don’t know why.”

  Luke bounded down the stairs and into the living room. He came face to face with Lil, who had the dubious honor of being their first guest.

  A woman is in the house, he thought.

  Luke approached her cautiously, as if she belonged in a museum, not a chair. “Mrs. O’Brien, what happened to you?�
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  “I was walking in the rain,” she said, clutching her arms around her. “I’m cold.” Once in the house, she’d lost her nerve. In her dripping clothes, aware she might seem crazy—and she couldn’t be sure she wasn’t—it felt fruitless to confront them.

  “Can I get you a towel?” Luke said.

  Felix, interested, sucked on his lollipop, but Luke ran his hand through his hair, nervously.

  “A towel? Yes,” said Lil.

  Luke left them alone in the living room. Right away Lil noticed Felix’s peculiar drawings on the light green walls, and she followed the trail of stick figures as they made their way up and down the hills and valleys that wound around three of the four walls.

  Felix took his lollipop out of his mouth. “You’re not like other people, right?” he said, closing one eye and looking at her.

  Lil could have said the same thing about him. He didn’t speak like other children. The little molester.

  Luke came back into the room with two folded towels, and laid them on his easy chair, quickly stepping back.

  Even this late in October, Lil O’Brien wore a thin blue summer skirt, and her blouse was blotched with rain. She tilted her head to one side and toweled her hair between her hands, and then laughed a little.

  “This is so absurd.”

  Luke smiled a little. He watched her like a movie.

  “Do you have a hair dryer?” she asked, wringing out the hem of her skirt, creating a small puddle on the floor.

  “No, but I do have a clothes dryer in the basement.”

  “No. I should go. I’d need to change … I really should go. I don’t … know why I’m here, exactly.”

  “But she’s all wet,” said Felix, to his father.

  “Uh, you can go upstairs and change. I’ll give you a robe.”

  A robe? She couldn’t put his robe on, could she? Too cold to think it through, she followed Luke Spoon up the creaky, narrow staircase.

  “I warn you, I’m not the best housekeeper.”

  Luke emerged from his bedroom with a thick, blue terrycloth monstrosity, and gestured down the hall toward the bathroom.

  She closed the bathroom door behind her and fiddled with the doorknob, realizing it had no lock. The freestanding bathtub on stubby curved legs had a thick ring of rust around the inside of it. The toilet seat was up, dust balls had collected in the corners of the floor, and an elaborate spiderweb spread across the top edge of a shelf. Her headache pounded, as rain pelted against a small foggy window.

  Lil let her clothes fall to the floor and wrapped herself in Luke Spoon’s thick warm robe; the vague smell of sweat rose up from the underarms.

  “Might as well dump it all in here, and I’ll throw it in the dryer,” said Luke, when she returned downstairs. “Some tea?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  Felix stared at her, his bare feet pushing his rocking chair gently back and forth. He sucked and slurped his lollipop, clutching its thin white stick in his hand.

  “The walls,” said Lil, almost to herself.

  “You mean the drawings? I did them,” said Felix.

  “Really? Why?” asked Lil.

  “I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “You’re the first person to notice them. Father doesn’t seem to.”

  Luke returned and set a mug of tea on a small table beside Lil.

  “Listen, I’ve got to get home. You really have to give me my things,” she said, as if he’d been keeping them from her.

  “But I doubt if they’re dry.”

  “It doesn’t matter if they’re dry,” said Lil.

  THE SIGHT of her underwear on the top of the pile of clothes unsettled her, and the fact that Luke Spoon had picked them out of the dryer disturbed her even more. “I have to hurry,” she said. Luke handed her the basket, and she made her way quickly up the stairs.

  Once again inside the privacy of the bathroom, she grabbed her damp bra and snapped it on, then pulled on her underwear, her socks, and her skirt. All of it clung to her, hot and clammy against her skin. As she buttoned her blouse, she stopped briefly to examine her reflection in the mirror that hung above the sink. Her hair was still wet from the rain, and her green eyes looked back at her. She spread her fingers on either cheek. “Get me out of here, of everywhere,” she whispered.

  Luke and Felix were waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs, like two schoolboys, and a wave of fatigue poured over her. The effort of meeting their eyes seemed too much to bear. She had nothing to rely on, no hellos or goodbyes, no language.

  “Can I drive you home?” asked Luke.

  “No, no.”

  “But it’s pouring. She’ll just get wet all over again,” said Felix looking up at his father.

  It was true. Outside, the rain fell steadily against the windows, and it didn’t make sense for her to venture out in it again. Reluctantly, she agreed to the ride, anything to get home.

  Felix wanted to stay behind, and the two adults took the short car ride from the Post Road to Mundy Lane.

  Luke drove slowly through Hanzloo as the rain pounded the car. Visibility was poor, and he repeatedly cleared the inside of the windshield with the palm of his hand as it fogged. When he pulled up in front of the O’Brien house, the wipers were swinging back and forth in a steady zoop, zoop.

  “You never said why you paid us a visit,” said Luke.

  “Thank you for the ride,” said Lil.

  “You’re very beautiful,” he said. It jumped out of his mouth.

  Lil turned her head sharply toward him.

  “What I mean is I’m a painter and … so is your daughter … beautiful. You are both so—”

  “They’ve taken her from me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My daughter. Alice. Because I’m not well. I guess you’ve seen enough of me to figure that out by now.” She paused, and the sound of the wipers on the windshield amplified inside the car. “And because of your son,” she added flatly. “They say your son did something to Alice, molested her. Did you know about that?”

  Luke rubbed his eyes under his glasses.

  “When I asked Alice, she wouldn’t tell me what happened.” Lil searched his face. “Did he? Did he do it?” she asked.

  Luke leaned into the steering wheel. “Look, my son may be unusual, but I can’t believe he’d do something like that.”

  “How do you know?” asked Lil.

  “Who told you this?” said Luke.

  “Clarisse McCarthy, and now she’s finagled my husband into thinking that Alice would be better off staying with her.”

  “Clarisse McCarthy? Oh, ridiculous! She’s the one who’s saying this? She seems to have a lot of power over people in this town,” said Luke, and without thinking, he reached out and put his hand over Lil’s, as if she were a trusted friend. “I don’t believe it,” he said.

  When she saw his hand on hers, she pulled away.

  “You’re not coming on to me, are you?” said Lil, fear darting across her eyes. “That’s not right. I’m trying to tell you that my family, my daughter, this is awful. If you for think for one minute that I would ever—”

  “I’m not coming on to you!” he said, raising both his hands. “It’s just that I received a letter in the mail—as I’m sitting here, I realize, of course it was Clarisse McCarthy who sent it—I came to your house the other morning to show you the letter, but you were, well, I couldn’t.”

  Lil looked out the car window and wiped her nose. “I hate her.”

  “You do?” Luke couldn’t contain his smile. “You’re funny. Who are you?”

  “Oh, come on, how the hell do I know? Who are you?” she said, buttoning her coat in a hurry. “I’m a housewife, just like the rest of them, and you are asking for trouble here in Hanzloo.”

  Luke took a firm hold of the steering wheel with his hands.

  Lil peered out the window toward her house, which was being pelted by wind and rain. “Snakes come out in the rain, did you know that?
If I were you, I’d move away from here.” She got out of the car, but before she closed the door she turned and poked her head back in. “What did happen between our children?”

  Luke raised his voice over the rain. “Probably nothing! That’s what I think. Look, maybe you should get out of this town. You don’t seem to belong here, either.”

  Lil slammed the car door and Luke yelled after her, “I know you’re lonely!” He watched her run up the driveway, as the rain pummeled the roof of his car.

  SEVENTEEN

  AFTER SIX DAYS at the McCarthy home, Alice was badly constipated, not even knowing what that meant. She’d been holding on to every inch of herself and couldn’t get comfortable at their house, most especially in any of the family’s bathrooms. Making even a tiny stink or tinkling noise was unbearable. It seemed that whenever she snuck away to try to use one of the bathrooms, the door was closed, and she worried it would be impolite to knock or wait in the hallway. She feared that from behind the door Mr. McCarthy might emerge in his boxer shorts, with a newspaper under his arm, having just flicked a cigarette into the toilet bowl as it flushed, with a bad smell lingering. It had happened once, and upon seeing Alice, he’d walked past as if she weren’t there, but then turned back abruptly, and said, “Boo!” He laughed so loud it seemed more like a roar, and though Alice had the sense that he was trying to be funny, she didn’t like it at all. Mr. McCarthy’s size alone was beastly, but his hairy back and chest made him seem like something that belonged in a zoo, not in someone’s home.

  “Mom,” she kept saying to herself. “Mom!” she called out one night, waking herself up, but no one else.

  Alice hadn’t seen Sneedler all week, and she pictured him shivering in the cold woods that lay beyond the McCarthys’ at the end of Mundy Lane. When no one was paying attention, she peeked out the windows on that side of the house, but there wasn’t a trace of him. She knew she should search for him, but sometimes at night the trees looked like they might become uprooted and run around.

  And what if Sneedler died?

  Before bed, her dad would call to say goodnight. Most of the time, Clarisse McCarthy stood beside her in the kitchen as she talked to him, but one night he called while Clarisse was tending to the twins.