Citizen Insane

Chapter Five





ODDLY, BUNNY AND MICHELLE’S FELINE fracas in the school parking lot had lifted my spirits. Maybe I was just reveling in the knowledge that someone might have bigger problems than me, who knows? Regardless, Bunny was losing control in a big way. She’d progressed from wacko quack to super psycho freak. Of course, I still wanted to know why the FBI had been called out to her house for a mere rabbit hit and run, but I’d needle Howard for that info soon enough. Right before I castrated him.

After Roz dropped me off, I opened my front door, expecting to find things quiet with Amber in bed, Bethany reading in her room, and Callie watching TV or talking to friends on her computer.

So much for expectations. Instead, I was greeted by an unusually warm, domestic scene. Comfortably cozy on the family room sofa, my mother sat, book in hand, flanked on one side by ten year old Bethany and on the other side by six year old Amber wearing a tiger’s tail and cat ears. Just two months earlier Amber had waved her fairy phase goodbye and sleuthed into her Josie and the p-ssycats phase. I was going broke keeping her in DVD sets of the old cartoons, many of which she could now recite from memory.

Callie was curled up in the overstuffed comfy chair, a red blanket hiding everything except her beautiful head. Norman Rockwell could not have painted a more perfect picture himself. I touched a hand to my heart.

The girls, engrossed by the story being read to them, didn’t look up as I entered. Finally, I thought, after all of these years, there was hope for my mother. She could be like other grandmothers—warm, loving and maternal. I sat on the edge of Callie’s chair and took in the literary moment, wondering what lovely, pretty little fairy tale she had chosen.

“’There isn't any night club in the world’,” she read in a calm yet dramatic voice, “’you can sit in for a long time unless you can at least buy some liquor and get drunk. Or unless you're with some girl that really knocks you out.’”

I jumped to my feet. “Mom!”

She peered at me over her tortoise shell half eye glasses. “What dear?”

“What are you reading to them?”

Innocently, she turned the red paperback around so I could see the title. “Catcher in the Rye. It’s a great American novel. You really should expose these girls to better literature. All I could find were some miserable books about that little brat on the prairie. No imagination. This, you can sink your teeth into.”

I grabbed the book from her hands. “This is not appropriate! What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking that they needed exposure to art.”

“Art? Catcher in The Rye? I’m barely comfortable with Callie hearing this stuff, but come on—Amber and Bethany?”

“This ‘stuff’ as you so blithely dismiss it, is considered some of the most important writing of the twentieth century. I’m taking a college literature course—reconnecting with the classics. You know, I dated JD for a brief time.”

Again, with a big fish tale.

“You dated JD Salinger?” Suspicion was evident in my tone.

“It was a long time ago,” she said, adding a nonchalant wave of her hand. “Before I met your father.”

Everything my mother claimed to have done in her life, including an ambiguous stint on Broadway, auditioning for the role of Bond girl, and getting drunk with Ernest Hemingway, happened before she met my father. Since she would never confess to her real age, I figured she was either a very precocious teenager, or she met my father when she was sixty.

“Mom, JD Salinger was a recluse.”

“Only after we dated.”

If her story was true, Salinger’s fear of people was finally explained.

She exhausted me. The woman simply exhausted me. More than anything, I just wanted to crawl into bed and put the horrible day behind me. I looked at my watch.

“Mom, it’s ten o’clock. Amber and Bethany should have been asleep over an hour ago.” I waved in the direction of the stairs. “Go girls. Get up there now.”

“We want more! Please, Mom?”

“You heard me—up there now.” Reluctantly and with the speed of two sloths, they did as I asked, Amber dragging her sad tiger tail behind her.

“Callie, you too. Shoo!” Callie performed the required teenage eye roll. She was a skilled eye-roller. Almost as good as her father.

“Why me?” she wailed as the eyeballs spun. “I’m not a baby.”

“I’m sure Grandma has somewhere important she has to be. Hang gliding lessons? Bungee jumping off Memorial Bridge? Climbing Mount Everest maybe?”

A skilled master at initiating awkward moments, my mom stared me down without giving up an answer. Silent seconds ticked away. Sweat beaded on my forehead. Callie wiggled restlessly then snuck silently away. When the Grand Intimidator had achieved the desired effect, she spoke.

“Actually,” she pulled the tortoise shell frames slowly from her face. “I will be going momentarily. I expect my ride any second now.”

I wondered why she would need a ride until it hit me—her Mini Cooper wasn’t in the driveway when I got home.

The doorbell rang.

Intuition and experience told me she was up to something.

Her eyes lit up like Roman candles on the Fourth of July. “There he is now!”

He? Either she had a boyfriend or . . . before I could consider the alternative, she shot out of her chair and leapt to the door. She was amazingly agile for a woman with such large bone mass. Something akin to the progeny of a gazelle and a wooly mammoth.

“Russ! Come in. I’ll get my things.” She was gushing.

Poking my head around the corner, a vision of supreme studliness befell my weary eyes.

She dragged me into the foyer. “Barbara, meet my friend, Russell Crow.”

I laughed.

Russell smiled.

“I get that all the time,” he responded with a half-chuckle. “Spelled C-R-O-W though. No E on the end.” Russell smiled real nice.

“Oh, who needs that E anyway?” I blabbered while soaking in his six-foot plus, plentifully abbed-frame, wavy blonde hair and deliciously rugged but blemish-free skin. He was a god. An Adonis. A godly Adonis had walked into my house in little old Rustic Woods,Virginia. My heart skipped about twenty beats.

“Russell is a fire fighter at the station just down the road. I met him at my Citizen’s Fire Fighter Academy.”

Of course, he was a fire fighter. They’re all hunks. It’s true—go to a station sometime and just try to find a fat and ugly fireman. They don’t exist. I couldn’t help from smiling.

“He’s the single fella I mentioned earlier,” my mother added.

My smile fell, my heart stalled, and my face flushed frantic fuschia.

While I quickly pondered very specific and merciless methods for murdering the woman who supposedly gave me life, Russell squelched the flames of my embarrassment by offering his hand for a shake, “You can call me Russ,” he said. “And don’t let your mother worry you. I’m not married, but I am seeing someone.”

“Thank goodness, because I’m married! I mean, not that if you weren’t married . . . I mean . . . well if I weren’t married . . . do you have a gun? A cross-bow? Because if you did, I’d ask you to end my misery right now.”

Russell Crow’s feathers didn’t ruffle even a wee bit. He continued smiling, unfazed by my incoherent dithering. “No worries. We have to get going.” He put his hand up for a farewell wave. “It was nice meeting you.”

“You too,” I managed to squeak while shooting deadly daggers of doom toward my mother who scooted out the door.

Before the door closed behind them, I heard Russel yell. “I’ve got it now!”

The door opened and Russell’s dreamy head appeared.

“You’ve got what now?” I asked.

“Where I’ve seen you before.”

“You’ve seen me before?”

“Were you over on Green Ashe Place earlier today? Talking with an FBI agent?”

I nodded.

“I thought so. I never forget a face. Especially such a pretty one.”

I gulped. “That agent was my husband, Howard.”

“He’s a lucky man.” He pulled his head back out and closed my door.

Holy cow. Talk about combustion. Fires were ignited in regions that hadn’t been ablaze for some time. A cold shower was in order. I was a married woman, after all.





Upstairs, Amber laid in bed with covers up to her chin, cat ears still in place, and awaiting her goodnight kiss. We rubbed noses.

“Mommy, what’s a prom?”

“It’s a special high school dance. Why?”

“Callie is being a grouchy pants and Bethany says it’s ‘cuz she’s hoping Brandon will ask her to the prom, but he hasn’t yet.”

I smiled. “That makes sense.” Brandon had been around our house a few times and I wondered if Callie was hoping for more than friendship.

“Not to me it doesn’t. Does that mean that she wants to kiss him? If it does, then that’s just plain yucky.” She stuck out her tongue. “Samuel Tinker said he wanted to kiss me on the playground and I told him if he tried, I’d punch him in his peanuts.”

“Where did you hear that word?”

“Emily Barnes. Why? Is it a bad word?”

“It depends on where you think his peanuts are . . . located.”

“In his stomach. Where else?”

“Good. Well, from now on, just call a stomach, a stomach. To avoid misunderstandings.”

“Why would there be any missed understandings?”

“Trust me.”

She sighed. “I don’t want to grow up, thank you very much.”

“Why?”

“You people seem to make everything way too complicaketed.”

“Complicated.”

“See what I mean?”

We exchanged kisses and I turned out the light.

Bethany’s room was dark, but I could see a flashlight under her covers. The girl lived to read.

“Good night, Bethy.”

“’Night Mom.”

“Promise you’ll turn the flashlight off before eleven?”

“Sure, Mom.”

I found Callie at her desk in front of the computer, her fingers dancing furiously on the keyboard. She’d pulled her thick, walnut hair off her shoulders with a band.

“Hey, gorgeous,” I said, sitting on the edge of her bed.

She didn’t look up. “Hey.”

“Whatcha doin’?”

“Homework.” Her fingers kept typing.

I traced little blue flowers on her bedspread. “Oh.”

“Do you want something?”

“No.” I cleared my throat while I looked around her room. “Not really.”

“That’s a Grandma move.”

It mortified me that she was right. “I was just wondering . . .”

She stopped what she was doing and turned her head to peer at me with an annoyed expression. “Mom.”

“Has anyone asked you to the prom yet?”

“There’s more to that question, isn’t there?”

“I don’t know . . . is there?”

“What’s with the vague-speak?”

“I was just trying to communicate in your own language. Isn’t that how teens talk? Stepping around the real issue, but everyone knows what you’re talking about?”

“In your day maybe. Teens have evolved since the sixteenth century. Now we just come out and ask. It’s much easier that way.”

“Touché.” She was a witty one and I couldn’t help but grin. “Well, from one decaying, primeval mother to one progressive, worldly teenager: has Brandon asked you to the prom yet?”

The corners of her mouth tugged reluctantly into a pretty smile and she shook her head. “Not yet.”

“Not yet?” I was tingly with excitement for her. “But you think he’s going to ask?”

“I think so. He keeps showing up out of no where and acts sort of weird. And he texts me like fifty times a day.”

I nodded. “That’s a sure sign. He’ll get up the courage soon enough. You just let me know when we need to go dress shopping, okay?”

I kissed her forehead. “Go to bed at a decent hour, would you?”





By eleven-thirty, I had seen all three girls to bed, taken a shower, sipped a half-glass of wine and cried a tear or two over Howard and his new woman. I only allowed myself two tears though. The crying and moping was going to stop pronto. No more whining. I crawled into bed and concluded that tomorrow was a new day. I wasn’t ready to be a divorcee. I loved my husband. True, there were many handsome and eligible men out there like Fire Fighter Russell Crow, but it seemed to me that a George Clooney in the bush was better than two Russell Crows in the hand.

With that, the decision to win back my husband was made and I turned out my light, calm and resolute in declaring war at the break of dawn.

Then the phone rang.

I groped for the receiver. Unidentifiable items clinked and clanked as they hit my floor in my failed attempt to answer the call before it woke up the household. Finally, my hands landed on the cordless receiver. I clicked the “talk” button, hopeful Howard would be on the other end. “Hello?”

So much for hope.

“Barb?” The female voice was familiar, but I couldn’t place it at first.

“Yeah. . .”

“Can you come over? I’m sick.”

“Bunny? Is that you?”

“Yes. It’s just so awful. Can you come?”

“Well . . . I just got into bed. Don’t you have . . . you know—friends you could call?”

“I don’t have any friends. Not anymore.”

“Bunny . . .”

“Please Barb! I need someone right now. I’m . . . I’m scared.” She seemed to be slurring her words. Even I was a little worried for her.

“Fine. I’ll be there in a few minutes. I need to get dressed.”

A dial tone in my ears was the only response.

“Bunny?”

Dial tone.

Damn! I slammed the phone down.

I turned on my light and slipped a pair of sweats over my pajama bottoms, then peeked out my window at Roz’s house. I didn’t want to go to Bunny’s alone. That woman was one fry short of a Happy Meal. Reinforcements were needed. Thankfully, Roz’s bedroom light shone brightly. She was probably reading. I reached for the phone and dialed her number.

“What’s wrong?” she answered on the first ring.

“I know it’s late. Sorry. I just got this weird call from Bunny. She says she’s scared and wants me to come over.”

“Doesn’t she have any friends to call?”

“I already asked that question.”

“And?”

“She says she doesn’t have any friends anymore.”

“After tonight, I guess that’s no surprise.”

“My thoughts exactly. I’m not going over there alone. She threatened to kill Michelle after all.”

“Now you’re just being silly. She only said that in the heat of the moment.”

“I won’t go if you don’t come with me.”

“Fine. You drive.”

“I’ll be right over.”

I checked on the girls and taped a note to my bedroom door just in case any of them woke up while I was gone and came looking for me. I put on my jacket and tapped the pocket to make sure my cell phone was there. Check. Finally, I slipped on a pair of clogs, picked up my keys and exited the house as quietly as possible, locking the door behind me.

The air had grown chilly and I shivered as I crawled into my car. After a minute of fiddling to get the key into the ignition, I turned the engine over, shattering the dark silence of the night with its oil-deprived roar.

A knock on the passenger’s window startled me until I realized it was Roz. She opened the door and slipped in. “Thought I’d save you the long drive to my house,” she said smiling.

“I’m glad you’re so chipper at this late hour.”

Determined to make this strange call of the wild short and sweet, I threw the gear shift into reverse, backed out and sped toward the stop sign at the end of White Willow Circle.

Roz white-knuckled her armrest. “It’s a mini-van, Barb. Not a Ferrari.”

“Sorry.” I looked both ways for a safe turn onto Tall Birch Avenue. “I just want to get this over with.”

“Be careful. We’ve got all night.”

One of my biggest gripes about Rustic Woods was the No Street Lights rule. Supposedly the issue was “light pollution.” I grumbled often and made several complaints to the homeowners association, as did other residents, to no avail. My headlights barely made a dent in the dense blackness of the moonless night. However, it was late, and there wasn’t another set of headlights anywhere around, so I turned left. We’d be at Bunny’s in less than a minute.

I couldn’t get Bunny’s odd behavior out of my mind and was about to ask Roz what she thought, when she shouted. “Barb, watch out!”

I hit the brakes, but not before I heard the thump.

My neck ached from stopping so fast. “What happened?”

“You hit something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. It’s too dark. I saw something out of the corner of my eye. A deer maybe?”

“I never saw a deer.”

“Well you hit something!”

“Okay, okay. Calm down. I’ll get out and check.” Shifting back to park and leaving the engine idling, I opened my door. My feet landed on the street rather than a dead animal, so things were looking up. I ran my fingers along the front side of my van—no dents. Another good sign. No front bumper damage either as far as I could tell and nothing on the ground in front. Maybe Roz was wrong. Maybe I hadn’t hit anything. I continued along the front bumper when it became very obvious that Roz was right. Well, she was sort of right. I hadn’t hit something.

I had hit someone.

Michelle Alexander.