Fiona Range

by Mary McGarry Morris

  “I can’t do that. He’ll only be here a few minutes more.”

  “A few minutes! He’s already been in there a half hour! What’s going on? What’re you doing in there?” he demanded.

  “We’re talking.” She kept looking at his distorted mouth, red and so wet a thin trickle of drool glistened on his chin. “We’re talking about my cousin, Elizabeth.”

  Just then the door to her apartment opened, and he let go of her arm.

  “I thought maybe you got locked out,” Rudy said, squinting and angling his head to see. “Is everything all right?”

  “It will be when you’re gone, buddy,” Patrick said before she could even nod. He stepped past her and stood in front of Rudy. “What the hell’re you doing here? What do you want? Yah! Don’t answer! You better not, because I know what you want. I know!” he said, pointing at Rudy. “Always coming by, looking up at the window. How many times you go by here this morning, huh, you no-good son of a—”

  “Patrick!”

  His entire face seemed raw, a wound so ugly and frightening she could barely say his name. “Patrick . . . Patrick . . . Patrick.”

  “Look,” Rudy said calmly. “I’m not sure what’s going on here, but I don’t think there’s any need to—”

  “Shut up!” Patrick roared, jabbing his finger into Rudy’s chest. “Just shut the fuck up!”

  Across the hall Ned Clinch’s door opened the width of his lock chain. “Do you people realize that it’s Sunday morning and some of us are trying to sleep?” he said, looking only at Fiona.

  “I know. I’m sorry, Mr. Clinch,” she said to the delicate little man who seemed more giddy than angry.

  “That’s my paper, isn’t it? You’ve got my paper! And you took it last week, didn’t you? I could tell. I thought the folds were all wrong.”

  “Here!” she said, pushing it in to him. “I just picked it up, that’s all. You can close the door now. It’s okay. There won’t be any more noise.”

  “I’ll close it when the damn hallway’s empty, that’s when I’ll damn well close it!” Ned Clinch declared from the safety of his chained door.

  “No! You’ll close it now,” Patrick cried, lunging as the door slammed shut. “You little fag!” He banged on the door. “You goddamn little creep.”

  “Fiona!” Rudy put his hand on her arm. “What do you want me to do?” he asked in a low voice, his face close to hers.

  “She wants you to leave, buddy!” Patrick bellowed with a shove at his extended arm. “She wants you to get the hell outta here!”

  Rudy stared at her. For all his usual agitation, he was in this moment so obdurately calm he might have been a brick wall Patrick was trying to move.

  “So go! Just—”

  “No!” she said. “You leave, Patrick. You have to go. I want you to go now!”

  He took a faltering step back, looking confused, as if he didn’t believe her.

  “I mean it! You have to! Please! Just go! Go!” she hissed, waving her hand as if to shoo him away.

  “I’ll call you!” he said as if it were a threat. “I’m gonna call. I don’t care what the fuck he says. You hear me?” He pointed at her. “I’m gonna call!”

  She nodded. “Yes. Call. You call me.”

  “Are you all right?” Rudy asked when they were in the apartment.

  She nodded as she dialed the phone. Mr. Clinch answered on the first ring. She apologized.

  “Apology not accepted,” he said, adding that this had been a nice, quiet place until she moved in.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, praying he wouldn’t complain to the landlord. “I’m so sorry. It won’t happen again, believe me. I promise, Mr. Clinch. I give you my word.”

  “You’d better, because I tell you if I see that creepy man lurking around here again I’m calling the police.”

  “There was a misunderstanding. He wasn’t lurking.”

  “He most certainly was! And he was here yesterday too! I saw him! He had his ear to your door. I knew you weren’t home, so I said to myself, ‘All right, I’ll give the creep two more minutes then I’m calling the police,’ but then he left.”

  She assured Mr. Clinch he wouldn’t be back. “Oh God,” she groaned after she hung up. Why was Patrick doing this?

  Rudy sat down next to her. “Fiona?”

  “Nice life I have, huh?” she said, looking up. “Let’s see, first it was handcuffs, then it was screaming women in Dunkin’ Donuts. And now this! Jesus, you must think I’m some real piece of work.”

  “Of course I don’t. This is the way it goes sometimes. For everyone.”

  “Yah, right.”

  “It’s true. And remember, ‘when sorrows come, they come not as single spies, but in battalions.’”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Hamlet.”

  “Oh. Good. Hamlet. He was the crazy one, right?”

  “Tormented, I’d say.”

  “That’s what Patrick is. God!” She sighed, shaking her head to free herself from this nightmare.

  “He’s the same guy who was here when I brought you the sneakers, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Was he trying to hurt you?”

  “No. No, he wouldn’t do that.”

  “He’s obviously in a bad way, Fiona. I mean, he was gone! He was drunk with rage.”

  “No, it’s pain and disappointment. In his whole life he’s never really had anything.”

  “That may be an explanation. But it’s no excuse. Not for what I just saw out there.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Fiona,” he said, putting his hand over hers. “What if you’re his target the next time he loses control?”

  “I wouldn’t be,” she said, pulling away.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he’s my father,” she said, unable to quell her smile.

  On Monday the coffee shop stayed busy from breakfast to closing. Fiona was grateful. She didn’t want to think. If yesterday had been bad, last night had been worse. Patrick had called late in the evening to apologize, but then became so worked up he began shouting that she was acting like a tramp, and he couldn’t understand it, couldn’t understand why she’d do that to herself. She threatened to hang up if he didn’t stop.

  “You better not,” he growled, and her hair stood on end.

  “I’m hanging up now. Don’t call me back until you’ve calmed down. And I don’t want you to ever come here again. Ever!” Her hands continued to tremble after she hung up the phone. He called back immediately. She left the receiver off the hook until morning. The minute she replaced it the phone rang again. She took it off the hook and left for work.

  A mild turn in the raw November days had lured shoppers out of the malls. The downtown storefronts had been decorated for Christmas since the beginning of the month. With Thanksgiving a few weeks away, Dearborn’s public works department was stringing tiny white lights in all the trees on Main Street. Lampposts along the way had been hung earlier in the day with large balsam wreaths and red bows.

  “It’s starting to feel a lot like Christmas,” Donna Drouin sang with a glance out the window. She was the new waitress hired to replace Sandy, who had moved into the Prescotts’ house. Sandy was pregnant. The Prescotts were hoping the baby would be Todd’s wake-up call, Donna was saying.

  Fiona swept the floor. She was already sick of Donna’s brash voice. Donna hadn’t stopped talking since she’d come in this morning. Mention a name and if she didn’t know the person, she’d at least know the best friend or closest living relative. A stout woman in her late forties, Donna had worked just about everywhere in town. She had even worked here a few years ago until Chester let her go because she was so messy and talked too much. Last week, after days of running an ad that brought in scores of young single mothers like Sandy, Chester told Maxine to call Donna Drouin. Maybe he could handle her big mouth better now that he had Maxine out front, he had confided in Fiona. But Donna
was already bothering the hell out of him. She and Maxine were quickly becoming fast friends. On Saturday she had given Maxine a perm. Her last job had been receptionist at Carlene’s Cute Cuts.

  “She’s so talented. She can do anything,” Maxine told Fiona.

  “Oh yah? Well just remember it’s not exactly rocket science,” Donna’s booming voice called across the empty dining room. The safety pins at the hem of her uniform glinted as she lumbered from table to table, refilling salt and pepper shakers. The coarse black hair on her unshaven legs was bad enough, Fiona thought, but today she had the worst body odor.

  Maxine touched her dry, frizzy hair. “Now I need some highlights. Donna’s going to give me a foil.”

  “No, don’t,” Fiona said too quickly, and Maxine’s eyes widened with injury. “It looks perfect the way it is.”

  “How about you, Fiona?” Donna called. “You’d be a great blonde.” She came over and lifted Fiona’s chin, moving it from side to side. “I remember when your mother went blond, and you have the same coloring.”

  “She was never blond,” Fiona scoffed, pulling back from the soiled fingers.

  “Oh yes she was!” Donna said with a sticky pinch of her cheek. “For a little while anyway. Everyone said how great she looked, and I know because I was working at the drugstore then and I sold her the kit. And then the next time I saw her it was all raggedy and short like it had been hacked off or something.”

  “When was that?” Fiona asked, trailing her to the next booth.

  “Right before she left. Sixty-nine or seventy. I don’t know, seems like everyone was dropping out then. Sometimes I think that’s what I should have done, just—”

  “What do you mean, ‘like it had been hacked off’? What happened? Didn’t she say?”

  “At first she tried to make it sound like it was some hot-shit, badass thing she felt like doing. But it wasn’t; I mean, you could tell, it was so . . . so violent-looking. Like I said, hacked. Like, some places right down to the scalp. You could even see cuts from the scissors.”

  “Did she say what happened?”

  “Yah. Patrick Grady did it. She said he got mad because she bleached her hair. She said everything she did made him mad. I told her she should go to the cops, but he already had enough problems, she said. But then she said she was going away anyway so it wouldn’t really matter anymore.”

  With Maxine’s approach Fiona started to leave before there could be any more badmouthing Patrick. She didn’t believe Donna. She’d never a heard a word about Natalie bleaching her hair or Patrick cutting it off. Donna would say anything for attention.

  “But I’ll tell you one thing though,” Donna called, anxious not to lose her audience. “She loved her baby girl. She was crazy about you, kiddo!” she said with a wink. “I never once saw her without you.”

  “Really?” Fiona turned back and couldn’t help smiling.

  “Yah. In fact that’s why she was there. You were sick. She came in for a prescription. And that’s how we got talking. She had to wait. Now that I think of it, that was probably the last time I saw her.”

  When she got home from work her uncle’s gleaming black Lincoln was idling behind her building. Her stomach began to ache. He got out of the car and hurried toward her.

  “Uncle Charles!” She tried to smile, but could tell from the ice in his eyes that he’d come about yesterday’s disturbance.

  “I have to talk to you.”

  “Oh yah, sure! Fire away!” Let me have it, she thought, folding her arms over the ketchup stain on her uniform.

  “I’d rather not out here, if you don’t mind.”

  She looked around the empty lot. “Yah, people might think that’s a little weird, huh, seeing you and me talking.”

  His breath quickened on his way up the stairs. She’d left the apartment a mess this morning. More fodder for his Fiona disaster mill. Her entire body felt locked in a permanent cringe. They didn’t speak until they got inside. She asked him to sit down, but he said he’d rather stand after sitting all day. Any other time that might have been a joke, but there wasn’t a trace of humor in his handsome face that was now lined and gray. He took a deep breath to calm himself before he began.

  “There comes a time—”

  “Look, Uncle Charles, I know exactly why you’re here, but first I just want to say it was all just a stupid misunderstanding, that’s all,” she said with a disgusted sigh.

  He looked at her. “As I was about to say, there comes a time in each of our lives when we must face up to the fact that certain things are absolutely beyond our control,” he said slowly.

  “Exactly!” she cried with relief. And that’s what—”

  “Fiona! Don’t interrupt me again. Please.”

  “Then let me tell you what happened!”

  “We always do it that way, don’t we? But this time you will listen to me. This time, I will speak first.” He paused, his cold gaze ensuring her silence. “My mistake has been in continuing to deal with you and all your troubles as if they were the mishaps of a child. Always picking up the pieces and patching the holes. But you are a grown woman, and as such, the havoc you wreak is so serious, the ramifications so pervasive, of such duration, so continuous, that now I see you destroying people’s very lives, and I can’t continue on in the same way. I just can’t!”

  Without a word she got up and walked into the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator and took out two bottles of beer. She put one on the coffee table in front of him, twisted open the cap on hers, then stood with her head back as she drank slowly, deliberately from the bottle. Setting the bottle down, she wiped her mouth, then smiled. “So what’re you going to do?”

  “Why? Why are you doing this, Fiona? What pleasure does it give you to hurt us this way, to—” His hands shot to his face, but then he looked up quickly as if he dared not look away, could not risk even a moment’s lapse. “To destroy us?” he gasped.

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” she said. “Please! Whatever shit I happen to step in, I step in for one reason, and one reason only. Because I just didn’t know it was there.”

  “Do you know what this will do to your cousin? Do you have any idea?”

  “I guess not. Because I don’t even know what the hell you’re talking about.” She raised the bottle in another long guzzle though she didn’t even want the beer. It left her mouth tasting of cold wet metal.

  “I’m talking about Elizabeth,” he said, then looked wildly about the room as if for another presence he had suddenly realized was there. “Oh God! Oh my God,” he said, gripping his head with both hands.

  “Elizabeth! What does she care?”

  He looked at her, mouth agape. “Of course. Now it all makes sense. Oh my God. Oh my God!” He lurched forward, then turned back. “Fiona, I’m going to ask you straight out, and I want the truth. The absolute truth. What is going on between you and Rudy Larkin?”

  She banged the bottle down and beer spurted onto the table. She looked at him, kept looking while all the bends and turns coalesced into blurred, ghostly images and voices of a half-forgotten film. “Oh. I see. Now I get it! Of course. Naturally whenever there’s trouble your first suspect would be me, right? Well, I wasn’t going to breach the good doctor’s confidence, but since you’re thinking such nasty thoughts I guess I’d better. Rudy came here because he’s afraid Elizabeth wants to break off their engagement.”

  “Why didn’t he go to her?” he asked, watching carefully.

  “He said he’s tried. But she won’t discuss it. Sound familiar?” she said, immediately regretting her sarcasm.

  He stood with his head hung, looking so miserable that she touched his arm. “They’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it. You know Lizzie. She always lives happily ever after, and she always will. She’s like you. She’s a perfectionist, and sometimes things just get magnified all out of proportion, right? They do, don’t they?” she added, trying to smile. “Uncle Charles!” She shook his arm. “It’s going to be all
right. Believe me. In the scheme of things this is no big deal!”

  He regarded her now with a kind of horror. “No, nothing’s a big deal, is it? Not even breaking up a marriage. I heard what happened with the Gliddens. What you did,” he said, holding his head back as if from some vile odor.

  “What I did? No. No,” she said with a deathly calm. “I want you to leave. I want you to leave right now.”

  “This can’t go on. It’s too destructive. What can I say? What can I do? There must be something, Fiona, something that would make you happy. You’re thirty years old! Is this the way it’s going to be for the rest of your life? Turmoil and shame? Is that what you want?”

  “I want you to leave.”

  “First you’re going to listen to me. For once in your life you’re going to listen. I’ve already talked to Patrick and I’ve told him I don’t want him anywhere near you. He mustn’t come here. He mustn’t call you. You can’t have anything to do with him.”

  “What? You can’t do that! You can’t tell me—”

  “Fiona! I will tell you, and that’s because I know exactly what’s happening. There’s a dangerous, dangerous game being played here, Fiona! And it’s working out just the way he wants it.”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” she scoffed.

  He held up his hand. “No. No, listen. Patrick Grady would like nothing better than to destroy this family. And now he’s trying to do just that through you.”

  “That’s ridiculous! You just don’t know him the way I do.”

  “Oh Fiona!” he gasped. “If you’ve never believed a word from my mouth, believe what I’ve just told you. Please!”

  Chapter 12

  Patrick was on the phone. He wanted to come over, but the only way she would see him was at his house. She assured him it wasn’t her uncle Charles, but her neighbors. She couldn’t risk upsetting them any more than they already were. As it was, neither Mrs. Terrill nor Mr. Clinch would speak to her. She didn’t dare tell him that Mr. Clinch had lodged a formal complaint with the landlord, a copy of which he had slipped under her door. According to Mr. Clinch she was “a troublesome neighbor, one who was attracting a most undesirable element to the premises.”