I'm what you would consider a mental case... and would you blame me. Having to live day to day life in Bailey Downs has to cause someone to break. More so when a moment in a persons past is probably one of the weirdest and fucked up occurrences in the whole town. But weirdness was a part of being a Fitzgerald.
When I was four, I had two sisters. Ginger and Brigitte, probably the most gothic and deep people I had ever known. I remember the dinner table conversations the most, the bickering between Mom, the dark humoured jokes about medical diseases or death, Mom becoming upset and both of them retreating down the stairs and into their room in the basement. That was how it usually went. It brings me comfort now, thinking back on those moments. Maybe it was because now that they were gone I felt that my family had been split, right down the middle like a crack in the earth. Or maybe it was because, now that I think about, they were the ones living in reality.
It was October, 31st, 2000, a cold mid-autumn night, that it happened. I call the occurance it because there is simply no way I can describe it, both logically and emotionally. It was this night that my mother returned home from a play date I had had with a friend from school. A friend who would still remain close to me to this day. We walked through the door together and came into the living room where the horror show began. I don't remember everything that night (some is in the deeper regions of my brain, forced there by the pain and fear, my psychologist says) but I do remember bits and pieces. My mothers horrified face as she came up from Ginger and Brigitte's room, the blood on her hands, the crazed expression. No wonder her mind broke.
But the craziest thing of all was there had been no source to the blood. Litres of it spread on the dusty, concrete flooring and no open vein to be seen. And my sisters gone, nowhere to be seen.
The information I received later in life (when I was old enough to investigate the case myself) told me that the investigating officers concluded my sisters had killed someone and hid the body somewhere unknown. They based this assumption on the body of young and beautiful Trina Sinclair, found in our backyard covered in dirt and worms. They had, what the court psychologist concluded, a psychotic break. A break brought on by their fascination with death and their gothic interests. Others speculated it was an act of satanic worship (how cliche) and my sisters were "opening themselves to dark energies for the purpose of some teen revenge plot."
Whatever explanation that floated around, everyone knew something dark had happened at the Fitzgerald house. We became the town pariahs suddenly over night. My parents friends began to ignore them along with the town. There was no more late night poker games for my father, no more book club for my mother. We all became invisible. Ghosts from a tragic past.
It was soon after that my mother suffered a psychotic break. I was 6, coming home from my first day of school. I found her in the kitchen, an empty bottle of wine in her hand. The house smelled of gasoline, sour and strong in the air. I had to fight to get the lighter out of her hands.
My father came home immediately after I called him at work. He had told me to stay in my room, lifting my mother from her catatonic state on the ground. He dragged her into their bedroom, slamming the door. The police came soon after and my mother was admitted into Happier Times Care Center, her file claiming her as mentally unstable.
Life was hard after that. Growing up without my mom was a struggle. Everyday I came home from school, no one to greet me, no after school snacks, no help with my math homework. I came home to an empty house, no one but me.
I learned to live with it after a while. I learned that I could make my own lunch. I could look in the back of the math textbook for the answers. Nobody needed to ask me about my day because nothing extravagant happened. No one wanted to talk to someone who was related to killers.
I'm 16 now, still a pariah in my high school, known as Fitzenstein by Tessa Sinclair and her Barbie doll goons. I sit with the only people that still care, my two best friends Gretchen Summers and Danielle Morrison. They were the ones that never left my side. Never treated me like a monster. That's all I wanted. To be treated like a normal person.
I still think about my sisters, wondering where they are today. The police figured they were dead somewhere, a double suicide. They were always going on about their death pact, even going so far to write a practice note. But the bodies had never been discovered, so it was still open to speculation. I imagined them both together, hiding somewhere in the woods. Somewhere remote. I wondered when they would ever come home. Would they ever come home? Would I ever discover what happened that Halloween night so long ago? It was this last question that was the key to curing my insanity. I was going insane from the unknown.