Echoes of Dollanganger (32 page)

“But by that logic, you'd be one, too,” I told her, and she got mad at me.

When I first began to read the diary by myself, I anticipated discovering secrets about the Foxworth family and what was true and what wasn't about the legend of children being locked in a house attic for years and years, but I had no idea, of course, that it would come to these intense sexual revelations. Surely, no one could know what went on between Christopher Jr. and his sister. Their mother and especially their grandmother would never reveal any of that later on. The truth was that it would be only in this diary that those discoveries would be made.

Boys loved to label girls who were considered more uninhibited, like Suzette, as being nymphomaniacs. Once you had that reputation, it wasn't easy getting washed of it. It would stain you and last throughout your high school life. I knew of girls who had that reputation and then left either for college or some job, and I could only imagine how difficult it was for them to return to live here, especially if they married someone not from here and then returned.
Boys from school who had never left and knew of their reputation would surely smirk and whisper behind a new husband's back. “Who hadn't had your wife when she was in school here?” they might say, and cause terrible fights, even divorces.

How unfair it was for girls. Boys were looked up to, respected, admired, and envied if they achieved the reputation of being good and experienced lovers. They could strut and smile, throw out their chests, and tease young girls, promising to give them the time of their lives and teach them things about sex no one else might, and that would be all right, just perfect, even expected, but if a girl would even suggest such a thing—there went her reputation, maybe for life if she remained here.

Tack onto all that a mere suggestion of something “dirty” happening between a brother and a sister, and both, but especially the sister, had better go pretty far away, maybe even change their names. Now I recalled an occasion once when I was with my father in Charley's, and one of the construction workers was telling jokes about redneck hillbillies. I was only ten and didn't really understand why my father got so upset with him telling the joke in front of me, but now I understood why. The joke was about a hillbilly introducing his wife to someone new. “I'd like you to meet my wife and my sister.”

Ha, ha. Lots of laughter followed, but my father had turned on him.

“I have my daughter here,” he said. I rarely saw him get that angry. The man slinked away like some
rodent and sat in a booth mumbling under his breath. We went home pretty quickly after that, and when I asked my father what had happened, he said, “Someone undressed his stupidity in public,” which I didn't quite understand then, either.

“Are you going to listen?” Kane asked, because I was obviously in such deep thought that I looked far away.

“Yes, go ahead,” I said petulantly. “Don't worry. I'm listening.”

A few days later, I was suddenly taken sick, vomiting and feeling generally weak and nauseated. I knew I couldn't go out and safely sneak around the house to rummage for money, but we desperately needed to get as much as we could as quickly as we could. I didn't like what was happening with the twins now. They were lethargic, sleeping too much, uninterested in everything, with their attention spans even shorter than they were, and they were just not growing the way they should. I told Cathy she had to go alone. She was very worried about me, but I assured her I would be all right. I was going to study up on my symptoms while she was out there. I warned her about not being discovered. Reluctantly, she left without me, but when she returned, I saw immediately that something had disturbed her.

“How much did you find?” I asked.

“Nothing, not a penny,” she said.

Something wasn't right, but I was too tired to
pursue her with more questions. She wanted to stay beside me, holding me, more than usual, but I warned her that our grandmother could just pop in on us, so she returned to her bed.

Time went by slowly, and our thoughts about escape were suffering, because our hunt for money wasn't producing enough yet. We had to be careful not to take too much when we did find some, or else we would arouse suspicions. That's all our grandmother would have to find out, I explained. Forget about her whipping us. She would do something much worse, I was sure. Summer was here again, and Cathy pointed out that we were entering our third year. The twins were getting worse. I was very concerned about their bouts of nausea, their listlessness, their loss of appetite, and the stunting of their growth.

“Look,” Kane said suddenly, turning the diary so I could see it. “There's a page blank right here. Weird.”

“Maybe he just turned it too quickly. What could he do once he began writing, that's all.”

Kane shook his head. “I don't know,” he said. “Christopher is too much of a perfectionist.”

“So what do you think happened?”

“I think he was going to stop.”

I froze for a moment. What if Kane was right? What would make Christopher change his mind about keeping a diary? What would stop anyone? Was this why he locked it in that metal box and hid it away,
why he didn't take it with him when he left? And yet he hadn't destroyed it, torn it up, or anything. It was almost as if he wanted someone to find it years later. That was his plan, never anticipating a horrendous fire.

“Maybe we should stop, then, Kane.”

“Could you do that?”

“I've always felt that my father knew something more, and that was why he was so concerned about my reading it. This might be it. Some things are better left buried.”

“It can't possibly matter now, can it? Malcolm Foxworth and his wife are dead, and Corrine is probably still in the loony bin. If we gave this to the district attorney, he'd file it away somewhere under ‘Why waste my time?' ”

“I suddenly just had a terrible chill,” I said, hugging myself.

He got up quickly and sat beside me, hugging me and rubbing my shoulder and my back, kissing my hair, my forehead, and my cheeks.

“It's not the kind of chill that comes from being in a cold room, Kane. It's the kind of chill that comes from deep inside you.”

“Take a deep breath. It'll pass,” he said.

“Suddenly, I'm really frightened for both of us,” I said.

He smiled. “Kristin, this is just someone's diary. It doesn't burn our fingers to hold it. Nothing terrible has happened to either of us because we're reading it
or to anyone we love. There's no such thing as a curse. You're acting like those fools who go up to Foxworth on Halloween and scare each other.”

“Because we're reading this diary, you've told me things you've never told anyone else, right?”

“So?”

“There's something about it, something more than it just being a diary about a terrible thing being done to children.”

“Whatever you think about it is coming from you, not from the diary. I probably would have told you things about myself anyway, because I trust you and I care more for you than any other girl I've met. Okay, it's magical. It brought us more closely together. I'll give you that but nothing more,” he said. “We've got to go on. If I were really Christopher, I'd want you to go on.”

I looked into his eyes. Yes, maybe he was right, I thought. I nodded softly. He smiled and kissed me and hugged me again, holding me tightly for a few moments. Then he rose and returned to the chair. I would never look at that chair again without thinking of these days, without hearing his voice, and without envisioning the Dollanganger children. My father was right. Things, furniture, mementos, all do take on a life of their own and become far more than wood, metal, plastic, and paper. Nothing deserves to end up in a junkyard along with other lost memories. I recalled him once saying, “We hold on to things we were given and things we shared with loved ones because we don't want to die.”

You die a little more with everything you leave behind, discard, and destroy. That was why he clung so hard to his old truck, why he despised the idea of people building and owning homes as investments. Homes weren't another form of commodity to him. They were filled with family, with the aromas of their favorite foods, with the echo of their laughter and the rumbling of their unhappiness, still damp with their tears. “When someone moves into someone else's home, despite the new paint and even the new appliances, they're putting on someone else's old socks,” he told me.

“But can't they make it their own, too?”

“Maybe,” he said. “But it gets crowded.”

My father, I thought, there was no one like him.

I took a deep breath. So did Kane, and he opened the diary, turned the blank page, and continued.

I couldn't get the book with the sexually explicit pictures out of my mind. Whenever it was time for me to venture out to search for more money, I had to admit to myself that I was drawn to look at that book almost as much as I was drawn to look for the money we needed for our escape. I confessed that to Cathy, and then I described what had nearly happened on my latest visit to Momma's bedroom and what I had overheard. It wasn't until I described it to her that I realized what she had done and how close to revealing us she had come.

I was looking at the book when I heard voices and realized it was our mother and her new
husband. I had no time to slip out, so I went into our mother's closet and crouched. While I was in there, I heard Bart Winslow complain about missing money. He was blaming it on the servants, but Momma wasn't very interested. They argued about going to a play, and fortunately for me, Momma won the argument, but then Bart Winslow described his dream.

“What dream?” Cathy asked.

As I related it to her, it was a dream about some young girl with long golden hair sneaking into their room while he was asleep and kissing him on the lips. I had a suspicion he was talking about Cathy, and as I told her about it, I could see in her face that I was talking about her.

It threw me into a rage. How could she risk our lives like that? Was he so handsome, her need so much greater than mine? I knew she was frustrated, but so was I, and I didn't go off and do anything that crazy. She could say nothing to defend herself.

I mumbled about how lucky I was that Momma had insisted they leave, which made it possible for me to sneak back out. Then I turned away from her and sulked about it on my own bed. I don't know how much time passed before I calmed down enough to look back at her, but she was gone. She had gone to sit by the window in the moonlight.

I stood there looking at her, looking at how the moonlight outlined her breasts, her thighs, and the small of her stomach through the thin
nightshirt. She sensed my presence and looked at me, unmoving, tempting me with her innocent new beauty. I told her she looked beautiful sitting there and that because of the moonlight, she was as good as naked. She didn't move to cover herself up.

Suddenly, I thought of her not as my young sister, Cathy, but as some far more sophisticated young nymph, a temptress who had so much confidence in herself that she would dare sneak up to a grown man sleeping and kiss him softly on his lips, wanting to taste those lips, wanting to satisfy her own sexual need. Well, didn't I need and want that? All I could think, which blinded me from thinking any other thought, was that she would have willingly given herself to Bart Winslow if he had awakened and reached for her. He would take her on that damn swan bed. She would know another man's love, not mine.

I was overcome with rage about that. I have no other way to explain it right now. I shot forward and seized her and accused her again of risking everything and wanting him. I told her she could never be anyone else's but mine, and I was determined to make her see that. I admit to losing complete control of myself. I shoved her down on the mattress. She struggled, fought for a little while, and then suddenly, she gave up. She returned my kiss and opened herself to me. I knew that because we were both virgins, it wouldn't be easy, it wouldn't be the wonderful experience it
was meant to be for all those who were truly in love, but I could not stop what I had started. She cried, but she clung to me as if she was afraid I would retreat. She dug her fingers into me, and I pushed on and into her.

We're damned, I thought almost immediately afterward.

Our dreadful grandmother was right.

We're the devil's spawn.

Kane lowered the diary slowly. He didn't look at me immediately. He stared ahead. We were both so quiet we could hear the heat in the pipes and the sound of a car horn way in the distance. It sounded desperate, like a lost goose calling for its flock.

Both of us had liked and admired the young Christopher who was telling us their story. Despite how frustrated we were by the way he tolerated and believed his mother, we respected his efforts to keep himself and his siblings safe. He was, after all, thinking only about their future. From the beginning, he understood how desperate a situation they were in. He loved his father, but he was angry at him for leaving them lost and vulnerable, so much so that they had to tolerate their tortured incarceration in that great house. Cathy's skepticism had so far proven to be more accurate than Christopher's unyielding love for his mother.

Even though Kane looked as shocked as I was at what he had just read, I doubted that he would deny
having anticipated it. I could shout at him now, if that was what would make me feel better. I could scream that I had told him so, that when he came upon that blank page, we should have done what I suggested. We should have stopped and left the rest of it buried, but I didn't, because I knew in my heart of hearts that I wanted to know just as much as he wanted to know.

Neither of us felt like talking about it immediately. He finally turned to me. “I'm thirsty,” he said. “We should have brought something to drink up with us.”