Authors: V.C. Andrews
“Chris,” I murmured, feeling unreal, “don’t look like that. It wasn’t your fault.” I cupped his face in my palms first, then drew his head down to my breast as I’d seen Momma do in the past. “It’s only a scratch, doesn’t hurt a bit (though it hurt dreadfully), and I know you didn’t do it deliberately.”
Hoarsely he choked, “Why did you run? Because you ran, I
had to chase. And I was only teasing. I wouldn’t cut one strand from your head; it was just something to do, to have fun. And you were wrong when you said I thought your hair was pretty. It’s more than just pretty. I think you may grow on your head the most glorious hair in the world.”
A little knife twisted in my heart as he lifted his head long enough to spread my hair fanlike and cover my bare breast. I could hear him breathing deeply my scent. We lay there quietly listening to the winter rain drumming on the slate roof not so far above. Deep silence all around. Always silence. Nature’s voices were the only ones to reach us in the attic, and so seldom did nature speak in friendly, soft tones.
The rain on the roof pitter-pattered down into only drops, and the sun came out and shone down on us to shimmer his hair and mine like long glimmering strands of silken diamonds. “Look,” I said to Chris, “one of the slats from a western window shutter has fallen out.”
“Nice,” he said, sounding sleepy and content, “Now we’ll have sun where once there was none. See, I’ve made a rhyme.” And then in a sleepy whisper, he said, “I’m thinking of Raymond and Lily and their quest for the purple grass where all dreams are fulfilled.”
“Were you? In a way, I was kinda thinking the same thing,” I answered, whispery, too. Over and over again I twirled a strand of his hair around my thumb, pretending not to notice one of his hands was ever so cautiously stroking my breast, the one his face didn’t cover. Because I didn’t object, he dared to kiss the nipple. I jumped, startled, wondering why that should feel so strange, and so extraordinarily thrilling. What was a nipple but a tannish-pink little peak? “I can picture Raymond kissing Lily, just where you kissed,” I went on breathlessly, wanting him to stop, and wanting him to go on, “but I can’t imagine them doing what comes next.”
Words to make his head pop up. Just the right words to make him look at me intensely again, with strange lights flickering in
his eyes which wouldn’t stay only one color. “Cathy, do you know what comes next?”
A blush heated my face. “Yes, I know, sort of. Do
you
know?”
He laughed, one of those dry chuckles you read about in novels. “Sure I know. My very first day in school, I was told in the boy’s restroom; that’s all the older boys could talk about. They had four-letter words on the walls that I didn’t understand. But they were soon explained, in detail. Girls, baseball, girls, football, girls, girls, girls were all they could talk about, and all the ways they were different from us. It’s a fascinating subject for most boys, and, I suppose, men.”
“But not fascinating for you?”
“Me? I don’t think about girls, or sex, though I wish to God you weren’t so damned pretty! And it would help if you weren’t always so near, and so available.”
“Then you do think about me? You do think I’m pretty?”
A smothered groan escaped his lips—more like a moan. He bolted up to sit straight, staring down at what my open sweater revealed, for the fan of my hair was displaced. If I hadn’t cut off the top of my leotards, he wouldn’t be seeing so much. But I had had to cut off the too-small bodice.
With trembling, clumsy fingers he fastened the buttons of my sweater, keeping his eyes averted from mine. “Get this straight in your head, Cathy. Of course you are pretty, but brothers don’t think about sisters as girls—nor do they feel any sort of emotion for them other than tolerance and brotherly affection—and sometimes, hate.”
“I hope God strikes me dead this second if you hate me, Christopher.”
His hands lifted to cover his face, hiding, and when he came out from behind the shield, he was smiling, cheerful, clearing his throat. “Come on, it’s time we went down to the twins before they burn their eyes into black holes from staring at the boob-tube for so long.”
It hurt to rise, though he assisted me up. In his arms I was held close while my cheek was pressed against his heart. And though he would put me from him quickly, I clung tighter. “Chris—what we did just now—was it sinful?”
Again, he cleared his throat. “If you think it so, then it was.”
What kind of an answer was that? If thoughts of sin stayed out of it, those moments lying on the floor when he touched me so tenderly with magical tingling fingers and lips were the sweetest moments since we’d come to live in this abominable house. I looked up to see what he was thinking and saw that strange look in his eyes. Paradoxically he seemed happier, sadder, older, younger, wiser . . . or was it he was feeling like a man now? And if he was, then I was glad, sinful or not.
We walked hand in hand down the steps to the twins, where Cory was plucking a tune on the banjo, while keeping his eyes glued to the TV. He picked up the guitar and began his own composition, as Carrie chanted simple lyrics he’d composed. The banjo was for happy tunes to move your feet. This melody was like rain on the roof, long, dreary, monotonous.
Gonna see the sun,
Gonna find my home,
Gonna feel the wind,
See the sun ag’in.
I sat on the floor near Cory, and took the guitar from his hands, for I could play a bit, too. He had taught me how—taught us all how. And I sang to him that special, wistful song that belonged to Dorothy in the movie
The Wizard of Oz
—a movie that the twins adored everytime they saw it. And when I had finished singing of bluebirds that flew over the rainbow, Cory asked, “Don’t you like my song, Cathy?”
“You bet I like your song—but it’s so sad. How about writing a few happy lyrics, with a little hope?”
The little mouse was in his pocket, just his tail poking out as
he fingered down there for bread crumbs. Mickey made a twisting movement, and then his head was out of the shirt pocket, and in his forefeet he held a bit of bread and daintily began to nibble. The look on Cory’s face as he stared down at his first pet touched me so deeply I had to turn away to keep from crying.
“Cathy, you know Momma, she never said nothing about my pet.”
“She hasn’t noticed him, Cory.”
“Why don’t she notice?”
I sighed, not really knowing who and what my mother was anymore, except a stranger we used to love. Death wasn’t the only thing that took away someone you loved and needed; I knew that now.
“Momma’s got a new husband,” said Chris brightly, “and when you’re in love, you don’t see anyone’s happiness but your own. Soon enough she’ll notice you’ve got a friend.”
Carrie was staring at my sweater. “Cathy, what’s that stuff on your sweater?”
“Paint,” said I without the slighest hesitation. “Chris was trying to teach me how to paint, and he got mad when my picture was better than anything he’s ever done, so he picked up the little pan with red, and he threw it at me.”
My older brother sat there with the darnedest look on his face.
“Chris, can Cathy paint better than you can?”
“If she says she can, then she must.”
“Where is her painting?”
“In the attic.”
“I want to see it.”
“Then you go up and get it. I’m tired. I want to look at TV while Cathy prepares dinner.” He shot me a swift look. “My dear sister, would you mind, for the sake of propriety, putting on a clean sweater before we sit down to eat dinner? There’s something about that red paint that makes me feel guilty.”
“It looks like blood,” said Cory. “It’s stiff like blood when you don’t wash it off.”
“Poster colors,” said Chris, as I left to go into the bath to change into a sweater many sizes too large. “Poster colors stiffen up.”
Satisfied, Cory began to tell Chris of how he’d missed seeing dinosaurs. “Chris, they were bigger than this house! They came up out of the water, and swallowed the boat, and two men! I knew you’d be sorry to miss seeing that!”
“Yeah,” said Chris dreamily, “I sure would have liked to have seen that.”
That night I felt strangely ill at ease, and restless, and my thoughts kept returning to the way Chris had looked at me in the attic.
I knew then what the secret was I’d been searching so long to find—that secret button that switched on love . . . physical, sexual desire. It wasn’t just the viewing of naked bodies, for many a time I’d bathed Cory, and seen Chris naked, and I’d never felt any particular arousal because what he and Cory had was different from what Carrie and I had. It wasn’t being naked at all.
It was the eyes. The secret of love was in the eyes, the way one person looked at another, the way eyes communicated and spoke when the lips never moved. Chris’s eyes had said more than ten thousand words.
And it wasn’t just the way he touched me, caressingly, tenderly; it was the way he touched, when he looked as he did, and that’s why the grandmother made it a rule that we shouldn’t look at the other sex. Oh, to think that old witch knew the secret of love. She couldn’t have ever loved, no, not her, the iron-hearted, the steel-spined . . . never could her eyes have been soft.
And then, as I delved deeper into the subject, it was more than the eyes—it was what was behind the eyes, in the brain, wanting to please you, make you happy, give you joy, and take away the loneliness of never having anyone understand as you want to be understood.
Sin had nothing at all to do with love, real love. I turned my head and saw that Chris was awake, too, curled up on his side,
staring over at me. He smiled the sweetest smile, and I could have cried for him, for me.
Our mother didn’t visit us that day, nor had she visited us the day before, but we’d found a way to cheer ourselves by playing Cory’s instruments and singing along. Despite the absence of a mother grown very negligent, we all went to bed more hopefully that night. Singing happy songs for several hours had convinced us all that sun, love, home and happiness were just around the bend, and our long days of traveling through a deep dark forest were almost over.
* * *
Into my bright dreams crept something dark and terrifying. Every day forms took on monstrous proportions. With my eyes closed, I saw the grandmother steal into the bedroom, and thinking me asleep, she shaved off all my hair! I screamed but she didn’t hear me—nobody heard me. She took a long and shiny knife and sliced off my breasts and fed them into Chris’s mouth. And there was more. I tossed, writhed, and made small whimpering sounds that awakened Chris as the twins slept on as children dead and buried. Sleepily, Chris stumbled over to sit on my bed, and asked as he fumbled to find my hand, “Another nightmare?”
Nooo! This was no ordinary nightmare! This was precognition, and psychic in nature. I felt it in my bone marrow, something dreadful was about to happen. Weak and trembling I told Chris what the grandmother had done. “And that wasn’t all. It was Momma who came in and cut out my heart, and she was sparkled all over with diamonds!”
“Cathy, dreams don’t mean anything.”
“Yes, they do!”
Other dreams and other nightmares I’d willingly told my brother and he’d listened, and smiled, and expressed his belief that it must be wonderful to have nights like being in a movie theater, but it wasn’t that way at all. In a movie, you sit and watch a big screen, and you know you are only watching a story
that someone wrote. I participated in my dreams. I was in the dreams, feeling, hurting, suffering, and I’m sorry to say, very seldom did I really enjoy them.
Since he was so accustomed to me and my strange ways, why did Chris sit as still as a marble statue, as if this dream affected him more than any other? Had he been dreaming, too?
“Cathy, on my word of honor, we are going to escape this house! All four of us will run away! You’ve convinced me. Your dreams must mean something, or else you wouldn’t keep having them. Women are more intuitive than men; it’s been proven. The subconscious is at work at night. We won’t wait any longer for Momma to inherit the fortune from a grandfather who lives on and on and never dies. Together, you and I, we’ll find a way. From this second on, I vow on my life, we depend only on ourselves . . . and your dreams.”
From the intense way he said this, I knew he wasn’t joking, making fun—he meant what he said! I could have shouted, I felt so relieved. We were going to get away. This house wasn’t going to do us in after all!
In the gloom and chill of that big shadowed and cluttered room, he stared down into my eyes. Maybe he was seeing me, as I saw him, looking larger than life, and softer than dreams. Slowly his head inclined toward mine, and he kissed me full on the lips as a way to seal his promise in a strong and meaningful way. Such a peculiar long kiss, to give me the sensation that I was falling down, down, down, when I was already lying down.
* * *
What we needed most was a key to our bedroom door. We knew it was the master key to every room in this house. We couldn’t use the sheet-ladder because of the twins, and we didn’t anticipate, either Chris or I, that our grandmother would be so thoughtlessly careless as to lay aside the key negligently. That just wasn’t her way. Her way was to open the door, and immediately stash the key in her pocket. Always her hateful gray dresses had pockets.
Our mother’s way was to be careless, forgetful, indifferent. And she didn’t like pockets in her clothes to add extra bulk to her svelte figure. We counted on her.
And what did she have to fear from us—the passive, the meek, the quiet? Her private little captive “darlings,” who were never going to grow up and be a threat. She was happy, in love; it lit up her eyes and made her laugh often. She was so damned unobservant you wanted to scream and make her see—make her see the twins so quiet and sick looking! She never mentioned the mouse—why wasn’t she seeing the mouse? He was on Cory’s shoulder, nibbling on Cory’s ear, and she never said a word, not even when tears streamed down Cory’s face because she wouldn’t congratulate him on winning the affections of a very stubborn mouse that would have gone his way, if allowed.