Secrets of Foxworth (10 page)

Most people give away the clothes that belonged to the ones they loved. I knew that my father had trouble doing that, and that even though he was probably past the reluctance, he would rather not think about it. He would rather feel that there was something more of
my mother with us besides old photographs and videos, something she had touched and that had touched her. Too many years had gone by for the scent of her perfume to be on her clothes, I thought, but when I brought some of the dresses and blouses to my face, I was sure the scent had lingered. With it came flashes of her face, her smile, and the sound of her voice when she sang or read to me or just asked me to do something.

I was thankful that being in the presence of her clothes didn't make me cry. It brought me some comfort. I wondered if Christopher would talk about something similar later in his diary. Sharing the loss of a parent drew me closer to him. I sat on the old settee and looked at the opened wardrobe, imagining Christopher seated beside me, talking to me in a very adult manner, explaining everything about memories and sorrow and moving on with your life.

“Neither your mother nor my father would want their death to destroy us,” he would surely say. “I had the feeling my father believed I would be all right no matter what, and I'm sure your mother had great faith in your father.”

Yes, I thought. Yes.

I rose, closed the wardrobe, and shut off the attic light before I went downstairs to the living room, where I found my father asleep in his chair as I had expected. I turned off the television, and just like always, his eyes popped open.

“What?” he said.

“Time to wake up and go to sleep, Dad,” I told him.

He rubbed his cheeks, glanced at his watch, and nodded. “Were you watching television with me?”

“No.”

“Still reading that diary?”

“Yes.”

“Don't tell me about it,” he said, standing and holding his hand out like a traffic cop. “I, personally, want to get a good night's sleep.”

“I thought you just did, watching television.”

“Ha, ha.” He turned to leave but paused. “Let's get the week's food shopping done tomorrow. I think I'm looking at a busy workweek.”

“Okay. I'll make a list.”

“Good. Good,” he said, and lumbered up the stairway. He paused again and looked back at me. “Don't stay up too late. Give your eyes a rest.”

“Will do,” I said.

He muttered something to himself and continued up the stairs. I went to the kitchen and began to work on the list. I wouldn't read any more of the diary tonight, I thought. I'd take a long break.

If I could . . .

“Hey,” Kane Hill said as soon as I picked up my phone. “What happened to you last night? Thought we had a date.”

“I don't remember making it definite,” I said. “I was just tired. I felt I might be coming down with something, so I decided to rest.”

“Yeah, you came down with boredom. It's catching around here. How about hanging out today?”

“I have to go shopping with my father and get to my homework. I left it all for the last minute.”

“You? You're the leading candidate for valedictorian, aren't you? You're in all the honors classes.”

“Whatever. I'm not worrying about it, Kane.”

He laughed. “Sure. Anyway, I'm having a house party Friday night to start the three-day weekend. My parents are going to Richmond.”

We had Monday off because of teacher meetings. Most of our teachers, knowing we had an extra day off, usually piled on the homework to make up for it.

“Do your parents know about the party?”

“More or less,” he said. “I wanted to be sure I got to you early enough to get it onto your busy calendar.”

“I can just squeeze you in,” I said, and he laughed again.

“Lana says you've been hanging around at Foxworth.”

“Hardly hanging around. I went with my father when he went to do an evaluation for the bank.”

“Well, how was it?”

“How was what?”

“Being there.”

“I took a nice walk to the lake on the property and then just watched my father and Todd Winston go through their inspection of the foundation. It's the original one. Someone might buy the property and build on it again.”

“My father's always toyed with that idea, but my mother gets the shakes just talking about it.”

“There's nothing to get the shakes about. It's just an overgrown tract of land with rubble.”

“Safe place for lovers to park at night, maybe, huh?” he asked. I was sure that his mind was full of imaginary scenarios.

“I gotta go, Kane. I'll write Friday in big block letters on my calendar.”

“See you at school.”

“Okay,” I said, and hung up.

There was a lot about Kane that I liked. He was one of the better-looking boys in our school, but I
think what I liked most about him was his casual, relaxed manner. I rarely saw him hyper or upset. He was famous for his James Dean shrug. About two years ago, there was a James Dean revival in one of the movie theaters, and many of the boys were trying to imitate him, but Kane really did have that offbeat smile and relaxed way about him. When he smiled at me now, especially since the last time we had spent time together at the mall and he took me home, it was as if he and I were sharing some big secret. I knew most of my girlfriends, especially Lana and Suzette, were more than a little jealous and were dying to know what had happened between us. I didn't say anything, because I knew they would be disappointed. Not enough had happened to please them.

It wouldn't be hard to break new sexual ground with Kane. He kept his light brown hair midway between the top and the base of his neck. Strands were always falling over his forehead, threatening to block the vision of his soft hazel eyes. Sometimes I thought his self-confidence had just a little more arrogance than I appreciated, but part of that was also just what everyone assumed the son of one of the wealthiest men in Charlottesville would possess, although his older sister, Darlena, was not stuck-up by any means. Kane was an above-average student, athletic, and, as Lana would mutter sometimes, “drop-dead gorgeous.” She said it was her mother's favorite expression for every stud she saw in real life and on television.

No matter what, though, I didn't want to be taken for granted by any boy. Actually, I thought that what
attracted Kane to me most was my fairly obvious indifference. It challenged him to work harder at winning me over, and for now, that was the most interesting thing about our new relationship.

I did everything I told Kane I was going to do. Dad and I went shopping at the supermarket. Every time we did, he never failed to tell me how much he had depended on my mother to do the week's grocery shopping.

“You know, I can do it all by myself now, Dad,” I told him. “I drive.”

“That's all right. I don't have that much opportunity to spend time with you, Kristin.”

“This isn't spending time with me, Dad. It's spending time with chopped meat and potatoes,” I told him, and he laughed.

I think he wanted to shop with me because it kept my mother's memory vivid for him. More and more these days, he was telling me how much I resembled her. He said that any father wants his daughter to look more like her mother than like him. “After all, she's the one he fell in love with, right?”

Thinking about this reminded me about Christopher's sister Cathy, who he said wanted more than anything to look like her mother. It was clear from what I had read so far that his mother really must have been very beautiful and also very aware of that. From the way he was describing her, she was obsessed with it. The implication was that she spent too much time on her makeup and hair and clothes, pushing her responsibilities onto both him and Cathy. Maybe Cathy
loved her father more, but I sensed that she loved the idea of becoming as beautiful as her mother most. I wasn't sure yet how Christopher felt about that. Did he want her to be as beautiful as their mother? Did he think she really could be?

I noticed that whenever any of my friends complimented another on how handsome or beautiful their older brothers or sisters were, they seemed surprised. Was there something about being a brother or sister that made you feel weird or guilty if you were a girl and thought your older brother was handsome or if you were a boy and thought your older sister was beautiful? No one would deny that his or her mother was pretty.

My mother was very attractive but in a more natural sort of way. We had the same hair and eyes, but I thought she had fuller lips and higher cheekbones whenever I compared myself to her now. I would hold her picture up beside me and look at myself in the mirror. Was that something Cathy Dollanganger would do? My mother didn't use very much makeup, as I recall. According to Dad, she didn't go to the beauty salon as often as most of her friends.

“But she could gussy up,” he told me, “whenever we had a fancy affair to attend.” He said that expression was something he had picked up from his grandmother, “gussy up.”

“All I have to do is use that once, and I'll be marked for life in my school,” I told him.

“It says a lot more than cool, girl,” he replied, and we both laughed.

More than once, I'd wished I had been born in an earlier time. Maybe Dad was exaggerating or saw things as having been better when he was younger because he wanted to think of them that way. One of my English teachers, Mr. Stiegman, once told us that nostalgia was nothing more than dissatisfaction with the present. Anything looked better than now, even harder times. It was a fantasy that people accept. Not according to my father, however. Besides harping on loyalty and complaining that youth was wasted on the young, he seemed genuinely happy with the twists and turns he had made in his life.

It took a few hours to shop and then get everything put away. While Dad planned our dinner and then watched a basketball game, I went up to my room to do my homework. No matter what I was working on, my eyes would drift toward Christopher's diary. It felt as if it was really calling to me:
Read me. I need you to read me.

But I resisted. I needed to concentrate on my work. Kane was right. I was neck-and-neck with another student in our class to be valedictorian, and I so wanted that to please my father and in my heart to please my mother, too. Ironically, that thought gave me pause again and drew me to look at the diary.

I had felt Christopher's pride in his accomplishments and how they pleased his parents. He wanted to be a doctor almost more for their sake than his own, but Cathy struck me as being far more self-centered. Was that because she was so young? On the other
hand, young children are always looking for their parents' approval. That was why she was so afraid when the twins were announced. She thought she might lose that approval or have it diluted. After the twins were born, she was, according to Christopher, becoming more and more of a help to her mother and to her father before his death. Maybe she wanted the twins to love her more than they loved their mother. Maybe that was her sweet revenge.

What a complicated family they had been, or were all families really just as complicated? Dad and I basically only had each other. We were a simple family now. After reading only part of Christopher's diary, I made a mental note to pay more attention to my friends and their relationships with their parents and siblings to see if there were any sorts of resemblances to the Dollangangers.

In an eerie sort of way, Christopher's diary was gradually taking over my everyday thoughts. Was there something magical about this book, something supernatural just like Foxworth itself in people's eyes? For a long moment, I wondered if it would actually change me in some dramatic way. I had the strong impression that my father suspected that or feared it. Maybe, just maybe, he already knew what I was about to discover when I continued reading the diary, and that was why he didn't want me to do it.

If my mother were alive, would she let me read it? One thing my father could have said that might have stopped me would be “Your mother wouldn't want
you to read that,” but he didn't say it. He would never use my mother or the memory of her to get me to do something.

It took all my self-control to finish my schoolwork and go to sleep without turning another page of Christopher's diary, but it was the first thing on my mind in the morning, and I knew that when I arrived at school, I was behaving differently from the get-go. First, I didn't want to have any homework to do after school, so instead of wasting my time in study hall, at lunch, and between periods, I attacked every assignment and ignored my friends, who were full of gossip from the weekend. Second, I wanted the school day to end as quickly as possible, and when Kane or Lana or any of the girls invited me to do something after school, I turned them all down, claiming I had some important household chores. Most shrugged, some smirked, but only Kane gave me a knowing look and a small smile.