The Flowers in the Attic Series: The Dollangangers: Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, and a New Excerpt! (181 page)

We heaped them in deep ravines, dropped down a match and crouched close together on the grass to watch the fire blaze high and warm enough to heat our cold hands and faces. The fire down below was so safe we could enjoy just watching and turning often to gaze at one another and the way the glow lit up our eyes and turned our skins a lovely shade of scarlet. Chris had a lover’s way of looking at me, of reaching to caress my cheek with the back of his hand, brushing my hair with his fingertips, kissing my neck, and in all ways touching me deeply with his abiding love. In the firelight of those leaves burning at night, we found each other in new ways, in mature ways that were even better than what
we’d had before, and that had always been overwhelmingly sweet.

And behind us, staying forever locked within her room in that horrible house, Melodie’s baby swelled her out more and more.

The month of October came to us in a stunning blaze of colors that stole my breath away, filling me with awe as only the works of nature could. These were the same trees whose tops we’d only glimpsed in our hideaway attic schoolroom. I could almost see the four of us staring out when I glanced up at the attic dormer windows, the twins only five, pining away to large-eyed gnomes, all our small, pale faces pasted wistfully to the smudgy glass, staring out, yearning to be free to do what now I took as only natural and our due.

Ghosts up there, our ghosts up there.

Color all our days gray, was the way I’d used to think. Color all Jory’s day gray now, for he wouldn’t let himself see the beauty of autumn in the mountains when he couldn’t stroll the woodsy paths, or dance over the browning grass, or lean to sniff the fall flowers, or jog alongside Melodie.

The tennis courts stayed empty as Bart abandoned them for lack of a partner. Chris would have loved a Saturday or Sunday tennis game with Bart, but Bart still ignored Chris.

The large swimming pool that had been Cindy’s special delight was drained, cleaned, covered over. The screens came down, the glass was cleaned before the storm windows went up. The cords of wood stacked out of sight behind the garage grew by the dozens, and trucks delivered coal to use when or if our oil furnaces failed, or our electricity went off. We had an auxiliary unit to light our rooms and keep our electric appliances working, and yet somehow I feared this winter as I’d never feared any winter but those in the attic.

Freezing cold it had been in the attic, like the Arctic zone. Now we were going to have the chance to experience what it had been like downstairs, while Momma enjoyed life with
her parents and friends, and the lover she found, while four unwanted children froze and starved and suffered upstairs.

Sunday mornings were the best. Chris and I gloried in our time together. We ate breakfast in Jory’s room so he wouldn’t feel so separate from his family, and only a few times could I persuade Bart and Melodie to join us.

“Go on,” urged Jory, when he saw me glance often at the window, “go walking. Don’t think I’m going to begrudge you and Dad your legs because mine don’t work anymore. I’m not a baby, or that selfish.”

We had to go or he’d think he was inhibiting our style of living. And so we went, hoping Melodie would join him.

One day we woke up so early the frost was still thick upon the ground and pumpkins were ripening under the stacked corn stalks where farmers eked out a poor living. The frost looked sweet, liked powdered sugar that would soon melt when the sun came out fully.

On our walk we stopped to stare up at the sky as Canadian geese flew south, telling us that winter would come earlier than usual this year. We heard the distant melancholy honking of those untiring birds fade as they disappeared in the morning clouds. Flying toward South Carolina—where once we had fled just before winter’s sharp bite.

In mid-October the orthopedist came to use huge electric shears to split Jory’s cast halfway through; then he used handheld shears to gently cut through what remained. Jory said he felt now like a turtle without its shell. His strong body had wasted inside that cast. “A few weeks of exercising your arms and shoulder muscles will see your chest as developed as ever,” encouraged Chris. “You’re going to need strong arms, so keep on using that trapeze, and we’ll have parallel bars put in your sitting room so you can eventually pull yourself up into a standing position. Don’t think life is over for you, that all challenges are behind you and nothing matters now, for you have miles and miles to go before
you’re done with life, don’t you ever forget that.”

“Yeah,” murmured Jory bleakly, staring empty-eyed toward the door, which Melodie seldom passed through. “Miles and miles to travel before I can find another body that works like it should. I guess I’ll start believing in reincarnation.”

*  *  *

The quickly chilling days turned bitterly cold, with autumn nights that took us quickly toward freezing. The migrating birds stopped flying overhead now that the wind was whistling through the treetops, howling around the house, stealing inside our rooms. The moon was again a raiding Viking longboat sailing high, flooding our bed with moonlight, giving us kindling for a new kind of romance. Clean, cool, bright love that lit up our spirits, and told us we weren’t really sinners of the worst kind. Not when our love could last as it had, while other marriages broke up after a few months or years. We couldn’t be sinning and feel as we did toward one another. Who were we hurting? No one, not really. Bart was hurting himself, we reasoned.

Still, why was I haunted by nightmares that said differently? I’d become an expert at turning off disturbing thoughts by thinking of all the trivial details in my life. There was nothing as diverting as the startling beauty of nature. I wanted nature to heal my wounds, and Jory’s—and perhaps even Bart’s.

With a keen eye I studied all the signs as a farmer might and reported them back to Jory. The rabbits grew suddenly fatter. The squirrels seemed to be storing more nuts. Woolly caterpillars looked like tiny train cars of fur inching toward safety—wherever that was.

Soon I was pulling out winter coats that I’d intended to give to charities; heavy sweaters and wool skirts I’d never expected to wear in Hawaii. In September Cindy had flown back to her high school in South Carolina. This was her last year in a very expensive private school that she “absolutely
adored.” Her letters poured in like unseasonable warm rain, wanting more money for this or that.

On and on flowed Cindy’s sprawling girlish script, needing everything, despite all the gifts I was constantly bombarding her with. She had dozens of boyfriends, a new one each time she wrote. She needed casual clothes for the boy who liked to hunt and fish. She needed dressy clothes for the boy who liked operas and concerts. She needed jeans and warm tops for herself, and luxury underwear and nightclothes, for she just couldn’t sleep in anything inexpensive.

Her letters emphasized all that I’d missed when I was sixteen. I remembered Clairmont and my days in Dr. Paul’s house, with Henny in the kitchen teaching me how to cook by example, not with words. I’d bought a cookbook on how to win your man and hold him by cooking all the right dishes. What a child I’d been. I sighed. Perhaps I’d had it just as good as Cindy, after all—in a different way—after we escaped Foxworth Hall. I sniffed Cindy’s pink, perfumed stationery before I put down her letter, then turned my attention to the present and all the problems in this Foxworth Hall, without the paper flowers in the attic.

Day after day of closely observing Bart when he was with Melodie was convincing me that they saw a great deal of one another, while Jory saw very little of his wife. I tried to believe that Melodie was trying to console Bart for not inheriting as much as he’d believed . . . but despite myself, I presumed there was more to it than pity.

Like a faithful puppy with only one friend, Joel followed Bart everywhere, except into his office or bedroom. He prayed in that tiny room before breakfast, lunch and dinner. He prayed before he went to bed, and prayed as he walked about, muttering to himself the appropriate quotes from the Bible to suit whatever occasion provoked him into pious mumbles.

In his own way, Chris was in Heaven, enjoying the best years of his life, or so he said. “I love my new job. The men I
work with are bright, humorous, and have unending tales to tell and take away the monotony of doing a lot of drudgery. We go into the lab each day, don our white coats, check our petri dishes, expecting miracles, and grin and bear it when miracles just don’t happen.”

Bart was neither friend nor foe to Jory, just someone who stuck his head in the door and said a few words before he hurried on to something he considered more important than wasting time with a crippled brother. I often wondered what he did with his time besides study the financial markets and buy and sell stocks and bonds. I suspected he was risking much of his five hundred thousand in order to prove to all of us he was smarter than Chris and craftier than the foxiest of all Foxworths, Malcolm.

Soon after Chris drove off on a Tuesday morning in late October, I hurried back up the stairs to check on Jory and see that he was properly taken care of. Chris had hired a male nurse to tend to Jory, but he was only here every other day.

Jory seldom complained about being housebound, although his head was often turned toward the windows to stare out at the brilliance of autumn.

“The summer’s gone,” he said flatly, lifelessly, as the wind tossed colorful leaves playfully about, “and it’s taken my legs with it.”

“Autumn will bring you reasons for being happy, Jory. Winter will make you a father. Life still has many happy surprises in store for you, whether or not you want to believe that. I believe like Chris, that the best is still to come. Now . . . let’s see what we can do to give you substitute legs. Now that you’re strong enough to sit up, there’s no reason why you can’t move into that wheelchair your father brought home. Jory, please. I hate seeing you in bed all the time. Try the chair, maybe it won’t be as obnoxious as you think.”

Stubbornly he shook his head.

I ignored that and went on with my persuasions. “Easily
we can take you outside. We can stroll through the woods as soon as Bart has workmen clear the paths that might hinder your progress, and right now you could sit on a terrace in the sunshine and gain back some of your color. Soon it will be too cold to go outside. And when the time comes, I can push you through the gardens and the woods.”

He threw the chair, kept where he could see it every day, a hard, scornful look. “That thing would turn over.”

“We’ll buy you one of those electric chairs that’s so heavy and well balanced it can’t turn over.”

“I don’t think so, Mom. I’ve always loved autumn, but this one makes me feel so sad. I feel I’ve lost everything that was truly important. I’m like a broken compass, spinning without direction. Nothing seems worthwhile. I’ve been cheated, and I resent it. I hate the days. But the nights are worse. I want to hold fast to summer and what I used to have, and the falling leaves are the tears I shed inside, and the wind whistling at night are my howls of anguish, and the birds flying south are all telling me that the summer of my life has come and gone and never, never again will I feel as happy, or as special. I’m nobody now, Mom, nobody.”

He was breaking my heart.

Only when he turned to look at me did he see this. Shame flushed his face. Guilt turned his head. “I’m sorry, Mom. You’re the only one I can talk to like this. With Dad, who is wonderful, I have to act manly. Once I spill out to you all I feel, it doesn’t eat at me inside so much. Forgive me for laying all my heavy feelings on you.”

“It’s all right. Never stop telling me just how you feel. If you do, then I won’t know how to help. That’s what I’m here for, Jory. That’s why you have parents. Don’t feel that your father won’t understand, for he will. Talk to him like you talk to me. Say anything you need to say, don’t hold back. Ask for anything within reason, and Chris and I give all we can—but don’t ask for the impossible.”

Silently he nodded, then forced a weak smile. “Okay. Maybe, after all, I can stand to sit in an electric wheelchair someday.”

Before him, spread on the table with casters that fitted over his bed, were the many parts of the clipper ship he was tediously gluing together. He seldom turned on the stereo, as if beautiful music was an abomination to his ears now that he couldn’t dance. He ignored the television as a waste of time, reading when he wasn’t working on the model ship. A tiny part of the wood was held by tweezers as he applied a bit of glue; then, squinting his eye, he looked at the directions and completed the hull.

Casually he asked without meeting my eyes, “Where’s my wife? She seldom comes to visit before five. What the hell does she do all day?”

It seemed a casual enough question for Jory to ask as Jory’s nurse came in again to say he was off for classes. He waved a cheerful good-bye and left. During his absence either Melodie or I were supposed to do what we could to make Jory comfortable, as well as keep him entertained. Keeping him occupied was the most difficult part. His life had been a physical one, and now he had to be content with mental activities. The nearest thing he had that even approached a physical life was putting the ship together.

At least I’d presumed Melodie came in to do what she could for him.

I very seldom saw Melodie. The house was so large it was easy to avoid those whom you didn’t want to see. Lately she’d taken to eating not only breakfast but lunch as well in her bedroom across the hall from Jory’s suite.

Chris brought home the custom-made electric wheelchair with its joystick for driving. Immediately the nurse began to teach Jory the methods he’d use to swing his body out of the bed and into a chair he’d have locked beside his bed, with the arm nearest the bed pulled out.

Jory had been crippled for more than three and a half long, long miserable months. For him they were more like years. He’d been forced to change into another kind of person, the kind of person I could tell he really didn’t like.

Another day came without a visit from Melodie, and Jory was asking again where she was, and what she did with her time. “Mom, did you hear my question? Please tell me what my wife does all day.” His usually pleasant voice held a sharp edge. “She doesn’t spend it with me, I know that.”