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! (33 page)

Now we had filthy, smelly rags to fill up a trunk, and add to the secrets of the attic.

We escaped the full horror of our situation by not talking about it much. We just got up in the mornings, splashed water on our faces, cleaned our teeth with plain water, drank a little water, moved about a little, then lay down to watch TV, or to read, and the devil to pay if she came in and caught us rumpling a bedspread. What did we care now?

To hear the twins cry for food put scars on my soul that I would bear for the rest of my life. And I hated, oh, how I hated that old woman—and Momma—for doing this to us!

And when mealtimes rolled by with no food, we slept. For hours on end we slept. Asleep you don’t feel pain or hunger, or loneliness, or bitterness. In sleep you can drown in false euphoria, and when you awaken, you just don’t care about anything.

There was one hazy, unreal day when we lay listless, all four of us, with the only life going on confined to the small box over in the corner. Dazed and tired, I turned my head for no reason at all just to look at Chris and Cory, and I lay without much feeling at all as I watched Chris take his pocket knife and slash his wrist. He put his bleeding arm to Cory’s mouth, and made him drink his blood, though Cory protested. Then it was Carrie’s turn. The two of them, who wouldn’t eat anything lumpy, bumpy, grainy, too tough, too stringy, or just plain “funny looking,” drank of their older brother’s blood and stared up at him with dull, wide, accepting eyes.

I turned my head away, sickened by what he had to do, and full of admiration that he
could
do it. He could always solve a difficult problem.

Chris came to my side of the bed and perched on the edge, and looked at me for the longest moment, then his eyes lowered
to the cut on his wrist that wasn’t bleeding as freely now. He lifted his pocket-knife and prepared to make a second slash so I too could be nourished by his blood. I stopped him, and seized hold of his jack-knife and hurled it away. He ran fast to get it, and again he cleaned it with alcohol, despite my vow never to taste his blood, and drain from him more of his strength.

“What will we do, Chris, if she never comes back?” I asked dully. “She will let us starve to death.” Meaning the grandmother, of course, whom we hadn’t seen in two weeks. And Chris had exaggerated when he said we had a full pound of cheddar cheese stashed away. We baited our mousetraps with cheese, and had been forced to take back the bits of cheese to eat ourselves, when everything else was gone. Now we’d been without one bit of food in our stomachs for three whole days and four days with only a little cheese and crackers. And the milk we saved for the twins to drink—gone ten days ago, too.

“She won’t let us starve to death,” said Chris as he lay down beside me and took me into his weak embrace. “We’d be idiots, and spineless, to allow her to do that to us. Tomorrow, if she doesn’t show up with food, and our mother doesn’t show up, we’ll use our sheet-ladder to reach the ground.”

My head was on his chest and I could hear his heart thumping. “How do you know what she’d do? She hates us. She wants us dead—hasn’t she told us that time and time again we should never have been born?”

“Cathy, the old witch is not dumb. She’ll bring food soon, before Momma comes back from wherever she’s been.”

I moved to bandage his slashed wrist. Two weeks ago Chris and I should have tried to escape, when both of us had the strength to make the perilous descent. Now, if we tried to make it, surely we’d fall to our deaths, what with the twins tied to our backs to make it even more difficult.

But when morning came, and there was still no food brought up to us, Chris forced us into the attic. He and I carried the twins who were too weak to walk. It was a torrid zone up there.
Sleepily, the twins sagged in the corner of the schoolroom where we put them down. Chris set about fashioning slings so we could attach the twins securely to our backs. Neither of us mentioned the possibility that we could be committing suicide, and murder, too, if we fell.

“We’ll do it another way,” said Chris, reconsidering. “I’ll go first. When I reach the ground, you’ll put Cory into a sling, tie him in fast so he can’t kick free, and then you’ll lower him down to me. Next, you can do that for Carrie. And you can come down last. And for God’s sake, put forth your very best efforts! Call upon God to give you the strength—don’t be apathetic! Feel anger, wrath, think of revenge! I’ve heard great anger gives you super-human strength in an emergency!”

“Let me go first. You’re stronger.” I said weakly.

“No! I want to be down there to catch in case anyone comes down too fast, and your arms don’t have the strength mine do. I’ll brace the rope about a chimney so all the weight won’t be on you—and Cathy, this is really an emergency!”

God, I couldn’t believe what he expected me to do next!

With horror I stared at the four dead mice in our traps. “We’ve got to eat these mice to gain some strength,” he said to me grimly, “and what we have to do, we
can
do!”

Raw meat? Raw mice? “No,” I whispered, revolted by the sight of those tiny stiff and dead things.

He grew forceful, angry, telling me I could do anything that was necessary to keep the twins alive, and myself alive. “Look, Cathy, I’ll eat my two first, after I’ve run downstairs for salt and pepper. And I need that coat hanger to tighten up the knots—leverage, you know. My hands, they’re not working too good now.”

Of course they weren’t. We were all so weak we could barely move.

He shot me a quick appraising glance. “Really, with salt and pepper, I think the mice might be tasty.”

Tasty.

He sliced off the heads, then skinned and gutted them next. I watched him slice open the small bellies and withdraw long, slimy intestines, little bitty hearts, and other miniature “innards.”

I could have vomited if there had been anything in my stomach.

And he didn’t run for the salt and pepper, or the coat hanger. He only walked, and slowly at that—telling me in this way he wasn’t too eager to partake of raw mice, either.

While he was gone, my eyes stayed glued to the skinned mice that were to be our next meal. I closed my eyes and tried to will myself into taking the first bite. I was hungry but not hungry enough to enjoy the prospects.

I thought then of the twins, who sagged in the corner with their eyes closed, holding each other, their foreheads pressed together, and I thought they must have embraced like that when they were inside Momma’s womb, waiting to be born, so they could be put away behind a locked door, and starved. Our poor little buttercups who once had known a father and mother who loved them well.

Yet, there was the hope the mice would give Chris and me enough strength and we could take them safely to the ground, and some kind neighbor who was at home would give them food, give all of us food—if we lived through the next hour.

I heard the slow returning steps of Chris. He hesitated in the doorframe, half-smiling, his blue eyes meeting with mine . . . and shining. In both of his hands he carried the huge picnic basket we knew so well. It was so filled with food the wooden lids that folded backwards couldn’t lie flat.

He lifted out two thermos jugs: one with vegetable soup, the other with cold milk, and I felt so numb, confused, hopeful. Had Momma come back and sent this up to us? Then why hadn’t she called for us to come down? Or why didn’t she come looking for us?

Chris took Carrie and I took Cory on our laps, and we spooned soup into their mouths. They accepted the soup as they
had accepted his blood—as just another event in their extraordinary lives. We fed them bits of sandwich. We ate most sparingly, as Chris cautioned, lest we throw it all up.

I wanted to stuff the food into Cory’s mouth, so I could get around to ramming food into my own ravenous stomach. He ate so darned slow! A thousand questions ran through my brain: Why today? Why bring food today and not yesterday, or the day before? What was her reasoning? When finally I could eat, I was too apathetic to be overjoyed, and too suspicious to be relieved.

Chris, after slowly eating some soup, and half a sandwich, unwrapped a foil package. Four powdered-sugar doughnuts were disclosed. We, who were never given sweets, were given a dessert—from the grandmother—for the first time. Was this her way of asking our forgiveness? We took it that way, whatever her purpose.

During our week of near starvation, something peculiar had happened between Chris and me. Perhaps it became enhanced that day when I sat in the hot tub of concealing bubble bath, and he toiled so valiantly to rid my hair of the tar. Before that horrible day, we’d been only brother and sister, play-acting the roles of parents to the twins. Now our relationship had changed. We weren’t play-acting anymore. We were the genuine parents of Carrie and Cory. They were our responsibility, our obligation, and we committed ourselves to them totally, and to each other.

It was obviously drawn now. Our mother didn’t care anymore what happened to us.

Chris didn’t need to speak and say how he felt to recognize her indifference. His bleak eyes told me. His listless movements said more. He’d kept her picture near his bed, and now he put that away. He’d always believed in her more than I, so naturally he was hurt the most. And if he ached more than I was aching, then he was in agony.

Tenderly he took my hand, indicating that now we could go back to the bedroom. Down the stairs we drifted as pale sleepy ghosts, in subnormal states of shock, all of us feeling sick and
weak, especially the twins. I doubted they weighed thirty pounds each. I could see how they looked, and how Chris looked, but I couldn’t see myself. I glanced toward the tall, wide mirror over the dresser, expecting to see a circus freak, short-cropped hair on top, long, lank pale hair in back. And lo, when I looked, there was no mirror there!

Quickly I ran to the bathroom to find the medicine cabinet mirror smashed! Back I raced to the bedroom, to lift the lid of the dressing table that Chris often used as a desk . . . and that mirror, too, was broken!

We could gaze in shattered glass and see distorted reflections of ourselves. Yes, we could view our faces in faceted broken pieces as a fly would, one side of the nose riding up higher than the other. It wasn’t pleasant viewing. Turning away from the dressing table, I put the basket of food down on the floor where it was coldest, then went to lie down. I didn’t question the reason for the broken mirrors, and the one taken away. I knew why she’d done what she did. Pride was sinful. And in her eyes Chris and I were sinners of the worst kind. To punish us, the twins would suffer, as well, but why she brought us food again, I couldn’t guess.

Other mornings came, with baskets of food carried up to us. The grandmother refused to look our way. She kept her eyes averted and swiftly retreated out the door. I wore a turban made of a pink towel around my head which revealed the front portion over my brow, but if she noticed, she didn’t comment. We watched her come and go, not asking where Momma was, or when she was coming back. Those so easily punished learn their lesson well, and don’t speak unless spoken to first. Both Chris and I stared at her, filling our eyes with hostility, with anger and hate, hoping she’d turn and see how we felt. But she didn’t meet a pair of our eyes. And then I would cry out and make her see, and make her look at the twins, and see for herself how thin they were, how shadowed their large eyes were. But she wouldn’t see.

Lying on the bed beside Carrie, I looked deep into myself and
realized how I was making all of this worse than it ought to be. Now Chris, once the cheerful optimist, was turning into a gloomy imitation of me. I wanted him back the way he used to be—smiling and bright, making the best out of the worst.

He sat at the dressing table with the lid down, with open medical books before him, his shoulders sagging. He wasn’t reading, just sitting there.

“Chris,” I said, sitting up to brush my hair, “in your opinion, what percentage of teen-aged girls in the world have gone to bed with clean, shining hair and awakened a tar baby?”

Swiveling around, he shot me a glance full of surprise that I would mention that horrible day. “Well,” he drawled, “in my opinion, I suspect you might well be the one and only . . . unique.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. Remember when they were putting down asphalt on our street? Mary Lou Baker and I turned over a huge tub of that stuff, and we made little tar babies, and put black beds in black houses, and the man in charge of the street-repair gang came along and bawled us out.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I remember you came home looking filthy-dirty, and you had a wad of tar in your mouth, chewing to make your teeth whiter. Gosh, Cathy, all you did was pull out a filling.”

“One good thing about this room, we don’t have to visit dentists twice a year.” He gave me a funny look. “And another nice thing is to have so much time! We’ll complete our Monopoly tournament. The champion player has to wash everyone’s underwear in the bathtub.”

Boy, he was all for that. He hated bending over the tub, kneeling on the hard tile, doing his wash and Cory’s.

We set up the game, and counted out the money, and looked around for the twins. Both had disappeared! Where was there to go but up in the attic? They’d never go there without us, and the bathroom was empty. Then we heard some small twittering noises behind the TV set.

There they were, crouched in the corner in back of the set, sitting and waiting for the tiny people inside to come out. “We thought maybe Momma was in there,” explained Carrie.

“I think I’ll go up in the attic and dance,” I said, getting up from the bed and moving toward the closet.

“Cathy! What about our tournament Monopoly game?”

Pausing, I half-turned. “Oh, you’d only win. Forget the tournament.”

“Coward!” he taunted now, the same as he used to. “Come on, let’s play.” He looked long and hard at the twins, who always acted as our bankers. “And no cheating this time,” he warned sternly, “if I catch one of you slipping Cathy money when you think I’m not looking—then I’ll eat every one of those four doughnuts myself!”