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! (91 page)

“Julian,” I said with such heavy sadness. “Have I made your life miserable?”

He blinked, as if not wanting to answer that, but I asked him again, and again, until I forced him to say, “Not altogether miserable—we had a few moments.”

“Only a few?”

“Well . . . maybe more than a few. But you don’t have to stay on and take care of an invalid. Get the hell out while you can. I’m no good, you know that. I’ve been unfaithful to you time and again.”

“If you are again, I’ll cut your heart out!”

“Go ‘way, Cathy. I’m tired.” He sounded sleepy from the many sedatives they fed into him and shot into him. “Kids are not good for people like us anyway.”

“People like us . . . ?”

“Yeah, people like us.”

“How are we different?”

He mockingly, sleepily laughed, bitterly too. “We’re not real. We don’t belong to the human race.”

“What are we then?”

“Dancing dolls, that’s all. Dancing fools, afraid to be real people and live in the real world. That’s why we prefer fantasy. Didn’t you know?”

“No, I didn’t know. I always thought we were real.”

“It wasn’t me who ruined your things, it was Yolanda. I watched, though.”

I felt sick, scared he was telling the truth. Was I only a dancing doll? Couldn’t I make my way in the real world, outside the theater? Wasn’t I, after all, any better at coping than Momma?

“Julian . . . I do love you, honest I do. I used to think I loved someone else, because it seemed so unnatural to go from one love to another. When I was a little girl, I used to believe love came only once in a lifetime, and that was the best kind. I thought once you loved one person, you never could love another. But I was wrong.”

“Get out and leave me alone. I don’t want to hear what you’ve got to say, not now. Now I don’t give a damn.”

Tears coursed my face and dropped down on him. He closed his eyes and refused to see, or listen. I leaned to kiss his lips, and they stayed tight, hard, unresponding. Next he spat,
“Stop! You sicken me!”

“I love you, Julian,” I sobbed, “and I’m sorry if I realized it too late, and said it too late—but don’t let it
be
too late. I’m expecting your baby, the fourteenth in a long line of dancers . . . and that baby is a lot to live for, even if you don’t love
me
anymore. Don’t close your eyes and pretend not to hear, because you are going to be a father, whether or not you want to be.” He rolled his dark, shining eyes my way, and I saw why they shone, for they were full of tears. Tears of self-pity, or tears of frustration, I didn’t know. But he spoke more kindly, and there was a tone of love in his voice. “I advise you to get rid of it, Cathy. Fourteen is no luckier a number than thirteen.”

*  *  *

In the room next door, Chris held me in his arms all through the night.

I woke up early in the morning. Yolanda had been thrown from the car in that accident, and today she would be buried. Cautiously I eased from the fold of Chris’s arms, and I arranged his nodding head more comfortably before I stole away to take a peek into Julian’s room. He had a night nurse on duty, and she was sound asleep beside his bed. I stood in the doorway and watched him in the dim, greenish light from the lamp covered by a green towel. He was asleep, deeply asleep. The intravenous tube that led to his arm ran under the sheet and into his vein. For some reason I fixed my eyes upon that bottle with the pale yellow liquid that seemed more water than anything else, so quickly it was being depleted. I ran back to shake Chris awake. “Chris,” I said, as he tried to pull himself together, “isn’t that IV supposed to just trickle into his arm? It’s running out very quickly—too quickly, I think.”

Hardly were the words out of my mouth when Chris was up and running toward Julian’s room. He snapped on the
ceiling light as he entered, then wakened the sleeping nurse. “Damn you for falling asleep! You were in here to watch him!” By the time he had that said, he’d pulled back the covers and there was Julian’s casted arm with the opening for the needle—and the needle was still inserted, and taped in position—but the tube had been cut! “Oh, God,” sighed Chris, “an air bubble must have reached his heart.”

I stared at the shiny scissors held so loosely in Julian’s slack right hand. “He cut the tube himself,” I whispered, “he cut the tube himself, and now he’s dead, dead, dead. . . .”

“Where did he get the scissors?” snapped Chris, while the nurse began to tremble. They were her small embroidery scissors she used to cut her crochet thread. “They must have fallen out of my pocket,” she said weakly. “I swear I don’t remember losing them—or maybe he took them when I was leaning over. . . .”

“It’s all right,” I said dully. “If he hadn’t done it this way, it would have been another. I should have known and warned you. There was no life for him if he could never dance again. No life at all.”

*  *  *

Julian was buried next to his father. On the headstone, I made sure Madame Marisha agreed to the name I added:
Julian Marquet Rosencoff, beloved husband of Catherine, and thirteenth in a long line of Russian male ballet stars.
Maybe it was ostentatious and gave away my own failure to love him enough while he lived, but I had to let him have it the way he wanted—or as I thought he wanted.

Chris, Paul, Carrie and I paused at the foot of Georges’s grave too, and I bowed my head to show respect to Julian’s father. Respect I should have given him too. Graveyards with their marble saints, angels, all so sweetly smiling, so pious or sober—how I hated them! They patronized we who lived; we who were made of fragile tissue and blood, who could grieve and cry while they would stand there for centuries, smiling piously down on all. And I was right back where I’d started.

*  *  *

“Catherine,” said Paul when we were all seated in the long black limousine, “your room is still as it was, all yours. Come home and live with Carrie and me until your baby is born. Chris will be there too, doing his internship at Clairmont Hospital.”

I stared over at Chris who was seated on the jumpseat, knowing he’d won a much better position in a very important hospital—and he was interning in a small, unimportant one. “Duke is so far away, Cathy,” he said with his eyes avoiding mine. “It was bad enough traveling when I was in college and med school . . . so if you don’t mind, let me be somewhere near so I can be here the day my nephew or niece arrives in the world.”

Madame Marisha jolted so her head almost struck the ceiling of the car. “You carry Julian’s child?” she cried. “Why didn’t you tell me before? How wonderful!” She glowed, so the sadness dropped from her like a gloomy cloak. “Now Julian’s not dead at all—for he will father a son, who will be exactly like him!”

“It may be a girl, Madame,” Paul said softly, while he reached for my hand. “I know you long for a boy like your son, but I long for a little girl like Cathy and Carrie . . . but if it’s a boy, I won’t object.”

“Object?” cried Madame. “God in his infinite wisdom and mercy will send to Catherine the exact duplicate of Julian! And he will dance, and he will reach the fame that was waiting just around the corner for the son of my Georges!”

*  *  *

Midnight found me all alone on the back veranda, rocking back and forth in Paul’s favorite chair. My head was full of thoughts for the future. Thoughts of the past conflicted and nearly drowned me. The floorboards squeaked faintly; they were old and had known grief like mine before; they sympathized. The stars and moon were out; even a few fireflies came to bob about in the garden darkness.

The door behind me opened and closed quietly. I didn’t look to see who it was, for I knew. I was good at sensing people, even in the dark. He sat in the chair next to mine, and rocked his chair in the same rhythm as I rocked.

“Cathy,” he said softly. “I hate to see you sitting there with that lost and drained expression. Don’t think all the good things in your life have passed you by and nothing is left. You’re still very young, very beautiful, and after your baby is born, you can quickly whip yourself back into shape, and dance until you feel you’re ready to retire and teach.”

I didn’t turn my head. Dance again? How could I dance when Julian lay in the ground? All I had was the baby. I would make the baby the center of my life. I would teach my child to dance, and he or she would reach the fame that should have been Julian’s and mine. Everything that Momma failed to give us I would bestow on my child. Never would my child be neglected. When my child reached for me, I would be there. When my child cried out for Momma, he wouldn’t have to make do with only an older sister. No . . . I’d be like Momma was when she had Daddy. That was what hurt the most, that she could change from someone loving and kind into what she was, a monster. Never, never would I treat my child as she’d treated hers!

“Good night, Paul,” I said as I stood to go. “Don’t stay out here too long. You have to get up early, and you looked tired at dinner.”

“Catherine . . . ?”

“Not now. Later. I need time.”

Slowly I ascended the back stairs, thinking of the baby in my womb, how I had to be careful and not eat junk food; I had to drink plenty of milk, take vitamins, and think happy thoughts . . . not vengeful ones. Every day from now on I would play ballet music. Inside me my baby would hear, and even before he or she was born a small living soul would be indoctrinated to the dance. I smiled, thinking of all the pretty
tutus I could buy for my little girl. I smiled even more to think of a boy like his father with a wild tumble of dark curls. Julian Janus Marquet would be his name. Janus for looking both ways, ahead and behind.

I passed Chris who was ready to come down the stairs. He touched me. I shivered, knowing what he wanted. He didn’t have to say the words. I knew them backward and forward, inside and out, upside down, or right side up; I knew them . . . as I knew him.

Though I tried diligently to think only of the innocent child growing within me, still my thoughts would steal to my mother, filling me with hate, filling me with unwanted plans for revenge. For somehow she had caused Julian’s death too. If we’d never been locked away in the first place and needed to escape and run, then I would never have loved Chris, or Paul, and perhaps Julian and I would have met inevitably in New York. Then I could have loved him as he needed and wanted to be loved. I could have gone to him “virgin pure, brand new.”

And would that have made any difference, I asked over and over. . . . Yes! Yes! I convinced myself it would have made
all
the difference!

A
s my baby grew within me, I began to find the identity I had lost, for the ballet kept the real me always in an embryo state, enclosed by my desire to dance and succeed. I was now standing firmly on the ground with the fantasy of glamorous life pushed to the background. Not that I didn’t still crave the stage and the applause now and then. Oh, I had my sorrowful moments—but I had one sure way to shut them out. I turned my thoughts on my mother, on what she’d done to us. Another death on your record, Momma!

Dear Mrs. Winslow,

Are you still running away from me? Don’t you know yet you can never run fast enough or far enough? Someday I will catch up, and we will meet again. Perhaps this time you will suffer as you made me suffer, and, hopefully, thrice the amount.

My husband has just died as the result of a car accident, just as your husband died many years ago. I am expecting his
baby, but I won’t do anything as desperate as you did. I will find a way to support him or her, even if I have triplets—or quadruplets!

I mailed that letter off, addressed to her home in Greenglenna, but the newspapers later informed me she was in Japan. Japan! Wow, she did get about.

I was turning into a woman I’d never seen before. Mirrors showed I wasn’t slim and supple anymore. That terrified me. I saw my breasts become rounder, fuller, as my middle swelled outward. I hated to move less than gracefully, but my hands loved to caress the swell of my baby’s small rump.

One day I realized I was luckier than most widows, I had two men needing me. Men who let me know in subtle ways they were ready to take Julian’s place. And I had Carrie, Carrie who considered me a model by which she could mold her own life. Dear, sweet little Carrie who was now sixteen, and had never had a date, or a boyfriend, or been to a prom. Not that she couldn’t have, if she’d forget her smallness. Chris persuaded his friends to date a younger sister who was dying on the vine for want of romance. She complained to me: “Chris doesn’t have to make dates for
you!
That college student, he doesn’t want me. He just comes to worm in closer to you.” I laughed at how ridiculous that was. Nobody would want me in the condition I was, pregnant, a widow, and too old for a college boy.

Carrie heard this, but sulked near the window. “Since you came back, Dr. Paul doesn’t take me out to the movies and to dinner like he used to. I used to pretend he wasn’t my guardian, but my sweetheart, and that made me feel good inside, because all the ladies look at him, Cathy. He is handsome, even if he is old.”