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! (97 page)

Very slowly her head lifted, and the moon that suddenly came into view from behind dark clouds shone in her eyes full of self-torture. “But
I’ll
know.” She began to sob, wild, hysterical sobs. “That’s not the worst thing, Cathy,” she screamed, “I liked doing what I did! I liked him wanting me to do it—I tried not to let my face show I was feeling any pleasure for God might have been watching. So you see why Alex won’t understand? He’d hate me, he would, I know he would! And even if he never knows, I’ll still hate myself for doing it and liking it!”

“Please stop crying. What you did isn’t that bad, really. Forget our grandmother who kept talking about our evil blood. She’s a bigoted, narrow-minded hypocrite who can’t tell right from wrong. She did all kinds of horrible things in the name of righteousness and nothing at all in the name of love. You’re not bad, Carrie. You wanted Julian to love you, and if what you did gave him pleasure and you pleasure, then that’s normal too. People are made to feel sensual pleasure, made to enjoy sex. Julian was wrong and he shouldn’t have asked you, but that was
his sin
, not yours.”

“I remember lots of things you don’t think I do,” she whispered. “I remember the funny way Cory and I used to talk to each other, so you and Chris couldn’t understand. We knew we were the Devil’s issue. We heard the grandmother.
We talked about it. We knew we were locked up because we weren’t good enough to be out in the world with people better than us.”

“Stop!” I cried. “Don’t remember! Forget! We did get out, didn’t we? We were four children not responsible for the actions of our parents. That hateful old woman tried to steal our confidence and our pride in ourselves—don’t let her succeed! Look at Chris, aren’t you proud of him? Weren’t you proud of
me
when I was on stage dancing? And one day, after you and Alex are married, he will change his mind about what is perverted and what isn’t—for I did. Alex will grow up and stop being overly righteous. He doesn’t know yet the pleasures love can give.”

Carrie pulled from my arms and went to stare out of the windows at the dark and distant mountains, and at the quarter moon that sailed as an uptilted Viking ship through the black seas of night. “Alex won’t change,” she said dully. “He’s gonna be a minister. Religious people think everything is bad, just like grandmother. When he told me he was going to give up the idea of being an electrical engineer, I knew it was all over between us.”

“Everybody changes! Look at the world about us, Carrie. Look at the magazines and the movies that decent people go to and enjoy, and the stage plays with everyone naked, and the kind of books being published. I don’t know if it’s for the better, but I do know people aren’t static. We all change from day to day. Maybe twenty years from now our children will look back to our time and be shocked, and maybe they will look back and smile and call us innocents. Nobody knows how the world will change—so if the world can change,
so can one man named Alex.”

“Alex won’t change. He hates today’s lack of morals, hates the kinds of books being published, the movies that are dirty and the magazines with couples doing wicked things. I don’t think he even approves of the kind of dancing you used to do with Julian.”

I wanted to yell out,
To hell with Alex and his prudery!
Yet I couldn’t slander the only man Carrie had found to love. “Carrie, sweetheart, go to bed. Go to sleep and remember in the morning that the world is full of all sorts of men who would be delighted to love someone as pretty, sweet and domestically oriented as you are. Think of what Chris tells us always, ‘things always happen for the best.’ And if it doesn’t work out for you and Alex, then it will work out for you and someone else.”

She threw me a quick glance of deepest despair. “How was it for the best when God made Cory die?”

Dear Lord, how to answer a question like that?

“Was it for the best when Daddy was killed on the highway?”

“You don’t remember that day.”

“Yes I do. I’ve got a good memory.”

“Carrie, absolutely no one is perfect, not me, not you, not Chris, not Alex. Not anybody.”

“I know,” she said, crawling into her bed like a good little girl obeying her mother. “People do bad things and God sees them and punishes them later on. Sometimes he uses a grandmother with her whip, like she beat you and Chris. I’m not dumb, Cathy. I know you and Chris look at each other in the way Alex and I look at each other. I think you and Dr. Paul were lovers too—and maybe that’s why Julian died, to punish you. But you’re the kind of woman men like and I’m not. I don’t dance; I don’t know how to make everybody love me. Only my family loves me, and Alex. And when I tell Alex he won’t love me or want me.”

“You won’t tell him!” I ordered sternly. She lay with her eyes fixed on the ceiling until finally she drifted off to sleep. Then I was the one left to lie awake, hurting inside, still astonished by the effect one old woman had on the lives of so many. I hated Momma for taking us to Foxworth Hall. She’d known what her mother was like and still she took us there. She’d known her mother and father better than anyone and
still she married a second time and left us alone, so she had the fun and we had the torture. And it was us who were still suffering while she had the fun!

Fun that would soon be over, for I was here and Bart was here, and sooner or later we would meet. Though how he had managed to avoid me so far I wasn’t to learn until later.

I comforted myself with the thoughts of how Momma would be suffering soon too, like we had suffered. Pain for pain, she’d learn how we had felt when
she
was left alone and unloved. She wouldn’t be able to cope . . . not again. One more blow would be her undoing. Somehow I knew that perhaps because I was so much like her.

*  *  *

“Are you sure you’re all right?” I asked Carrie a few days later. “You haven’t been eating well. Where has your appetite gone?”

She said quietly, her face expressionless. “I’m just fine. I just don’t feel like eating much. Don’t take Jory with you today to your dance studio. Let me keep him all day. I miss him when he goes away with you.”

I felt uneasy about leaving her all day with Jory who could be a handful, and Carrie didn’t look like she was feeling well. “Carrie, be honest with me, please. If you feel unwell, let me take you to a doctor.”

“It’s my time of the month,” she said with her eyes downcast, “I just feel crampy in my middle three or four days before it starts.”

Only the blues of the month—and when you were her age you did feel more cramps than at mine. I kissed my small son good-bye while he set up a terrible wail, wanting to go with me and watch the dancers.

“Wanna hear the music, Mommy,” objected Jory who knew very well what he wanted and what he didn’t. “Wanna watch the dancers!”

“We’ll go for a walk in the park. I’ll push you in the swing
and we’ll play in the sandbox,” said Carrie hastily, picking up my son and holding him close. “Stay with me, Jory. I love you so much and I never see enough of you. . . . Don’t you love your aunt Carrie?”

He smiled and threw his arms about her neck, for yes, Jory loved everyone.

*  *  *

It was a terribly long day. Several times I called to check on Carrie to see if she was all right. “I’m fine, Cathy. Jory and I had a wonderful time in the park. I’m going to lie down now and take a nap—so don’t call and wake me up again.”

Four o’clock came, and my last class of the day, when my six- and seven-year-olds moved on out into the center of the studio. While the music played I counted,
“Un, deux, pliés, un, deux, pliés,
and now,
un, deux, tendu,
close up,
un, deux, tendu,
close up.” And on and on I instructed, when suddenly I felt that prickly rise of my neck hackles to inform me that someone was staring at me intently. I whirled about to see a man standing far to the rear of the studio. Bart Winslow—my mother’s husband!

The minute he saw I recognized him he came striding toward me. “You do look sensational in purple tights, Miss Dahl. May I have a moment of your time?”

“I’m busy!” I snapped, annoyed that he could ask when I had twelve little dancers I couldn’t take my eyes off of. “My day will be over at five. If you care to you can sit over there and wait.”

“Miss Dahl, I’ve had one devil of a time finding you, and you’ve been right here under my nose all the time.”

“Mr. Winslow,” I said coolly, “if I didn’t mail you an adequate fee you could have written a letter and it would have been forwarded to me.”

He knitted his dark, thick brows together. “I’m not here about the fee—though you didn’t pay me the price I had in mind.” Smiling and assured, he slipped a hand inside his
jacket and pulled from the breast pocket a letter. I gasped to see my own handwriting and all the postmarks and cancellation marks on that letter that had followed my mother all about Europe! “I see you recognize this letter,” he said with his keen brown eyes watching my every flicker of expression.

“Look, Mr. Winslow,” I said, very much in a state of flurry, “my sister isn’t feeling well today and she’s taking care of my son who is hardly more than a baby. And you can see I’ve got my hands full here. Can we talk about this some other time?”

“At your convenience, Miss Dahl, any time.” He bowed and then handed me a small business card. “Make it as soon as possible. I’ve many questions to ask you—and don’t try skipping out. This time I’m keeping close tabs on you. You don’t think one dinner date was enough, do you?”

It upset me so much to see him with that letter that the moment he was gone I dismissed my class and went into my office. There I sat down to pore over my green ledger, totaling the figures and seeing I was still in the red. Forty students I’d been assured when I bought out this school, but I hadn’t been told most of them went away during the summers and didn’t return until fall. All the spoiled little rich kids in the winter and the middle-class children in the summer who could only come once or twice a week. No matter how I stretched the money I earned it didn’t cover all my costs of redecorating and installing new mirrors behind the long barre.

I glanced then at my watch, saw it was almost six o’clock, then changed into my street clothes and ran the two blocks to my small house. Carrie should have been in the kitchen preparing dinner while Jory played in the fenced-in yard. But I didn’t see Jory, nor was Carrie in the kitchen!

“Carrie,” I called, “I’m home—where are you and Jory hiding?”

“In here,” she responded in a thin whisper.

All the way I ran to find her still in bed. Weakly she explained Jory was staying with the next-door neighbor.
“Cathy . . . I don’t really feel very good. I’ve thrown up four or five times; I can’t remember how many . . . and I’m so crampy. I feel funny, real funny. . . .”

I put my hand to her head and found it strangely cold, though the day was very warm. “I’m going to call a doctor.” No sooner were the words out of my mouth than I had to laugh bitterly at myself. There wasn’t a doctor in this town who made house calls. I ran back to Carrie and stuck a thermometer in her mouth, then gasped to read the figures.

“Carrie, I’m going to get Jory and then I’m driving you to the nearest hospital. You have a temperature of one hundred and three point six!”

Listlessly she nodded, then drifted off to sleep. I rushed next door to check on my son who was happily playing with a little girl a month older than he was. “Look, Mrs. Marquet,” said Mrs. Townsend, a sweet, motherly woman in her early forties who was taking care of her granddaughter, “if Carrie is sick, let me keep Jory until you come home. I do hope Carrie isn’t seriously ill. She’s such a dear little thing. But I’ve noticed she’s been looking pale and miserable for a day or so.”

I’d noticed the same thing and had tied it all to her romance with Alex that was going awry.

How wrong I was!

*  *  *

The very next day I called Paul. “Catherine, what’s wrong?” he said when he heard the panic in my voice.

I spilled it all out, how Carrie was sick and in the hospital where they had already made several tests, and still they didn’t know what was wrong with her. “Paul, she looks dreadful! And she’s losing weight fast, unbelievably fast! She’s vomiting, can’t keep any food down and has diarrhea too. She keeps calling for you and Chris too.”

“I’ll have another doctor fill in for me here and fly right up there,” he said without hesitation. “But wait before you try and get in touch with Chris. The symptoms you name are so
common to a number of minor ailments.”

I took him at his word and didn’t try and contact Chris who was enjoying a two-week tour of the West Coast before he came home and continued his residency. In three hours Paul was with me in the hospital room staring down at Carrie. She smiled weakly to see him there and held out her thin arms. “Hello,” she whispered thinly, “I’ll bet you didn’t think you’d see me in an ole hospital bed, did you?”

Immediately he took her in his arms and began to ask questions. What were her first signs that something was wrong?

“About a week ago, I started feeling very tired. I didn’t tell Cathy ’cause she worries so much about me anyway. Then I had headaches and I felt sleepy all the time, and I got big bruises and didn’t know how I got them. Then I combed my hair and lots and lots of it came out, and then I just started throwing up . . . and other things that other doctors have already asked me and I told them.” Her thin, whispering voice drifted off. “I wish I could see Chris,” she mumbled before her eyes closed and she was asleep.

Paul had already seen Carrie’s chart and talked to her doctors. Now he turned to me with that blank expression that put dread in my heart . . . it was so fraught with meaning. “Maybe you ought to send for Chris.”

“Paul! Do you mean . . . ?”

“No, I don’t mean that. But if she wants him, he should be here with her.”

I was in the hall, waiting for the doctors to do certain tests on Carrie. They had chased me from the room. As I paced back and forth before the closed door to her room, I sensed him before I saw him. I whirled about, catching my breath to see Chris striding down the long corridor, bypassing nurses carrying bedpans and trays of medicines who gaped to see him in all his splendid glory.