Cutler 1 - Dawn

Dear V. C. Andrews Reader:

Those of us who knew and loved Virginia Andrews know that the most important things in her life were her novels. Her proudest moment came when she held in her hand the first printed copy of
FLOWERS
IN THE ATTIC
. Virginia was a unique and gifted storyteller who wrote feverishly each and every day. She was constantly developing ideas for new stories that would eventually become novels. Second only to the pride she took in her writing was the joy she took in reading the letters from readers who were so touched by her books.

Since her death many of you have written to us wondering whether there would continue to be new V. C. Andrews novels. When Virginia became seriously ill while writing the Casteel series, she began to work even harder, hoping to finish as many stories as possible so that her fans could one day share them. Just before she died we promised ourselves that we would take all of these wonderful stories and make them available to her readers.

Beginning with the final books in the Casteel series we have been working closely with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Virginia's stories and to expand upon them by creating additional novels inspired by her wonderful storytelling genius.

DAWN
is the start of a new V. C. Andrews series. We believe it would have given her great joy to know that it will be entertaining so many of you. Other V. C. Andrews novels will be published in the coming years and we hope they continue to mean as much to you as ever.

Sincerely,

THE ANDREWS FAMILY

Momma once told me that she and Daddy named me Dawn because I was born at the break of day. That was the first of a thousand lies Momma and Daddy would tell me and my brother Jimmy. Of course, we wouldn't know they were lies, not for a long time, not until the day they came to take us away.

1

The sound of dresser drawers being opened and closed woke me. I heard Momma and Daddy whispering in their room, and my heart began to thump fast and hard. I pressed my palm against my chest, took a deep breath, and turned to wake Jimmy, but he was already sitting up in our sofa bed. Bathed in the silvery moonlight that came pouring through our bare window, my sixteen-year-old brother's face looked chiseled from granite. He sat there so still, listening. I lay there listening with him, listening to the hateful wind whistle through the cracks and crannies of this small cottage Daddy had found for us in Granville, a small, rundown town just outside of Washington, D.C. We had been here barely four months.

"What is it, Jimmy? What's going on?" I asked, shivering partly from the cold and partly because deep inside I knew the answer.

Jimmy fell back against his pillow and then brought his hands behind his head. In a sulk, he stared up at the dark ceiling. The pace of Momma's and Daddy's movements became more frenzied.

"We were gonna get a puppy here," Jimmy mumbled. "And this spring Momma and I were gonna plant a garden and grow our own vegetables."

I could feel his frustration and anger like heat from an iron radiator.

"What happened?" I asked mournfully, for I, too, had high hopes.

"Daddy came home later than usual," he said, a prophetic note of doom in his voice. "He rushed in here, his eyes wild. You know, bright and wide like they get sometimes. He went right in there, and not long after, they started packing. Might as well get up and get dressed," Jimmy said, throwing the blanket off him and turning to sit up. "They'll be out here shortly tellin' us to do it anyway."

I groaned. Not again, and not again in the middle of the night.

Jimmy leaned over to turn on the lamp by our pull-out bed and started to put on his socks so he wouldn't have to step down on a cold floor. He was so depressed, he didn't even worry about getting dressed in front of me. I fell back and watched him unfold his pants so he could slip into them, moving with a quiet resignation that made everything around me seem more like a dream. How I wished it were.

I was fourteen years old, and for as long as I could remember, we had been packing and unpacking, going from one place to another. It always seemed that just when my brother, Jimmy, and I had finally settled into a new school and finally made some friends and I got to know my teachers, we had to leave. Maybe we really were no better than homeless gypsies like Jimmy always said, wanderers, poorer than the poorest, for even the poorest families had some place they could call home, some place they could return to when things went bad, a place where they had grandmas and grandpas or uncles and aunts to hug them and comfort them and make them feel good again. We would have settled even for cousins. At least, I would have.

I peeled back the blanket, and my nightgown fell away and exposed most of my bosom. I glanced at Jimmy and caught him gazing at me in the moonlight. He shifted his eyes away quickly. Embarrassment made my heart pitter-patter, and I pressed my palm against the bodice of my nightgown. I had never told any of my girlfriends at school that Jimmy and I shared even a room together, much less this dilapidated pull-out bed. I was too ashamed, and I knew how they would react, embarrassing both Jimmy and me even more.

I brought my feet down on the freezing-cold bare wood floor. My teeth chattering, I embraced myself and hurried across the small room to gather up a blouse and a sweater and a pair of jeans. Then I went into the bathroom to dress.

By the time I finished, Jimmy had his suitcase closed. It seemed we always left something else behind each time. There was only so much room in Daddy's old car anyway. I folded my nightgown and put it neatly into my own suitcase. The clasps were as hard as ever to close and Jimmy had to help.

Momma and Daddy's bedroom door opened and they came out, their suitcases in hand, too. We stood there facing them, holding our own.

"Why do we have to leave in the middle of the night again?" I asked, looking at Daddy and wondering if leaving would make him angry as it so often did.

"Best time to travel," Daddy mumbled. He glared at me with a quick order not to ask too many questions. Jimmy was right—Daddy had that wild look again, a look that seemed so unnatural, it sent shivers up and down my spine. I hated it when Daddy got that look. He was a handsome man with rugged features, a cap of sleek brown hair and dark coal eyes. When the day came that I fell in love and decided to marry, I hoped my husband would be just as handsome as Daddy. But I hated it when Daddy was displeased—when he got that wild look. It marred his handsome features and made him ugly—something I couldn't bear to see.

"Jimmy, take the suitcases down. Dawn, you help your momma pack up whatever she wants from the kitchen."

I glanced at Jimmy. He was only two years older than I was, but there was a wider gap in our looks. He was tall and lean and muscular like Daddy. I was small with what Momma called "China doll features." And I really didn't take after Momma, either, because she was as tall as Daddy. She told me she was gangly and awkward when she was my age and looked more like a boy until she was thirteen, when she suddenly blossomed.

We didn't have many pictures of family. Matter of fact, all I had was one picture of Momma when she was fifteen. I would sit for hours gazing into her young face, searching for signs of myself. She was smiling in the picture and standing under a weeping willow tree. She wore an ankle-length straight skirt and a fluffy blouse with frilly sleeves and a frilly collar. Her long, dark hair looked soft and fresh. Even in this old black and white photo, her eyes sparkled with hope and love. Daddy said he'd taken the picture with a small box camera he had bought for a quarter from a friend of his. He wasn't sure it would work, but at least this picture came out. If we'd ever had any other photos, they'd been either lost or left behind during our many moves.

However, I thought that even in this simple old photograph with its black and white fading into sepia and its edges fraying, Momma looked so pretty that it was easy to see why Daddy had lost his heart to her so quickly even though she was only fifteen at the time. She was barefoot in the picture, and I thought she looked fresh and innocent and as lovely as anything else nature had to offer.

Momma and Jimmy had the same shimmering black hair and dark eyes. They both had bronze complexions with beautiful white teeth that allowed them ivory smiles. Daddy had dark brown hair, but mine was blond. And I had freckles over the tops of my cheeks. No one else in my family had freckles.

"What about that rake and shovel we bought for the garden?" Jimmy asked, careful not to let even a twinkle of hope show in his eyes.

"We ain't got the room," Daddy snapped.

Poor Jimmy, I thought. Momma said he was born all crunched up as tightly as a fist, his eyes sewn shut. She said she gave birth to Jimmy on a farm in Maryland. They had just arrived there and gone knocking on the door, hoping to find some work, when her labor began.

They told me I had been born on the road, too. They had hoped to have me born in a hospital, but they were forced to leave one town and start out for another where Daddy had already secured new employment. They left late in the afternoon one day and traveled all that day and that night.

"We were between nowhere and no place, and all of a sudden you wanted to come into this world," Momma told me. "Your daddy pulled the truck over and said, 'Here we go again, Sally Jean.' I crawled onto the truck bed where we had an old mattress, and as the sun came up, you entered this world. I remember how the birds were singing.

"I was looking at a bird as you were coming into this world, Dawn. That's why you sing so pretty," Momma said. "Your grandmomma always said whatever a woman looked at just before, during, or right after giving birth, that's what characteristics the child would have. The worst thing was to have a mouse or a rat in the house when a woman was pregnant."

"What would happen, Momma?" I asked, filled with wonder.

"The child would be sneaky, cowardly."

I sat back amazed when she told me all this. Momma had inherited so much wisdom. It made me wonder and wonder about our family, a family we had never seen. I wanted to know so much more, but it was difficult to get Momma and Daddy to talk about their early lives. I suppose that was because so much of it was painful and hard.

We knew they were both brought up on small farms in Georgia, where their people eked out poor livings from small patches of land. They had both come from big families that lived in rundown farmhouses. There just wasn't any room in either household for a newly married, very young couple with a pregnant wife, so they began what would be our family's history of traveling, traveling that had not yet ended. We were on our way again.

Momma and I filled a carton with those kitchen-wares she wanted to take along and then gave it to Daddy to load in the car. When she was finished, she put her arm around my shoulders, and we both took one last look at the humble little kitchen.

Jimmy was standing in the doorway, watching. His eyes turned from pools of sadness to coal-black pools of anger when Daddy came in to hurry us along. Jimmy blamed him for our gypsy life. I wondered sometimes if maybe he wasn't right. Often Daddy seemed different from other men—more fidgety, more nervous. I would never say it, but I hated it whenever he stopped off at a bar on his way home front work. He would usually come home in a sulk and stand by the windows watching as if he were expecting something terrible. None of us could talk to him when he was in one of those moods. He was like that now.

"Better get going," he said, standing in the doorway, his eyes turning even colder as they rested for a second on me.

For a moment I was stunned. Why had Daddy given me such a cold look? It was almost as if he blamed me for our having to leave.

As soon as the thought entered my mind, I chased it away. I was being silly! Daddy would never blame me for anything. He loved me. He was just mad because Momma and I were being so slow and dawdling, instead of hurrying out the door. As if reading my mind, Momma suddenly spoke.

"Right," she said quickly. Momma and I started for the door, for we had all learned from hard experience that Daddy was unpredictable when his voice turned so tight with anger. Neither one of us wanted to invoke his wrath. We turned back once and then closed the door behind us, just like we had closed dozens of doors before.

There were few stars out. I didn't like nights without stars. On those nights shadows seemed so much darker and longer to me. Tonight was one of those nights—cold, dark, all the windows in houses around us black. The wind carried a piece of paper through the street, and off in the distance a dog howled. Then I heard a siren. Somewhere in the night someone was in trouble, I thought, some poor person was being carried off to the hospital, or maybe the police were chasing a criminal.

"Let's move along," Daddy ordered and sped up as if they were chasing us.

Jimmy and I squeezed ourselves into the backseat with our cartons and suitcases.

"Where we going this time?" Jimmy demanded without disguising his displeasure.

"Richmond," Momma said.

"Richmond!" we both said. We had been every-where in Virginia, it seemed, but Richmond.

"Yep. Your daddy's got a job in a garage there, and I'm sure I can land me a chambermaid job in one of the motels."

"Richmond," Jimmy muttered under his breath. Big cities still frightened both of us.

As we drove away from Granville and the darkness fell around us, our sleepiness returned. Jimmy and I closed our eyes and fell asleep against each other as we had done so many times before.

Daddy had been planning our new move for a little while because he had already found us a place to live. Daddy often did things quietly and then announced them to us.

Because the rents in the city were so much higher, we could afford only a one-bedroom apartment, so Jimmy and I still had to share a room. And the sofa bed! It was barely big enough for the two of us. I knew that sometimes he awoke before me but didn't move because my arm was on him and he didn't want to wake me and embarrass me about it. And there were those times he touched me accidentally where he wasn't supposed to. The blood would rush to his face, and he would leap off the bed as if it had started to burn. He wouldn't say anything to acknowledge he had touched me, and I wouldn't mention it.

It was usually like that. Jimmy and I simply ignored things that would embarrass other teenage boys and girls forced to live in such close quarters, but I couldn't help sitting by and dreaming longingly for the same wonderful privacy most of my girlfriends enjoyed, especially when they described how they could close their doors and gossip on their own phones or write love notes without anyone in their families knowing a thing about it. I was even afraid to keep a diary because everyone would be looking over my shoulder.

This apartment differed little from most of our previous homes—the same small rooms, peeling wallpaper, and chipped paint. The same windows that didn't close well. Jimmy hated our apartment so much that he said he would rather sleep in the street.

But just when we thought things were as bad as they could be, they got worse.

Late one afternoon months after we had moved to Richmond, Momma came home from work much earlier than usual. I had been hoping she would bring something else for us to have for dinner. We were at the tail end of the week, Daddy's payday, and most of our money from the previous week was gone. We had been able to have one or two good meals during the week, but now we were eating leftovers. My stomach was rumbling just as much as Jimmy's was, but before either of us could complain, the door opened and we both turned, surprised to see Momma come in. She stopped, shook her head, and started to cry. Then she hurried across the room to her bedroom.

"Momma! What's wrong?" I called after her, but her only answer was to slam the door. Jimmy looked at me and I at him, both of us frightened. I went to her door and knocked softly. "Momma?" Jimmy came up beside me and waited. "Momma, can we come in?" I opened the door and looked inside.