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! (71 page)

“Wait a minute,” Paul cautioned in a low voice, clamping
both his hands down on my shoulders when I would heedlessly run forward and rescue Carrie. “Look at those crates, Cathy. Just one careless move on your part and they will all come crashing down on both you and Carrie.”

Somewhere behind me a teacher moaned and began to pray. How Carrie had managed to drag herself down that close passageway while blind and bound was unbelievable. A fully adult person couldn’t have done it—but I could do it—I was still small enough.

Even as I spoke I planned the way. “Carrie, do exactly as I say. Don’t lean to the right or to the left. Lie flat on your stomach, aim for my voice. I’m going to crawl in to you and take hold of you under your arms. Raise your head high so your face won’t be scraped. Dr. Paul will grab hold of my ankles and pull us both out.”

“Tell her it’s going to hurt her leg.”

“Did you hear Dr. Paul, Carrie? It’s going to hurt your leg so please don’t thrash about if you feel pain, everything will be over in a second or two and Dr. Paul will make your leg well again.”

It seemed to take hours for me to inch down that tunnel while the crates teetered and rocked, and when I had her by the shoulders I heard Dr. Paul cry out “Okay, Cathy!” Then he pulled, fast and hard! Down thundered the wooden crates! Dust flew everywhere. In the confusion I was at Carrie’s side, removing the gag and blindfold while the doctor untied her bonds.

Then Carrie was clinging to me, blinking because the light hurt, crying from the pain, terrified to see the teachers and her leg so crooked.

In the ambulance that came to take Carrie to the hospital Chris and I rode and shared the same stool, each of us holding one of Carrie’s hands. Paul followed in his white car so he’d be there to supervise the orthopedist who would set Carrie’s broken leg. Lying face upward on the pillow near her head with fixed smiles and rigid bodies were Carrie’s three dolls.
That’s when I remembered. Now the crib was missing too, just as the cradle had disappeared years ago.

Carrie’s broken leg spoiled the long summer vacation trip our doctor had planned for all of us. Again I raged inwardly at Momma. Her fault; always we were punished for what she’d caused! It wasn’t fair that Carrie had to be laid up and we couldn’t journey north—while our mother gallivanted from here to there, going to parties, hobnobbing with the jet set and the movie stars as if we didn’t exist at all! On the French Riviera now. I cut that item from Greenglenna’s society column and pasted it into my huge scrapbook of revenge. That was one article I showed to Chris before I put it into the book. I didn’t show him all of them. I didn’t want him to know I had subscribed to the Virginia newspaper that reported on everything the Foxworths did.

“Where did you get this?” he demanded, looking up from the clipping he handed back to me.

“The Greenglenna newspaper—it’s more concerned with high society than Clairmont’s
Daily News
. Our mother is a hot item, didn’t you know?”

“I try to forget, unlike you!” he said sharply. “
We
don’t have it so bad now, do we? We’re lucky to be with Paul, and Carrie’s leg will mend and be as good as ever. And other summers will come when we can go to New England.”

How did he know that? Nothing ever was offered twice. Maybe in other summers to come we’d be too busy or Paul would. “You realize, being an ‘almost’ doctor, don’t you, that her leg might not grow while she’s in that cast?”

He looked strangely ill-at-ease. “If she grew like average kids I guess there might be that risk. But, Cathy, she doesn’t grow very much, so there’s little chance one leg will be shorter than the other.”

“Oh, go bury your nose in
Gray’s Anatomy
!” I flared, angry because he’d always make light of anything I said that made Momma the fault of anything. He knew why Carrie
didn’t grow as well as I did. Deprived of love, of sunshine and freedom, it was a marvel she’d lived to survive! Arsenic too! Damn Momma to hell!

Busily, day by day, I added to my collection of news clippings and blurry photographs cut from many newspapers. That’s where most of my “pin money” went. Though I stared at all the pictures of Momma with hate and loathing, I looked at her husband with admiration. How very handsome, how powerfully built her young husband was with his long, lean, darkly bronzed skin. I stared at the photograph that showed him lifting a champagne glass high as he toasted his wife on their second wedding anniversary.

I decided that night to send Momma a short note. Sent first class, it would be forwarded.

Dear Mrs. Winslow,

How well I remember the summer of your honeymoon. It was a wonderful summer, so refreshingly pleasant in the mountains in a locked room with windows that were never opened.

Congratulations and my very best wishes, Mrs. Winslow, and I do hope all your future summers, winters, springs and falls will be haunted by the memory of the kind of summers, winters, springs and falls your Dresden dolls used to have.

Not yours anymore,
   The doctor doll,
      The ballerina doll,
         The praying-to-grow-taller doll,
            And the dead doll.

I ran to post the letter and no sooner had I dropped it in the mailbox on the corner than I was wishing I had it back. Chris would hate me for doing this.

It rained that night and I got up to watch the storm. Tears streaked my face as much as the rain streaked the window glass. Because it was Saturday Chris was home. He was out there on the veranda, allowing the wind-driven rain to wet his pajamas and glue them to his skin.

He saw me just about the time I saw him, and he stepped into my room without saying a word. We clung together, me crying and him trying hard not to. I wanted him to go, even as I held hard to him and cried on his shoulder. “Why, Cathy, why all the tears?” he asked as I sobbed on and on.

“Chris,” I asked when I could, “you don’t still love
her
, do you?”

He hesitated before he answered. That made anger simmer my blood into a rolling boil. “
You do!”
I cried. “How can you after what she did to Cory and to Carrie? Chris, what’s wrong with you that you can go on loving when you should hate as I do?”

Still he didn’t say anything. And his very silence gave me the answer. He went on loving her because he had to if he were to go on loving me. Every time he looked in my face he saw her and what she’d been like in her early youth. Chris was just like Daddy, who had been just as vulnerable to the kind of beauty I had. But it was only a surface resemblance. I wasn’t weak! I wasn’t without abilities! I could have thought of one thousand ways to earn a living, rather than lock my four children in a miserable room and leave them in care of an evil old woman who wanted to see them suffer for sins that weren’t even theirs!

While I thought my vengeful thoughts and made my plans to ruin her life when I could, Chris was tenderly kissing me. I hadn’t even noticed. “Stop!” I cried when I felt his lips pressing down on mine. “Leave me alone! You don’t love me
like I want to be loved, for what I am. You love me because my face is like hers! Sometimes I hate my face!”

He looked terribly wounded as he backed toward the door. “I was only trying to comfort you,” he said in a broken voice. “Don’t turn it into something ugly.”

*  *  *

My fear that Carrie’s leg would come out of the cast shorter than the other proved groundless. In no time at all after her leg was cut free from the plaster she was walking around as good as ever.

As fall neared, Chris, Paul and I conferred and decided that a public school where Carrie could come home every afternoon would be best for her after all. All she’d have to do was board a bus three blocks from home; the same bus would bring her home at three in the afternoon. In Paul’s big homey kitchen she’d stay with Henny while I attended ballet class.

Soon September was upon us again, then November had gone by, and still Carrie hadn’t made a single friend. She wanted most desperately to belong, but always she was an outsider. She wanted someone as dear as a sister but she found only suspicion, hostility and ridicule. It seemed Carrie would walk the long halls of that elementary school forever before she found a friend.

“Cathy,” Carrie would tell me, “nobody likes me.”

“They will. Sooner or later they will know how sweet and wonderful you are. And you have all of us who love and admire you so don’t let others worry you. Don’t care what they think!” She sniffed, for she did care, she did!

*  *  *

Carrie slept on her twin bed pushed close beside mine, and every night I saw her kneel beside her bed, temple her small hands under her chin, and with lowered head she prayed, “And please, God, let me find my mother again. My real mother. And most of all, Lord God, let me grow just a
little bit taller. You don’t have to make me as tall as Momma, but almost as tall as Cathy, please God, please, please.”

Lying on my bed and hearing this, I stared bleakly up at the ceiling and I hated Momma, really despised and loathed her! How could Carrie still want a mother who’d been so cruel? Had Chris and I done right in sparing her the grim truth of how our own mother had tried to kill us? How she’d caused Carrie to be as small as she was?

Upon her smallness Carrie placed all her unhappiness and loneliness. She knew she had a pretty face and sensational hair, but what did they matter when the face and the hair were on a head much too large for the thin little body? Carrie’s beauty did nothing at all to win her friends and admiration, just the opposite. “Doll face, Angel Hair. Hey you, midget, or are you a dwarf? Are you gonna join a circus and be their littlest freak?” And home she’d run, all three blocks from the bus stop, scared and crying, tormented again by children without sensitivity.

“I’m no good, Cathy!” she wailed with her face buried in my lap. “Nobody likes me. They don’t like my body ’cause it’s too little, and they don’t like my head ’cause it’s too big, and they don’t even like what is pretty ’cause they think it’s wasted on somebody too little like me!”

I said what I could to comfort her but I felt so inadequate. I knew she watched my every movement and compared my proportions to hers. She realized I was very much in proportion and how much she was constructed grotesquely.

If I could have given her a part of my height, gladly I would have done so. Instead, I gave her my prayers. Night after night, I too went down on my knees and prayed to God, “Please let Carrie grow! Please, God, she’s so young, and it hurts her so much, and she’s been through so much. Be kind. Look down, God! See us! Hear us!”

One afternoon Carrie went to the only one who could deliver almost everything—so why not size?

Paul was sitting on his back veranda, sipping wine, nibbling cheese and crackers. I was at ballet class, so I heard only Paul’s version of what happened.

“She came to me, Cathy, and asked if I didn’t have a stretching machine to pull her out longer.”

I sighed when he told me.

“‘If I had such a machine,’ I told her”—and I knew he’d done it with love, kindness and understanding, not with mockery—“‘it would be a very painful process. Have patience, darling, you’re taller than you were when you came. Time will make you grow. Why, I’ve seen the shortest young people suddenly just shoot up overnight after they reach puberty.’ She stared at me with those big blue haunted eyes and I saw her disappointment. I had failed her. I could tell from the way she ambled off with her shoulders drooping and her head hung so low. Her hopes must have ridden high when those cruel kids at her school chided her about finding a ‘stretching machine.’”

“Isn’t there one thing modern medicine can do to help her grow?” I asked Paul.

“I’m looking into it,” he said in a tight voice. “I’d give my soul to see Carrie reach the height she wants. I’d give her inches of my height, if only I could.”

W
e had been with our doctor for one year and a half, and what exhilarating and baffling days they were. I was like a mole coming out of darkness only to find the brilliant days weren’t at all like I had supposed they would be.

I’d thought once we were free of Foxworth Hall and I was almost an adult life would lead me down a clear and straight path to fame, fortune and happiness. I had the talent; I saw that in the admiring eyes of Madame and Georges. Madame especially harped on every little flaw of technique, of control. Every criticism told me I was worth all her efforts to make me not only an excellent dancer but a sensational one.

During summer vacation Chris obtained a job as a waiter in a café from seven in the mornings to seven in the evenings. In August he would leave again for Duke University where he would begin his second year in college. Carrie fiddled away her time playing on the swing, playing with her little girl toys, though she was ten now and should be outgrowing dolls. I spent five days a week in ballet class, and half of Saturday. My small sister was like a shadow tagging after me when I
was at home. When I wasn’t she was Henny’s shadow. She needed a playmate of her own age but she couldn’t find one. She had only the porcelain dolls to confide in now that she felt too old to act the baby with Chris and me, and suddenly she stopped complaining about her size. But her eyes, those sad, sad yearning eyes, told how she longed to be as tall as the girls we saw walking in the shopping malls.