Echoes of Dollanganger Read online

  Despite her timidity, she climbed down that sheet ladder as if she had been doing it all her life.

  Once we were down and moving hand in hand through the darkness, the thrilling sense of freedom overtook me. Everything looked fresh and new and exciting. I had never appreciated the stars more and realized how important were all the little things I had once taken for granted. I was so entranced I didn’t notice how frightened Cathy was, but when I did, I put my arm around her, and her trembling subsided.

  Finally, the lake loomed before us, with all its promise of pleasure. For a little while, at least, we could be young again; I could be like a boy of nearly seventeen and she could be a fourteen-year-old girl.

  We decided to swim in our underwear instead of completely nude, although Cathy had no bra. She embraced herself and touched the water with her toe. I saw that she was hesitant about getting in, so I pushed her into the water, and suddenly we were young children again, splashing each other, dunking each other. I clung to her and she to me, laughing and spinning each other about. We swam until we were both exhausted, and then we walked out and fell on the grass to lie on our backs, catch our breath, and gaze up at the stars.

  Lying there beside her, her blossoming breasts captured in the starlight, her face gleaming wet, I couldn’t help but reach for her hand. What if she weren’t my sister? I thought. What if I was here with some girl I liked? What would I do next? Cathy looked at me and saw how I was staring at her.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, shaking my head and turning away. Whatever she saw in my face, it made her think of being with someone you loved. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Girls mature faster than boys. She would have all these feelings, too, and maybe even stronger ones than mine.

  It occurred to Cathy first that we were now the ages our parents were when they first met. I suspected she was thinking that they were related, but it didn’t stop them from falling in love.

  “Do you think it was true, Christopher?” she asked me. “Do you think they really fell in love at first sight? Is that possible?”

  I wanted to believe it. I wanted to believe that there was something more between a male and a female than mere physical attraction. I told her that whenever I was physically attracted to a girl in school and thought that maybe, maybe, it could be love, I was disappointed once I talked to the girl, who nearly always was too silly or stupid for me.

  “Am I too stupid for someone to love?” she asked.

  “Absolutely not,” I replied, and told her how talented I thought she was. Her problem was that she had too many talents and would have trouble settling on one. She drew closer to me. I put my arm around her, and she rested her head against my shoulder.

  The night, the stars, and our sense of freedom relaxed us both like we hadn’t been for more than two years. Before we had been brought here, I wouldn’t have dreamed of being as open and honest with her as I was now. It was nearly impossible for me to think of her as a little girl anymore, and I felt sure she could never think of me as just her older brother. It was too late for us to go back to that sort of innocence. I’d be the first to admit how confused I now was about my feelings. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like the insecurity. It made me angry.

  Cathy sensed it. “Where do you think our mother is?” she asked. It had been so long since she had visited us.

  I looked for as many reasons as I could to explain her neglecting us. Maybe she was sick. Maybe she had gone on a business trip. Cathy shot down every rationalization I presented. That only fired up my own frustration and anger.

  When she asked me if I loved and trusted our mother as much as I used to, I snapped back at her, not because she was wrong to wonder but because I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t. She quickly changed the subject to what it was like to date, and her questions suggested that neither of us would know what to do because we had been out of socializing so long.

  God, she was so right, I thought, and I exploded, revealing how angry I was at Momma. I raged about being shut away from life and feeling more like a first-grader when it came to my emotions now. I know my outburst frightened Cathy. Maybe because we were out in the open, I didn’t contain myself. I didn’t care who heard me. She hadn’t seen me this way for a long time, maybe never. She wanted to leave immediately.

  “We have to get back to the twins,” she said.

  On the way back, she suggested that we climb down with the twins, maybe make a sling to hold them so we could bring them down and escape. We had found a way. I knew she was saying all this because of how I had behaved. She was probably worried that I was losing it fast now and that if we stayed much longer, who knew what would happen? I couldn’t blame her for thinking that.

  My mind reeled with the possibility of making an escape, but I didn’t want to give Cathy any false hope. After all, where would we go? How would we go anywhere? We would need money. How far could we get, considering we would be two teenagers traveling with small children? Everyone would look at us and wonder. Eventually, we were bound to attract some policeman, and then what? If we told him who we were, we might be returned to Foxworth Hall, but this time, we would be returned only to be thrown out with Momma. We would be children with a single parent who had nothing. What then? All Momma would do would be complain how we had destroyed our chances, our opportunities. She’d hate us, at least Cathy and me.

  No, I thought, better to ignore her for now, even though the pleasure of being free was so great I couldn’t calm myself down enough to not think about it.

  I let Cathy start up first. About three-quarters of the way, she lost her footing on the bottom knot and screamed in panic. I quietly, calmly told her how to regain her control, and she was able to continue up. By the time I joined her, we were both exhausted, but all Cathy could think of was what would have happened to the twins if she had fallen from that sheet ladder.

  “I can’t believe I’m happy to be back here,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  Instead, I thought, look what had happened to us if we could even for a moment be happy we were here.

  Kane paused and stared at me for a moment before he swept off his wig, as if he had to do that before he could talk to me now as Kane Hill.

  “You ever go skinny-dipping?”

  “No.”

  “My sister did at our house. She had a party for a half dozen of her friends in early June of her senior year. Our parents were away for the weekend. I had gone to an early movie, got bored, and came home early. I heard the laughter out at the pool and made my way there, sort of sneaking up on them. I remained in the darkness and watched.”

  “So your sister didn’t know you were there?”

  “No. I remember being more angry than amused.”

  “Angry? Why?”

  “I resented my sister being nude in front of those boys. Finally, I turned around, disgusted, and went back into the house.”

  “Did you tell her how you felt about it later?”

  “No.”

  “So she never knew you were there?”

  “No. The thing is, I’ve been at skinny-dipping parties but didn’t react like I did spying on hers.”

  “Probably just . . . natural. You were embarrassed for her.”

  “No, for myself,” he said. “What just happened between Christopher and Cathy has made me think of something.”

  I smiled to myself. It hadn’t just happened to them, as he had put it, but also to us. Reading the diary this way, it was as if we were doing what he had done at his sister’s pool party, staying in the shadows and observing something happening right before us. “What?”

  “Say you never met your sister your whole life. Say you didn’t even know you had a sister, and you met this girl and dated her and went skinny-dipping and did it all. Would it be sinful?”

  “I don’t know. It might be sinful but not your fault, if that makes any sense,” I said.

  “But the point is that every desi
re the brother had as a boy and every desire the sister had as a girl would still be there. No wall would go up between them miraculously. Nothing would click in their heads and stop their sexual activity.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Whatever thoughts Christopher has and whatever he does with his sister are not his fault, even though the situation isn’t the same. I mean, he knows she’s his sister, but it’s as if they’re on a desert island or something, just when things are happening to them, to their bodies.”

  “I’m not blaming them for anything, Kane,” I said. He was acting as if he thought condemnation was on the tip of my tongue. “It’s too soon to be judgmental.”

  “Right,” he said, nodding.

  Look how important it is for him to defend Christopher, I thought. I wanted to smile, but something kept me from introducing even an iota of amusement into it.

  “If there’s anyone to blame for anything, it’s Corrine and, despite her high-and-mighty moral attitude, Grandmother Olivia. Right?”

  “You don’t have to convince me, Kane,” I said.

  “Yeah, well . . . yeah,” he replied, and put his wig on.

  Momma had been gone more than two months now. Every time the door opened, all of us would stop whatever we were doing and shift our eyes quickly to see if it was finally Momma, but it was always our grandmother, silent, looking like she was tiptoeing through a field of snakes, eager to get in and get out. Neither Cathy nor I had the courage to ask her where our mother was. Besides a tirade of threats and horrible predictions for us, she might add the one thing I think both of us feared to hear: “Your mother has run off. She realized what evil she brought into the world.”

  Cathy would look away quickly, and when she looked to me, I would turn away and focus on something I was doing, as if our disappointment didn’t matter, but oh, how it did. The little ball of anger rolling around inside me night and day was like a rock gathering moss. Sometimes I would wake in the middle of the night, the rage inside me so hot and strong my teeth were clenched and my jaw ached.

  Cathy talked endlessly about escaping. Our swimming adventure had crystallized the possibilities for her. I wouldn’t deny that I still savored every second of that time at the lake, that wonderful sense of freedom we had walking hand in hand through the darkness, seeing the stars, and feeling the cool night breeze. It was as if we had come back to life again.

  Every afternoon, I would go to the window, sometimes twice a day, to see the train pass by, the same train that had brought us here years ago. Sometimes it sounded mournful, like a train carrying a famous dead person, like Lincoln’s train, and sometimes it was more like it was calling me directly, telling me it was there. It would be there for us to take us away from all this. It bounced back and forth from being a train that reminded me of our situation, growing more horrid every day, every week, to being the sound of hope, the call to a new future, a new life, and a place where we would all grow naturally again.

  Cathy could sense this mix of feelings inside me. The longer Momma was away, the more stridently she pleaded for our escape. “You’re always watching for that train,” she said. “You know you want to be on it, want all of us to be on it.”

  Her constant prodding and nagging were wearing down what resistance I had left in me. Why would we wait for a mother who had neglected us so long? Why would we wait for an old man to die if it hadn’t happened in all this time? How would we know if he had without Momma being here? Would our grandmother come rushing up, happy to unlock the door and bring us into the bosom of her home? Would she say, “Now you can be my grandchildren, and you can forget all the terrible things I had to do to you”?

  Hardly, I thought. I had no good answers for her. Maybe it was cruel to do it, but I fanned her dreams, her hope.

  “Where would you go if we did get out of here?” I asked.

  She talked about going farther south, being on beaches, soaking up the sunshine like someone who had been dying of thirst and crossing a desert. I let myself daydream aloud, too, and talked about things I’d like to be doing out there, the fun I’d like to be having. Those were weak moments for me. Cathy pounced on them. “Why are we staying? You hate it as much as I do.”

  Of course I did. I hated every moment, actually, but I reminded her how important money was in this world and how the old man had to die soon. It was just logical. He was sick. We saw him in the wheelchair. He couldn’t live much longer, he just couldn’t, and then we’d have the money. I reminded her how important it was for me to become a doctor and how expensive that education would be. “Without money, I’ll never be anything. What job could I do to keep us alive out there? Who’d even give me a job? Whatever I could manage wouldn’t pay enough to keep the four of us alive.”

  Of course, Cathy promised to take any job to help. We were going back and forth about it. The train was coming again. And then our grandmother appeared and told me to get away from the window. I tried to defy her. When she called me “boy,” I told her to call me by my name.

  “Call me Christopher, or don’t call me at all.”

  I thought she would rant and deliver another punishment, maybe starve us again for a week, but she smiled coldly at me instead and went into what I could only call her rationalization for how she was treating us, how she had treated our mother. She hated my name because of what she said our father had done to her and her husband. She claimed she was the one who got her husband to take in his half brother when he had no one, and how did he repay them? He ran off with our mother to get married. He had the nerve to come back, as if they could ignore that he had married his own niece. When our grandfather threw them out, he had his first heart attack, so his terrible health was their fault, my mother’s fault. She did this to her own father. She was so passionate about the story she seemed to lose her breath.

  Both Cathy and I were shocked at the outburst. I thought, okay, they did that to you, but why take it out on us? I told her we weren’t to blame.

  Then she went into how sinful we were in this small room.

  I challenged her and blamed anything that had happened or would happen on her, on her locking us away. How could she think of herself as good and pious if she would starve little children? I didn’t know where the strength for my rant came from, but it came, and I let it all out with as much venom as she directed at us.

  Cathy kept pleading with me to stop, but it was too late. Our grandmother ran out. I thought, okay, she’d find a way to punish us, but maybe it was worth it.

  To my surprise, she came back instantly, with a green willow switch in her hand. She had it so fast I knew she always kept one nearby. She ordered me to strip down and said that if I didn’t, she would starve us again, starve the twins. I had to submit to her whipping me in the bathroom.

  Afterward, because Cathy was screaming and crying, she did the same to her, only she went wild, breaking the switch on Cathy’s naked body. I could hear Cathy’s defiance, which I knew would only drive the old lady to be crueler. She pounded her so hard with a hairbrush that she finally knocked her unconscious.

  She left her there on the floor and came out, her bosom lifting and falling, her face still red with rage. I was in great pain, but I didn’t cry.

  “God sees everything you do,” she said. She had said that before.

  It was on the tip of my tongue to reply, “Then you will surely go to hell,” but I said nothing. I looked down. I was terrified now for the twins. Would she turn on their small bodies? She did look at them, clinging to each other.

  “The devil’s spawn,” she muttered, and walked out.

  I got the twins to go up to the attic to play so they wouldn’t see how bad Cathy was. Then I carried her out of the bathroom and began to treat her wounds. When she woke up, I told her I was worried she might have a concussion. She sobbed, and we held each other. We were both still naked, and I couldn’t help it. I had to kiss her. The feel of her body against mine seemed, for the moment, to make me forget the pain. We had ne
ver held each other naked. I could see it was affecting her as much as it was me.

  She felt my erection and whispered, “Stop, Christopher. This is what she thinks we do, making love.”

  “Making love involves more, Cathy,” I said. I smiled at her, and I described it in as much detail as I could. Her expression went from fascination to fear and then to guilt for even imagining it.

  “We can’t. We won’t. We never will, right?” she asked.

  I didn’t say anything. I wanted to say no, but at the same time, I didn’t trust fate or my own emotions anymore. So much had happened to us and between us over the years that we were confined, so much of what I would never, even in my wildest dreams, have imagined. All brothers and sisters have a deep love for each other, even if they’re close in age and go through sibling rivalry. I had read so much about this, even before we left our home. As all my teachers knew, I read and understood on a level at least three grade levels above my age.

  But that love had a different nature to it. It came from being part of something greater than yourself, your family. An attack on your sister or brother was an attack on your family. Protecting and cherishing your sister or brother was a way to protect and cherish your family, especially your parents. When another sort of feeling even suggested itself, you instantly retreated from it, were ashamed of it, and forced yourself to bury it. You didn’t nourish it.

  Could I say I wasn’t doing that now?

  I continued to attend to her wounds and then had her attend to mine. Neither of us mentioned again how close we were to doing exactly what our grandmother believed we had been doing.

  Later, I kissed her good night after we had put the twins to sleep—kissed her, I hoped, the way my father would have kissed her good night. She held my hand for a moment, as if she wanted another kiss or to kiss me back, and then she let go and turned away.

  But it was too late, I thought. We had touched each other in ways I was sure we had both begun to imagine we might.

  And now we had to live with whatever dreams might come of it.