Secrets of Foxworth Read online

  “I can just squeeze you in,” I said, and he laughed again.

  “Lana says you’ve been hanging around at Foxworth.”

  “Hardly hanging around. I went with my father when he went to do an evaluation for the bank.”

  “Well, how was it?”

  “How was what?”

  “Being there.”

  “I took a nice walk to the lake on the property and then just watched my father and Todd Winston go through their inspection of the foundation. It’s the original one. Someone might buy the property and build on it again.”

  “My father’s always toyed with that idea, but my mother gets the shakes just talking about it.”

  “There’s nothing to get the shakes about. It’s just an overgrown tract of land with rubble.”

  “Safe place for lovers to park at night, maybe, huh?” he asked. I was sure that his mind was full of imaginary scenarios.

  “I gotta go, Kane. I’ll write Friday in big block letters on my calendar.”

  “See you at school.”

  “Okay,” I said, and hung up.

  There was a lot about Kane that I liked. He was one of the better-looking boys in our school, but I think what I liked most about him was his casual, relaxed manner. I rarely saw him hyper or upset. He was famous for his James Dean shrug. About two years ago, there was a James Dean revival in one of the movie theaters, and many of the boys were trying to imitate him, but Kane really did have that offbeat smile and relaxed way about him. When he smiled at me now, especially since the last time we had spent time together at the mall and he took me home, it was as if he and I were sharing some big secret. I knew most of my girlfriends, especially Lana and Suzette, were more than a little jealous and were dying to know what had happened between us. I didn’t say anything, because I knew they would be disappointed. Not enough had happened to please them.

  It wouldn’t be hard to break new sexual ground with Kane. He kept his light brown hair midway between the top and the base of his neck. Strands were always falling over his forehead, threatening to block the vision of his soft hazel eyes. Sometimes I thought his self-confidence had just a little more arrogance than I appreciated, but part of that was also just what everyone assumed the son of one of the wealthiest men in Charlottesville would possess, although his older sister, Darlena, was not stuck-up by any means. Kane was an above-average student, athletic, and, as Lana would mutter sometimes, “drop-dead gorgeous.” She said it was her mother’s favorite expression for every stud she saw in real life and on television.

  No matter what, though, I didn’t want to be taken for granted by any boy. Actually, I thought that what attracted Kane to me most was my fairly obvious indifference. It challenged him to work harder at winning me over, and for now, that was the most interesting thing about our new relationship.

  I did everything I told Kane I was going to do. Dad and I went shopping at the supermarket. Every time we did, he never failed to tell me how much he had depended on my mother to do the week’s grocery shopping.

  “You know, I can do it all by myself now, Dad,” I told him. “I drive.”

  “That’s all right. I don’t have that much opportunity to spend time with you, Kristin.”

  “This isn’t spending time with me, Dad. It’s spending time with chopped meat and potatoes,” I told him, and he laughed.

  I think he wanted to shop with me because it kept my mother’s memory vivid for him. More and more these days, he was telling me how much I resembled her. He said that any father wants his daughter to look more like her mother than like him. “After all, she’s the one he fell in love with, right?”

  Thinking about this reminded me about Christopher’s sister Cathy, who he said wanted more than anything to look like her mother. It was clear from what I had read so far that his mother really must have been very beautiful and also very aware of that. From the way he was describing her, she was obsessed with it. The implication was that she spent too much time on her makeup and hair and clothes, pushing her responsibilities onto both him and Cathy. Maybe Cathy loved her father more, but I sensed that she loved the idea of becoming as beautiful as her mother most. I wasn’t sure yet how Christopher felt about that. Did he want her to be as beautiful as their mother? Did he think she really could be?

  I noticed that whenever any of my friends complimented another on how handsome or beautiful their older brothers or sisters were, they seemed surprised. Was there something about being a brother or sister that made you feel weird or guilty if you were a girl and thought your older brother was handsome or if you were a boy and thought your older sister was beautiful? No one would deny that his or her mother was pretty.

  My mother was very attractive but in a more natural sort of way. We had the same hair and eyes, but I thought she had fuller lips and higher cheekbones whenever I compared myself to her now. I would hold her picture up beside me and look at myself in the mirror. Was that something Cathy Dollanganger would do? My mother didn’t use very much makeup, as I recall. According to Dad, she didn’t go to the beauty salon as often as most of her friends.

  “But she could gussy up,” he told me, “whenever we had a fancy affair to attend.” He said that expression was something he had picked up from his grandmother, “gussy up.”

  “All I have to do is use that once, and I’ll be marked for life in my school,” I told him.

  “It says a lot more than cool, girl,” he replied, and we both laughed.

  More than once, I’d wished I had been born in an earlier time. Maybe Dad was exaggerating or saw things as having been better when he was younger because he wanted to think of them that way. One of my English teachers, Mr. Stiegman, once told us that nostalgia was nothing more than dissatisfaction with the present. Anything looked better than now, even harder times. It was a fantasy that people accept. Not according to my father, however. Besides harping on loyalty and complaining that youth was wasted on the young, he seemed genuinely happy with the twists and turns he had made in his life.

  It took a few hours to shop and then get everything put away. While Dad planned our dinner and then watched a basketball game, I went up to my room to do my homework. No matter what I was working on, my eyes would drift toward Christopher’s diary. It felt as if it was really calling to me: Read me. I need you to read me.

  But I resisted. I needed to concentrate on my work. Kane was right. I was neck-and-neck with another student in our class to be valedictorian, and I so wanted that to please my father and in my heart to please my mother, too. Ironically, that thought gave me pause again and drew me to look at the diary.

  I had felt Christopher’s pride in his accomplishments and how they pleased his parents. He wanted to be a doctor almost more for their sake than his own, but Cathy struck me as being far more self-centered. Was that because she was so young? On the other hand, young children are always looking for their parents’ approval. That was why she was so afraid when the twins were announced. She thought she might lose that approval or have it diluted. After the twins were born, she was, according to Christopher, becoming more and more of a help to her mother and to her father before his death. Maybe she wanted the twins to love her more than they loved their mother. Maybe that was her sweet revenge.

  What a complicated family they had been, or were all families really just as complicated? Dad and I basically only had each other. We were a simple family now. After reading only part of Christopher’s diary, I made a mental note to pay more attention to my friends and their relationships with their parents and siblings to see if there were any sorts of resemblances to the Dollangangers.

  In an eerie sort of way, Christopher’s diary was gradually taking over my everyday thoughts. Was there something magical about this book, something supernatural just like Foxworth itself in people’s eyes? For a long moment, I wondered if it would actually change me in some dramatic way. I had the strong impression that my father suspected that or feared it. Maybe, just maybe, he already knew what I
was about to discover when I continued reading the diary, and that was why he didn’t want me to do it.

  If my mother were alive, would she let me read it? One thing my father could have said that might have stopped me would be “Your mother wouldn’t want you to read that,” but he didn’t say it. He would never use my mother or the memory of her to get me to do something.

  It took all my self-control to finish my schoolwork and go to sleep without turning another page of Christopher’s diary, but it was the first thing on my mind in the morning, and I knew that when I arrived at school, I was behaving differently from the get-go. First, I didn’t want to have any homework to do after school, so instead of wasting my time in study hall, at lunch, and between periods, I attacked every assignment and ignored my friends, who were full of gossip from the weekend. Second, I wanted the school day to end as quickly as possible, and when Kane or Lana or any of the girls invited me to do something after school, I turned them all down, claiming I had some important household chores. Most shrugged, some smirked, but only Kane gave me a knowing look and a small smile.

  “I hope there’s not another man involved,” he whispered after the last class of the day ended and we all started out of the room.

  I just smiled back at him. You see, there really was another man with whom I was involved—Christopher Dollanganger—but I wasn’t about to mention it or even hint at it. I just couldn’t outright deny Kane’s half-facetious accusation, and because of that, his curiosity brightened. I even thought he might follow me home to be sure that was where I was going. I wondered how he would react if he knew the truth, relieved that it was only someone in a diary or spooked that I would be so drawn to it?

  I couldn’t blame him for either reaction.

  I could tell that my father had been home, which was unusual on a workday. My first thought was that he might have decided to get the diary away from me. He might have been thinking about it all day. Panicked, I hurried up to my room. It was there where I had left it, but it looked like it had been picked up and placed differently. Had he thought of doing that but changed his mind out of fear of how I would react? Of course, there were parents who forbade their children to read something or view something. They believed that they were doing it to protect their children, but it had been some time now since my father had treated me like a young, impressionable girl.

  Oh, he issued standard warnings about driving carefully, not staying out too late, avoiding bad influences, but he did it almost mechanically, as if it was something he had to do but didn’t believe was as necessary with me as it would be for other girls my age. He had confidence in me that came from our mutual pain, the loss of my mother. We trusted each other in ways I could see my friends’ parents didn’t trust them. Because of how his father’s death had only sped up his already quickened maturity, it occurred to me that Christopher’s mother might have had the same sort of attitude toward him that my father had toward me.

  Was I deliberately looking for these resemblances between us, or were they simply there and too obvious to deny?

  I held the diary reverently in my hands. It was as if it could give me psychic powers. Now I felt sure of what had occurred. Sometime today, at some moment, maybe because of something someone said or something Dad remembered, he had come home to dispose of this book. When it came to doing it, he retreated, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t come for it again. I made up my mind to hide it well from now on. I didn’t like keeping secrets from my father, not now, not ever, but this had become too important to me. I would see it through to the end. It was a promise I had made to Christopher and a promise I would keep.

  I sat on my bed and opened the diary.

  What happened to us next, I knew was coming. Oh, it was obvious that Cathy would go into a deep depression. She didn’t care about anything, not her schoolwork, how she dressed and looked, or even how the twins were getting along. Whenever she was home, she was in a sulk, sleeping more than ever, and practically bursting out in hysterical tears every time Daddy’s name was brought up or she saw something of his.

  Momma depended mostly on me to get her to snap out of it. She tried to comfort her occasionally, telling her the expected things like we should be grateful for the years we had Daddy. Nothing comforted Cathy. I wasn’t all that much help, either. I was hurting just as deeply as she was, and I was full of the same rage that this had happened. In all my dreams, my father was out there in the audience looking up proudly while I accepted my diplomas from high school and from college. Now those dreams had evaporated or burst like bubbles.

  But something else was going on, something I anticipated simply by looking at the growing pile of bills on Momma’s desk. She had no job. Our neighbors had been helping, bringing us food from time to time, but something deeper and darker was surrounding our devastated family. I was afraid even to dream of college and medical school. The twins were crying and complaining more, and Cathy’s rage against the injustice of our father’s unexpected death and the God who had taken him from us boiled over nightly. Momma looked like she was sinking in the quicksand of one tragic thing after another.

  In the beginning, whenever I tried to have a serious conversation about our situation, she would start to tear up and wave me off. I felt like I was making everything more painful by asking realistic questions. There was nothing to do but wait until she was ready.

  The time came when she finally was.

  One night, while the twins were occupied with themselves, she pulled Cathy and me aside and told us how dire things were.

  Incredibly, Daddy had not kept up a life insurance policy. There would be no money coming from that sort of thing. All of the possessions we had that were bought on time would be reclaimed. We couldn’t keep up the payments. With every sentence she uttered, it felt as if the roof was falling lower and lower and would soon bury us.

  I wondered why she was so busy every night writing letters. Surely, she was asking someone in the family somewhere for help, or maybe she was applying for a job. Even I was shocked by her next revelation.

  “I have been writing to my mother,” she said, “asking her to help us.”

  Neither Cathy nor I could speak for a moment. All my life, I had wondered about our grandparents, our family. Neither Daddy nor Momma wanted to talk about them. They never mentioned them and always avoided answering questions, so I stopped asking.

  “She has agreed to our living in their house in Charlottesville, Virginia,” Momma said. Her face was suddenly bright with the happiness and hope we hadn’t seen since Daddy’s death. “We’re not just going to live with two elderly people who need us to care for them or anything. My parents are rich, very rich, as rich as some kings and queens.”

  She went on to describe the house, and then she almost casually dropped the news that froze me in my shoes, news that Cathy couldn’t quite comprehend.

  We were going to leave that night on a train.

  The reality of what she was saying took hold as she continued to describe how she had grown up in a big house with servants and how our lives would be wonderful again. Now Cathy began to cry and complain about leaving her friends.

  “What friends? You’ve been ignoring them for weeks anyway,” I told her. She looked at me as if I was betraying her for not complaining about this as hard as she was, but the cold truth was staring us in the face. We had no income; we were in debt. We could even be evicted!

  Cathy grew coldly quiet again, until Momma described how little we could take with us. She wanted us to take no more than two suitcases for all four of us. Cathy began to wail about all the toys and dolls she would be leaving behind. Momma promised she would have far more when we were living with her parents.

  But we hadn’t reached the worst fact of all yet. I could see it in Momma’s face. She had one more thing to tell us. She tried to make it seem less frightening and astounding than it was by beginning with “There is, however, one small thing.”

  Small thing? It was like telling
passengers on the Titanic that there were no more life jackets.

  Momma had been written out of her father’s will. The reality was that whether we were here or there, we were just as poor.

  “Did Daddy know this, Momma?” I asked her. I was thinking about all the times he had sat with me and described the great things we were going to do and have, the trips, the expensive clothes, the college educations, all of it. Was he anticipating inheritance?

  “Yes,” she said. “He knew I was disinherited, but he kidded me about it and said I had ‘fallen from grace.’ How foolish I was. I laughed, too, back then. I never dreamed we’d be . . . in this situation.”

  How foolish she was? What about Daddy? What were all those plans? Just the ramblings of a dreamer? While he was dreaming, our bills were accumulating. Why didn’t he think about all possibilities, the most obvious being that something could happen to him and we would be in desperate trouble?

  It was as if my rose-colored glasses were being shattered. Did both my parents live in fantasies? Daddy had permitted Momma to buy all these things. Even if they were on payment plans, they still had to be paid for, and there was all that accumulating interest. Where was the father I had seen, the one who was moving up the ladder and would be a highly paid executive? And now this, trapped into going to live with grandparents who didn’t care enough about their own daughter to keep up with what was happening in her life. They never called, they never wrote, and they certainly had never visited us or invited us to visit them in all these years. She wasn’t just disinherited; she was disowned. She no longer existed in their eyes. I didn’t know why. At the moment, that didn’t matter. We were leaving, and we would have to live with them.

  “So why are we going there, Momma?” I asked. “They don’t sound like they really want us, especially if your own father cut you out of his will.”

  “I am confident,” she said, pulling her shoulders up with pride, “that I can win back his love and have him put me back in his will. I once told you, I think, that I lost my two brothers, who died in accidents, so I’m the only one left. He’s too proud to let his money not follow his blood. You’ll see. We’ll be fine. We’ll be more than fine. We’ll be very rich, too, someday soon. He’s not a well man. He’s been in and out of hospitals and now has a full-time nurse.”