Dollenganger 02 Petals On the Wind (14 page)

fully on Carrie, where, where, where? And behind my
eyes I saw her crouched in a dark corner in what
seemed a canyon rising tall on either side of her. "I want to look in the attic myself," I said to
Miss Dewhurst, and she quickly said they'd already
thoroughly searched the attic and called and called
Carrie's name. But they didn't know Carrie like I did.
They didn't know my small sister could go off to a
never- never land where speech didn't exist, not when
she was in shock.
Up the attic stairs all the teachers, Chris, Paul
and I climbed. It was so much like it used to be, a
huge, dim and dusty place. But not full of old furniture
covered with dusty gray sheets or remnants of the past.
Up here were only stacks upon stacks of heavy
wooden crates.
Carrie was here. I could sense it. I felt her
presence as if she reached out and touched me, though
when I looked around I saw nothing but the crates. "Carrie!" I called as loudly as possible. "It's me, Cathy. Don't hide and keep quiet because you're afraid! I've got your dolls and Dr. Paul is with me and so is Chris. We've come to take you home, and never again are we going to send you away to school!" I
nudged Paul, "Now you tell her that too."
He abandoned his soft voice and boomed,
"Carrie, if you can hear me, it's just as your sister says.
We want you to come home with us to stay. I'm sorry,
Carrie. I thought you'd like it here. Now I know you
couldn't possibly have been happy. Carrie, please
come out, we need you."
Then I thought I heard a soft whimper. I raced
in that direction with Chris close at my heels. I knew
about attics, how to search, how to find.
Abruptly I drew to a halt and Chris collided
with me. Just ahead, in the dim shadows created by the
towers of heavy wooden crates, still in her nightgown,
all torn, dirty and bloody, gagged and still blindfolded,
I spied Carrie. Her spill of blond hair gleamed in the
faint light. Beneath her a leg was twisted in a
grotesque way. "Oh, God," whispered Chris and Paul
at the same time, "her leg looks broken."
"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."