Echoes of Dollanganger (26 page)

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“I was wondering if you thought we were growing normally. I don't mean being with others our age and all that. I mean . . . our bodies.”

“I think we are,” I said. “Despite everything.
All the cells in our bodies have these built-in messages, orders, and things happen automatically.”

“Do you think my breasts should be bigger by now?”

“No, they're fine,” I said quickly. I didn't want to reveal how often I had gazed upon them.

“There was this girl in the seventh grade I remember, Linda Swanson, who was bigger than Momma.”

“That happens sometimes. It's called precocious puberty,” I told her. I had read about it recently because I had wondered about us both either maturing too quickly or not quickly enough.

I could see she had many more questions to ask, probably mostly about herself, but she was too shy and too embarrassed.

“Nothing you're going through is unnatural,” I said firmly. “I've read a great deal about it.”

She nodded, looking a little relieved, but when her gaze went to the twins, her chin began to tremble. “I've been measuring them, and I want you to do it, too, Christopher. You and I have grown, as you say, normally, but they're too small. Their heads look too big.”

This wasn't something I had not thought about myself. I was always hesitant about bringing up negative or sad things to her. Like a firecracker, she would go off ranting and raving about Momma and our grandmother, and I would have trouble
calming her down. It was only when I told her she was frightening the twins that she eased up.

I nodded. “We'll study them,” I promised.

We began to measure their growth daily. Cathy was right. They looked stunted and always too fragile. I thought what they needed was sunshine. We tried to get them out and on the roof when it was safe, but they fought us. Strangely, they had become terrified of leaving their confined world. Their resistance and their screams forced us to give up. We could attract attention, and who knows what our grandmother would do to us then?

Cathy was very upset about it. She cried continually. They were going to become dwarfs. They'd soon die. They'd be freaks. On and on, she predicted one horror after another for our little brother and sister. We couldn't force them to eat more than they would, and lately, they were reluctant to do anything physical. In small ways, they were dying. Cathy was right, I thought. I was growing desperate about it, and then finally, one day, the door opened. We all looked up, and there was Momma.

I should say she burst in, more bubbly and happier than we had seen her since we had come here. Of course, she went on and on about how happy she was to see us and how often she had thought about us. I stood there listening, and I'm sure I looked like someone who was listening to a woman who had gone mad. Finally, I was able to
speak, and I told her in a calm voice how wrong she had been to leave us for so long, no matter what her reasons could possibly be.

The smile on her face, which I would have to admit looked more false and empty than any smile she had ever given us, disappeared instantly. Her eyes narrowed, and that little ripple of anger I had seen too often since we were brought here revealed itself in her tightened lips. I always believed I could read her better than anyone, even our father, maybe especially our father.

“You sound different,” she said cautiously. “Did anything go seriously wrong?” Perhaps the casual way she asked that question shocked me the most.

“Did anything go wrong!”

I couldn't help myself. A dam had broken. Cathy's rants had nothing on the one I delivered, crying out about all that had happened to us since she was last here, how we had grown and matured but how the twins had not. Before she could flood us with presents and promises, I made it clear to her that nothing she could give us now but our freedom would matter. We had outgrown this place, outgrown our childish bodies. We wanted to be our own ages, doing things people our own ages did. Already, I told her, she had taken away what we should have had just like any other young person, and we could never get it back.

I had never spoken to her as sharply and as
truthfully as this. All her false walls crumbled. The shock on her face was stunning. Even Cathy, who was apt never to give her any credibility, looked genuinely surprised and impressed. Could we give her the benefit of the doubt, believe this new face? She looked like she would die on the spot if I no longer loved her.

I didn't want to do it, but I felt myself retreat a little. I told her that of course, I loved her. I made it clear that it wasn't easy to love her now. I reviewed everything she had told us, especially how a few days had turned out to be weeks and then months and now years, all this time waiting for an old man to die, an old man who was supposed to have been so sick he wouldn't last hours, let alone years. We had endured all this to inherit a fortune with her.

I gave her an ultimatum. Turn over the key to the room, and let us go far away. She could send us whatever money she wanted, if she wanted. If she didn't and she wanted us out of her life so she could inherit her father's fortune, so be it. We simply had to be set free. She had no other choice. We would stand for nothing less. I glanced at Cathy. She looked shocked at my determination, but I wasn't going to play the fool any longer. I had to make our mother understand that we had come to the end of our hope and our tolerance.

She stared at me for a few moments silently and then gave Cathy a most hateful look. Did she
think my younger sister had turned me against her and that was it, the only reason I had spoken to her this way?

Cathy leaped up and joined in now, pointing out the condition of the twins and screaming at her for permitting it all to happen. I didn't interrupt her. Everything she was saying was painfully true. I looked to Momma, hoping she would see it all and break down with regret and apologies, but our attack on her seemed to only strengthen her resolve and self-pity. I was so disappointed.

This was all my fault, I thought. I had given in to Momma too easily, defended her too often, and believed in her too much. Cathy and the twins should hate me just as much as I hated myself at this moment.

In a slow, mean tone of voice, Momma defended herself, giving herself credit for keeping us alive and not in the streets begging. She repeated all the efforts and work she had put into this plan and then told us her father was so sick now that he couldn't even be placed in a wheelchair. We were so close. He would die any day, and she would immediately come to us and free us to join her in the fortune she was to inherit. Every dream and plan we had would come true.

Neither Cathy nor I reacted. How often had we heard this? And yet I couldn't help but wonder if this time, it might be true. I held back
my comments, and I didn't apologize. And then, suddenly, she went into a tantrum that rivaled any Cathy had performed. In fact, she looked just like Cathy, pounding the pillows on the bed and crying about how heartless and ungrateful we were. She wailed and looked like she would tear out her hair.

I couldn't help it. She was the only one left who would love us. Maybe she had permitted all the terrible things to happen to us, but she was dependent on her mother, too. She had been just as lost as we were. I looked at Cathy. She was feeling terrible for her. Together we approached her, and both of us pleaded for her to forgive us for our outbursts. The twins looked stunned and lost in the midst of all this. I felt terrible for them.

Momma calmed down, but she didn't look forgiving. She then described the gifts she had gotten for us, how she had thought of each of us and what we would appreciate the most. For me, it was a new set of encyclopedias ordered for my upcoming birthday, bound in leather and gold and with my name and the date engraved on them. I looked at Cathy and realized she was back to being very angry. Momma had talked about my gift, how much she would spend on me, but did not say anything to Cathy or the twins about theirs.

Momma looked at Cathy, and something she saw in her face brought back her rage. She went to
the door quickly and turned on us, berating us for how we had treated her. Then she said a shocking thing: Until we really thought about how we had hurt her, she would not return. She left. I was stunned.

How would she know if we were sorry, if she planned never to return until we were? It was illogical.

Cathy looked at me and then at the twins, who came rushing up to her, embracing her. She glared.

“She never even kissed them,” she said.

Kane lowered the diary.

“She sure knows how to play them,” Kane said. “I'm disappointed in Christopher, falling for that act and asking her to forgive them. See? You can be pretty smart, book-smart, but it doesn't do you any good if you're an emotional cripple.” He stood up.

“I wouldn't go that far, Kane. You once said it. He wants to believe her so much, loves her so much, that he lies to himself.”

He stood by the window with his back to me. “Your parents ever lie to you?” he asked, still not turning around. Then, after a second or so, he did. “I don't mean little white lies to get you to do things when you were younger or telling you there's a Santa Claus or something. I mean a real lie, a serious lie.”

“No. I can't even imagine it happening,” I said.

“Mine did. Big-time.” He looked down and then walked back to his chair. I thought he wasn't going to
say any more about it, but he looked at me and said, “I've never told anyone.”

“You don't have to tell me,” I said. I was caught between my curiosity and my desire not to hear anything unpleasant to add to what we were reading together. I felt overwhelmed with sadness and anger as it was.

“I never knew anyone I wanted to tell it to,” he said. He glanced at the diary. “Maybe when you open up someone else's secrets, your own pour out whether you like it or not.”

“Kane . . .”

“No, it's all right. It's supposed to be good to get things out, things that have been eating away at you for a long time, right? Don't all psychologists tell people that? Revelation therapy.”

I stared at him, waiting. Seeing how determined he was, I didn't want to stop him and make him feel any worse about whatever it was he was going to tell me.

“How come your parents never had another child? I mean, you were about eight when your mother died. Her death didn't have anything to do with her being pregnant or anything, did it?”

“No. My mother had a bad miscarriage when I was four, and the result made it difficult, if not impossible, for her to have another child.”

“But they wanted one, right?”

“Yes, very much. My father once told me they were toying with adopting.”

He nodded, looked away and then back at me.
“After my parents had my sister, my mother didn't want any more children.”

“Oh, so you were an accident?” I asked. A few of our classmates had revealed that they had been, but that didn't seem to have made much of a difference in their lives. I imagined no one liked to be thought of as an accident, but if the end result was being loved just as much as a planned child, what difference did it make in the end?

“I wish,” he said.

I shook my head. “I don't understand. You're not adopted, are you?”

“Hardly. I'm really more like my mother than I care to admit and even more like my father at times, even though he acts as if I had been left on his doorstep. No, for years, I knew nothing, of course. I was too young to understand, anyway. My parents always made it seem like everything that happened was as normal as it was for any couple. My mother became pregnant, and I was born, and lucky for them, I was a boy. My father wanted a boy to carry on the Hill empire.”

“So? Where's the lie?”

“The lie was that my mother wanted me. She was very upset at how long it took her to regain what she called only ninety percent of her beautiful figure after Darlena was born. Motherhood was an annoyance. Both Darlena and I had nannies up the wazoo. My parents battled for some time over having another child. Finally, my father bought me. That's the truth,
even though I was actually never told it by either of them. Darlena overheard a conversation, an argument between them.”

“Bought you?”

“He gave my mother five hundred thousand dollars for her own personal account if she agreed to get pregnant. So here I am, the five-hundred-thousand-dollar baby. Of course, considering inflation and all, I might not be worth that now.”

“I'm sorry,” was all I could think to say. What child would want to learn that his mother was bribed into having him? Once he learned that, what sort of relationship would he have with his mother? Every time she got angry at him, his mother's eyes would reveal how much she really didn't want to have a child.

And would the child ever do anything that made her regret her resistance, make her proud to have had that child? It was horrible enough being with friends who couldn't care less if you were there, but being with a mother who never really wanted you had to be very difficult, especially while you were growing up and you saw how loving other mothers were with their children.

Suddenly, I understood so much more about Kane. His indifference, the way he made so much in his life seem trivial, that shrug and offbeat smile, his otherwise cool casualness about all that happened to him and around him, which had made him so attractive to so many, seeing him as the calm rebel—it was all really his cry for help and attention. He never took himself
very seriously, because he believed there was nothing serious about him. If his mother wasn't so into herself, she wouldn't have taken the offer, and he would never have been born.

Afterward, he was merely an obligation. She solved ninety percent of that by hiring nannies and by permitting his sister or assigning to her so much responsibility for him when he was young. No wonder that closeness had developed.