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! (98 page)

Time rolled backward and I saw Daddy, Daddy as I best
remembered him, dressed in white tennis clothes. I couldn’t speak when Chris took me in his arms and bowed his tanned face down into my hair. I heard the thud of his heart beating strong and regular. I sobbed, so near a deluge of tears, “It didn’t take you long to get here.” His face was in my hair and his voice was husky. “Cathy,” he asked, raising his head and looking me directly in the eyes, “what is wrong with Carrie?”

His question stunned me—for he should know! “Can’t you guess? It’s that damned arsenic, I know it is! What else could it be? She was fine until a week ago, then all of a sudden she’s sick.” I broke then and sobbed, “She wants to see you.” But before I led him to Carrie’s small room, I put in his hand a note I’d found in the diary she’d started the day she met Alex. “Chris, Carrie knew for a long time something was going wrong, but she kept it to herself. Read this and tell me what you think.” While he read, my eyes stayed glued to his face.

Dear Cathy and Chris,

Sometimes I think you two are my real parents, but then I remember my real momma and daddy, and she seems like a dream that never was, and I can’t picture Daddy unless I have his photograph in my hand—though I can picture Cory just like he was.

I’ve been hiding something. So if I don’t write this you are going to blame yourselves. For a long time I’ve felt I was going to die soon, and I don’t care anymore, like I used to. I can’t be a minister’s wife. I wouldn’t have lived this long if you two, and Jory, and Dr. Paul and Henny hadn’t loved me so much. Without all of you to hold me here, I would have gone on to Cory a long time ago. Everybody has somebody special to love, except me. Everybody has something special to do, except me. I’ve always known I’d never get married. I knew I was fooling myself about having children, for my
hips are too narrow, and I think too I’m too small to make a good wife. I’d never be anybody special, like you, Cathy, who can dance and have babies and everything else. I can’t be a doctor like Chris, so I’d just be nothing much, just somebody to get in the way and worry everybody because I’m unhappy.

So, right now, before you read on further, promise in your heart you won’t let the doctors do anything to make me live on. Just let me die, and don’t cry. Don’t feel sad and miss me after I’m buried. Nothing has been right, or felt right since Cory went away and left me. What I regret most is I won’t be around to watch Jory dance on stage like Julian used to. Now I have to confess the truth, I loved Julian, the same as I love Alex. Julian never thought I was too little, and he was the only one who made me feel a normal woman, for a short time. Though it was sinful, even when you say it was not, I know it was, Cathy.

Last week I started thinking about the grandmother and what she used to say to us all the time about being the Devil’s spawn. The more I thought about it, the more I knew she was right—I shouldn’t have been born! I am evil! When Cory died because of the arsenic on the sugared doughnuts the grandmother gave us, I should have died too! You didn’t think I knew, did you? You thought all the time I was sitting on the floor, in the corner, I couldn’t hear and didn’t take notice, but I was seeing and hearing, but I didn’t believe, back then. Now I believe.

Thank you, Cathy, for being like my mother and the best sister alive. And thank you, Chris, for being my substitute father and my second best brother, and thank you, Dr. Paul, for loving me even though I didn’t grow. Thank all of you for never being ashamed to be seen with
me, and tell Henny I love her. I think maybe God won’t want me either, until I grow taller, and then I think about Alex, who thinks God loves everybody, even when they aren’t so tall.

She’d signed that letter in a huge scrawl to make up for her small size. “Oh, dear God!” cried Chris. “Cathy, what does this mean?”

Only then could I open my purse and take from it something I’d found hidden away in the dark, far end of the closet in Carrie’s room. His blue eyes grew wide and the color seemed to fade as he read the name of the rat poison bottle, then saw the package of sugared doughnuts with only one left. One left. It had been bitten into just once. Tears began to course down his cheeks, then he was really sobbing on my shoulder. “Oh, God . . . she put that arsenic on the doughnuts, didn’t she, so she could die in the same way Cory did?”

I broke free from his clutching arms and backed a few feet away, feeling I was drained of all blood. “Chris! Read that letter over again! Didn’t you notice what she wrote, how she didn’t believe, and ‘Now I believe.’ Why wouldn’t she believe back then, and believe now? Something happened! Something happened to make her believe that our mother could poison us!”

He shook his head in a bewildered fashion, the tears still eking from his eyes. “But if she knew all along, how could anything more happen to convince her, when overhearing us talking and seeing Mickey die didn’t?”

“How can I tell you?” I cried out desperately. “But the doughnuts have been liberally coated with arsenic! Paul had them tested. Carrie ate those, knowing they would kill her. Can’t you see this is another murder our mother committed?”

“She isn’t dead yet!” Chris cried. “We’ll save her! We won’t let her die. We’ll talk to her, tell her she has to hold on!”

I ran to hold him, fearing it was too late and desperately
hoping it wasn’t. Even as we clung together, made parents again by our common suffering, Paul came from Carrie’s room. The solemn expression on his drawn face told me everything.

“Chris,” said Paul calmly, “how wonderful to see you again. I’m sorry the circumstances are so sad.”

“There’s hope, isn’t there?” cried Chris.

“There’s always hope. We are doing what we can. You look so tan and vibrant. Hurry in to see your sister and pass along some of that vitality to her. Catherine and I have said all we can think of to try to make her fight back and gain her will to live. But she has given up. Alex is in there on his knees by her bed, praying for her to live, but Carrie has her head turned toward the windows. I don’t think she realizes what is said or what is done. She’s gone off somewhere out of our reach.”

Paul and I trailed along behind Chris who ran to Carrie. She lay thin as a rail beneath a pile of heavy covers, when it was still summer. It just didn’t seem possible she could age so quickly! All the firm, ripe, rosy roundness of youth had fled, leaving her small face gaunt and hollow. Her eyes were deep pits to make her cheekbones very prominent. She even seemed to have lost some of her height. Chris cried out to see her so. He leaned to gather her in his arms, called her name repeatedly, stroked her long hair. To his horror hundreds of the golden strands clung to his fingers when he drew them away. “Good God in heaven—what’s being done for her?”

When he brushed the hair from his fingers I hurried forward to pluck them from his hands, and in a plastic box I carefully laid them out. The electric static of the box kept them in place. An idiot notion, but I couldn’t bear to see her beautiful hair swept up and thrown away. Her hair glinted on the pillows, on the bedspread, on the white lace of her bedjacket. As in a trance of nightmares unending I gathered up the long hairs and arranged them neatly while Alex prayed on and on. Even as he was introduced to Chris he paused only long enough to nod.

“Paul, answer me! What is being done to help Carrie?”

“Everything we know how to do,” answered Paul, his voice low and soft, the way people speak when death is near. “A team of good doctors are working around the clock to save her. But her red blood cells are being destroyed faster than we can replace them with transfusions.”

Three days and nights all of us lingered beside Carrie’s bedside while my neighbor took care of Jory. Each of us who loved her prayed that she’d live. I called Henny and told her to go to church and have all her family and church members pray for Carrie too. She tapped over the line her signal for “Yes, Yes!”

Flowers arrived daily to fill her room. I didn’t look to see who sent them. I sat beside Chris or Paul, or between both, and held to their hands and silently prayed. I looked with distaste upon Alex, whom I believed responsible for much of what was wrong with Carrie. Finally I could keep my question to myself no longer; I got up and stalked Alex and backed him into a corner. “Alex, why would Carrie want to die during the happiest days of her life? What did she tell you and what did you say?”

He turned his bewildered, unshaven, grief-stricken face to mine. “What did I say?” he asked, his eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep. I repeated my question with an even harder edge to my voice. He shook his head as if to clear it, looking hurt and sleepy as he ran long fingers through the tumble of his uncombed brown curls. “Cathy, God knows I’ve done everything I can to convince her I love her! But she won’t listen to me. She turns her face aside and says nothing. I asked her to marry me and she said yes. She threw her arms about my neck and said yes over and over again. Then she said, ‘Oh, Alex, I’m not nearly good enough for you.’ And I laughed and said she was perfect, just exactly what I wanted. Where did I go wrong, Cathy? What did I do to make her turn against me so now she won’t even look my way?”

Alex had the kind of sweet, pious face you expect to
see carved only on marble saints. Yet, as he stood there, so humbled, so racked by grief and torn by love turned against him, I reached out and soothed him as best I could, for he did love Carrie. In his own way he loved her. “Alex, I’m sorry if I sounded harsh; forgive me for that. But did Carrie confess anything to you?”

Again his eyes clouded. “I called and asked to see her a week ago and her voice sounded strange, as if something terrible had happened and she couldn’t speak about it. I drove as fast as I could to be with her, but she wouldn’t let me in. Cathy, I love her! She’s told me she’s too small and her head is too large, but in my eyes her proportions are just right. To me she was a dainty doll who didn’t know she was beautiful. And if God lets her die I will never in this life find my credence again!” That’s when he buried his face in his hands and began to cry.

It was the fourth night after Chris arrived. I dozed beside Carrie. The others were trying to catch a catnap before they too were ill and Alex was napping in the hall on a cot when I heard Carrie call my name. I ran to her bed and knelt beside it, then reached for her small hand under the covers. It was only a bony hand now, with skin so translucent her veins and arteries could be seen.

“Darling, I’ve been waiting for you to wake up,” I whispered in a hoarse voice. “Alex is in the hall and Chris and Paul are napping in the doctor’s quarters—shall I call them in?”

“No,” she whispered. “I want to talk only to you. I’m gonna die, Cathy.” She said it so calmly, as if it didn’t matter, as if she accepted it and was glad. “No!” I objected strongly. “You are
not
going to die! I’m not going to let you die! I love you as my own child. Many people love and need you, Carrie! Alex loves you so much and he wants to marry you, and he won’t be a minister now, Carrie; I’ve told him it makes you uncomfortable. He doesn’t really care what his career as long as you stay alive and love him. He doesn’t care if you are small
or if you have children. Let me call him in so he can tell you all . . .”

“Nooo,” she whispered thinly. “I’ve got something secret to tell you. Her voice was so faint it seemed to come from over hundreds of soft, rounded, little hills far, far away. “I saw a lady on the street.” Her voice was so low I had to lean to hear. “She looked so much like Momma I had to run up. I caught hold of her hand. She snatched hers away and turned cold hard eyes on me. ‘I don’t know you’ she said. Cathy, that was our mother! She looks like she used to almost, only a little older. She even had on the pearl necklace with the diamond butterfly clasp that I remember. And, Cathy, when your own mother doesn’t want you—don’t that mean nobody can want you? She looked at me and she knew who I was; I saw it in her eyes, and still she didn’t want me because she knows I’m bad. That’s why she said what she did—that she didn’t have any children. She doesn’t want you or Chris either, Cathy, and all mothers love and want their children unless they’re evil, unholy children . . . like us.”

“Oh, Carrie! Don’t let her do this to you! It’s the love of money that made her deny you . . . not that you are bad or wicked or unholy. You haven’t done anything evil! It’s money that matters to her, Carrie, not us. But we don’t need her. Not when you have Alex and Chris, Paul and me . . . and Jory too, and Henny. . . . Don’t break our hearts, Carrie, hang on long enough to let the doctors help you. Don’t give up. Jory wants his aunt back; every day he asks where you are. What am I going to tell him—that you didn’t care enough to live?”

“Jory don’t need me,” she said in the manner she’d spoken when she was a child. “Jory’s got lots of people besides me to love and care for him . . . but Cory, he’s waiting for me, Cathy. I can see him right now. Look over there behind your shoulder; he’s standing next to Daddy and they want me more than anyone here.”

“Carrie, don’t!”

“It’s nice where I’m going, Cathy, flowers everywhere, and beautiful birds, and I can feel myself growing taller. . . . Look, I’m almost as tall as Momma, like I always wanted to be. And when I get there nobody’s ever gonna say again I got eyes big and scary as an owl’s. Nobody will ever call me ‘dwarf’ again, and tell me to use a stretching machine . . . ’cause I’m just as tall as I want to be.”

Her weak and trembling voice faded away. Her eyes rolled heavenward and stayed open without blinking. Her lips stayed parted, as if she had something else to tell me.
Dear God, she was dead!

Momma had started all of this. Momma who got out of everything scot-free! Scar-free! And rich, rich, rich! All she had to do was shed a few tears of self-pity after she went home. That’s when I screamed! I know I screamed. I wailed and wanted to rip the hair from my head and tear the skin from my face—for I looked too much like that woman who had to pay, pay, pay . . . and then pay some more!

*  *  *

On a hot August day we buried Carrie in the Sheffield family plot, a few miles outside the city limits of Clairmont. No rain this time. No snow on the ground. Now death had claimed every season but winter and left only that cold, blustery weather for me to rejoice in. We covered Carrie over with the crimson flowers she so loved, and purple ones too. The sun above was a rich saffron color, almost orange before it turned to vermilion as it sank to the horizon and turned the heavens rosy-red.