Dollenganger 06 My Sweet Audrina (37 page)

Somehow Arden managed to hoist me out of the grave first, then he scrambled out of the hole. He wanted to carry me back to the house, but that would show Papa and Vera, again, that I just wasn't strong enough. Devastated and wrung out, still I managed to walk beside Arden as the rain pasted our clothes to our bodies, our hair to our heads. Like war victims, we stumbled blindly forward, making that long trek back to that house of deceit. By the time we reached there, the rain had washed us both free of mud.

Once we were inside the house, Arden hurried me into the downstairs powder room and dried my hair. He stripped off my wet clothes as I stood there shivering, my teeth chattering, goose bumps rising up on my arms. He rubbed me down with a fresh towel before he pressed his face between my thighs. I jumped with the electrical thrill of his kiss put there-- why hadn't he kissed me there before?

"You've never allowed me to do anything like this," he said as he took a white terry cloth robe from the linen closet and held it for my arms to slip into. His lips brushed over my shoulder before he pulled the robe on more snugly. "Don't pull away from me again. Scream and yell and fight back, but don't freeze me out. I don't know how to cope with you when you go silent and cold. Tonight when you fought and screamed, it seemed to me you were fully alive, and for the first time you had control of your life, and even if you thought you went down in defeat, you were the victor. You have made me see how wonderful our lives could have been, and how wonderful our lives will be from now on?'

I couldn't -decide anything now. I had to find Papa and confront him. I had so many questions. I'd force him to answer if I had to. I pulled from Arden's embrace. "I need to see Papa, and then we'll talk about us."

Impatiently I waited for Arden to dry his hair and change from his wet clothes into a robe similar to mine, and then, with him beside me, I went to find Papa.

Papa's Story
.
In the hallways the lamps threw shadows on the

walls as Arden and I walked up the stairs to take us up to the attic and into the cupola . . . and even before we were halfway up the spiraling iron stairs, I heard Sylvia's voice as she tried to talk to Papa.

"Aud . . dreen . . . na . . . ?"
"I don't know where she is," said Papa, as if beside himself. "That's why I came up here. From this vantage point you can look for miles and miles . . but I can't see a damned thing!"
"I'm here, Papa," I said as I came through the opening in the floor and stood again on the Turkey rug. Quickly he closed the window to keep out the wind and rain that had the wind chimes beating frantically.
My huge Papa looked exhausted, too weary to face all the questions I had to ask.
"What did you do to me? Why did you lie to me? Papa, we dug into her grave--it's empty!"
Sagging, he slumped to the floor where his great head bowed low. "I did what I thought was best."
How could he know what was best for me? He was a man. How could any man know what it felt like to be a woman or girl, used and defiled.
His head lifted and his dark eyes pleaded for understanding, telling me that he had tried,
desperately tried to give me back the pride the boys had stolen. "They had left you so little, so little, and nine years old was a long, long way from dying," he said in that gritty, hurt voice as I stared down at him and Arden's arms came around me to give me additional strength. "And if your mother lied, and I lied, we both did what we could to make you believe there had once been a First Audrina, and it was she who was raped and not you."
"But Papa!" I yelled. "How could you make me forget what happened? What gave you the right to take my mind and fill it with holes, so that I've gone through my life thinking I'm half crazy?"
"Love for you gave me that right," he answered wearily. "It's not difficult to deceive a child. Darling, listen to me and don't close your mind. Your aunt said a hundred times we should be honest and help you cope, and sometimes your mother agreed with her. But it was I who didn't want you to live with what had happened. It was I who made the decision to do what I could to erase that rainy day in the woods from your mind."
I broke free from Arden's arms and began to pace the Turkey rug, glancing at Sylvia, who backed up to a window and stared up at the wind chimes as if she were hearing them blow, when they just dangled now, motionless.
Papa went on, following me with his troubled eyes. "You are the only Audrina. There never was another. After you were . . . after what happened, I had a grave dug and a tombstone put there to convince you that you had an older, dead sister. It was my way of saving you from yourself." His voice had turned very flat.
Had I known all along and hidden from the truth? The question badgered me. Had I known I was the first but no longer the best? I sobbed, feeling myself coming apart. Into my mind came a fleeting memory of staggering home that day, knowing the house was full of birthday guests, their cars had been parked in the drive . . . and inside the back door Momma had grabbed me, and in that scalding hot water she'd made me sit while I screamed, and she used that stiff, hard brush to scrub where already I was bleeding and hurting so much. My own mother hurting me worse than the boys had. Making all my skin raw and ready to bleed, trying to cleanse me of their filth, and at the same time letting me know I'd never be cleansed, for she couldn't reach inside my brain and scrub there . . . and Papa wouldn't want me now . . . wouldn't want me . . .
Whirling, I confronted Papa again. "What did you do to make me forget? How did you do it?"
"Stand still and let me tell you then," he said, his face going red. "And I'm going to confess something I've tried to hide from myself . . . I didn't think you could cope with that gang-rape. . . because
I
couldn't cope with it. To save myself and to save my love for you . . I had to make you over into that same chaste little girl who'd never known an ugly deed. When you wouldn't go back to school, and wouldn't eat, and refused to look in a mirror because you didn't want to see the face of a girl who'd been so brutally used, I took you to a psychiatrist. He tried to help you, but in the end he decided the best thing to do was give you electric shock treatments. I was there the day they strapped you down. You screamed as you were buckled down and a leather strap was put between your lips so you wouldn't bite off your tongue. Inside I was screaming, too. Then they fired that electricity into your brain . . . and your back buckled up as you tried to scream. It came out a horrible gurgle that I can hear to this day . . and I screamed, too. I couldn't stand for them to do that again. I took you home, and decided that in my own way, I could do the same thing without all that torture?'
I stopped pacing and stared down at him. "But Papa, I do remember some things. My cat named Tweedle Dee . . . and I remember visiting the First Audrina's grave . and I was seven then, Papa, only seven!"
Cynically he smiled. "You were a clever little girl I had to outsmart. But as clever as you were, you were only a child. It's not difficult for an adult to tell a child anything and make her believe. And I wanted you to retain a few memories, so I planted them in your head piecemeal. You were seven the first day you met Arden; I let you keep that memory. I took you on my lap and as I sat in the rocking chair, I talked to you and told you about your older sister, and I remolded you, reshaped you into what you'd been before--clean and pure, sweet and loving. Yes, it was I who planted a great many notions in your head. I considered you an angel too good for this world where innocence is abhorred. You were to me everything that was sweet and feminine, and to have you raped was an abomination I couldn't live with. I did what I did for myself, too, to convince myself that it wasn't my daughter who'd been raped, not my beautiful, gifted, innocent child. And I did make you well, didn't I? I did save you from thinking you were ruined, didn't I? If I hadn't done what I did, what would have become of you, Audrina? What?
"All your pride in yourself had vanished. You cringed in the shadows. You tried to live in them. You wanted to die, and die you might have if I hadn't reconstructed you. I told you the good things about your life, and forced you to forget all the bad. . . all but a few. We need a few bad experiences to appreciate the good. You weren't stupid; perhaps in your own way you were very clever."
I nodded, almost absently, reliving it all over again, how he'd done his best to take away the horror of what those boys had done to me on that awful day in the rain.
"Didn't I wash it from your memory?" he pleaded, his eyes shiny with tears. "Wash it clean away? Didn't I build for you a fairy-tale castle to live in, and around you I put only the best? Not for your mother, Audrina, but for
you
I stole and cheated, to give you everything to make up for what had been stolen. Didn't I do enough? Tell me what I didn't do." He swiped with his fist at his tears of self-pity, as if he'd suffered more than I.
"Day after day I held you on my lap and told you over and over again, it hadn't happened to you but to your older sister, and they killed the First Audrina and left her on the mound under the golden raintree. I even tried to make her death pretty.
Not you,
I said over and over,
it was the other Audrina, the one dead in the grave.
After a while you did seem to forget, and in your own mind you did something that surprised even me. You forgot the rape, and made it seem something mysterious had killed the First Audrina in the woods. On your own, you banished the knowledge of the rape from your memory."
I shivered, then looked away from Papa, who was still talking. "I rocked you, cradled you in my arms and told you it was all a nightmare and you stared at me with those huge, tortured eyes, so hopeful, so wanting to believe it hadn't happened to you. I guessed I was on the right track so I kept it up, day after day . . in my own way I did for you the best I could."
The best he could, the best he could . .
"Are you listening, darling? I made you into a virgin again. Maybe I confused things for you a bit, but it was the best I could do."
The rain on the pointed copper roof of the cupola made a loud steady staccato beat, drumming into me acceptance, telling me time and again that deep inside me I'd known all the time.
"Was it easy to shift time about, Papa, and make me forget even my right age?"
"Easy?" he asked hoarsely, rubbing at his tired eyes. "No, it wasn't easy. I did everything to erase time, to make it unimportant. Because we lived so far from others, I could fool you. I had all the newspapers stopped. The newspapers that came were old ones that I stuffed in the mailbox. I made you two years younger. I put away all the calendars and told your aunt not to let you look at her television set. I set all the clocks in this house so they told different times. We gave you tranquilizers for your headaches and you thought it was only aspirin, so you slept often. Sometimes you woke up from a nap and you'd think it was a new day, when only an hour had passed. You were confused, and ready to believe anything I said that would give you peace. I made Vera swear she'd never tell you the truth or she'd be punished so severely that she'd never want to look in a mirror again--and not one red cent would she inherit if she betrayed what I was doing. Your mother and your aunt held Tuesday 'teatimes' twice a week so you'd think time really did move along swiftly. Always you kept asking what day it was, what week, what month. Even what year. You wanted to know your age, why you didn't have birthday parties, why Vera didn't have them. We lied and told you anything to make you unaware of time. Then a week later we'd convince you months had passed. And in seventeen months we convinced you there had been an older sister who died in the woods--that's all the time it took. And your aunt and your mother tutored you and kept you up with your schoolwork, though I'd told you you'd never been to school at all. It seemed safer that way. When you went back, we sent you to a new school where no one knew your history."
Tears were in my eyes. No First and Best Audrina, only me.
"Go on, Papa," I whispered, feeling very weak, very strange, riveting my eyes on him as if to pull every speck of the truth from him while I had him.
Telling it was like reliving it, and none of it was pleasant for him, either. "Audrina, I lied and deceived only to spare you suffering. I would have told any lie, done anything to turn you back into that wonderfully self-confident, friendly girl who feared nothing. And if you wonder now about certain incidents you can't remember, remember you were suicidal, trying to destroy yourself In my own way, I think I saved not only your life but also your sanity."
My heart was pounding. Something was going on in my body, but the revelations coming at me like blows kept me asking questions when I should have guessed what was wrong. I had stood at the grave of the First and Best Audrina, and I'd envied her because he'd loved her first, and better than he'd ever love me. I had wanted to be her, just to have known that kind of love. It seemed wild and insane that
I had been
her all the time, the first, the best . . . not the second, the worst.
Tears coursed down my cheeks as I crumpled to my knees where Papa could gather me into his arms. As if I were that ruined nine-year-old girl, he rocked rue back and forth.
"Don't cry, my darling, don't cry. It's all over and you're still the same sweet girl you always were. You're not changed. Nothing dirty can touch some people. You're that kind."
Still, up there in the cupola I felt nine years old again, ravished, degraded and not quite human.
Only then did I look toward the opening in the floor to see Vera standing there. Her dark, glittering eyes showed such hatred, such malice that it made her lips quiver. Her strange orange hair seemed alive with electricity as she glared at me. Bits
and
pieces of the past began to flash behind my eyes.
That look of envy on Vera's face. . the way I'd felt when I thought about the First Audrina. Gladly Vera would see me dead, as I'd been glad the First Audrina was dead. Now I remembered my ninth birthday. I remembered that morning, getting ready for school. I hadn't finished dressing. Vera and I used the same bathroom to bathe and dress for school. Vera kept glancing at me as I stepped from the tub.
"Wear your prettiest petticoat today, Audrina. The one with that handmade lace and the little shamrocks that you love so much. Wear the matching panties, too."
"No. I'll put those things on after I come home. I hate school restrooms. I hate Momma forcing me to wear my best dress to school when all the girls will be jealous and hate me for doing it."
"Oh, silly, it wasn't Momma's idea, it was mine. It's time the village girls know just what kind of beautiful clothes you have. She thought it was a wonderful idea to show them the Whitefern girls still do wear silk dresses--and everything else."
On the porch I stood and watched as Vera headed for where the school bus would pick her up. She twisted around and called back, "Enjoy your pedestal for the last time, Audrina. For when you come home you're going to be just like the rest of us--not so pure anymore."
I jolted with that memory and stared at Vera with new awareness. No, I tried to convince myself, Vera wouldn't have set those boys on me . . . would she? She was the only one who knew which paths I always used. There were many vague meandering paths in our patch of woods that spread for hundreds of acres.
It was those dark eyes that betrayed her, the cunning way she looked me up and down, smirking, laughing at me silently inside, as if she'd get the better of me no matter what I did.
"It was
you
who set me up, wasn't it, Vera?" I asked, trying to keep my voice calm, my thoughts rational. "You hated me, and envied me so much you wanted Papa to hate me, too. I cried with my head in Momma's lap, thinking something I'd done had made those ugly boys think I was wicked. I blamed myself for teasing them. I thought I'd done some innocent thing that gave them evil ideas, when I couldn't remember anything I'd said or done to make them think I wasn't the nice kind of girl Papa wanted me to stay. It was
you
who told them which path I took!"
Despite myself my voice was rising, taking on an accusatory tone. I stood, then took several steps closer to her.
"Oh, stop it!" she yelled. "It's all over and done with, isn't it? How could I know you'd disobey and use the shortcut? It wasn't my fault--it was your own!"
"Wait a minute!" bellowed Papa, jumping to his feet and hurrying to my side even as Arden came closer, too. "Many times I've overheard whispers in the village drugstore about someone in this house who betrayed my daughter. I thought it was the boy who used to trim our shrubs and mow our lawn. But, of course, it had to be you! He wasn't of this house, or in this house . . . we bred a viper in our midst. Who else here would want Audrina harmed more than the unwanted child who didn't know who her father was!"