Echoes of Dollanganger (2 page)

Whatever had happened at the original Foxworth Hall, it still had an atmosphere of mystery and horror around it. It had been kept alive through fantastic theories printed in the local newspaper and discussed around the date of the famous first fire and always on Halloween. The diary could carry that same aura. Touch it, open the cover, read the pages, and you could be carried away in the same ugly shadows and cold wind that had carried away those children.

I had tossed and turned all night debating these thoughts and worries in my mind. Sometimes I believe we all really do have two people living inside us arguing often. One has conscience, and the other doesn't. Everyone talks to himself or herself. They would all have to admit that. Well, who
were
they all talking to? Who is the himself or herself?

The following morning, one side of me seemed to have won the argument. I was determined to tell Kane to forget it. I was even working up a good story, a fabrication, something that would end his idea completely. I thought I might tell him that my father had found me reading the diary into the early hours and was so angry that he had seized it right out of my hands. He had said he was going to burn it, and I had watched him throw it into an old oilcan in our backyard. It had gone up in a puff of black smoke.

But I changed my mind the moment I set eyes on my father at breakfast and saw how happy he was with how well his work was going rebuilding a new, more modern mansion on the Foxworth property. He was getting along with Arthur Johnson, who didn't seem as difficult apparently as other customers he had worked for. That made my father even more sweet and loving to me. I regretted even thinking of using him to deceive someone by making him sound unreasonable and angry. I couldn't do it. However, I felt trapped because I was disobeying his wishes by permitting someone else to know about the diary. I comforted myself by telling myself in this case, he would understand and forgive me.

But the questions and the doubts about what I had agreed to do wouldn't be still. Really, I had thought, what if Kane should betray me and, in a real sense, betray Christopher?
Go through with this or not, Kristin?
I had asked myself while I had dressed to go down to breakfast. I was tottering between yes and no. I could easily go in either direction. I looked at the clock. It wasn't much longer before I would have to make a definite decision. Kane was going to pick me up to take me to school again, and I knew he would be talking about nothing else. When I had told my father that Kane was coming, he paused in making our breakfast.

“Picking you up again? We're considerably out of his way, especially with morning traffic. He has to be getting himself up and out much earlier.”

“Oh, please. He doesn't care about that, Daddy,” I said, making it sound like he was just another parent who didn't understand what was and wasn't a priority for teenagers like us.

He shrugged. “To me—you excluded, of course—it seems young people don't want to make compromises or sacrifices too easily. They don't naturally go out of their way. It's the ‘please me now' generation.”

“You can exclude Kane, too, from that conclusion. Besides, you'd have driven as far as another state to pick up Mommy, wouldn't you?”

He turned and squinted at me, deepening the folds in his forehead. “I see. Getting a little serious in this first romance of yours?” he asked.

I was a bit surprised myself at how quickly I had
come to Kane's defense, but I had also compared us to my father and mother, who I knew had loved each other intensely. That comparison was a bit over the top, at least for now. And my father was right to characterize my dating Kane as my first real romance. I had gone out on dates, met other boys at parties and dances, but none of that ever became much more than one follow-up call or a few days of some additional hanging out together. Until now, those budding romances always seemed to drift away with the softening of a grip on my hand, until my date's fingers cooled into icicles and finally slipped out to find a different hand to hold. More often than not, however, it was my hand that began to avoid theirs.

You can't help but think at first that it's your fault, that maybe there's something wrong with you, especially if it happened more than once or twice. Most of my girlfriends had a similar reaction to their failed little affairs of the heart. I always felt I should have been sorrier about it. My indifference surprised me. Was I capable of having deep feelings for anyone besides my own father?
Maybe you're too picky, too sensitive, or too afraid of having a relationship
, I told myself.
Your standards are too high—impossible, in fact. No relationship will ever be satisfying, and it's mostly your own fault.

The insecurity rocks you for a while and makes you so timid that you don't even want to look at another boy and encourage what might be another flop. Why try? Failure was inevitable no matter how promising it was when it started. It was as if the moment
I returned a smile, joined a conversation with a new boy, and then went on a date, magnifying glasses dropped over my eyes, and I could see all of my prospective boyfriend's weaknesses and faults. The only comfort I had was watching other couples fail. It was always good to have friends close enough to support me and sympathize, especially because they had been through the same challenges, similar experiences.

I was an amateur psychiatrist, especially when it came to myself, and I came up with a theory, which I told no one, especially not my father. Maybe because of how involved I was with my father's loss of his one great love, I was afraid of ever finding one of my own. People end up alone for many reasons. Many are just too selfish to share or compromise or are just too cynical. They believe love brings too many expectations that can never be fulfilled. And because you've invested so much of yourself in it, your emotions are bankrupt when it fails, and unlike with any other bankruptcy, you can't reorganize those feelings and begin again.

However, right from the beginning, I could sense that something different from any of those brief little romances was happening between Kane and me. We were looking at each other with more intensity, holding our gazes longer, smiling at each other more often, and rushing toward every opportunity to be together. It was happening whether or not either of us wanted it to happen. Every time we saw each other in the school hallways, there was almost a surge of electricity in the air. Everyone around us began to fade away,
their voices drifting off, their questions lingering unanswered.

I had to believe there was something special between us, and whatever that was, it helped me relax my resistance and permit myself to believe something magical could be happening. After all, that was how it was supposed to work, wasn't it? It was finally happening to me. I felt relief about myself, as if going seventeen years without having a serious romance was close to tragic, abnormal, an indication of troubled relationships to come. I worked on convincing myself that whatever happened between Kane and me would support and justify my faith in his promises, but especially when it came to the diary, because he could see how important it was to me. Of course, he wouldn't betray me. He couldn't, I thought. Why was I even debating with myself about it? He cared for me too much. He knew I wouldn't forgive him and that everything we had would burn out as fast as a meteor falling to earth.

That buoyed my confidence and sent me back to yes, but then, almost immediately, I wondered if I was becoming another one of those ostriches my father often pointed out to me, people who wouldn't face unpleasant realities or admit to weaknesses in themselves or others they trusted.

“You can't simply will things to happen the way you want them to, Kristin,” my dad had warned me. “The night owl knows sunrise is coming, and there is nothing he can do to stop it, no matter how much he enjoys the darkness.”

Wisdom often dripped from his lips like honey, always kindly, always sweet. Right now, I had to answer him truthfully about Kane.

“Yes, Daddy. It's a little serious between Kane and me,” I replied.

He nodded and then, turning away, added, “Let me know if a little turns into a lot.”

“Why?” I demanded with a little more fervor than I had intended. Was he already suspicious about what I was going to share with Kane? Would he be upset if I had strong feelings for someone besides him?

“I'm just kidding, Kristin. I don't expect you to run off and elope or anything. Uh-oh,” he added, putting up his hands to surrender when I didn't respond. Then he hummed the theme from
Jaws
as if a big shark was approaching a swimmer, and he stepped back.

“What?”

“I think I just entered that world I've been warned about.”

“What world?”

“The world of sensitive teenage girls, otherwise known as bedlam.”

“Very funny, Daddy. The world of teenage boys is more dysfunctional, if you ask me.”

“Probably so.” He returned his attention to the pancakes on the stove. “But at least that's waters I've swum in myself. I know what to expect and when to expect it. Teenage girls are more like an earthquake.”

He flipped a pancake. Right after being in the navy, where he got into cooking, he had been a short-order
cook in a diner-type restaurant off I-95. This was before he met my mother and got into the construction business. When I was little, he actually would juggle a couple of pancakes with two spatulas. It made my mother and me laugh. He would flip one so it fell perfectly on my plate. Somehow all that juggling made them even more delicious.

“And so for me, with a teenage daughter,” he said, bringing over my pancakes, “it does feel like swimming in shark-infested waters.”

“I promise, I'll warn you ahead of time before I bite,” I said as he poured out just the right amount of maple syrup and added banana, which he had sliced for me. He would do all that even when I was married and had children of my own, I thought.

“I'll appreciate the warning. Oh, by the way, I might be running late every afternoon this week,” he said, sitting across from me. “Scheduling all these building inspectors, dealing with different contractors, meeting with the architect. This owner is taking a very detailed interest in all the construction, too. He's a nice guy, but lately, now that this is really happening, it feels like he's breathing down my neck sometimes. He slips in behind me like a ghost stepping back into the world.”

“Don't most new homeowners take that sort of interest in what you're doing?”

“Not like this,” he said. “Sometimes I get the feeling someone's looking over Arthur Johnson's shoulder, too.”

“What do you know about him?”

“I told you he ran a hedge fund and made a lot of money. I know as much about him as I have to, I guess. But between you and me, I think it's ridiculous for a man that young to retire, even if he can. He's married to a woman about twelve years younger. I picked that up. Her mother apparently worked for his father. I sort of got the impression that—” He suddenly clamped his lips together and scrunched his nose the way he would when he was about to utter a secret or a nasty comment about something or someone in front of me and stopped himself.

“What?”

He looked at me oddly, obviously hesitant to tell me what he was thinking.

“I'm not a child anymore, Dad. You don't have to worry about offending my innocent little ears.”

“Yeah, I have to keep reminding myself. Anyway, you've heard worse and read worse, I'm sure,” he added, raising his eyebrows.

“Worse than what?”

“I picked up that Arthur Johnson's father got romantically involved with Arthur's mother-in-law after her husband died. Right after,” he added. I guess I didn't react enough, so he said, “Minutes after. Understand?”

“Oh. She might have picked up with him a little before her husband had died?” I asked.

He nodded. “And maybe not just a little before. His wife had died just a year or so earlier, not that her still being alive might have stopped him anyway.”

The disapproval on his face was blatant. I knew he was thinking of his own tragedy and wondering how much in love with his wife Arthur Johnson's father had been if he could move on to another woman so quickly. And wondering about it even more so when he learned about Arthur Johnson's mother-in-law. For many reasons, a line from Shakespeare's
Hamlet
never drifted too far from my memory after we had read it in English class: “A second time I kill my husband dead, when second husband kisses me in bed.”

It was only natural for me to wonder if my father would fall in love with someone again. When would he be ready, if ever, to kiss another woman in his bed? It was painful for me to think about it, but I didn't want to wish him endless loneliness, and I was especially worried about what his life would be like when I was out of the house. I had been filling out applications for college. An acceptance would come soon and ring a bell in this house. I wondered how often he thought about that. I knew he did. Maybe he had his own timetable for when he would fall in love again, and it would start when that bell rang; or maybe he was determined never to love again. Maybe he knew that line in Tennyson's poem: “ 'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”

“Anyway,” he continued, now that he had committed to revealing the story, “afterward, Arthur Johnson met and spent time with his future wife because of their parents' relationship, and both parents were pleased when they became engaged. Then they
decided to do the same thing, get engaged and get married. It was a double wedding. His father married his wife's mother at the same ceremony.”

“To save money?”

“Maybe,” he said, smiling. “When you question why someone rich looks for bargains, he always tells you that's how he became rich. The women shopped for gowns together, and the men bought tuxedos together. They probably did get deals. They even bought similar wedding rings from the same jeweler. He gave away his son at the altar, and she gave away her daughter, and then vice versa. It was a ceremony conducted in mirrors.”