Secrets of Foxworth (19 page)

How she beamed. She embraced and kissed me, thanking me for being so understanding and giving her the strength to do what she had to do for us all. My words seemed to energize her. It was as if she no longer felt any pain from that whipping. Even the twins seemed impressed with how quickly she had recuperated.

She made us join hands and promise never to think of ourselves as ugly or evil, but I wondered why she had brought us to such a terrible place with such a horrible woman to rule over us. We might have been better off living in semipoverty. She knew what her parents were like, how rigid and cruel they could be.

“Didn't you anticipate all this?” I couldn't help but ask.

She smiled. “You sound so much like your father sometimes, Christopher. Of course, I knew how cruel they could be, but I thought that after all these years, being alone, having no family, they would realize what they had lost and they would have changed.” She went on to explain how her mother's letter had filled her with optimism, but, she said, smiling at me, “I know what's really eating away at her.”

“What?” Cathy demanded. Maybe she hoped something was literally eating away at her and she would disappear completely.

Momma held her smile on me like a spotlight.
“Once she looked at Christopher, she saw his handsome father, and once she looked at you, Cathy, she saw me, and her rage came rolling back like thunder over the hills.”

“Then she'll always hate us,” Cathy said, throwing up her hands. “Why bother? Let's go.”

Momma nodded reluctantly. For a moment, I thought she was going to pack us up and take us out of this hellhole. I could see Cathy thought the same and looked excited, hopeful, but instead, Momma came up with her plan.

She decided she would go to secretarial school and learn all the skills she needed to get a decent job and find us a big enough apartment. Then we could move out and not want for the basic things, at least. In the meantime, she wanted us to amuse ourselves, care for the twins, and put up with her mother's insane rules. Like the dreamer she could be when our father was alive, she drifted into her visions of the future, a future in which we would all realize our dreams. Of course, I knew that even if she did get a good job and a decent place for us to live, what we wanted to do for ourselves would take a great deal of money.

Nevertheless, I was happy, of course, to hear that she wanted to take us out of here. For a while, I feared that she didn't see how difficult all this was for us or that she was ignoring and pretending. I couldn't help it. I wanted to dream along with her, but Cathy was suddenly the more realistic one, asking her how long it would take.

“It won't take me that long. Maybe a month.”

I looked at Cathy quickly. A month? Stuck here? I gave her my best “keep it to yourself” look, and she didn't start to rant and rave. Momma promised that in the meantime, she would have enough money to buy us things and bring them to us. Just before she left, she told us she was just as much a prisoner as we were, even worse, because she was under her father and mother's close scrutiny.

“If I just breathe wrong, they'll pounce.”

I knew her technique so well. She hoped that if we felt sorry for her, we wouldn't feel as sorry for ourselves. I didn't say anything. Momma was who she was, I thought. I loved her more than any child could love his mother, but I wasn't blind to her weaknesses. I had to tolerate them. She needed me to be strong for her and for us all, now more than ever.

When we went to sleep that night, I persuaded Cathy to think only good thoughts. I teased her the way I used to and promised her that she would be the dancer she dreamed of being. I called her “Cathy Doll,” which was the stage name she hoped to have. It worked. Yes, I was like Momma. I knew how to get my sister to cooperate, and together, I thought we could handle the twins. I'd start by teaching them things they should be learning in school. We'd make it through this, I told myself. We'd give Momma the time she needed.

I thought they had all fallen asleep finally, but
when I looked at Cathy, I saw her eyes were still wide open. She was thinking too hard.

“What?” I asked her. “What are you thinking so hard about?”

“We could have been born with horns and tails.”

“No, that's ridiculous.”

She sat up and looked at me. “But this is why we all have blue eyes and golden hair.”

“There are scientific reasons for hair and eye color based on genetics, what you inherited. The scientific information isn't perfect yet.” I said. I was tired now myself, very tired. Thinking can exhaust you, too.

“Still,” Cathy said, pushing hope into herself. “If we follow her rules and she thinks we're good, she'll treat us like she should treat her grandchildren.”

“Sure,” I said.

She lay down again. “It will be all right,” she whispered, more to herself than to me.

I looked at the locked door and then at my little brother and sister curled in fetal positions, dreaming good dreams the way children their age should.

I wanted to whisper, “It will be all right,” to myself, too.

But my lips wouldn't let me.

Nor would my heart.

What a mistake reading Christopher's diary before I went to sleep was becoming. I spent a night tossing
and turning, picturing the four of them shut up in that mansion and believing that their mother would find a way to rescue them. Normally, Christopher was too smart to buy into his mother's fantasies, but this time, lying right beside his intelligence was his hope. It was weaker, thinner, but he clung to it. What choice did he have? They were too young and needy to be able to do anything more for themselves. How would even three of them survive all this?

The more I thought about them, the more questions I had, and those questions were like tiny balls of hail pounding at my brain, making sleep almost impossible. I finally did fall asleep, but only a couple of hours before I had to get up, and thank goodness, this time, I had remembered to set my alarm.

I leaped out of my bed and nearly drowned myself in the shower to wake up. Usually, I gave myself plenty of time to dress, do my hair, and put on a little lipstick before I made an appearance. I was mumbling annoyance at myself all the way down the stairs.

“Heard your alarm go off,” my father said as soon as I set foot in the kitchen. He turned to give me a scornful look. “How late did you stay up?”

“Not that late,” I said, and dropped like a sack of potatoes into my chair.

He pulled the corners of his mouth in tightly and gave me his best look of disappointment. He had squeezed fresh oranges for my juice and was at the stove preparing French toast for both of us. The aroma helped me become more alert.

I stretched, drank my juice, and smiled. “You usually wait until the weekend to make that.”

“Had a craving and thought you might, too.”

“Maybe you should return to being a short-order cook, Dad. You're so good at it.”

“Thank you, but no thank you. This Masterwood is not going to work for anyone else.”

“Open your own diner. I'll be hostess, waitress. We'll call it Burt's Eats or something.”

“How I wish I was young enough to have fantasies again,” he said. “I wish I was eighteen again.” He brought me a plate of French toast. He put the maple syrup next to it and the jar of Mrs. Wheeler's homemade jam. Mrs. Wheeler was a widow who lived five miles or so down the road and made jams, sour pickles and sour tomatoes, pies, and birthday cakes to supplement her income. My father was always drumming up more business for her. He said she reminded him of his mother, “who treated her kitchen the way most people treat a church.”

He wished he was young enough to have fantasies? I thought. Corrine Dollanganger, a married women with four children, clung to them, and Christopher instinctively knew that without them, he and his brother and sisters wouldn't survive. Maybe fantasies were as important to our lives as bread. I wondered now about my own.

Since reading the last page I had read in the diary, all my dreams rang with more hope than reality to me. Just recently, I had been imagining myself becoming a super doctor who not only treated patients but on the
side performed miraculous research and found cures for cancer and other serious illnesses. Had I let everyone fill me with so much hot air about myself and my brilliance that I would explode with the shock of reality someday, maybe sooner than I thought?

“What made you want to get into construction? And don't tell me your name again,” I said, taking my first bites of the French toast. As usual, it was better than any we had out at any restaurant, including Charley's Diner. He had some secret in making it that he wouldn't even tell me.

He stood there looking down at me. “You're asking many more questions these days.”

“Maybe I need more answers as I get older, even though parents supposedly say their young children never stop asking questions.”

“That was you. You were born with question marks in your eyes.”

“I'm regressing,” I said, smiling. “This is so good, Dad.”

“I'm glad,” he said, and went to serve himself. “She makes really good jam,” he told me as he smeared some of it on his toast. “Everyone has some talent hidden in themselves. It just takes the right combination of events to bring it out, I guess.”

“You're giving me an answer?”

He ate and looked past me for a few moments. Then he nodded. “The moment I met your mother, I became more ambitious. When you care a great deal about someone else besides yourself, you want to do more. Short-order cooking for a living was okay when
I had no one but myself. I even put up with the dumb things my boss would do that made my work harder, but once I was with your mother, the world began to change, open up. She inspired me.” He paused and waved his right forefinger at me. “You wait until you find the right person to inspire you, Kristin. It makes all the difference when you have someone besides yourself to be responsible for, someone you love and who loves you.”

I nodded, but I wasn't thinking about myself. I was thinking about Christopher and how all that was happening was forcing him to be more mature. He didn't appear to me to be someone who ever pumped up balloons of false hope. He was simply too realistic about everything, even when he was much younger, but I had the sense that he knew the chances of him enjoying his youth were slipping away.

Was I really enjoying my youth? How much had my mother's death taken from me? After my mother died, all I wanted to do was escape from sadness, and the quickest way to do it seemed to be just get older, almost overnight. All teenagers wanted to rush their lives along, wanted to be on their own faster. It drove us to resist rules, take chances, and lie to ourselves. How many times, in how many different ways, did my friends tell their parents, “You're treating me like a child”? I never had to. My father sensed I was unfortunately taking on a seriousness born out of my mother's unexpected passing. She had slipped away like a shadow helpless against the morning sun.

“What do you have on for today?” Dad asked.

“Nothing special. I'm going to Kane's party tonight. You remember?”

“Driving yourself, or what?”

“Kane's picking me up.”

He nodded. He looked thoughtful. I imagined he was thinking about me growing up so fast, but he surprised me. That wasn't in his thoughts right now. “I didn't want to mention this,” he said after he sipped his coffee. “Don't want to encourage any thinking about it, but I know you'd want to know.”

“What?”

“When we were going through a shed to retrieve anything worth saving before we knocked it down, we found a child's rocking horse. I'm guessing that it survived the first fire. Probably the way it fell under some metal, whatever.”

“Really. Where is it?”

“Todd took it to refurbish it. He thinks it might sell as an antique. Was it mentioned in the diary?”

For a moment, I couldn't answer. Was he interested, or was he just testing to see what was in the diary? “Yes,” I said. “The first day after they had been brought there.”

He thought and nodded.

“Those children were told they had nothing after their father's death, right? And that was why she brought them to Foxworth? Is that what he wrote in his diary?”

“Yes. Corrine threw herself on the mercy of her parents. She sounds to me like someone very helpless. She was babied and spoiled, even though her parents
were supposedly very cruel. I know now that her husband spoiled her.”

He smirked and shook his head.

“What?”

“I don't know what's true or not true. We—your mother, I should say—understood differently.”

“Meaning what?”

“She wasn't that desperate. She could have survived without her parents. But as I've been saying, who knows what really happened?” he added and rose.

“What do you mean? There was a life insurance policy? She had some money?”

“Like I said, who knows what was and wasn't true? It was too long ago, and the people who knew her well enough are either dead or gone.”

“Didn't this Bart Foxworth who rebuilt the house ever talk to anyone about it?”

“Talk about it? He chased people off that property at gunpoint if they came around with that intention. You heard them talking at Charley's. He didn't have much to do with local people. There was something about them that brought out the hermit in him. Maybe they were termites in a previous life. No, he and his cousins or whoever they were only fanned the wild stories with their weird ways. First, he rebuilt the place and left it standing for years and years without anyone living in it, and then he abandoned it like a rat fleeing a sinking ship.”

“I don't understand the second fire, then. No one was living there?”

“Hobos discovered it or . . .”