When I sat at the kitchen table, I poured some lemonade, bit into my ham and cheese sandwich, and turned the page.
Momma was excited about my plan to dress up the attic, but I had no illusions about why. She saw it all as another way to occupy us all and distract us from the situation we were still wallowing in. Every time she came to see us after her secretarial school classes, she would bring more materials, crayons, paints, anything to encourage us to continue with “this major project.” As always, she added the fact that what we were doing would impress our grandmother and go far toward not only helping her win back her parents’ affections but also convincing her mother that we were not “the devil’s spawn.”
Oh, how Cathy hated it whenever she said those words. How could our own mother let her mother call us those names and describe us as evil? What had we ever done that was sinful? “Especially Christopher,” she would say. “He wouldn’t even cheat on a school quiz!”
Momma would take on that mournful, sympathetic look and describe how it was more painful to her than it was to us. “It tears at my heart and the memory of your dear departed and wonderful father whenever she utters those ugly words. You should see the way she glares at me sometimes. It’s enough to make anyone’s heart shatter into pieces.”
Cathy was skeptical. How come she was wearing beautiful new clothes? Who bought them? She had such a variety of shoes. How could they still hate her so much and yet spend so much on her?
“It’s only because I’m applying myself,” she told us. “My father respects hard work and ambition. Of course, I hate the schoolwork, but I tolerate it for us all.”
“Do you have a good teacher? Are you at least fond of him?” I asked. There was something about the way she described those classes that made me think he might be flirting with her.
“Oh, I have this old biddy for a teacher,” she declared. “Not that she thinks of herself as that. She has a bosom that enters the room two minutes before she does, and she’s not shy about putting it into the faces of her male students, especially this one particular man. I think it annoys her that he looks more at me than at her, even with all her flaunting about. She’s actually a bit messy about her looks. I could teach her a thing or two about makeup and hair, if she let me.”
Cathy was surprised she was in classes with men. Why would men want to be secretaries? Momma described them as writers, journalists, who needed to master typing skills. From the way she described how some of them leaned on her for help, I wondered just how much she was concentrating on her own work. If there was one thing I knew would capture my mother’s attention, it was a man’s attention on her. I often wondered why that didn’t make my father angry. It made me angry.
“Are you thinking of dating any of them?” I came right out and asked.
Cathy looked surprised for a moment and then nodded to herself.
“No, no, of course not.” She described one of the men as so tiny and short that she could carry him out of the room. She went on and on about Daddy again, about how handsome and tall he was and how he was still so alive in her memory. She told me she spent most of her nights crying and thinking about him and how cruel he was to die so soon.
“He should have been more careful, and he should have provided a safety net of financing. He should have been thinking about me,” she moaned. All of us stared at her. She realized it and quickly added, “I mean about all of us.”
“He couldn’t help being killed,” Cathy said angrily.
“No one really can,” Momma said. “I’m not blaming him for that. I’m just . . . upset with what I’ve had to do. But don’t worry. I have it under control. We’ll be fine. We’ll all be just fine.”
None of us said anything. She put on that smile mask I hated to see her wearing and then left after kissing the twins, kissing me, and hugging Cathy, who kept her arms limp at her sides.
For a few moments, I couldn’t think of anything encouraging to say after she left. Cathy looked at me.
“What?”
“Nothing, Christopher. I have nothing to say that you want to hear,” she said, and turned back to dressing up the attic. Soon we were all back to it.
To make us even more excited about our decorating work, Momma began bringing books on arts and crafts. It was my job to run the work as if we were all in a kindergarten classroom, with me as the twins’ teacher and Cathy as my assistant. At first, the twins began to rebel. They didn’t like sitting for long at desks and getting instructions. Then, with all the added materials and Momma’s suggestion that we do animals, too, they became more involved. I began to think we just might get through this, giving Momma the time she needed to master the secretarial skills and get a job after all. But as Cathy began questioning her more and more about her school progress, skepticism started to infiltrate my wall of hope and put holes into my optimism.
Something wasn’t right, but I wasn’t about to suggest it to Cathy. She was hanging by a thread the way it was. Besides not being able to be outside and at a school where she could mix with other students, have girlfriends, and flirt with boys, she had to be a surrogate mother to the twins and join with me to fulfill our mandatory tasks. Every Friday, we had to strip down the room and clean the bathroom at dawn and then drag or carry the sleepy twins up into the attic to wait and have our cold breakfast cereal while the maids under our grandmother’s barking orders cleaned below.
Cathy wondered why they never realized we had been there. “Don’t they sense us? They should smell us. They should have heard something. It’s like we really don’t exist anymore,” she said. “We’re all ghosts.”
Actually, I thought that was an interesting idea. After all this time alone with my brother and sisters and not being able to pursue my own interests the way I used to, even when we were struggling after my father’s death, I wasn’t above some fantasizing.
None of this existed in the real world, I told myself. What if when we entered Foxworth that night, we had crossed into someone else’s nightmare? We were invisible to anyone else. Our grandmother was a powerful witch who waved her hands over us and made us little more than ghosts of ourselves. She had life-and-death power over all of us, including Momma. We had fallen down a much darker tunnel than Alice in her Wonderland.
“What are you thinking so hard about?” Cathy asked me.
For a moment, I felt like I had been caught doing something I shouldn’t. Then I smiled. “All the wonderful things we will have and do once we are out of here,” I said.
She looked disappointed for a moment and then said something that hurt me more than she could ever realize. “If there was anything I believed for sure—for sure, Christopher—it was that you weren’t a dreamer like me. Or more important, like Momma. I was depending on that. Now I really feel alone.”
How sad for her, I thought, but Christopher’s fantasy about becoming invisible was interesting, not because I was a science-fiction fan or anything. I didn’t take him literally, but I could understand why children, especially children who were once the objects of so much attention, would feel like they were disappearing in their severely imposed isolation. All they could do was try to keep happy in their make-believe world, a decorated stuffy old attic filled with forgotten people and forgotten things. It wasn’t hard to believe that they were beginning to feel like they could be forgotten, too. In a sense, they were living in a graveyard.
My deep thoughts were jarred at the sound of our doorbell. I knew it wasn’t Uncle Tommy. He wasn’t arriving until Monday. I leaned over, parted the curtain, and looked out to see Lana and Suzette. For a few moments, I thought I might let them believe I wasn’t home. They pushed the door button again and again. They were knocking, too. I knew how they both could be like bulldogs when they were determined.
I rose, looked at the diary, and quickly hid it under a pile of magazines before I went to the front door. The phone was already ringing.
“Oh, I thought you might be home,” Lana said. “We saw Kane with Ryan at th
e mall having lunch and wondered why he wasn’t with you.”
“I told you we’re going out tonight,” I said, sounding a little more testy than I had intended.
They both smiled. Why did my close friends suddenly look so immature and unimportant to me? Hanging out with them suddenly was a distraction, a waste of time. Nothing we could do together had any meaning. What did they know about real suffering? Children locked in an attic was just another Halloween story to them.
“Lana said she thought you might be getting a little snobby,” Suzette said. I still hadn’t stepped back to invite them in.
“Why?”
“You rushed me off the phone, for one thing,” Lana said. “We always told each other everything and cared about each other’s opinions. Suddenly, Kane Hill is off limits? There was never anything off limits between us.”
“I didn’t mean to give that impression. I had things to do.”
Neither was smiling now. Neither believed me.
“Well, did you or didn’t you stay over at Kane’s house after the party?”
“I already told you. That’s a stupid lie Tina Kennedy is spreading.”
“Well, if you don’t talk to us and tell us what really happened last night, how are we able to defend you?” Suzette asked, as if they were the ones being maligned.
“Come on in,” I said with a deep sigh, “and stop pouting like children.”
They looked at each other, laughed, and entered.
“I’m dying of thirst,” Suzette said, crumbling the sheet of ice that had formed between us.
“And I’m starving. We didn’t eat anything at the mall.”
“Once we saw Kane was spending the day with Ryan instead of you, we thought we had better check this whole thing out,” Suzette added, and hurried into the kitchen.
We were always like this at one another’s houses, opening refrigerators, finding things to eat in the cabinets, looking through whatever magazines were on tables, inspecting one another’s rooms, acting as if we all lived in whoever’s house we were in at the time. We could often be more like sisters. We tried on one another’s clothes, borrowed anything and everything from one another, and shared secrets and stories that might, at least in their case, not please their parents if they knew. Until now, nothing seemed too personal to share, especially our little romantic experiences.
I helped make sandwiches for them and then made myself a cup of tea to have with a biscuit just so I could sit and eat something with them.
“Well?” Lana asked after she bit into her sandwich. “Inquiring minds want to know.”
“Sorry to disappoint you. It was PG-13 all the way,” I said. “I wasn’t there that long after you all left.”
They both looked disappointed.
“With his reputation, I thought you surely would ‘cross the Rio Grande,’ ” Suzette said.
“Maybe she will tonight,” Lana added, sounding hopeful.
“You sound like that’s all you think about,” I said.
“You don’t?” Suzette fired back. “All of a sudden, you’re eight years old again.”
“I think about it, but that’s not all I think about.”
“It’s not all we think about, Kristin, but it wasn’t that long ago that we all talked about it. How close did you come last night?” Lana asked—more like demanded.
She was right. The three of us did talk about it often. I wasn’t sure why I was being so defensive. They stared at me, at my silence.
“I think we talked about it all the time because we weren’t really serious about any of the boys. It was something abstract.”
“Huh?” Lana said. “Return to English.” She tugged on her earlobe.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is that when you like someone, I mean really like him, you feel different about discussing the intimate details, even with your best friends. Does that make any sense?”
They just looked at me.
“No,” Lana finally declared. “It doesn’t. We’ve shared things we wouldn’t tell our own mothers. Nothing is sacred when you have a real friend, and I thought we were all real friends.”
“We are! I don’t know, maybe I’m just embarrassed about my feelings right now. Maybe I’m surprised at myself.”
“That’s too deep for me,” Suzette said. She rose and began washing her dish and glass.
“He’s going to hurt you, you know,” Lana said. “Boys like Kane can ruin you if you’re not careful.”
“Stop it, Lana,” Suzette said. “You don’t know that. You sound jealous.”
“I’m just trying to give her some advice. She doesn’t have anyone else but us,” she whined. She was trying to defend herself, but her remark was like a dart thrown into the center of my heart.
They had mothers to confide in if they needed to. I didn’t. That was what she meant about my not having anyone else but them.
“I mean . . .”
“Oh, shut up,” Suzette said. She turned back to me. “Where’s he taking you for dinner?” she asked, anxious to get us all off the topic.
“The River House.”
“Wow.”
“He can afford it if anyone can,” Lana said. “I’ve never been there. My father won’t spend the money.” Now she did sound a little jealous.
“What are you going to wear?” Suzette asked.
Her question brought relief. I stood up quickly.
“Something of my mother’s. Come on up to my room. I just brought it inside from airing out. It’s been in a closet for . . . a long time. I’ll show you,” I said, and we were back to being best friends.
They both thought I looked beautiful in the dress.
“Everyone says your mother was beautiful, too,” Lana offered as a way of recovering for her remark in the kitchen.
Afterward, we sat around talking about different fashions, clothes other girls wore at school. They both went on about the boys they liked, but each admitted she didn’t see herself getting too serious with any of them. At least, not the way I seemed to be getting serious with Kane. Our conversation ran on to upcoming parties and events, how we were all going to spend our Christmas holidays, and hopes for some sort of “real” New Year’s Eve party.
At some moment during our chatter, I found myself drifting off and thinking about Christopher and Cathy and how these kinds of conversations and plans were things they could only imagine. If they really were up in that attic for more than three years, they missed the heart of their best young years, having boyfriends and girlfriends, going to parties, just hanging out, and having endless phone calls.
How could their own mother permit that to happen, permit them to miss these years, these experiences? How did she think they would turn out? Why did she let it go on and on so long? Didn’t she realize that they would be socially immature the first day they returned to the world? It would be like coming up out of a coal mine and into the light of day. They would be blind for a while.
Suzette was the first to realize I was off somewhere else and suggested that she and Lana leave. “We can tell when someone is dreaming of what’s to come.”
“No, I . . .”
“You want to be fresh for your date,” she said. “Do what my mother does. Lie down with pieces of cucumber over your eyes.”
“Ugh,” Lana said. “How smelly.”
“You bathe or shower afterward, dummy,” Suzette said, and we left my room.
“I think I need some help with the math homework,” Lana told me when we were back in the living room. “Think you’ll have some time tomorrow?”
“Sure. Call me in the morning, and we’ll figure it out.”
Suzette was always the nosiest of the three of us. She looked around the living room and then began to flip through the magazines. I started toward her, but she saw the diary.
“What’s this?” she asked.
I scooped it up. “My diary,” I said.
“You keep a diary?” Suzette looked at Lana, who shrugged.
“I used to,” Lana said, “but after my brother found it and read it aloud, I burned it.”
“So are we in it?” Suzette asked.
“You’ll never know,” I said. “A diary is personal.”
“We know who’s mainly in it by now, anyway,” Lana said. “His name starts with K.”
Suzette continued to look at me and the diary suspiciously.
“That looks pretty old,” she said.
“It is. It belonged to my mother, but she never used it.”
“Oh. Well, whatever floats your boat,” she quipped, and they headed for the front door.
I followed but not too closely. I know I was clutching the diary so tightly that I made them suspicious, but I couldn’t help it.
“Have a great time,” Suzette said.
“Yeah. Whatever you do, do it for me, too,” Lana added, and they walked out.
I stood in the doorway watching them get into Suzette’s car. I waved, and they waved back. I could see they were talking a mile a minute as they drove off.
“Like I’d let anyone else touch you,” I told the diary, and hurried upstairs to put it under my pillow. It was getting late, and I had a lot of preparing to do, but I couldn’t stop thinking about our conversation. Had I done or said anything to give them a hint at what was really in this diary? Had they bought my story? They couldn’t possibly imagine what I had. Could they? It would be like some sort of a betrayal if I let anyone else read it or even know about it. Christopher would hate me, I thought, which was a silly thought, of course. He didn’t even know I existed.
Suddenly, that idea passed through my mind like lightning. What if he did know? What if I could meet him? What would I say? What would he say to me? Would he be terribly embarrassed that I had read his diary or terribly angry? I would give it back to him, of course, but he would know that I knew his deepest, most intimate thoughts, and the truth was, no matter how honest we wanted to be, none of us wanted anyone to know all our deepest, most intimate thoughts.
Secrets of Foxworth Page 20