“Say it anyway,” I told him.
He widened his smile. “Kristin Masterwood, I, Kane Hill, declare that I love you. When I’m away from you, I think so hard about you I forget what I’m doing. I don’t hear anyone talking to me. When I close my eyes, I see you. You’re with me when I’m asleep, and you’re the first thing I think about when I wake up. If I could skip everything between now and the day I could marry you and care for you, I would do it.”
We kissed.
“Let me finish making dinner,” I said softly. His words had taken away my breath. I could barely do more than whisper. Every part of my body he had touched was tingling with anticipation of his lips and fingers caressing me lovingly again. He nodded and stepped back.
“I’ll go up to your room and start some homework and leave you alone so you won’t be distracted. I’m gonna be very hungry.”
“You’d better be,” I said.
He walked out slowly, paused in the doorway to smile again, and then went up to my room.
I didn’t know when I had felt more content, more happy. I made sure to follow my father’s recipe exactly, measuring his ingredients carefully, and then put the lasagna in the oven. After that, I worked on the salad and got out some bread to heat. We had some of my favorite frozen yogurt. I planned to put some fresh fruit on it and surround it with ginger snaps for dessert.
Confident that we’d have a great dinner together, I finished setting the table and then went upstairs to join Kane and maybe start some of my own homework, but when I stepped through my bedroom doorway, I stopped as if I had walked into a glass wall.
Kane was lying on my bed.
And in his hands was Christopher’s diary.
Epilogue
“I was bored with my history assignment. It actually made me tired, so I leaned back on your bed and thought your pillow was really hard.”
I didn’t speak. All I could do was stare. Every muscle in my body felt locked. It made him nervous. He fumbled with the diary.
“So I moved the pillow and saw this. At first, I thought it was your diary, and I swear I didn’t open it, but then I realized how old it was and was naturally very curious. You look so upset, Kristin. I didn’t mean to . . .”
“How much have you read, Kane?”
“Just the first page. What is this? I mean, who is this? Was he your mother’s old boyfriend or something?” he asked, and put the diary down.
I picked it up. “No,” I said. My mind reeled as I tried to think of different things I could say. Should I make up something? Would he see right away that I wasn’t telling the truth? I sat at the foot of the bed, still stunned.
He sat up. “I’m sorry, Kristin,” he said.
I shook my head. “It’s not your fault. I probably would have done the same thing if it happened in your bedroom.” I looked at the diary. “There were many times when I almost told you about this, but I had promised my father I wouldn’t tell anyone about it.”
“Why?”
“It’s complicated. It has to do with our family, but . . . actually, he doesn’t like that I’m reading it, either.”
“Oh. Well, I promise. I’ll never mention it.”
I looked at him. Should I believe him? Didn’t everything boil down finally to trust? What kind of relationship could we have if we didn’t trust each other? “There would be no way you could hurt me worse than if you did that, Kane.”
“I understand. I’ll never do anything to hurt you, Kristin.” He smiled. “I’m still willing to write it in blood. Why exactly is your father so adamant about it?”
“Okay,” I said, deciding I would trust him. “When my father was first inspecting the foundation at Foxworth, I went along, and he and one of his employees found a locked box. They thought they had found something valuable, like jewelry or even money, but when it was opened, this was in it.”
“Foxworth? You mean, that diary belonged to someone who lived there?”
“Someone who didn’t want to live there. This is Christopher Dollanganger’s diary, his story about what happened in the attic.”
Kane’s face lit up with surprise and excitement. “I never believed most of it. I thought it was all just exaggerated and distorted.”
“The basic story is true. Four children were locked in the house and spent years mainly in the attic. Christopher was the oldest. I’ve read up to here slowly,” I said, indicating my bookmark. “It’s not easy to take.”
“Is that why your father doesn’t want you to read it?”
“Yes. He’s afraid it will have a bad effect on me. They are, as you know and I’m often reminded, distant relatives of mine.”
Kane smiled. “I don’t see how it could harm you. It’s just someone’s diary.”
“It’s more than that. There’s no way for you or anyone else to understand until you read it.”
“I see. From the little I did read, it looks like it’s well written. He must have been a pretty smart kid.”
“Very intelligent.”
“I’d like to read it, too,” Kane said. “With you, I mean. I would have to catch up to where you are, of course.”
“Really?”
“Sure. It’s obvious that it’s important to you, and what’s important to you is important to me, but I guess I’m also very curious about it.”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s better to have another opinion about it all, Kristin, and from the way it sounds, your father’s not going to read it.”
“Hardly.”
“So?”
“We’d have to read it here. I wouldn’t let this out of my house.”
“Tell me something hard to do,” he replied. “I’ll tell you what. Once I catch up to where you are, I’ll read it aloud to you. It’s written by a boy, so I’ll pretend to be him.”
“You’d want to do that?”
“Absolutely. It’ll be more . . . interesting for both of us. What is it they always tell us in literature class, you’ve got to identify with the character, care about him or her, to really enjoy or get into the story?”
“Yes.”
He reached for the diary. “So. Let’s do it the right way,” he said.
I gave it to him, and he stared at it and then looked at me.
“We’re going to do this secretly, I imagine.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “My father would be very upset with me otherwise.”
“Then I have another idea.”
The way he was looking at me actually gave me a chill for a moment. “What?” I whispered.
“We’ll read it only when you’re home alone. Mostly after school but also on weekends while your father’s at work on his new project.”
“Yes, of course, but . . .”
He looked up at the ceiling and nodded to himself.
“What?” I asked.
“And to get into it, really get into it, we’ll read it up in your attic,” he said.
I didn’t say yes to that immediately. The idea was both exciting and frightening to me. Kane was right. It would get us both into the story and the situation quickly and dramatically, but did I want to be in it that deeply? I was already finding myself identifying so closely with both Christopher and Cathy that I feared what he feared, cried when she cried, and felt the claustrophobia they both felt. My attic wasn’t as large by any means, but it was still closed in and full of memories. Just like the Dollanganger children had to keep what they were doing secret from all but their grandmother and their mother, we would have to keep what we were doing secret from my father.
I had never kept anything as serious as this secret from my father. What secrets had I kept? What I had bought him for his birthday and Christmas? He knew everything I did at school and everything that happened to me there. He knew every one of my friends. Oh, I didn’t talk about what girls talked about, and I didn’t give him a blow-by-blow description of my dates, especially with Kane, but these weren’t secrets so much as what gave me my independence a
nd my femininity. He didn’t expect to know or hear any of that.
What was more important, perhaps, was that I had never really disobeyed him. I had already done so by telling Kane what the diary was and how I had come to have it. Somehow, in the end, I had to believe in my heart that my father would understand.
“My attic is nothing like the one they were in. I mean, it’s probably not even a tenth of the size.”
He shrugged. “It’s like being on a movie set. Movie sets are only suggestions of what places are really like, but you get the sense of it.”
It was a weird idea, but I thought Christopher would approve of it. He’d want me to fully grasp what they had experienced.
I nodded slowly. “Okay. We’ll start tomorrow after school. Right now, I want to get back to our dinner,” I said.
“You need help?”
“No, I’ve done everything. Just like a man to ask afterward,” I added, and he laughed.
“Okay. I’ll start catching up. Call me when you want me to come down,” he said.
I had to smile. He was into this almost as much as I was. “Put it back under the pillow when I call you.”
“Yes, Mommy,” he said.
I felt the blood rise in my face. Cathy Dollanganger had just stepped into her mother’s shoes firmly and perhaps forever.
I nodded and started to leave the room. I looked back. He was sprawled on my bed, and as crazy as it might seem, I didn’t see him.
I saw Christopher Dollanganger.
Waiting.
For me to join him in the attic.
Read on for a sneak peek at what happens next in
Christopher’s Diary: Echoes of Dollanganger
By V.C. Andrews®
Available in February 2015 from Pocket Books
Becoming Christopher and Cathy
The shorter days of approaching winter darkened every corner of my attic earlier and earlier every afternoon. Usually, when you think of yourself ascending, whether it’s hiking up a mountain, flying in an airplane, or walking to the top floor of your house, you imagine moving into brighter light. But as my boyfriend Kane Hill and I walked up the attic stairway for the first time together, I could almost feel the shadows growing and opening like Venus flytraps to welcome us.
The stairs creaked the way they always had, but it sounded more like a warning this time, each squeak a groan of frantic admonition. Our attic didn’t have an unpleasant odor, but it did have the scent of old things that hadn’t seen the light of day for years: furniture, lamps, and trunks stuffed with old clothing too out of fashion to care about or throw out when the previous owners left. They were still good enough for someone else to use. All of it had been accumulated by those my father called “pack rats,” but he also admitted to being one himself. Our garage was neat but jammed with his older tools and boxes of sample building materials, my first tricycle, various hoses, and plumbing fittings he might find use for someday.
The attic floor was a dark brown hardwood that had worn well and, according to my father, was as solid as the day it had been laid. He looked in on it once in a while, but I would go up regularly to dust a bit, get rid of spiderwebs, and clean the two small windows, spotted with small flies and other tiny bugs who thought they had died outside. I felt I had to maintain the attic mostly because my father kept my mother’s things in an old wardrobe there, a hardwood with a walnut veneer that had embossed cherubs on the doors, another antique. Even after nearly nine years, my father couldn’t get himself to throw out or give away any of her things: shoes and slippers, purses, dresses, blouses, nightgowns, coats, and sweaters.
Just like in the Foxworth attic Christopher had described in his diary, there were other larger items that previous occupants had left, including brass and pewter tables and standing lamps, a dark oak magazine rack with some old copies of Life and Time, some black and silver metal trunks that had once worn their travel labels proudly, bragging about Paris, London, and Madrid, and other pieces of furniture that had lost their places in the living room and the bedrooms when the decor had been changed.
Despite being thought useless and relegated to this vault, to my father they were almost a part of the house now. He said that their having been there so long gave them squatters’ rights. It really didn’t matter whether they had been there long or whether they would find another home, fulfill another purpose. Memories, no matter whose they were, were sacred to him. Things weren’t ever simply things. Old toys were once cherished by the children who owned them, and family heirlooms possessed history, whether or not you knew exactly what that history was. It didn’t surprise me that a man who built and restored homes had such respect for what was in them. I just hadn’t paid much attention to any of it until now.
I was still not convinced that what Kane Hill had suggested the day he discovered Christopher’s diary under my pillow was a good idea. At first, I suspected that he might be playing with me, humoring me, when he had said he would read it aloud to me, pretending to be Christopher Dollanganger, the oldest of the four children who had been incarcerated in Foxworth Hall more than fifty years ago. I didn’t want to diminish the diary’s historical importance for Charlottesville or in any way make fun of it. He had assured me that he wouldn’t do that.
And then he had added, “To get into it, really get into it, we’ll read it up in your attic.”
The Foxworth attic was where the four Dollanganger children spent most of their time for years, there and in a small bedroom below. According to what I knew and how Christopher had described it, the attic was a long, rambling loft that they had turned into their imaginary world because of how long they had been shut away from the real one. The idea of reading Christopher’s thoughts and descriptions aloud in a similar environment both fascinated and frightened me. We would no longer be simply observers. In a sense, by playing the roles of Christopher and Cathy, we would empathize, and not just sympathize, with them.
As soon as he had said it, Kane saw the indecision in my face, however, and went on to explain that it would be like acting on a movie set. Movie sets in studios were suggestions of what really was or had been, weren’t they?
“This is no different, Kristin,” Kane said.
I pointed out that my attic was so much smaller than the one in Foxworth, but he insisted that it was an attic, a place where we could better pretend to be imprisoned and therefore better understand what Christopher and Cathy had experienced.
He thought we’d get a more realistic sense of it. “It will be like reading Moby Dick while you’re on a ship on the ocean. This way, you’ll appreciate what happens to the older sister more, and I’ll appreciate Christopher’s words more, I’m sure.”
Of course, I had found myself empathizing with Cathy often when I read Christopher’s diary, anyway, but not to the extent he was suggesting. It was more like putting on her clothes and stepping into her shoes. In moments, I would lose myself completely and for a while become her. Maybe I did have to be in an attic for that. However, what frightened me about pretending to be her in front of someone else was the possibility that I would be exposing my own vulnerabilities, my own fears and fantasies. Everyone knew the Dollanganger children were distant cousins of mine.
What if I was more like her than I imagined?
ABOUT
One of the most popular authors of all time, V.C. Andrews has been a bestselling phenomenon since the publication of Flowers in the Attic, first in the renowned Dollanganger family saga, which includes Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, and Garden of Shadows. Today, more than seventy of V.C. Andrews’s novels have sold worldwide and been translated into twenty-five foreign languages.
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V.C. Andrews® Books
The Dollanganger Family Series
Flowers in the Attic
Petals on the Win
d
If There Be Thorns
Seeds of Yesterday
Garden of Shadows
The Casteel Family Series
Heaven
Dark Angel
Fallen Hearts
Gates of Paradise
Web of Dreams
The Cutler Family Series
Dawn
Secrets of the Morning
Twilight’s Child
Midnight Whispers
Darkest Hour
The Landry Family Series
Ruby
Pearl in the Mist
All That Glitters
Hidden Jewel
Tarnished Gold
The Logan Family Series
Melody
Heart Song
Unfinished Symphony
Music in the Night
Olivia
The Orphans Miniseries
Butterfly
Crystal
Brooke
Raven
Runaways
The Wildflowers Miniseries
Misty
Star
Jade
Cat
Into the Garden
The Hudson Family Series
Rain
Lightning Strikes
Eye of the Storm
The End of the Rainbow
The Shooting Stars Series
Cinnamon
Ice
Rose
Honey
Falling Stars
The De Beers Family Series
Willow
Wicked Forest
Twisted Roots
Into the Woods
Hidden Leaves
The Broken Wings Series
Broken Wings
Midnight Flight
The Gemini Series
Celeste
Black Cat
Child of Darkness
The Shadows Series
April Shadows
Girl in the Shadows
The Early Spring Series
Broken Flower
Scattered Leaves
The Secrets Series
Secrets in the Attic
Secrets in the Shadows
Secrets of Foxworth Page 26