Dead of night! Oh, God! I wished Chris hadn’t mentioned the attic where Cory had almost died in a trunk before he went on to meet Daddy in heaven. Chris kissed my cheek and wiped away my tears. “Come now, don’t cry. I said all of that wrong. She’ll be all right.”
“What do you mean you don’t know where my ward is?” fired Paul in a hard voice as he coldly eyed Miss Dewhurst. “It was my understanding the girls in this school were properly supervised twenty-four hours a day!”
We were in the posh office of Miss Emily Dean Dewhurst. She was not seated behind her impressive, large desk, but restlessly pacing the floor. “Really, Dr. Sheffield, nothing like this has ever happened before. Never have we lost a girl. We make a room check every night to see the girls are tucked in bed with lights out, and Carrie was in her bed. I myself looked in on her, wanting to comfort her if she’d let me, but she refused to look at me or to speak. Of course it all began with I that fight in your ward’s room and the demerits that resulted in their loss of their weekend liberty. Every member of the faculty has helped me search and we’ve questioned our girls who profess to know nothing about it—which I imagine they do—but if they won’t talk, I don’t know what to do next.”
“Why didn’t you notify me when you first found her missing?” Paul asked. I spoke up then and asked to be taken to Carrie’s room. Miss Dewhurst turned eagerly to me, anxious to escape the doctor’s wrath. As we three followed her up the stairs she spilled forth lengthy excuses so we’d understand how difficult it was to handle so many mischievous girls. When we finally entered Carrie’s room several students trailed behind us, whispering back and forth about how much Chris and I looked like Carrie, only we weren’t “so freakishly small.”
Chris turned to scowl at them. “No wonder she hates it here if you can say things like that!”
“We’ll find her,” assured Chris. “If we have to stay all week and torture each little witch here we’ll make them tell us where she is.”
“Young man,” shot out Miss Dewhurst, “nobody tortures my girls but me!”
I knew Carrie better than anyone and around the grooves of her brain I ambled. Now, if I were Carrie’s age, would I try to escape a school that had unjustly kept me from going home? Yes! I would do exactly that. But I was not Carrie; I would not run away in only a nightgown. All her little uniforms were there, custom sewn by Henny, and her small sweaters, skirts and blouses, and pretty dresses, all there. Everything she’d brought to this school was in its proper place. Only the porcelain dolls were missing.
Still on my knees before Carrie’s dresser, I sat back on my heels and looked up at Paul and showed him the box that contained nothing but cotton wadding and sticks of wood. “Her dolls aren’t here,” I said dully, not comprehending the sticks at all, “and as far as I can tell the only article of her clothing that’s missing is one of her nightgowns. Carrie wouldn’t go outside wearing only her nightgown. She’s got to be here—someplace no one has looked.”
“We have looked everywhere!” Miss Dewhurst spoke impatiently, as if I had no voice in this matter, only the guardian, the doctor, whose favor she sought even while Paul turned on her another of his stern, hard looks.
For some reason I can’t explain I swiveled my head about and caught a cat-who’s-eaten-the-canary look on the pale and sickly face of a frizzled, rust-haired, skinny girl whom I detested merely from hearing the little Carrie had told me about her roommate. Maybe it was just her eyes, or the way she kept fingering the big square pocket of her organdy pinafore that narrowed my own eyes as I tried to pierce the depths of hers. She blanched and shifted her green eyes toward the windows, shuffled her feet about uneasily and quickly yanked her hand from her pocket. It was a lined pocket and it bulged suspiciously.
“You,” I said, “you’re Carrie’s roommate, aren’t you?”
“I was,” she murmured.
“What is that you have in your pocket?”
Her head jerked toward me. Her eyes sparked green fire as the muscles near her lips twitched. “None of your business!”
“Miss Towers!” whiplashed Miss Dewhurst. “Answer Miss Dollanganger’s question!”
“It’s my purse,” said Sissy Towers, glaring at me defiantly.
“It’s a very lumpy purse,” I said, and suddenly I lunged forward and seized Sissy Towers about the knees. With my free hand, as she struggled and howled, I pulled from her pocket a blue scarf. From that scarf tumbled Mr. and Mrs. Parkins and baby Clara. I held the three porcelain dolls in my hand and demanded, “What are you doing with my sister’s dolls?”
“They’re my dolls!” said the girl, her gimlet eyes narrowing to slits. The girls gathered around began to snicker and made whispering remarks to one another.
“Your dolls? These dolls belong to my sister.”
“You lie!” she fired back. “You are stealing from me and my father can have you thrown in jail!”
“Miss Dewhurst,” ordered the small demon, her hand reaching for the dolls, “you make this person leave me alone! I don’t like her, no more than her dwarf sister!”
I got to my feet and towered threateningly above her. Protectively I put the dolls behind my back. She’d have to kill me to get to them!
“Miss Dewhurst!” shrieked the imp as she attacked me. “My mommy and daddy gave me those dolls for my Christmas!”
“You lying little devil!” I said, itching to slap her defiant face. “You stole those dolls and the crib from my sister. And because you did Carrie is at this very moment in extreme danger!” I knew it. I felt it. Carrie needed help and fast. “Where is my sister?” I raged.
I stared hard at that red-haired girl named Sissy, knowing she had the answer to where Carrie was but knowing she’d never tell me. It was in her eyes, her mean, spiteful eyes. It was then that Lacy St. John spoke up and told us what they’d done to Carrie the night before.
Oh, God! There was no place in the world more terrifying to Carrie than a roof—any roof! I went reeling back into the past, when Chris and I had tried to take the twins out on the roof of Foxworth Hall so we could hold them in the sunlight and keep them in the fresh air so they’d grow. And like children out of their minds from fright they’d screamed and kicked.
I squeezed my eyelids very tight, concentrating fully on Carrie, where, where, where? And behind my eyes I saw her crouched in a dark corner in what seemed a canyon rising tall on either side of her.
“I want to look in the attic myself,” I said to Miss Dewhurst, and she quickly said they’d already thoroughly searched the attic and called and called Carrie’s name. But they didn’t know Carrie like I did. They didn’t know my small sister could go off to a never-never land where speech didn’t exist, not when she was in shock.
Up the attic stairs all the teachers, Chris, Paul and I climbed. It was so much like it used to be, a huge, dim and dusty place. But not full of old furniture covered with dusty gray sheets or remnants of the past. Up here were only stacks upon stacks of heavy wooden crates.
Carrie was here. I could sense it. I felt her presence as if she reached out and touched me, though when I looked around I saw nothing but the crates. “Carrie!” I called as loudly as possible. “It’s me, Cathy. Don’t hide and keep quiet because you’re afraid! I’ve got your dolls and Dr. Paul is with me and so is Chris. We’ve come to take you home, and never again are we going to send you away to school!” I nudged Paul, “Now you tell her that too.”
He abandoned his soft voice and boomed, “Carrie, if you can hear me, it’s just as your sister says. We want you to come home with us to stay. I’m sorry, Carrie. I thought you’d like it here. Now I know you couldn’t possibly have been happy. Carrie, please come out, we need you.”
Then I thought I heard a soft whimper. I raced in that direction with Chris close at my heels. I knew about attics, how to search, how to find.
Abruptly I drew to a halt and Chris collided with me. Just ahead, in the dim shadows created by the towers of heavy wooden crates, st
ill in her nightgown, all torn, dirty and bloody, gagged and still blindfolded, I spied Carrie. Her spill of blond hair gleamed in the faint light. Beneath her a leg was twisted in a grotesque way. “Oh, God,” whispered Chris and Paul at the same time, “her leg looks broken.”
“Wait a minute,” Paul cautioned in a low voice, clamping both his hands down on my shoulders when I would heedlessly run forward and rescue Carrie. “Look at those crates, Cathy. Just one careless move on your part and they will all come crashing down on both you and Carrie.”
Somewhere behind me a teacher moaned and began to pray. How Carrie had managed to drag herself down that close passageway while blind and bound was unbelievable. A fully adult person couldn’t have done it—but I could do it—I was still small enough.
Even as I spoke I planned the way. “Carrie, do exactly as I say. Don’t lean to the right or to the left. Lie flat on your stomach, aim for my voice. I’m going to crawl in to you and take hold of you under your arms. Raise your head high so your face won’t be scraped. Dr. Paul will grab hold of my ankles and pull us both out.”
“Tell her it’s going to hurt her leg.”
“Did you hear Dr. Paul, Carrie? It’s going to hurt your leg so please don’t thrash about if you feel pain, everything will be over in a second or two and Dr. Paul will make your leg well again.”
It seemed to take hours for me to inch down that tunnel while the crates teetered and rocked, and when I had her by the shoulders I heard Dr. Paul cry out “Okay, Cathy!” Then he pulled, fast and hard! Down thundered the wooden crates! Dust flew everywhere. In the confusion I was at Carrie’s side, removing the gag and blindfold while the doctor untied her bonds.
Then Carrie was clinging to me, blinking because the light hurt, crying from the pain, terrified to see the teachers and her leg so crooked.
In the ambulance that came to take Carrie to the hospital Chris and I rode and shared the same stool, each of us holding one of Carrie’s hands. Paul followed in his white car so he’d be there to supervise the orthopedist who would set Carrie’s broken leg. Lying face upward on the pillow near her head with fixed smiles and rigid bodies were Carrie’s three dolls. That’s when I remembered. Now the crib was missing too, just as the cradle had disappeared years ago.
Carrie’s broken leg spoiled the long summer vacation trip our doctor had planned for all of us. Again I raged inwardly at Momma. Her fault; always we were punished for what she’d caused! It wasn’t fair that Carrie had to be laid up and we couldn’t journey north—while our mother gallivanted from here to there, going to parties, hobnobbing with the jet set and the movie stars as if we didn’t exist at all! On the French Riviera now. I cut that item from Greenglenna’s society column and pasted it into my huge scrapbook of revenge. That was one article I showed to Chris before I put it into the book. I didn’t show him all of them. I didn’t want him to know I had subscribed to the Virginia newspaper that reported on everything the Foxworths did.
“Where did you get this?” he demanded, looking up from the clipping he handed back to me.
“The Greenglenna newspaper—it’s more concerned with high society than Clairmont’s Daily News. Our mother is a hot item, didn’t you know?”
“I try to forget, unlike you!” he said sharply. “We don’t have it so bad now, do we? We’re lucky to be with Paul, and Carrie’s leg will mend and be as good as ever. And other summers will come when we can go to New England.”
How did he know that? Nothing ever was offered twice. Maybe in other summers to come we’d be too busy or Paul would. “You realize, being an ‘almost’ doctor, don’t you, that her leg might not grow while she’s in that cast?”
He looked strangely ill-at-ease. “If she grew like average kids I guess there might be that risk. But, Cathy, she doesn’t grow very much, so there’s little chance one leg will be shorter than the other.”
“Oh, go bury your nose in Gray’s Anatomy!” I flared, angry because he’d always make light of anything I said that made Momma the fault of anything. He knew why Carrie didn’t grow as well as I did. Deprived of love, of sunshine and freedom, it was a marvel she’d lived to survive! Arsenic too! Damn Momma to hell!
Busily, day by day, I added to my collection of news clippings and blurry photographs cut from many newspapers. That’s where most of my “pin money” went. Though I stared at all the pictures of Momma with hate and loathing, I looked at her husband with admiration. How very handsome, how powerfully built her young husband was with his long, lean, darkly bronzed skin. I stared at the photograph that showed him lifting a champagne glass high as he toasted his wife on their second wedding anniversary.
I decided that night to send Momma a short note. Sent first class, it would be forwarded.
Dear Mrs. Winslow,
How well I remember the summer of your honeymoon. It was a wonderful summer, so refreshingly pleasant in the mountains in a locked room with windows that were never opened.
Congratulations and my very best wishes, Mrs. Winslow, and I do hope all your future summers, winters, springs and falls will be haunted by the memory of the kind of summers, winters, springs and falls your Dresden dolls used to have.
Not yours anymore,
The doctor doll,
The ballerina doll,
The praying-to-grow-taller doll,
And the dead doll.
I ran to post the letter and no sooner had I dropped it in the mailbox on the corner than I was wishing I had it back. Chris would hate me for doing this.
It rained that night and I got up to watch the storm. Tears streaked my face as much as the rain streaked the window glass. Because it was Saturday Chris was home. He was out there on the veranda, allowing the wind-driven rain to wet his pajamas and glue them to his skin.
He saw me just about the time I saw him, and he stepped into my room without saying a word. We clung together, me crying and him trying hard not to. I wanted him to go, even as I held hard to him and cried on his shoulder. “Why, Cathy, why all the tears?” he asked as I sobbed on and on.
“Chris,” I asked when I could, “you don’t still love her, do you?”
He hesitated before he answered. That made anger simmer my blood into a rolling boil. “You do!” I cried. “How can you after what she did to Cory and to Carrie? Chris, what’s wrong with you that you can go on loving when you should hate as I do?”
Still he didn’t say anything. And his very silence gave me the answer. He went on loving her because he had to if he were to go on loving me. Every time he looked in my face he saw her and what she’d been like in her early youth. Chris was just like Daddy, who had been just as vulnerable to the kind of beauty I had. But it was only a surface resemblance. I wasn’t weak! I wasn’t without abilities! I could have thought of one thousand ways to earn a living, rather than lock my four children in a miserable room and leave them in care of an evil old woman who wanted to see them suffer for sins that weren’t even theirs!
While I thought my vengeful thoughts and made my plans to ruin her life when I could, Chris was tenderly kissing me. I hadn’t even noticed. “Stop!” I cried when I felt his lips pressing down on mine. “Leave me alone! You don’t love me like I want to be loved, for what I am. You love me because my face is like hers! Sometimes I hate my face!”
He looked terribly wounded as he backed toward the door. “I was only trying to comfort you,” he said in a broken voice. “Don’t turn it into something ugly.”
* * *
My fear that Carrie’s leg would come out of the cast shorter than the other proved groundless. In no time at all after her leg was cut free from the plaster she was walking around as good as ever.
As fall neared, Chris, Paul and I conferred and decided that a public school where Carrie could come home every afternoon would be best for her after all. All she’d have to do was board a bus three blocks from home; the same bus would bring her home at three in the afternoon. In Paul’s big homey kitchen she’d stay with Henny while I attende
d ballet class.
Soon September was upon us again, then November had gone by, and still Carrie hadn’t made a single friend. She wanted most desperately to belong, but always she was an outsider. She wanted someone as dear as a sister but she found only suspicion, hostility and ridicule. It seemed Carrie would walk the long halls of that elementary school forever before she found a friend.
“Cathy,” Carrie would tell me, “nobody likes me.”
“They will. Sooner or later they will know how sweet and wonderful you are. And you have all of us who love and admire you so don’t let others worry you. Don’t care what they think!” She sniffed, for she did care, she did!
* * *
Carrie slept on her twin bed pushed close beside mine, and every night I saw her kneel beside her bed, temple her small hands under her chin, and with lowered head she prayed, “And please, God, let me find my mother again. My real mother. And most of all, Lord God, let me grow just a little bit taller. You don’t have to make me as tall as Momma, but almost as tall as Cathy, please God, please, please.”
Lying on my bed and hearing this, I stared bleakly up at the ceiling and I hated Momma, really despised and loathed her! How could Carrie still want a mother who’d been so cruel? Had Chris and I done right in sparing her the grim truth of how our own mother had tried to kill us? How she’d caused Carrie to be as small as she was?
Upon her smallness Carrie placed all her unhappiness and loneliness. She knew she had a pretty face and sensational hair, but what did they matter when the face and the hair were on a head much too large for the thin little body? Carrie’s beauty did nothing at all to win her friends and admiration, just the opposite. “Doll face, Angel Hair. Hey you, midget, or are you a dwarf? Are you gonna join a circus and be their littlest freak?” And home she’d run, all three blocks from the bus stop, scared and crying, tormented again by children without sensitivity.
“I’m no good, Cathy!” she wailed with her face buried in my lap. “Nobody likes me. They don’t like my body ’cause it’s too little, and they don’t like my head ’cause it’s too big, and they don’t even like what is pretty ’cause they think it’s wasted on somebody too little like me!”
The Flowers in the Attic Series: The Dollangangers: Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, and a New Excerpt! Page 53