“I think he was going to stop.”
I froze for a moment. What if Kane was right? What would make Christopher change his mind about keeping a diary? What would stop anyone? Was this why he locked it in that metal box and hid it away, why he didn’t take it with him when he left? And yet he hadn’t destroyed it, torn it up, or anything. It was almost as if he wanted someone to find it years later. That was his plan, never anticipating a horrendous fire.
“Maybe we should stop, then, Kane.”
“Could you do that?”
“I’ve always felt that my father knew something more, and that was why he was so concerned about my reading it. This might be it. Some things are better left buried.”
“It can’t possibly matter now, can it? Malcolm Foxworth and his wife are dead, and Corrine is probably still in the loony bin. If we gave this to the district attorney, he’d file it away somewhere under ‘Why waste my time?’?”
“I suddenly just had a terrible chill,” I said, hugging myself.
He got up quickly and sat beside me, hugging me and rubbing my shoulder and my back, kissing my hair, my forehead, and my cheeks.
“It’s not the kind of chill that comes from being in a cold room, Kane. It’s the kind of chill that comes from deep inside you.”
“Take a deep breath. It’ll pass,” he said.
“Suddenly, I’m really frightened for both of us,” I said.
He smiled. “Kristin, this is just someone’s diary. It doesn’t burn our fingers to hold it. Nothing terrible has happened to either of us because we’re reading it or to anyone we love. There’s no such thing as a curse. You’re acting like those fools who go up to Foxworth on Halloween and scare each other.”
“Because we’re reading this diary, you’ve told me things you’ve never told anyone else, right?”
“So?”
“There’s something about it, something more than it just being a diary about a terrible thing being done to children.”
“Whatever you think about it is coming from you, not from the diary. I probably would have told you things about myself anyway, because I trust you and I care more for you than any other girl I’ve met. Okay, it’s magical. It brought us more closely together. I’ll give you that but nothing more,” he said. “We’ve got to go on. If I were really Christopher, I’d want you to go on.”
I looked into his eyes. Yes, maybe he was right, I thought. I nodded softly. He smiled and kissed me and hugged me again, holding me tightly for a few moments. Then he rose and returned to the chair. I would never look at that chair again without thinking of these days, without hearing his voice, and without envisioning the Dollanganger children. My father was right. Things, furniture, mementos, all do take on a life of their own and become far more than wood, metal, plastic, and paper. Nothing deserves to end up in a junkyard along with other lost memories. I recalled him once saying, “We hold on to things we were given and things we shared with loved ones because we don’t want to die.”
You die a little more with everything you leave behind, discard, and destroy. That was why he clung so hard to his old truck, why he despised the idea of people building and owning homes as investments. Homes weren’t another form of commodity to him. They were filled with family, with the aromas of their favorite foods, with the echo of their laughter and the rumbling of their unhappiness, still damp with their tears. “When someone moves into someone else’s home, despite the new paint and even the new appliances, they’re putting on someone else’s old socks,” he told me.
“But can’t they make it their own, too?”
“Maybe,” he said. “But it gets crowded.”
My father, I thought, there was no one like him.
I took a deep breath. So did Kane, and he opened the diary, turned the blank page, and continued.
I couldn’t get the book with the sexually explicit pictures out of my mind. Whenever it was time for me to venture out to search for more money, I had to admit to myself that I was drawn to look at that book almost as much as I was drawn to look for the money we needed for our escape. I confessed that to Cathy, and then I described what had nearly happened on my latest visit to Momma’s bedroom and what I had overheard. It wasn’t until I described it to her that I realized what she had done and how close to revealing us she had come.
I was looking at the book when I heard voices and realized it was our mother and her new husband. I had no time to slip out, so I went into our mother’s closet and crouched. While I was in there, I heard Bart Winslow complain about missing money. He was blaming it on the servants, but Momma wasn’t very interested. They argued about going to a play, and fortunately for me, Momma won the argument, but then Bart Winslow described his dream.
“What dream?” Cathy asked.
As I related it to her, it was a dream about some young girl with long golden hair sneaking into their room while he was asleep and kissing him on the lips. I had a suspicion he was talking about Cathy, and as I told her about it, I could see in her face that I was talking about her.
It threw me into a rage. How could she risk our lives like that? Was he so handsome, her need so much greater than mine? I knew she was frustrated, but so was I, and I didn’t go off and do anything that crazy. She could say nothing to defend herself.
I mumbled about how lucky I was that Momma had insisted they leave, which made it possible for me to sneak back out. Then I turned away from her and sulked about it on my own bed. I don’t know how much time passed before I calmed down enough to look back at her, but she was gone. She had gone to sit by the window in the moonlight.
I stood there looking at her, looking at how the moonlight outlined her breasts, her thighs, and the small of her stomach through the thin nightshirt. She sensed my presence and looked at me, unmoving, tempting me with her innocent new beauty. I told her she looked beautiful sitting there and that because of the moonlight, she was as good as naked. She didn’t move to cover herself up.
Suddenly, I thought of her not as my young sister, Cathy, but as some far more sophisticated young nymph, a temptress who had so much confidence in herself that she would dare sneak up to a grown man sleeping and kiss him softly on his lips, wanting to taste those lips, wanting to satisfy her own sexual need. Well, didn’t I need and want that? All I could think, which blinded me from thinking any other thought, was that she would have willingly given herself to Bart Winslow if he had awakened and reached for her. He would take her on that damn swan bed. She would know another man’s love, not mine.