Petals on the Wind (Dollanganger 2)

"About a week ago, I started feeling very tired. I didn't tell Cathy 'cause she worries so much about me anyway. Then I had headaches and I felt sleepy all the time, and I got big bruises and didn't know how I got them. Then I combed my hair and lots and lots of it came out, and then I just started throwing up . . . and other things that other doctors have already asked me and I told them." Her thin, whispering voice drifted off. "I wish I could see Chris," she mumbled before her eyes closed and she was asleep.

Paul had already seen Carrie's chart and talked to her doctors. Now he turned to me with that blank expression that put dread in my heart . . . it was so fraught with meaning. "Maybe you ought to send for Chris."

"Paul! Do you mean . . . ?"

"No, I don't mean that. But if she wants him, he should be here with her."

I was in the hall, waiting for the doctors to do certain tests on Carrie. They had chased me from the room. As I paced back and forth before the closed door to her room, I sensed him before I saw him I whirled about, catching my breath to see Chris striding down the long corridor, bypassing nurses carrying bedpans and trays of medicines who gaped to see him in all his splendid glory.

Time rolled backward and I saw Daddy, Daddy as I best remembered him, dressed in white tennis clothes. I couldn't speak when Chris took me in his arms and. bowed his tanned face down into my hair I heard the thud of his heart beating strong and regular. I sobbed, so near a deluge of tears, "It didn't take you long to get here." His face was in my hair and his voice was husky. "Cathy," he asked, raising his head and looking me directly in the eyes, "what is wrong with Carrie?"

His question stunned me--for he should know! "Can't you guess? It's that damned arsenic, I know it is! What else could it be? She was fine until a week ago, then all of a sudden she's sick." I broke then and sobbed, "She wants to see you." But before I led him to Carrie's small room, I put in his hand a note I'd found in the diary she'd started the day she met Alex. "Chris, Carrie knew for a long time something was going wrong, but she kept it to herself. Read this and tell me what you think." While he read, my eyes stayed glued to his face.

Dear Cathy and Chris,

Sometimes I think you two are my real parents, but then I remember my real momma and daddy, and she seems like a dream that never was, and I can't picture Daddy unless I have his photograph in my hand--though I can picture Cory just like he was.

I've been hiding something. So if I don't write this you are going to blame yourselves. For a long time I've felt I was going to die soon, and I don't care anymore, like I used to. I can't be a minister's wife. I wouldn't have lived this long if you two, and Jory, and Dr. Paul and Henny hadn't loved me so much. Without all of you to hold me here, I would have gone on to Cory a long time ago. Everybody has somebody special to love, except me. Everybody has something special to do, except me. I've always known I'd never get married. I knew I was fooling myself about having children, for my hips are too narrow, and I think too I'm too small to make a good wife. I'd never be anybody special, like you, Cathy, who can dance and have babies and everything else. I can't be a doctor like Chris, so I'd just be nothing much, just somebody to get in the way and worry everybody because I'm unhappy.

So, right now, before you read on further, promise in your heart you won't let the doctors do anything to make me live on. Just let me die, and don't cry. Don't feel sad and miss me after I'm buried. Nothing has been right, or felt right since Cory went away and left me. What I regret most is I won't be around to watch Jory dance on stage like Julian used to. Now I have to confess the truth, I loved Julian, the same as I love Alex. Julian never thought I was too little, and he was the only one who made me feel a normal woman, for a short time. Though it was sinful, even when you say it was not, I know it was, Cathy.

Last week I started thinking about the grandmother and what she used to say to us all the time about being the Devil's spawn. The more I thought about it, the more I knew she was right--/ shouldn't have been born! I am evil! When Cory died because of the arsenic on the sugared doughnuts the grandmother gave us, I should have died too! You didn't think I knew, did you? You thought all the time I was sitting on the floor, in the corner, I couldn't hear and didn't take notice, but I was seeing and hearing, but I didn't believe, back then. Now I believe.

Thank you, Cathy, for being like my mother and the best sister alive. And thank you, Chris, for being my substitute father and my second best brother, and thank you, Dr. Paul, for loving me even though I didn't grow. Thank all of you for never being ashamed to be seen with me, and tell Henny I love her I think maybe God won't want me either, until I grow taller, and then I think about Alex, who thinks God loves everybody, even when they aren't so tall.

She'd signed that letter in a huge scrawl to make up for her small size. "Oh, dear God!" cried Chris. "Cathy, what does this mean?"

Only then could I open my purse and take from it something I'd found hidden away in the dark, far end of the closet in Carrie's room. His blue eyes grew wide and the color seemed to fade as he read the name of the rat poison bottle, then saw the package of sugared doughnuts with only one left. One left. It had been bitten into just once. Tears began to course down his cheeks, then he was really sobbing on my shoulder. "Oh, God . . . she put that arsenic on the doughnuts, didn't she, so she could die in the same way Cory did?"

I broke free from his clutching arms and backed a few feet away, feeling I was drained of all blood. "Chris! Read that letter over again! Didn't you notice what she wrote, how she didn't believe, and Now I believe.' Why wouldn't she believe back then, and believe now? Something happened! Something happened to make her believe that our mother could poison us!"

He shook his head in a bewildered fashion, the tears still eking from his eyes. "But if she knew a

ll along, how could anything more happen to convince her, when overhearing us talking and seeing Mickey die didn't?"

"How can I tell you?" I cried out desperately. "But the doughnuts have been liberally coated with arsenic! Paul had them tested. Carrie ate those, knowing they would kill her. Can't you see this is another murder our mother committed?"

"She isn't dead yet!" Chris cried. "We'll save her! We won't let her die. We'll talk to her, tell her she has to hold on!"

I ran to hold him, fearing it was too late and desperately hoping it wasn't. Even as we clung together, made parents again by our common suffering, Paul came from Carrie's room. The solemn expression on his drawn face told me everything.

"Chris," said Paul calmly, "how wonderful to see you again. I'm sorry the circumstances are so sad."

"There's hope, isn't there?" cried Chris.

"There's always hope. We are doing what we can. You look so tan and vibrant. Hurry in to see your sister and pass along some of that vitality to her. Catherine and I have said all we can think of to try to make her fight back and gain her will to live. But she has given up. Alex is in there on his knees by her bed, praying for her to live, but Carrie has her head turned toward the windows. I don't think she realizes what is said or what is done. She's gone off somewhere out of our reach."

Paul and I trailed along behind Chris who ran to Carrie. She lay thin as a rail beneath a pile of heavy covers, when it was still summer. It just didn't seem possible she could age so quickly! All the firm, ripe, rosy roundness of youth had fled, leaving her small face gaunt and hollow. Her eyes were deep pits to make her cheekbones very prominent. She even seemed to have lost some of her height. Chris cried out to see her so. He leaned to gather her in his arms, called her name repeatedly, stroked her long hair. To his horror hundreds of the golden strands clung to his fingers when he drew them away. "Good God in heaven--what's being done for her?"

When he brushed the hair from his fingers I hurried forward to pluck them from his hands, and in a plastic box I carefully laid them out. The electric static of the box kept them in place. An idiot notion, but I couldn't bear to see her beautiful hair swept up and thrown away. Her hair glinted on the pillows, on the bedspread, on the white lace of her bedjacket. As in a trance of nightmares unending I gathered up the long hairs and arranged them neatly while Alex prayed on and on. Even as he was introduced to Chris he paused only long enough to nod.

"Paul, answer me! What is being done to help Carrie?"

"Everything we know how to do," answered Paul, his voice low and soft, the way people speak when death is near. "A team of good doctors are working around the clock to save her. But her red blood cells are being destroyed faster than we can replace them with transfusions."

Three days and nights all of us lingered beside Carrie's bedside while my neighbor took care of Jory. Each of us who loved her prayed that she'd live. I called Henny and told her to go to church and have all her family and church members pray for Carrie too. She tapped over the line her signal for "Yes, Yes!"

Flowers arrived daily to fill her room. I didn't look to see who sent them. I sat beside Chris or Paul, or between both, and held to their hands and silently prayed. I looked with distaste upon Alex, whom I believed responsible for much of what was wrong with Carrie. Finally I could keep my question to myself no longer; I got up and stalked Alex and backed him into a corner. "Alex, why would Carrie want to die during the happiest days of her life? What did she tell you and what did you say?"