Immediately thoughts of my own father came to torment me. An accident on the highway. Were we duplicating our mother's act in reverse, running away from, not to, Foxworth Hall? Tick-tock went the clocks. Thumpity-thump-thump went my heartbeats. Nursery rhymes I had to read so the twins would sleep and stop asking questions. Little Tommy Tucker, sing for your supper . . . When you wish upon a star . . . dancing in the dark . . . all our lives, dancing in the dark . . .
"Mother, please stop pacing the floor," ordered Jory. "You rub my nerves raw. Why this grand rush to leave? Tell me why, please say something."
Joel and Bart strolled in to join us.
"You weren't at the dinner table, Mother. I'll tell the chef to prepare a tray." He glanced at Toni. "YOU can stay."
"No, thank you, Bart. Jory has asked me to marry him." Her chin lifted defiantly. "He loves me in a way you never can."
Bart turned betrayed, hurt eyes on his brother. "You can't marry. What kind of husband can you make now?"
"The very kind I want!" cried Toni, striding to stand beside Jory's chair and putting her hand lightly on his shoulder.
"If you want money, he doesn't have one percent of what I have."
"I wouldn't care if he had nothing," she answered proudly, meeting squarely his dark, forbidding gaze. "I love him as I've never loved anyone before."
"You pity him," stated Bart matter-of-factly.
Jory winced but said nothing. He seemed to know Toni needed to have it out with Bart.
"Once I did pity him," she confessed honestly. "I thought it a terrible shame such a wonderful man with so much talent had to be handicapped. Now I don't see him as handicapped. You see, Bart, all of us are handicapped in one way or another. Jory's is in the open, very visible. Yours is hidden--and sick. You are so sick, and it's pity I feel now--FOR YOU."
Seething emotions contorted Bart's face. I glanced at Joel for some reason and saw him staring at Bart, as if commanding him to stay silent.
Twisting about, Bart barked at me, "Why are you all gathered in this room? Why don't you go to bed? It's late."
"We are waiting for Chris to come home."
"There was an accident on the highway," spoke up Joel. "I heard the news on the radio. A man killed." He seemed delighted to give me this news.
My heart seemed to drop a mile--another Foxworth downed by an accident?
Not Chris, not my Christopher Doll. No, not yet, not yet.
From far away I faintly heard the kitchen door open and close. The chef leaving for his apartment over the garage I thought--or maybe Chris. Hopefully I turned toward the garage. No bright blue eyes, no ready smile and arms outstretched to hold me. No one came through the door.
Minutes passed as we all stared at each other uncomfortably. My heart began to throb painfully; it was time he was home. Time enough.
Joel was staring at me, his lips cocked in a peculiarly hateful way, as if he knew more than he'd said. I turned to Jory, knelt beside his chair and allowed him to hold me close. "I'm scared, Jory," I sobbed. "He should be home by now. It couldn't take him three hours even in the winter with icy roads."
No one said anything. Not Jory, who held me tight. Not Toni. Not Bart or even Joel. The very show of all of us being together, waiting, waiting brought back only too vividly the scene of my father's thirtysixth birthday party and the two state policemen w
ho'd come to say he'd been killed.
I felt a scream in my throat ready to sound when I saw a white car heading up our private road, a red light spinning on the top.
Time turned backward.
NO! NO! NO! Over and over again, my brain screamed even as they spilled out the facts about the accident, the doctor who'd jumped out of his car to help the injured and dying victims laid on the roadside, and as he ran to cross the highway, he'd been struck by a hit-and-run driver.
They carefully, respectfully put his things on a table, just as they'd dumped my father's possessions on another table in Gladstone. This time I was staring at all the items that Chris usually carried in his pockets. All this was unreal, just another nightmare to wake up from--not my photograph in his wallet, not my Chris's wristwatch and the sapphire ring I'd given him for Christmas. Not my Christopher Doll, no, no, no.
Objects grew hazy, dim Twilight gloom pervaded my entire being, leaving me nowhere, nowhere. The policemen shrank in size. Jory and Bart seemed so far away. Toni loomed up huge as she came to lift me to my feet. "Cathy, I'm so sorry . . . so terribly sorry . . ."
I think she said more. But I tore from her grip and ran, ran as if all the nightmares I'd ever dreamed in my life were catching up with me. Seek the tarnish and you shall find.
On and on running, trying to escape the truth, running until I reached the chapel where I threw myself down in front of the pulpit and began to pray as I'd never prayed before.