Heaven (Casteel 1)

My own free will.

For Keith.

For Our Jane.

I handed her the doll.

I watched Kitty toss my beloved bride doll onto the grate. Tears streaked my face as I fell to my knees and bowed my head and said a silent prayer . . . as if my mother herself lay on her funeral pyre.

With horror I watched the fine lace dress with pearls and crystal beads burst into instant flame, the silvery-gold hair catching fire; the wonderfully alivelooking skin seemed to melt; two small licks of flames consumed the long, dark curling lashes.

"Now ya listen, scumbag," said Kitty when it was over, and my irreplaceable portrait doll lay in ashes. "Don't ya go tellin Cal what I did. Ya smile, ya act happy when my guests show up. STOP that cryin! It were only a doll! Only a doll!"

But that heap of ashes in the fireplace represented my mother, my claim to the future that should have been hers. How could I prove who I was, how, how?

Unable to refrain, I reached into the hot ashes and plucked from them a crystal bead that had rolled free from the hearth. It sparkled in my palm like a teardrop. My mother's tear. "Oh, I hate you, Kitty, for doing this!" I sobbed. "It wasn't necessary! I hate you so much I wish it had been YOU in the fire!"

She struck! Hard, brutally, over and over again until I was on the floor, and still she was slapping my face, slamming her fists into my stomach . . . and I blacked out.

Mercifully blacked out.

sixteen MY SAVIOR, MY FATHER

. SHORTLY AFTER THE PARTY WAS OVER AND ALL KITTY'S friends were gone, Cal found me lying facedown on the floor in the room where I slept; no longer could I think of it as my room. He stood in the doorway silhouetted by the hall light behind him. I felt too sore and raw to move. My beautiful new dress was torn and dirty. And even though he was there I continued to lie in a crumpled heap and cry. It seemed I was always crying for what I'd had once and lost. My pride, my brothers and sisters, my mother--and her doll.

"What's wrong?" Cal asked, stepping into the room and falling down on his knees beside me. "Where have you been? What's the matter?"

I cried on and on.

"Heaven darling, you've got to tell me! I tried to slip away from the party earlier, but Kitty clung to my arm like a burr. She kept saying you didn't feel well, that you were having cramps. Why are you on the floor? Where were you during the party?" He turned me over gently and gazed lovingly into my swollen and discolored face before he stared at my torn dress and nylons full of runs. An expression of such rage flashed through his eyes it frightened me. "Oh, my God," he cried out, clenching his fists. "I should have known! She's hurt you again, and I didn't save you from her! And that's why she treated me so

possessively tonight! Tell me what happened," he demanded again, reaching to cradle me in his arms.

"Go way," I sobbed. "Leave me alone. It's going to be all right. I'm not really hurt . . ."

I sought for the right words to soothe his anxiety and my own misery, which by this time I was thinking I'd brought on myself. Maybe I was hillscum filth, and did deserve everything Kitty had done. My own fault. Pa couldn't love me. If your own father couldn't love you, who could? Nobody could love me. I was lost, all alone . . . and never would anybody love me, never love me enough.

"No, I won't go away." He lightly touched my hair, his lips traveling all over my sore, puffy face. Perhaps he thought it was that way only from crying, not from a battering. There were no lights on for him to see well. Did he think his small kisses could ease the pain? Yet they did, a little. "Does it hurt that much?" he asked with pity in his voice. He looked so sad, so loving.

His fingertips on my swollen eye were so tender. "You look so beautiful lying here in my arms, with the moonlight on your face. You seem half a child, half a woman, older than sixteen, but still so young, so vulnerable and untouched."

"Cal . . . do you still love her?"

"Who?"

"Kitty."

He seemed dazed. "Kitty? I don't want to talk about Kitty. I want to talk about you. About me."

"Where's Kitty?"

"Her girlfriends," he began in a mocking, sarcastic voice, "decided that Kitty really needed a special gift." He paused and smiled ironically. "They've all gone to watch male strippers, and I was left here to sit with you."

"As if I'm a baby . . . ?"

I stared at him with tears wetting my face. His smile grew tighter, more cynical. "I'd rather be right where I am, with you, than any other place in the world. Tonight, with all those other people, drinking and eating, laughing over silly jokes, I realized something for the first time. I felt all alone because you weren't there." His voice deepened. "You came into my life, and truthfully I didn't want you. I didn't want to take on the role of a father, even if Kitty did feel she had to be a mother. But now I'm so damned scared Kitty will hurt you in some horrible way. I've tried to be here as much as possible. And yet I haven't saved you from anything. Tell me what she did today."

I could tell him. I could make him hate her. But I was scared, not only of Kitty but of him, a grown man who appeared at this very minute totally infatuated with a kid of seventeen. Limply I lay in his arms, completely exhausted, listening to his heart pound.