“What a place this was,” he continued as we pulled away from the property. “Land with a lake on it like that. I’d buy it myself if I had the money. Too bad there wasn’t any in that box, or at least valuable jewelry. We’d make an offer.”
I looked down at the diary again. Maybe it was worth more than Dad thought. There was no way to know without reading it, but I didn’t want to read it while we were driving. I never liked to read in a car or in the truck while it was moving. It made me dizzy. The writing was all in script, but it was a careful, neat script that, although it was slightly faded in places, was quite legible.
We had to stop at the quick market for some basic groceries on the way home, so for a while, I put the diary out of my mind and concentrated on what we needed. When we got home, I helped carry the bags of groceries in first. After everything was put away, I went back to the truck and got the metal box.
Dad was on the phone making a report to the president of the bank about the property. I went past him and up the stairs to my room. I took off my sweater and got comfortable before I fixed my pillows and sat on my bed with the box beside me. Then I opened it, took out the diary, and again, very carefully, began to turn the page after the line How do you lie in a diary?
Years later, I would remember “The Diary of Anne Frank” for another reason, a more dramatic reason. Just as Anne Frank was forced to hide in an attic, my sister Cathy, our twin brother and sister, Cory and Carrie, and I were forced to hide in our grandparents’ attic. We weren’t hiding from Nazis, of course, but the way our mother described her father and the way our grandmother Olivia treated us, we probably didn’t feel much less afraid than poor Anne Frank.
Anne Frank’s father had her diary published. He wanted the world to know her story, their story. Everyone sees the same story in a different way. My sister saw our story one way, and I saw it another. When I began writing this, I didn’t do it because I thought it was so important to tell it from my eyes and ears and memories. But now I do. So I’ll be more careful about what I continue to write.
I paused to catch my breath. Is this what I thought it was? Dad’s guess about who Christopher could be was right, but more important, this was not some silly rambling, as he had said. It was so well written. I was excited, and I wondered if I should call Lana or Suzette. All my friends would like to know about this. I reached for the phone and then stopped.
No. I thought there was something about a diary that demanded respect. Although Christopher wrote that he had come to the point where he wanted his view of everything to be known, I felt very special being the first one ever to read it. I should read it all first and not tell anyone about it until I was finished, I decided. It was almost a sacred trust. Maybe I was meant to be the one to discover it because I was a distant relative.
Others might not see it that way. They might just see it as something sensational and tell me to send it to a supermarket rag or something. I could just hear Missy Meyer saying, “You could get lots of money for it, maybe. I’ll ask my father to look into it for you. The local newspaper might pay you and serialize it. You’ll be famous and make a lot of money!”
No, thanks, I thought. This was too special. I returned to the diary, now determined to read as much as I could before I went to sleep.
There are times now when I think back to what our lives were like in the mid-’50s and remember it all the way you might remember a dream. Often, with dreams that are so vivid, you’re not sure how much of it was fantasy and how much of it was real. There is so much of it that I want to be true, but I’m not the kind of person who is comfortable fooling himself.
I’ve always had a lot to think about, so it’s not really so unusual for me to have decided to keep a diary. My thoughts are very important to me. This diary will be a way of keeping my history, our history, authentically. Nothing Momma has said, nothing Cathy has said, and nothing Daddy has said will be as easy to recall later on when I’m much older if I don’t remember to write down what was important as soon as I can.
I didn’t do this right away. I kept telling myself diaries were something girls kept, not boys. Then I read about some famous diaries in literature and, of course, ships’ captains’ logs, all written by men, and I thought, this is silly. There’s nothing absolutely feminine about writing your thoughts down, about capturing your feelings. I just wouldn’t do something silly like write “Dear Diary.” I’d just write everything as it happened and be as accurate as I could.
I bought this diary myself with my allowance, but I never told anyone I had, not even my father, who was interested in everything I did and thought. It seemed to me that the whole point of keeping a diary was keeping that secret until it was time to let others read it, if that was your purpose. And it would be no good if it was done cryptically so that people had to figure out what I meant here and what I meant there. That’s why I have to be as honest as I can about what I saw, what I heard, and especially what I felt.
Like Otto Frank, I think it’s important that more people know what really happened to us before and afterward. Cathy used to call us flowers in the attic, withering away. It helpe
d her to think of us that way. But we weren’t flowers. We were young, beautiful children who trusted that those who loved us would always protect us even better than we could protect ourselves.
Besides, I can’t ever think of us in any symbolic way. We weren’t the creations of someone’s imagination. We were real flesh-and-blood children. We were locked away, not only by selfish greed but by cruel hearts that used the Bible like a club to pound out the love we carried in our innocent hearts. How that happened and what became of us is too important to just let it disappear in the dying memories of those who lived it.
“Hey, you,” Dad said from my doorway. I was so involved in my reading I didn’t hear him come upstairs. He said he had been calling up to me.
“Oh, sorry, Dad. I didn’t hear you.”
“Aren’t you having any lunch today?”
“Oh, is it lunchtime?”
“You have a nice watch, Kristin, and four clocks in this room.”
“I don’t have four. Just the teddy bear clock and the Beatles alarm clock you found in an old house.”
“Okay. I’m going to make myself a ham and cheese sandwich. You want one?”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“You didn’t tell me if you wanted the chicken with pasta or the meat loaf tonight.”
“I’m a fan of your meat loaf, Dad. You know that.”
“Uh-huh. So what’s got you so involved? What is that, anyway?”
“You were right. It is the diary of the older brother, just as you thought it might be. He’s telling their story from his point of view.”
“Really? The whole story?”