Cat (Wildflowers 4)

"'Why am I in a hospital?' I asked him.

"'What do you remember last?' he replied.

"'I was getting ready for the dance. I. . . was looking at myself in the mirror, I think,' I told him and he smiled and said that was good. I was getting better quickly, which was what he had expected. I asked for my parents and he told me my mother would be coming up to see me any moment.

"'What about my father?' I asked him

" `Do you want to see him?' he asked me. He studied my face carefully.

" I said.

"He nodded.

"'You're going to be all right,' he promised, squeezing my hand.

"Mrs. Jenner brought me my tray of food and as I was eating, my mother arrived. She stood outside in the hallway with the doctor and they talked in very low murmuring voices for a while. I finished eating before she came in. Then Mrs. Jenner took the tray and left Mother and me alone.

"She looked very sick, pale, her eyes bloodshot. I can't remember ever seeing my mother cry. If something bothered her that much, she would go off to be by herself. She stood by my bed now and the tears slipped out of the corners of her eyes like fugitives sneaking down her cheeks.

"'Horrible,' she muttered. 'It's so horrible. He doesn't deny it.'

"'What?' I asked her. 'Who?'

"She took a deep breath and shook her head. She seemed to suck her tears back into her eyes, straightened her body, filling her spine with steel again, pulling her shoulders up.

"'Let's not talk about it now,' she commanded. 'Let's never talk about it.'

"Of course, that was not to be." I gazed at Doctor Marlowe. "Talking about it became very important. We've traveled a long way, right, Doctor Marlowe?"

"A very long way, Cathy."

"Are we home yet?" I asked her. I was trembling a little.

"Almost, honey," she said. She looked at the other three who were sitting quietly. "You're all almost there," she said with a smile.

I nodded and took another deep breath.

"I remained in therapy for a while, working with Doctor Finnigan. By the time I returned home from the hospital, Daddy was gone. Like your mother, Misty," I reminded her, "my mother had tried to purge the house of everything that would remind us of him She didn't go so far as to sell or give away his favorite chair, but she didn't just clean out his closets and drawers. She sanitized them. She scrubbed the house as if his essence, the very memory of him, was something that could be vacuumed up, scrubbed away.

"Unlike you, Jade, I didn't have to be involved in much of the legal stuff. I knew my mother had started the process of getting a divorce, of course, and I knew that lawyers had met and settlements had been concluded to her satisfaction.

"Like your daddy, Star, mine was gone suddenly, almost as if some wizard had made him disappear. I know it was part of whatever was decided that he would never have any contact with me again. It wasn't something I easily accepted or believed. To this day I sometimes expect him to appear, to come walking up the stairs, to knock on my door and open it and smile at me and ask how his special little girl is doing.

"It would be like everything that has happened was just a bad nightmare.

"But then, my mother is always there to remind me it was no dream." I looked at Doctor Marlowe. "That's good and bad, I know. I have to face the demons to destroy them, to rid myself of them," I recited.

She nodded.

"But it would be nice to bury them forever." "You will," Doctor Marlowe promised.

"Why wasn't he arrested? Why didn't he go to jail?" Jade wanted to know.

"First, my mother didn't want all the notoriety. Even today, not that many people know the real reason for their separation and divorce. Second, I don't think I could stand having to tell this story in a courtroom, even if it was only before a judge.

"I did meet with a judge and a representative of a child protection- service to conclude custody questions. For a while I thought they might take me away from Mother, too, that maybe they thought she was really more directly responsible. I suppose it was hard for them to believe she was so. . ."

"Dumb?" Star asked.