“Don’t do it,” I told myself aloud. “Don’t you dare.”
But I didn’t listen. I opened to where I had left off. Just a page or two, I thought, and I’d be off.
I was thinking more like an addict than a sensible young girl.
Until now, and mainly because of our grandmother’s warnings and her dark view of us, neither Cathy nor I thought anything about the other being present when either of us bathed. Neither our mother nor our father had ever forbidden it, and if they didn’t see anything wrong about it, we certainly didn’t.
Cathy thought we had to clean up before eating our lunch. We had gone through so much of the dusty attic, practically swimming through layers of old air, skimming through the history of the family, stirring up bookworms and moths, and sweeping away gobs of spiderwebs.
“I feel putrid,” she declared. “We’re all too dirty to put our hands on food.” She immediately directed me to help bathe Carrie and Cory. As soon as they were done and she had dressed them, she stripped and got into the tub.
Suddenly, as if just realizing where we were and what we were doing, she stopped washing her face, turned to me, and asked what would happen if the grandmother (she avoided saying “our grandmother,” as if calling her “the grandmother” made her sound more like the creature she thought she was) caught us like this.
I moved to the tub and embraced her. She put her head on my shoulder and choked back a sob.
How quickly it had all changed, I thought. I would do my best to hide it from her and the twins, but this did feel like being in a dungeon, no matter how lightly I treated it, and Grandmother Foxworth couldn’t resemble a sadistic and cruel prison matron more.
“Forget about what she says,” I told Cathy. “We’re going to be rich. Think about that, about all the things we’ll have and be able to do.”
I knew she dreamed of being a famous ballerina. I had checked on the best schools for dance when Momma and Daddy mentioned such a possibility for her, and although they were expensive, I described them again. As I ranted on and on about the things we’d all have, I began to wash her back the way I often did, the way I washed Momma’s back occasionally. If she could walk in our mother’s sh
oes, she would.
Despite how insignificant I made our grandmother’s warnings and innuendos sound, I couldn’t deny that she had put new thoughts in my male mind. I had looked at Cathy’s naked body so often while we were growing up, but I always thought of it the way a student of human anatomy might. She was my own private female specimen, maturing right under my eyes and confirming all that I had read and studied about the birth of sex. Her breasts were already little buds crowned with slightly orange nipples, and the beginnings of her pubic hair told me she was marching to the drumbeat of her stirring hormones.
The second I felt a stirring in myself, I dropped the washcloth and backed away from the tub. What shocked me was the power and speed with which my own sexual awareness sprang out of the dark pocket in which it normally slept. I restrained it but never treated it as I would an unwelcomed guest when girls I knew flirted with me or showed a little too much of their bodies, maybe deliberately brushing themselves against me to seize my attention, something Mindy Thompson used to do whenever we were in lunch line or leaving a classroom. This was different. This was my sister Cathy. Maybe, I thought, our grandmother was right.
Cathy glanced back at me, surprised.
“They’re getting restless again. I’d better move things along, distract them,” I told her, when I really meant distract myself.
She nodded and rose out of the tub. I thought she’d call for me to wipe her back, but she didn’t, and I put all my attention on the twins.
We had our lunch, but almost as soon as it ended, they were complaining again. I rushed back up to the attic and found books to read to them. We broke out a checkers set for Cathy and myself. We stuffed every minute, every second, with something to keep them from crying and whining about being shut up in this house. They finally fell asleep and had their afternoon naps. Cathy and I fell asleep ourselves. The day waned, and before we knew it, we were all at dinner. The twins grew exhausted from their own endless complaining. It was going to be easy to get them to bed. It was now Cathy who looked like she would get hysterical any moment. She kept looking at the locked door and the windows and me.
“What?”
“How could she want to leave us like this? What if there’s a fire? We’d have to tie sheets together and form a fire escape or something.”
“Brilliant,” I told her, and she brightened. “It’s good that you think ahead. Most girls your age don’t have any foresight.”
She beamed.
“If we both think of sensible things like that, we’ll get through it, Cathy Doll.”
The dread left her face.
Years ago, our father’s best friend, Jim Johnston, called us the “Dresden dolls,” because we were all flaxen-haired with fair complexions. We looked more like fancy porcelain people. The name stuck, and even neighbors began to refer to us as the Dresden dolls. I knew Cathy liked it, liked to be thought of as someone special, even though I wasn’t crazy about being called any kind of doll.
She nodded, hopeful again. “Okay, how about checkers?” she said. “I’m determined to beat you.”
For a few minutes, at least, it was as if we were back at home. Cathy and I were playing checkers. The twins were comfortably asleep. All was quiet and well with the world. Maybe we could get through this, I thought. No, not maybe; we would get through this. Momma knew what she was doing, I decided. I felt cheerful again, buoyed up.
And then the door was thrown open, and she came into the room.
And it was like in one moment faster than a blink, all the air was sucked out of it.
I could hear the now-frantic sound of the buzzer. Kane had his finger on it and wasn’t taking it off, so it kept ding-donging. At the same time, my phone began to ring.