Christopher's Diary: Echoes of Dollanganger

“Yeah, but maybe that’s what eventually happened to Christopher and Cathy when it came to their mother. Maybe they still loved her but they didn’t like her. I don’t like her,” he added. “Even if Christopher does.”

“But you really don’t like your own mother?”

He shrugged. “Let’s put it this way, Kristin. I don’t have trouble imagining her locking me away in an attic if it meant she’d inherit a fortune.”

“You don’t mean that.”

He smiled. “Wait until you get to know her better,” he said. “When she lets her hair down. Sometimes my mother reminds me of Lady Macbeth.”

He made me think. I had been at the homes of many of my friends, eaten dinner with their families, watched television with them, and slept over, but did I really know what their family life was like? How much of it was a show for me, the nearly orphaned girl? Don’t let her see any family problems. Be grateful you’re not in her situation.

The neighbors the Dollangangers had before Christopher Sr. was killed probably thought of them as a precious little family full of love and beauty. Could any of those neighbors and friends, any who had been waiting for Christopher Sr. at his birthday party that fateful night, ever have imagined those children locked away by their own mother and grandmother for years?

We left for the restaurant.

“Promise me you won’t read the diary without me,” Kane said after we had sat in a booth at the Italian Stallion and ordered our pizza. “To make this real for us, we have to make the discoveries together.”

“I won’t.”

“I can tell from the expression on your face if you do,” he warned.

“You want me to make your famous blood oath?” I asked.

“Maybe,” he said, and then he laughed.

We talked a lot about events in the earlier part of the diary. Kane found it hard to believe that Christopher Sr. had left his family so destitute.

“The man has no life insurance? He had four children. There’s something odd about it, about the way they behaved together, anyway. It was like a family of children. They lived in a bubble, and the bubble burst. They thought all they had to do was change their name to Dollanganger, and they could make the past disappear. You know what I think? I think by the time we get to the end, Christopher Jr.’s going to think his parents were just plain irresponsible. You saw the way he began to doubt his father, thinking he might have been some kind of dreamer who talked a good game but never had his grasp of anything substantial. Even his job might have been all fluff.”

“You were supposed to be the objective pair of eyes here, Kane,” I said. “No preconceptions. Wait until we get to the end before making judgments.”

“I know, I know. I get . . . frustrated too easily. But you’ll keep my feet on the ground,” he added, reaching for my hand. “Just the way in the end Cathy will keep Christopher’s. That’s a bet.”

We stared at each other, but I felt as if we were looking through each other, looking at our visions of Christopher and Cathy rather than ourselves.

“I still have some work to do,” I said, “and I’d like to spend some time with my father before I go to sleep.”

“Sure.” He signaled for our check.

When we pulled into my driveway, I could see my father was home. His cherished pickup, Black Beauty, was parked there. He treated it like some revered old friend, full of mechanical arthritis but still ambulatory. Sometimes I would catch him just looking at it and stroking it affectionately, lost in some memory that involved it or perhaps thinking about my mother sitting beside him.

“Maybe I could get your dad a good deal on a new truck,” Kane said. “I’ll talk to my father.”

“Don’t bother. Even if you brought one over for free, he’d drive his. He says they grew on each other. He even named it: Black Beauty.”

Kane laughed. “Tell him people like him will put my father out of business.”

“I will,” I said.

He kissed me softly. “I would have preferred being the older child in my family,” he said. “I kind of like the idea of looking after someone the way Christopher is doing, without the situation, of course.”

“You will someday, with your own children,” I said.

He nodded, but I could see he meant something else. “See you in the morning.”

“You sure? I mean, I could drive myself and—”

“Absolutely not. I’m looking after you as if there was no one else,” he said. “As if we had no one but each other.”