Epilogue

Perhaps the most magical thing in our lives is time. Sometimes it passes quickly; seconds cascade into minutes, minutes into hours, and hours into days, like a flooded stream tearing its way down a mountain and through a valley. It seems impossible to hold it back. Daily routines help. It’s the empty spaces that make hours longer than they are. Waiting for the next thing to do is like waiting for a train or a bus. My Faith liked to say, “A watched pot never boils.” The more you anticipate, the longer it takes.

Count Piro’s days ironically were fuller than mine, so time passed quickest for him. He went from his homeschooling to his therapy to his meals and playtime. More often now, Dorian took him out, and Grandpa and she took him for rides when I was at school. Grandpa bought him a sled when the snow was heavier, and he enjoyed being pulled around on the property. Jimmy and some of the other employees took a liking to him and pulled him around, too.

He was filling out, growing stronger, and then, one day in early March, with his therapist’s help, he began to use crutches. He could stand for a while, but moving forward was still a problem. Dr. Friedman was happy with his progress, but he wasn’t confident that he would ever toss away those crutches or not need a wheelchair from time to time. Going up stairs was still a huge problem.

I began to help him with his homework and still read to him occasionally. The same rules applied to how to handle him and his memories. I understood that Dr. Patrick had made some important inroads, and little bits and pieces about his past began to dribble out to me. But there was nothing yet that would bring his ordeal to a conclusion.

At least, that was what I believed for the longest time.

And then I started to notice that Grandpa was in deep thought and spent a lot of time in his office after work. Sometimes I caught him looking at me as if he was about to say something, and when I looked at him, he shook his head and moved off to do something else.

The night before my seventeenth birthday, he came to my room. Myra, Count Piro, and I had eaten dinner together. Grandpa and Dorian had gone out to dinner. They had been doing that more often, but this time, they had been talking about me. I knew it from how quickly he had come to my room when they returned. He knocked on the door and peered in when I said, “Come in.”

“Got a few minutes?” he asked.

“I’ll try to pull away from this math problem,” I replied.

He smiled, came in, and closed the door softly behind him. I was at my desk. He sat on my bed.

“What’s up?”

I was expecting him to tell me that he had decided to ask Dorian Camden to marry him. I had already decided to be happy for him, but as it turned

out, that wasn’t his primary reason for visiting me.

“I’m going to tell you a story,” he began, “and then I’m going to ask you what you think we should do about it. If you don’t want to answer now, that’s fine. You don’t have to decide immediately. Okay?”

I closed my book and turned completely around. “Yes, Grandpa.”

“Once upon a time, there was a family of four, an older brother somewhere between thirteen and fourteen, an older sister twelve or thirteen, and twins about five or six, let’s say. They seemed to be a happy family, but something terrible happened to the father, and not long afterward, they left their home, went on a train somewhere at night, and went to a big house owned by their grandparents. As weird as this sounds, they were shut up in a room and an attic and, from what we can tell, were there like that for years.”

“Years?”

“Maybe three or more. Their mother did not live in these rooms with them. She visited them, brought them presents, but never took them out.”

“How could any mother do that?”

He nodded. “Yes, how could any mother do that? The older brother and the older sister tried to take care of the twins as best they could, and the twins eventually saw them more as parents.”

“But they were so young. How could they act like parents?”

“Maybe they had no choice.”

“And the grandparents let this go on, too?”

“It’s confusing, but it seems so.”

“They weren’t proud of them or happy about them?”

“I don’t know the reasons, Clara Sue. I know only this much. Whatever was brought for them to eat eventually contained arsenic. Too much over too long a time was consumed for it to be a one-time, accidental thing.”

I felt a chill. I had to take a breath. “But who would do that to them? Their own mother, their grandmother?”

“No one else brought them food. I don’t know much more. This has taken months to put together from answers William has given to Dr. Patrick. She had to figure out most of it. Besides the trauma of being poisoned, he was undernourished, as you know, and it is coming from a child’s memory.”

I knew Grandpa wasn’t telling me all this to make me feel bad about the way I had treated Count Piro, but I couldn’t help it. “Where are the rest of them now?”

Tags: V.C. Andrews
Source: readsnovelonline.net