Petals on the Wind

  "Everybody changes! Look at the world about us, Carrie. Look at the magazines and the movies that decent people go to and enjoy, and the stage plays with everyone naked, and the kind of books being published. I don't know if it's for the better, but I do know people aren't static. We all change from day to day. Maybe twenty years from now our children will look back to our time and be shocked, and maybe they will look back and smile and call us innocents. Nobody knows how the world will change--so if the world can change, so can one man named Alex."

  "Alex won't change. He hates today's lack of morals, hates the kinds of books being published, the movies that are dirty and the magazines with couples doing wicked things. I don't think he even approves of the kind of dancing you used to do with Julian."

  I wanted to yell out, To hell with Alex and his prudery! Yet I couldn't slander the only man Carrie had found to love. "Carrie, sweetheart, go to bed. Go to sleep and remember in the morning that the world is full of all sorts of men who would be delighted to love someone as pretty, sweet and domestically oriented as you are Think of what Chris tells us always, 'things always happen for the best.' And if it doesn't work out for you and Alex, then it will work out for you and someone else."

  She threw me a quick glance of deepest despair.

  "How was it for the best when God made Cory die?" Dear Lord, how to answer a question like that? "Was it for the best when Daddy was killed on the highway?"

  "You don't remember that day."

  "Yes I do. I've got a good memory."

  "Carrie, absolutely no one is perfect, not me, not you, not Chris, not Alex. Not anybody."

  "I know," she said, crawling into her bed like a good little girl obeying her mother. "People do bad things and God sees them and punishes them later on. Sometimes he uses a grandmother with her whip, like she beat you and Chris. I'm not dumb, Cathy. I know you and Chris look at each other in the way Alex and I look at each other. I think you and Dr. Paul were lovers too--and maybe that's why Julian died, to punish you. But you're the kind of woman men like and I'm not. I don't dance; I don't know how to make everybody love me. Only my family loves me, and Alex. And when I tell Alex he won't love me or want me."

  "You won't tell him!" I ordered sternly.

  She lay with her eyes fixed on the ceiling until finally she drifted off to sleep. Then I was the one left to lie awake, hurting inside, still astonished by the effect one old woman had on the lives of so many I hated Momma for taking us to Foxworth Hall. She'd known what her mother was like and still she took us there. She'd known her mother and father better than anyone and still she married a second time and left us alone, so she had the fun and we had the torture. And it was us who were still suffering while she had the fun!

  Fun that would soon be over, for I was here and Bart was here, and sooner or later we would meet. Though how he had managed to avoid me so far I wasn't to learn until later.

  I comforted myself with the thoughts of how Momma would be suffering soon too, like we had suffered. Pain for pain, she'd learn how we had felt when she was left alone and unloved. She wouldn't be able to cope . . . not again. One more blow would be her undoing. Somehow I knew that--perhaps because I was so much like her.

  "Are you sure you're all right?" I asked Carrie a few days later. "You haven't been eating well. Where has your appetite gone?"

  She said quietly, her face expressionless. "I'm just fine. I just don't feel like eating much. Don't take Jory with you today to your dance studio. Let me keep him all day. I miss him when he goes away with you."

  I felt uneasy about leaving her all day with Jory who could be a handful, and Carrie didn't look like she was feeling well. "Carrie, be honest with me, please. If you feel unwell, let me take you to a doctor.

  "It's my time of the month," she said with her eyes downcast, "I just feel crampy in my middle three or four days before it starts."

  Only the blues of the month--and when you were her age you did feel more cramps than at mine I kissed my small son good-bye while he set up a terrible wail, wanting to go with me and watch the dancers.

  "Wanna hear the music, Mommy," objected Jory who knew very well what he wanted and what he didn't. "Wanna watch the dancers!"

  "We'll go for a walk in the park. I'll push you in the swing and we'll play in the sandbox," said Carrie hastily, picking up my son and holding him close. "Stay with me, Jory. I love you so much and I never see enough of you. . . . Don't you love your aunt Carrie?"

  He smiled and threw his arms about her neck, for yes, Jory loved everyone.

  It was a terribly long day. Several times I called to check on Carrie to see if she was all right. "I'm fine, Cathy. Jory and I had a wonderful time in the park. I'm going to lie down now and take a nap--so don't call and wake me up again."

  Four o'clock came, and my last class of the day, when my six- and seven-year-olds moved on out into the center of the studio. While the music played I counted, "Un, deux, plies, un, deux, plies, and now, un, deux, tendu, close up, un, deux, tendu, close up." And on and on I instructed, when suddenly I felt that prickly rise of my neck hackles to inform me that someone was staring at me intently. I whirled about to see a man standing far to the rear of the studio. Bart Winslow--my mother's husband!

  The minute he saw I recognized him he came striding toward me. "You do look sensational in purple tights, Miss Dahl. May I have a moment of your time?"

  "I'm busy!" I snapped, annoyed that he could ask when I had twelve little dancers I couldn't take my eyes off of. "My day will be over at five. If you care to you can sit over there and wait."

  "Miss Dahl, I've had one devil of a time finding you, and you've been right here under my nose all the time."

  "Mr. Winslow," I said coolly, "if I didn't mail you an adequate fee you could have written a letter and it would have been forwarded to me."

  He knitted his dark, thick brows together. "I'm not here about the fee--though you didn't pay me the price I had in mind." Smiling and assured, he slipped a hand inside his jacket and pulled from the breast pocket a letter. I gasped to see my own handwriting and all the postmarks and cancellation marks on that letter that had followed my mother all about Europe! "I see you recognize this letter," he said with his keen brown eyes watching my every flicker of expression.

  "Look, Mr. Winslow," I said, very much in a state of flurry, "my sister isn't feeling well today and she's taking care of my son who is hardly more than a baby. And you can see I've got my hands full here. Can we talk about this some other time?"

  "At your convenience, Miss Dahl, any time." He bowed and then handed me a small business card. "Make it as soon as possible. I've many questions to ask you--and don't try skipping out. This time I'm keeping close tabs on you. You don't think one dinner date was enough, do you?"

  It upset me so much to see him with that letter that the moment he was gone I dismissed my class and went into my office. There I sat down to pore over my green ledger, totaling the figures and seeing I was still in the red. Forty students I'd been assured when I bought out this school, but I hadn't been told most of them went away during the summers and didn't return until fall. All the spoiled little rich kids in the winter and the middle-class children in the summer who could only come once or twice a week. No matter how I stretched the money I earned it didn't cover all my costs of redecorating and installing new mirrors behind the long barre.

  I glanced then at my watch, saw it was almost six o'clock, then changed into my street clothes and ran the two blocks to my small house. Carrie should have been in the kitchen preparing dinner while Jory played in the fenced-in yard. But I didn't see Jory, nor was Carrie in the kitchen!

  "Carrie," I called, "I'm home--where are you and Jory hiding?"

  "In here," she responded in a thin whisper.

  All the way I ran to find her still in bed. Weakly she explained Jory was staying with the next-door neighbor. "Cathy . . I don't really feel very good. I've thrown up four or five times; I can't remember how many . . . and I'm
so crampy. I feel funny, real funny. . . ."

  I put my hand to her head and found it strangely cold, though the day was very warm. "I'm going to call a doctor." No sooner were the words out of my mouth than I had to laugh bitterly at myself. There wasn't a doctor in this town who made house calls. I ran back to Carrie and stuck a thermometer in her mouth, then gasped to read the figures.

  "Carrie, I'm going to get Jory and then I'm driving you to the nearest hospital. You have a temperature of one hundred and three point six!"

  Listlessly she nodded, then drifted off to sleep. I rushed next door to check on my son who was happily playing with a little girl a month older than he was. "Look, Mrs. Marquet," said Mrs. Townsend, a sweet, motherly woman in her early forties who was taking care of her granddaughter, `if Carrie is sick, let me keep Jory until you come home. I do hope Carrie isn't seriously ill. She's such a dear little thing. But I've noticed she's been looking pale and miserable for a day or so."

  I'd noticed the same thing and had tied it all to her romance with Alex that was going awry.

  How wrong I was!

  The very next day I called Paul. "Catherine, what's wrong?" he said when he heard the panic in my voice.

  I spilled it all out how Carrie was sick and in the hospital where they had already made several tests, and still they didn't know what was wrong with her. "Paul, she looks dreadful! And she's losing weight fast, unbelievably fast! She's vomiting, can't keep any food down and has diarrhea too. She keeps calling for you and Chris too."

  "I'll have another doctor fill in for me here and fly right up there," he said without hesitation. "But wait before you try and get in touch with Chris. The symptoms you name are so common to a number of minor ailments."

  I took him at his word and didn't try and contact Chris who was enjoying a two-week tour of the West Coast before he came home and continued his residency. In three hours Paul was with me in the hospital room staring down at Carrie. She smiled weakly to see him there and held out her thin arms. "Hello," she whispered thinly, "I'll bet you didn't think you'd see me in an ole hospital bed, did you?"

  Immediately he took her in his arms and began to ask questions. What were her first signs that something was wrong?

  "About a week ago, I started feeling very tired. I didn't tell Cathy 'cause she worries so much about me anyway. Then I had headaches and I felt sleepy all the time, and I got big bruises and didn't know how I got them. Then I combed my hair and lots and lots of it came out, and then I just started throwing up . . . and other things that other doctors have already asked me and I told them." Her thin, whispering voice drifted off. "I wish I could see Chris," she mumbled before her eyes closed and she was asleep.

  Paul had already seen Carrie's chart and talked to her doctors. Now he turned to me with that blank expression that put dread in my heart . . . it was so fraught with meaning. "Maybe you ought to send for Chris."

  "Paul! Do you mean . . . ?"

  "No, I don't mean that. But if she wants him, he should be here with her."

  I was in the hall, waiting for the doctors to do certain tests on Carrie. They had chased me from the room. As I paced back and forth before the closed door to her room, I sensed him before I saw him I whirled about, catching my breath to see Chris striding down the long corridor, bypassing nurses carrying bedpans and trays of medicines who gaped to see him in all his splendid glory.

  Time rolled backward and I saw Daddy, Daddy as I best remembered him, dressed in white tennis clothes. I couldn't speak when Chris took me in his arms and. bowed his tanned face down into my hair I heard the thud of his heart beating strong and regular. I sobbed, so near a deluge of tears, "It didn't take you long to get here." His face was in my hair and his voice was husky. "Cathy," he asked, raising his head and looking me directly in the eyes, "what is wrong with Carrie?"

  His question stunned me--for he should know! "Can't you guess? It's that damned arsenic, I know it is! What else could it be? She was fine until a week ago, then all of a sudden she's sick." I broke then and sobbed, "She wants to see you." But before I led him to Carrie's small room, I put in his hand a note I'd found in the diary she'd started the day she met Alex. "Chris, Carrie knew for a long time something was going wrong, but she kept it to herself. Read this and tell me what you think." While he read, my eyes stayed glued to his face.

  Dear Cathy and Chris,

  Sometimes I think you two are my real parents, but then I remember my real momma and daddy, and she seems like a dream that never was, and I can't picture Daddy unless I have his photograph in my hand--though I can picture Cory just like he was.

  I've been hiding something. So if I don't write this you are going to blame yourselves. For a long time I've felt I was going to die soon, and I don't care anymore, like I used to. I can't be a minister's wife. I wouldn't have lived this long if you two, and Jory, and Dr. Paul and Henny hadn't loved me so much. Without all of you to hold me here, I would have gone on to Cory a long time ago. Everybody has somebody special to love, except me. Everybody has something special to do, except me. I've always known I'd never get married. I knew I was fooling myself about having children, for my hips are too narrow, and I think too I'm too small to make a good wife. I'd never be anybody special, like you, Cathy, who can dance and have babies and everything else. I can't be a doctor like Chris, so I'd just be nothing much, just somebody to get in the way and worry everybody because I'm unhappy.

  So, right now, before you read on further, promise in your heart you won't let the doctors do anything to make me live on. Just let me die, and don't cry. Don't feel sad and miss me after I'm buried. Nothing has been right, or felt right since Cory went away and left me. What I regret most is I won't be around to watch Jory dance on stage like Julian used to. Now I have to confess the truth, I loved Julian, the same as I love Alex. Julian never thought I was too little, and he was the only one who made me feel a normal woman, for a short time. Though it was sinful, even when you say it was not, I know it was, Cathy.

  Last week I started thinking about the grandmother and what she used to say to us all the time about being the Devil's spawn. The more I thought about it, the more I knew she was right--/ shouldn't have been born! I am evil! When Cory died because of the arsenic on the sugared doughnuts the grandmother gave us, I should have died too! You didn't think I knew, did you? You thought all the time I was sitting on the floor, in the corner, I couldn't hear and didn't take notice, but I was seeing and hearing, but I didn't believe, back then. Now I believe.

  Thank you, Cathy, for being like my mother and the best sister alive. And thank you, Chris, for being my substitute father and my second best brother, and thank you, Dr. Paul, for loving me even though I didn't grow. Thank all of you for never being ashamed to be seen with me, and tell Henny I love her I think maybe God won't want me either, until I grow taller, and then I think about Alex, who thinks God loves everybody, even when they aren't so tall.

  She'd signed that letter in a huge scrawl to make up for her small size. "Oh, dear God!" cried Chris. "Cathy, what does this mean?"

  Only then could I open my purse and take from it something I'd found hidden away in the dark, far end of the closet in Carrie's room. His blue eyes grew wide and the color seemed to fade as he read the name of the rat poison bottle, then saw the package of sugared doughnuts with only one left. One left. It had been bitten into just once. Tears began to course down his cheeks, then he was really sobbing on my shoulder. "Oh, God . . . she put that arsenic on the doughnuts, didn't she, so she could die in the same way Cory did?"

  I broke free from his clutching arms and backed a few feet away, feeling I was drained of all blood. "Chris! Read that letter over again! Didn't you notice what she wrote, how she didn't believe, and Now I believe.' Why wouldn't she believe back then, and believe now? Something happened! Something happened to make her believe that our mother could poison us!"

  He shook his head in a bewildered fashion, the tears still eking from his eyes. "But if she knew a
ll along, how could anything more happen to convince her, when overhearing us talking and seeing Mickey die didn't?"

  "How can I tell you?" I cried out desperately. "But the doughnuts have been liberally coated with arsenic! Paul had them tested. Carrie ate those, knowing they would kill her. Can't you see this is another murder our mother committed?"

  "She isn't dead yet!" Chris cried. "We'll save her! We won't let her die. We'll talk to her, tell her she has to hold on!"

  I ran to hold him, fearing it was too late and desperately hoping it wasn't. Even as we clung together, made parents again by our common suffering, Paul came from Carrie's room. The solemn expression on his drawn face told me everything.

  "Chris," said Paul calmly, "how wonderful to see you again. I'm sorry the circumstances are so sad."

  "There's hope, isn't there?" cried Chris.

  "There's always hope. We are doing what we can. You look so tan and vibrant. Hurry in to see your sister and pass along some of that vitality to her. Catherine and I have said all we can think of to try to make her fight back and gain her will to live. But she has given up. Alex is in there on his knees by her bed, praying for her to live, but Carrie has her head turned toward the windows. I don't think she realizes what is said or what is done. She's gone off somewhere out of our reach."

  Paul and I trailed along behind Chris who ran to Carrie. She lay thin as a rail beneath a pile of heavy covers, when it was still summer. It just didn't seem possible she could age so quickly! All the firm, ripe, rosy roundness of youth had fled, leaving her small face gaunt and hollow. Her eyes were deep pits to make her cheekbones very prominent. She even seemed to have lost some of her height. Chris cried out to see her so. He leaned to gather her in his arms, called her name repeatedly, stroked her long hair. To his horror hundreds of the golden strands clung to his fingers when he drew them away. "Good God in heaven--what's being done for her?"