The Unwanted (6 page)

Here, in New England, you knew. First you were in the woods, then you were in the middle of a town, then you were in the woods again.

“Are all the towns like this?” she asked her father.

Keith, startled out of a reverie, glanced over at her. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. So … well, all the towns seem separate, as if they’re all by themselves. At home everything runs together.”

Keith smiled. “I noticed the same thing when I used to go out there. I could never tell the difference between North Hollywood and Studio City and Van Nuys and Sherman Oaks. I could never see how anyone could stand it.”

For the first time since her mother had died, Cassie found herself giggling. “That’s because there isn’t any difference,” she said. “They’re all the same. The whole Valley’s all the same.” Her smile faded. “Is that how come you stopped coming to visit me? Because you didn’t like the Valley?”

Keith said nothing for a moment, then shook his head. “I
wouldn’t have cared where you lived. I just thought—Well, it doesn’t matter now.”

Now it was Cassie who fell silent.
He doesn’t want to talk about Mother
, she thought. Her mind drifted back to the last time she’d seen him, right after Tommy had moved out. She’d wanted to talk to him then, wanted to ask him what had happened when she was little and he’d left her mother. But she’d been afraid to. Her mother had told her often enough that all he’d do was lie to her and that she shouldn’t believe a word he said. So she hadn’t said anything at all that day. And then she’d never seen her father again.

“You could have written to me,” she said finally.

Keith looked at her once again. She was facing straight ahead, her eyes apparently fixed on the highway, but he could see they were glistening with tears. “I did write to you, honey,” he said quietly. “I wrote to you every month. And I sent you Christmas presents, and birthday presents too. But I never heard anything back.” Keith waited, but Cassie said nothing. “Your mother never gave them to you, did she?” he finally asked.

Cassie hesitated, then shook her head.

For the rest of the trip to False Harbor, neither of them said anything.

    Eric Cavanaugh was mowing the front lawn when he saw the Winslows’ station wagon pull into the farthest of the twin driveways that separated his house from the Winslows’. He waved, and was about to call out a greeting, when the passenger door opened and a girl got out.

She looked about the same age as he was. Her face was pale, and her dark brown hair, pulled back in a ponytail, made her skin seem even whiter than it was. She was wearing a pair of red jeans, with sneakers of the same color, and had on a white blouse. As he watched, she opened the back door of the station wagon and pulled out a brown raincoat and a bulging leather bag. Though Eric couldn’t see anything about her that looked much different from all the other girls he knew, he had a distinct feeling that there was something odd about her. Then he heard Mr. Winslow speaking to him.

“I want you to meet someone, Eric. This is my daughter, Cassie. She’s just arrived from California to live with us.
Cassie, this is Eric Cavanaugh. The proverbial boy next door,” he added, winking at Eric.

Cassie smiled shyly and held out her hand, but Eric didn’t take it. Without meaning to, he frowned slightly, still trying to place her in his mind. As their eyes met, he took an involuntary step backward. Then, remembering his manners, he recovered himself and managed a crooked grin. “H-hi,” he stammered. “I’m sorry about your mother.…” Cassie’s face turned even more pale, and as she turned and hurried toward the house, Eric wished he’d thought of something else to say. But his mind had suddenly gone blank, for as he’d looked at Cassie, something had happened to him.

It was as if their minds had met, as if an instant connection had been made. Something within her had reached out, and something within him had responded. As he went back to his lawn mowing, the strange feeling inside him grew stronger.

She was someone he’d been searching for, though he had been unaware that he was even searching. He knew her, knew how she felt, knew what she was thinking. For some reason he didn’t understand, he was certain that it had been the same for her.

And in that instant, he had known something else—that Cassie Winslow didn’t truly care that her mother had died.

But that’s stupid
, Eric told himself.
I’ve never seen her before, and I don’t know anything about her at all
.

She looks so much older than I thought she would, Rosemary Winslow thought as the front door opened and Cassie stepped inside. But, of course, why wouldn’t she? After all, the last pictures Keith had brought back had been taken when Cassie was only eleven. The child in those pictures, the little girl with the large—almost haunted—dark brown eyes which had stared out from beneath thick bangs, was gone. The girl who stood before Rosemary was now almost grown up. Nearly as tall as Rosemary herself, Cassie held herself erect, her long chestnut hair drawn back to expose a pale face that seemed more mature than her fifteen years. But the girl’s eyes still seemed to have the same haunted look that Rosemary remembered so vividly from the last set of snapshots.

“I’m Rosemary,” she said, offering Cassie a smile and stepping forward, ready to hug the girl. “I’m so very sorry about what’s happened. If there’s anything I can do …”

Cassie hesitated—Rosemary could almost feel the girl shrinking away from her. Then she offered Rosemary her hand. “I’m Cassie,” she said softly. “It … it was good of you to take me in.”

Good of us? Rosemary repeated in her own mind. What a strange thing to say—what else could she have thought might happen?

“I’ve been wanting to meet you for so long,” Rosemary said out loud. “I even tried to convince your father to take Jennifer and me along the last time he went to visit you, but
Jennifer was only three, and in the end it just didn’t seem like it would be fair.” She turned and glanced up the stairs. “Jen? Don’t you want to come down and meet your sister?”

Jennifer suddenly appeared at the top of the stairs, looking shyly down at Cassie. Very slowly she started down the steps. “My name’s Jennifer Elizabeth,” she said, offering her hand to Cassie. “But you can call me Jen, or Jenny. Just don’t call me Punkin. Daddy calls me that, and I hate it. Did he call you by a dumb name when you were little?”

Cassie stared at the little girl, who was a tiny feminine version of her father. Her reddish curls seemed to go in every direction, and her sparkling green eyes peered out of a square face with a jaw that gave her a stubborn look. But though her voice had been serious when she spoke, Cassie still saw a happy gleam in Jennifer’s eyes.

“I don’t remember what he called me,” she said. “I was only a baby when he went away.” She turned to her father. “Did you have a nickname for me?”

Keith spoke without thinking. “Same as Jen’s. Punkin.” Then, seeing the hurt in both his daughters’ eyes, he wished he could take the words back. “I guess I don’t have any imagination, do I?” he offered, trying to ease the moment.

“Jenny, why don’t you take Cassie upstairs and show her her room?” Rosemary said hurriedly, then turned to Cassie. “Did you really manage to get everything into that one little bag, or are there some suitcases in the car?”

Cassie shook her head. “This is all I brought. Daddy said I shouldn’t bring anything else—”

“And you paid attention to him?” Rosemary replied with an exaggerated gasp. “I told him no girl your age could put everything in one bag, and that he shouldn’t have asked you to.”

“It’s all right,” Cassie replied. “I don’t really have much anyway. All I needed was a few extra clothes.”

“Well, all right,” Rosemary said doubtfully. “But if you find out you forgot anything, just let me know, and we’ll go do some shopping.”

Jennifer, who was already halfway up the stairs, whirled around. “Come on,” she urged. “Don’t you even want to see the room?”

Cassie hurried up the stairs after Jennifer, then followed
her down the hall to a large room in the southeast corner of the house. As she stepped through the door, she stopped short. The room had obviously just been done over, but whoever had planned it must have thought she was still ten years old. The walls were papered with what looked like characters out of
Alice in Wonderland
, and the curtains were made out of material that matched the paper. Against one wall there was an ornate brass bed, covered with a blue quilt with white ruffles. In addition to the bed there was a wooden desk, a bureau, and a rocking chair, all of it painted white. The rocking chair had a cushion on its seat, upholstered in the same blue as the quilt on the bed.

“Don’t you just love it?” Jennifer asked excitedly.
“Alice in Wonderland
is my favorite book in the whole world.”

Cassie suddenly understood. “This is your room, isn’t it?”

Jennifer hesitated, then slowly nodded. “It’s always been my room. Mom and I just finished decorating it, and I was going to move back into it today. But then when we found out that you were coming, we decided I should stay in the other room and you should have this one, because this one is bigger.”

“That’s dumb,” Cassie announced. “Let’s go see the other room.”

Jennifer’s eyes clouded over with doubt. “I shouldn’t show it to you. Mom says I shouldn’t let anyone in my room unless I’ve cleaned it, and I didn’t even pick it up today.”

“Well, that’s dumb too,” Cassie decided. “I never cleaned my room at home, and I had anyone in it I wanted. Let’s go see it.”

Reluctantly Jennifer led Cassie back into the hall, then across to the other side of the house. “It’s kinda small,” she said before she opened the door. “Daddy says there didn’t used to be a bathroom up here, and when they put one in a long time ago, they took half of this room for it.” She pushed the door open and let Cassie step inside.

This, she knew as soon as she crossed the threshold, was the room that would be hers.

Had it not been for the space lost to the bathroom, the bedroom would have been large and L-shaped, with two windows on each wall. As it was, the room was perfectly rectangular, but no more than eight feet wide, with its fifteen-foot
length giving it more of the feeling of a hall than a room. Just inside the door—to the left—a closet had been built. The floors were pine, and as Cassie moved slowly down the length of the room toward the single window at the far end, the planks creaked under her feet.

And yet despite its odd proportions and creaking floor, or maybe even because of them, the room felt right to her. Its relationship to the rest of the house seemed to her to reflect her own relationship to her father’s family.

Not quite connected, not quite fitting in.

Set apart.

In her mind’s eye she emptied the room of Jennifer’s toys and filled it with her own things. She covered the pink wallpaper with forest-green paint, and trimmed the window sashes in white enamel. Suddenly the room took on a cozy feeling, as if it were wrapping itself around her, protecting her. As Jennifer had said, the room wasn’t nearly as large as the other one, but it wasn’t really small either. It was just oddly shaped. As Cassie examined it more carefully, she realized she could divide the space in half, with her bed in the part closest to the door. The rest of the room would be set aside as a private place, a place shut off to everyone else but her.

She came finally to the window and looked out. Below her was the backyard, its lawn neatly cut, and beyond that, separated from the yard by a black wrought-iron fence, was a small cemetery. “What’s that?” she asked, and Jennifer came over to stand beside her.

“It’s the graveyard,” the little girl said solemnly. “It’s the oldest one in False Harbor, and everyone in it’s been dead a real long time. Practically nobody ever gets buried there anymore—it’s almost all full.”

Cassie grinned mischievously at the little girl. “Are there any ghosts in there?”

Jennifer’s eyes rolled scornfully upward. “There’s no such thing as ghosts. Everyone knows that!”

“But it’s still fun to think about,” Cassie replied. “I mean, wouldn’t it be neat to think maybe there are still people down there who’ve been there for hundreds of years, and sometimes, when it’s real dark, they get up and wander around the town?”

Jennifer frowned. “Why would they want to do that?”

Cassie shrugged, and let her imagination begin to flow. “Lots of reasons. Maybe they just want to see the houses they lived in, or keep an eye on their descendants.” Her voice dropped slightly. “Or maybe there are people in the graveyard who weren’t supposed to die, and they’re still there, waiting for revenge.”

Jennifer’s eyes narrowed, but when she spoke, her voice quavered just the tiniest bit. “Now,
that’s
dumb!” she declared in conscious imitation of Cassie’s earlier pronouncements. “All you’re doing is trying to scare me, and you can’t. I’m not a baby.”

“But it could be true,” Cassie insisted, her gaze returning to the graveyard once more. “Nobody knows what happens to us after we die. Maybe we just die, but maybe we don’t. Maybe we keep on living, in different bodies.”

Jennifer frowned. “You mean like re—reincar—whatever that word is?”

“Reincarnation,” Cassie said. “Maybe—” She fell silent as she noticed a slight movement out of the corner of her eye. Peering out the window, she looked to the left and saw Eric Cavanaugh leaning into the power mower, pushing it through the thick grass in his backyard. She frowned slightly, remembering his odd reaction when he’d been introduced to her. For a second he’d almost seemed afraid of her.

She watched him for a few moments, and then, as if he could feel her eyes on him, he turned, squinted against the sun as he tipped his face up, and hesitantly waved. Another moment went by before Cassie waved back.

Abandoning the window, she looked at the room once more, then her eyes fell on Jennifer, who was watching her warily. “I told you it was small,” the little girl said cautiously. “You don’t like it, do you?”

“Yes, I do,” Cassie said. “In fact I like it a lot better than the other room, and I think we ought to trade.”