Heaven by V.C. Andrews Page B

more important to me than my whole sister, Fanny, who doesn’t really give a damn about anybody but herself. She doesn’t love me as you do, and I can’t love her as much as I can love you. You’re the only sister I got who can put her mind on a star in another universe.” He looked so sad then, making me hurt inside.
    “Tom, I’m gonna cry if you say one more thing! It makes me ache to think someday you might go away and I’ll never see you again.”
    He shook his head, making his red hair ruffle in layers. “I’d never go anywhere you didn’t want me to go, Heavenly. It’s you and me together, all our lives through. You know, like they say in books, through thick and thin, through rain and snow … through the dark of night.”
    Laughing, I answered, “That’s the mail, silly.” Tears were in my eyes as I reached to take his hand and squeeze it. “Let’s just promise never, so help us God, will we ever go separate ways, or be angry with one another, or feel differently about each other than we feel now.”
    He had me then in his arms, holding me as if I were made of spun glass and any second I’d break. He choked when he said, “Someday you’ll get married—Iknow you say you won’t, but Logan Stonewall is already looking with calf eyes at you.”
    “How can he love me when he doesn’t know me?”
    His face bowed into my hair. “All he needs to do is look at your face, your eyes—that’s enough. Everything about you is written on your face, shining in your eyes.”
    I pulled away and brushed at my tears. “Pa never sees what you do, does he?”
    “Why do you let him hurt you so much?”
    “Oh, Tom … !” I wailed, falling into his arms and really beginning to cry. “How am I ever going to have any confidence in myself when my own father can’t stand to look at me? There must be something evil he sees in me that makes him hate me.”
    He stroked my hair, my back, and there were tears in his eyes when I looked, as if my pain were his. “Someday Pa’s gonna find out he don’t hate ya, Heavenly. I know that day’s comin soon.”
    I yanked away.
    “No, it’s not ever coming! You know it as much as I know it. Pa thinks I killed his angel by being born, and in a thousand years he won’t forgive me! And if you want to know what I think, I think my mother was damned lucky to escape him! For sooner or later he’d have been as mean to her as he is to Sarah now!”
    We were both shaken by this kind of frankness. He pulled me back and tried to smile, but he only looked sad. “Pa doesn’t love Ma, Heavenly. He’s miserable with Ma. From all I’ve heard, he did love your mother. He married mine only because she was pregnant with me, and he tried for once to do the right thing.”
    “Because Granny made him do the right thing!” I flared with hot bitterness.
    “Nobody kin make Pa do what he sets his mind against, remember that.”
    “I’m remembering,” I said, with thoughts of how Pa refused to let himself really look at me.
    Again it was Monday, and we were all in school. Miss Deale expounded on the joys of reading Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, but I was dying to get on to study hall.
    “Heaven,” said Miss Deale, her baby-blue eyes fixed on me, “are you listening, or daydreaming?”
    “Listening!”
    “What was the poem I just discussed?”
    For the life of me I couldn’t remember one word she’d said in the last half hour, and that was not my way. Oh, I had to stop thinking of that darn Logan. Yet, when I was in the study hall and Logan was seated to my right, I began feeling the strangest kind of sensations whenever our eyes met. His hair wasn’t a true brown or black, but a blend with auburn highlights, with a little gold where the summer sun had streaked it. Really, I had to force myself not to glance his way again, since every time I did he was staring at me.
    Logan smiled before he whispered: “Who in the world was ingenious enough to give you such a name as Heaven?