“What’s wrong, Cassie?”
She took a deep breath, bringing her shoulders up. “Daddy.”
“What about him?” I asked, now clutching my hands and pressing them between my breasts.
“He said …” She had to gasp for the air to speak. “He said he had a terrible day after all, and he was too exhausted to eat dinner. He apologized and went up to his room. He looked awful, just awful.”
“But I thought you told me and Mrs. Underwood that you had called him twice and he sounded good.”
“I said that just for her benefit, so she would know what sort of people Heavenstones are.”
“Well … what should we do?”
“There’s nothing we can do at the moment, Semantha,” she replied, her voice losing any softness and returning to her Cassie voice. “Not in light of what Mother has done.” She looked toward the door and upward. “He’s suffering. I was hoping I could ease that pain quickly, but it will take more time.”
“It is too soon to expect our lives to return to normal.”
She narrowed her eyes.“Our lives were never quite normal, Semantha. What I hope to do is bring that about as quickly as I can.”
“I don’t understand. Why weren’t our lives normal?”
She shook her head at me as if I were far too young and unsophisticated to comprehend what she was saying. It was a waste of her time to try. Instead, she turned and looked out the window again.
“Cassie?”
She raised her right hand to shut me up and dismiss me. I stood there anyway and waited. Maybe she thought I had left, but I was positive I clearly heard her say, “He’ll forget her as soon as I can fill the empty place in his heart.”
It was as if someone had thrown a pail of ice water over me. I actually shivered.
And then I turned and fled the living room.
Holes in His Heart
CASSIE AND I never sat down to eat the dinner she had made. She was so disappointed about Daddy that she dumped the meat loaf into the garbage. Then she told me to make myself something else to eat. She said she wasn’t hungry and, with her head down, charged up the stairs to her room. It reminded me of when she was very young and went into tantrums, not speaking to anyone for days sometimes. No one could shut herself up as quickly and as completely as Cassie could. Daddy used to say she cut herself off so tightly that it was amazing she could breathe.
I made myself a sandwich and ate alone in the dining room. With both Daddy and Cassie shut up in their rooms, the house was cemetery-quiet. The stillness toyed with my brain. It was as if some normally heavily locked door was thrown open, and my imagination came rushing out, gleeful that it had no restrictions, no limits. Suddenly, I saw Mother sitting at the table. She was much younger, too, and so were Daddy and Cassie. Daddy had just surprised Mother with a gift for their anniversary.
“But our anniversary isn’t until Sunday, Teddy. Today’s Friday,” she said as she turned the small gift-wrapped box, looking at it from every angle as if she wanted first to guess what was in it.
“If I gave it to you on Sunday, it would be less of a surprise,” Daddy said. “Here it comes out of the blue, so to speak. You never expected it.”
“See how clever your father is?” Mother told us. She looked especially at Cassie, but Cassie didn’t speak. She looked upset, in fact, making that small tightness in the corners of her mouth. Funny how I never thought about her reaction, I told myself now. What annoyed her? Did she think Daddy was being too corny or something?
She tried not to look as Mother opened the small box and took out a beautiful gold locket shaped like a heart with a small diamond at the center. She held it up so Cassie and I could see it.
“Oh, how beautiful, Teddy.”
“Open it,” he said with that wide smile of his that warmed me so when I was little. His eyes would sparkle. It was as if I could actually smell his love. It was that great and comforting.
Mother worked the latch and looked. Even more surprise blossomed in her face.
“Teddy, where did you get these?”
“I have my ways,” he said, winking at me. He looked at Cassie, but she didn’t change expression.
Mother turned the locket so we could see. “This is a picture of me when I was your age, Semantha, and this is a picture of your father when he was your age, Cassie.”
“You didn’t know each other then,” Cassie said sharply. It was clear she thought the pictures were silly, especially in such a locket.
“Oh, but we did,” Daddy said. “Not very well, but we had met, because your mother’s father, your grandfather Brody, was a salesman for Carter and Smith and just happened to have brought your mother on a call to our store in Kenton when I was there with my father. We spent a little time together waiting for our fathers. Remember, Arianna?”
“Not as well as you do, Teddy.”
“I think I fell in love with you that day,” he said.
“How can you fall in love with someone when you’re that young?” Cassie asked. She asked it in that hard tone of voice that made you think what you had said was very stupid. When she did it to me, it was cutting and painful, but Daddy always held his smile and never changed his tone with her.
“You can when you meet your soul mate, Cassie,” he said, and reached for Mother’s hand.
“That’s romantic nonsense,” Cassie muttered.
“When you meet yours, you’ll change your mind,” Daddy told her.
Cassie didn’t reply. She simply started to eat, her gaze far-off. I knew she had shut the door on any further discussion.
The whole scene, that memory, played itself before me as if I were watching a television rerun. When I heard Cassie’s footsteps on the stairway, the memory popped like a bubble, and that door in my brain locked tightly after it and pulled my imagination back inside.
“Are you going to have something to eat, Cassie?” I asked as soon as she stepped into the dining room.
She didn’t answer. She continued into the dining room and walked slowly around the table, pausing at Daddy’s seat. She looked at it as if he were sitting there. Slowly, she extended her hand and held it in the air as though she were caressing Daddy’s head lovingly. Then she turned to me with a strange, deep smile on her face. I had never seen her eyes so bright. They seemed to illuminate her whole face, giving her an excited glow.
“I understand,” she told me. “I sat up in my room and thought and thought and thought, and suddenly, I understood.”
“Understood what, Cassie?”
“Daddy’s pain. Think of it as two holes in his heart, Semantha.” She sat in what had always been Mother’s seat and leaned toward me. “Mother’s death is one hole, and Asa’s is another.”
“Asa’s?”
“The Asa that could have been, Daddy’s Asa. One hole is so deep it won’t close, but the other will in time.”
“Which will close?”
“Mother’s death,” she said without hesitation. “Men lose their wives, and most, sooner rather than later, remarry and close the hole, but no parent can close the hole created by a lost child. The child has to be brought back to do that.”
“Brought back? How can a child be brought back?”
She didn’t answer. She continued to look at me, but the way she was looking at me gave me the eerie feeling that she was looking through me and not at me. And she was smiling, smiling at her own thoughts.
“Cassie? How can a lost child be brought back? No one can bring someone back, Cassie.”
She snapped out of her thoughts, stopped smiling, and said, “Jesus raised Lazarus, didn’t he?”
“But that was Jesus. He performed a miracle.”
“There are other ways,” she said.
“What other ways?”
“Don’t keep asking the same question. We can, and we will.”
“But I don’t understand.”
She was frightening me now. I could feel the terror gripping me at the base of my spine. There
was this new, even stranger look in her eyes. She blinked, and it was gone as quickly as it had come.
“It doesn’t matter. Just do what I tell you to do. Get along with Mrs. Underwood, and do your house chores. I’ll take care of everything else,” she said sharply.
I was still confused, but I didn’t say so. Her expression changed again, this time returning to a warmer, more sisterly look. She nodded at my sandwich?
“You made that with the chunky chicken. Very good. I’m hungry now. Why don’t you make me the same sandwich.”
This was another surprise. The only other time she let me make her anything was recently, after I had gotten in trouble in school. She didn’t mind me in the kitchen helping clean up or gathering what was needed to set the table, but she rarely liked me participating in the actual preparation of any food, except for slicing salad ingredients. It was always so important for her to receive all of the compliments, and if Mother ever started to show me some recipe, Cassie always reminded me of some other chore I had. She would tell Mother that she would teach me whatever it was later, but she never did.
“Food preparation requires almost as much concentration as a work of art,” she would tell me whenever I complained, “and you don’t have the ability to concentrate on something like that, Semantha. In fact, you almost have attention-deficit disorder. That’s why you’re doing only mediocre work in school, even with my help.”
She told me that so often and with such conviction that I started to believe it myself. This was another justification for her deciding that I should have a private tutor after all. It had come to that, she said. Deep down, I wanted to disagree adamantly, but the truth was my grades were nothing special. Next to her, I was like a small flashlight beside the sun.
I rose quickly to make her the same sandwich.
“And cut it in perfect quarters,” she added before I entered the kitchen.
Little did I realize it that night, but it was only the beginning. Every day for weeks afterward, Cassie insisted that I learn all of the recipes she knew, recipes she had learned from Mother, and I prepared them for our dinners. At first, I worked with her at my side until she was satisfied, and then she began to have me do all of the preparations myself. I thought she had finally come to see me as old and smart enough, but she had another reason for giving me the responsibility.
“I have to spend more time with Daddy,” she explained. “You will simply have to take on more and more of our housework as well.”
Spending time with Daddy didn’t only mean going with him to work in the morning or following him in her own car. It meant sitting at the diningroom table and talking to him while I prepared our dinner. Mostly, I heard her voice and her laughter. Daddy was still not fifty percent of his former self, and even with Cassie talking excitedly about something, he would stare blankly and drift away. It was easy to see how much that bothered Cassie. Her commands were sharper and full of frustration.
“Clean up. Wash the kitchen windows tonight. Clean out the refrigerator. Polish the stairway banister tomorrow.” On and on and on.
With these new responsibilities, my home-schooling, and my usual house chores, I had little time for myself, not that there was much for me to do for myself, anyway. The few friends I had made at school quickly forgot me once I stopped attending. I heard only once from Kent, but that was early on, merely to confirm that it was true that I had withdrawn from public school. None of the girls called me. Despite the fears I had about returning and facing the other students after Mother’s death, I couldn’t help but feel a constant emptiness. Aside from Mrs. Underwood, who avoided any conversation other than what was necessary for schoolwork, Cassie, and Daddy, I spoke to no one for weeks and weeks.
And Daddy was still quite different, much quieter, rarely smiling or laughing, even with me. He seemed only vaguely interested in my progress with Mrs. Underwood, too. If he said anything about it, it was to tell me Cassie had told him I was doing well. In my mind, I wasn’t really doing much better than I had done attending school, but Mrs. Underwood appeared satisfied. Her compliments, if any, were never exuberant. The best words I heard from her lips were “Good, continue.”
So, despite all I had to do, I still felt a terrible sense of loneliness and boredom. Cassie kept telling me how time softens the pain of loss, but I missed Mother even more. I thought it was just as true for Daddy, but Cassie insisted otherwise. When I told her what I thought, she became impatient and annoyed.
“I told you about the two holes, Semantha. It’s the deeper one, the deeper one!”
I didn’t argue, but I still didn’t understand or believe what she was saying. In the weeks that followed, Cassie became so different. She no longer wore any of her own clothes but only Mother’s. She would put on some of Mother’s jewelry as well, and Cassie was never one for wearing lots of jewelry. In fact, I recalled how much she had complained about Mother’s jewelry. No matter what Mother wore, it was always too much, too gaudy. Now she was doing exactly the same thing, never leaving the house without wearing a necklace, earrings, four or five rings, bracelets, and watches, even a jeweled pin. And this was the sister who had often said, “What Mother’s wearing today could feed a third world country for a week.”
One other thing that truly surprised me even more was Cassie’s sudden use of makeup, all Mother’s makeup too. Once someone who hated even to put on lipstick, Cassie would now spend hours on her hair and face while she sat at Mother’s vanity table and looked into what had been Mother’s mirror.
When I asked her about it, she snapped at me.“Don’t you see how I’m trying to brighten things up here for Daddy? Can you even begin to imagine what it must be like for him every day to finish his work and start out for this house, knowing how empty it is for him? The holes, Semantha, the holes!”
She didn’t have to shout about it. Of course, I could imagine how hard it was for Daddy; it was still hard for me, and I wasn’t completely oblivious to the other change in him as well. I noted how he drank more, especially after dinner. I was very worried about him, and when Uncle Perry paid a visit, I brought it up the first chance I had. Actually, I was the one responsible for his visiting. I realized I hadn’t seen him for a long time, and I called him to invite him to lunch on a Saturday. When I told Cassie, she had another fit.
“Why did you do that without checking with me?”
“It’s only lunch, Cassie. What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal is Daddy and I are going to Lexington on Saturday, and I’m not going to change our plans to accommodate Uncle Perry.”
“Well, I suppose I could cancel and tell him to come some other time if we’re going to Lexington.”
“I didn’t say we’re going, Semantha. I said Daddy and I are going. It’s a business trip, not an outing. We won’t have time to entertain you.”
“I don’t have to be entertained. I haven’t gone anywhere in weeks, Cassie.”
“I’ll take you out for dinner one night this week. I think Daddy’s having a dinner meeting with some retailers. Thank goodness for the business. It takes his mind off the holes in his heart for a while, at least.”
“Maybe Daddy will be upset that he won’t be here for Uncle Perry,” I said.
“Hardly,” Cassie said. “Don’t give it a second thought.”
She smiled and walked off with that Cassie confidence that she wore like a dress. I had to conclude that she was probably right, because when Uncle Perry arrived, he was surprised that neither Daddy nor Cassie was home.
“I left a message for Teddy that I’d see him this weekend. He never called back to tell me about any trip to Lexington, or I would have stayed home and joined him.” He thought a moment and then added, “But I imagine he had a lot on his mind.”
I had prepared us a nice lunch, and because it was late spring, I had set the table on the patio. Uncle Perry was genuinely delighted and insisted on helping me bring everything out.
“This is a terrific shrimp salad, Sam,
” he remarked as soon as he tasted it. “I had no idea you were so clever in the kitchen.”
“I hadn’t been until recently, but we’re doing everything we can to help Daddy cope.”
“That’s good.”
I told him about Daddy’s drinking and how it worried me.
“I’m concerned, too, but I’m sure he’ll be all right in time.”
I almost expected him to add, We’re Heavenstones, after all, but he stopped short of that.
“So, how did you learn to be a gourmet cook overnight?” he asked.
“Cassie’s been tutoring me. There isn’t much I can’t make that she can anymore.”
“Oh?”
“Actually, I do most of the cooking now, Uncle Perry.”
“Really?”
He nodded and looked away for a moment to sip his iced tea.
“I notice Cassie has made a number of changes,” he said, not looking at me, and then he turned quickly to see my reaction. “She’s wearing different clothing, jewelry, makeup. Has she found a boyfriend?”
“I don’t think so. She doesn’t go anywhere at night.”
“Hmmm.” He sipped some more tea and ate. “Do you like this home-schooling thing, Sam?”
“It’s okay for now, but I do miss being with other kids my age.”
“Yes, I would think you would. To be frank, Sam, I don’t understand why my brother agreed to such an arrangement. Did you want this?”