Secret Whispers

  He turned to me and realized I had been staring at him the whole time he spoke. Then, without further comment, he put his arm around me and held me close. Together, we cried in silence. We finally cried together, both of us, out of happiness and sorrow. Lucille had done this. She had brought Daddy and me together the way I had hoped we would be.

  “Come on. Let’s see what Mrs. Dobson has for dessert. She told me she was doing something special for your first dinner home after your graduation.”

  She had done something special. She had made her famous English white cake with the words Congratulations, Miss Semantha in chocolate. Daddy led our applause. I could see how much pleasing him meant to Mrs. Dobson. Lucille had probably been sucking up most of his compliments these days, with sparingly few going to her.

  “This is my own mum’s recipe,” she said proudly. “We had it only on very special occasions.”

  I thanked her and hugged her, which embarrassed her, so she fled.

  Later, the three of us sat in the den and talked. Actually, Lucille did most of the talking, mainly continuing the discussion about their wedding and the high-profile guests they were expecting. Every once in a while, she would turn to me to support her opinion of something we had seen or ordered for the wedding. Daddy looked happier than I could ever remember. Normally, that would have upset me. Normally, it would have seemed sinful for him to be happier than when he was with Mother, but tonight I could deny him nothing.

  How different I felt when I went to sleep this time. Something Lucille had advised appeared true. She had said that the way she handled bad memories was to pile on good memories, deliberately do things to please herself, to create happy times, and after a while, the weight of all of that drives the bad memories farther and farther down until they don’t come back so often, and even when they do, they’re easy to push away.

  Today was certainly proof of that. I hadn’t thought much about Ethan or Ellie or any of my unhappy experiences at school. I wondered if I could do it tomorrow and the day after as well. I wanted to. For one thing, Cassie still had little or nothing to say. She was mute in her grave, and my mind danced with all sorts of wonderful and delicious new possibilities. Maybe I would go to work with Uncle Perry. Maybe I would find someone better than Ethan. Maybe we would be a family again.

  Like a dying ember in a fireplace, the image of Cassie’s angry face dwindled and went dark. I could sleep, and for once I would not be afraid of my dreams. The Heaven-stone house sighed with relief. There were no moans and groans of age in the pipes, floors, ceilings, and walls. Downstairs, our ancestors opened their eyes again. Maybe Daddy was right. We were too powerful a family. Fate would pause at our gates with her bag full of trouble and disaster, look up our driveway, and quickly move on to the homes of weaker and more vulnerable families.

  I imagined a sign on the lawn: beware of the Heaven-stones.

  I smiled to myself and fell asleep, no longer afraid of the morning to come.

  But before morning, I had a terrible nightmare. In it, Lucille was shoveling dirt into Cassie’s grave, covering her coffin.

  And Cassie was screaming my name, pleading with me to stop Lucille.

  I let her keep shoveling.

  Beware of the Heaven-stones

  THIS TIME, I was grateful for the morning sunlight rushing through the opened curtains to wash the nightmare out of my head. It popped like a bubble, and I rose quickly to shower and dress to go down to breakfast. Uncle Perry had left a message that he was coming to have lunch with me. I was surprised he would make the trip during the workweek, but I knew he was very concerned about me and my adjusting to Daddy’s marriage to Lucille.

  During the dark period after Cassie’s death, when Daddy was so withdrawn and sullen, it was Uncle Perry who had spent hours talking with me, taking me for rides, eating dinner with me, trying to help me recover from what anyone would have thought was an impossible series of tragedies. He had always been a candle in the darkness for me.

  Although I could never put it into the proper words the way Cassie could, I had always seen Uncle Perry as the softer, kinder side of the Heaven-stone family. It wasn’t that I thought Daddy an unkind man, but he was more of what Cassie liked to call man tough. She said Daddy had inherited far more of the pioneer spirit of rugged individualism than Uncle Perry had. She didn’t imply that it was because Uncle Perry was gay. She said that had nothing to do with it. There were many strong and successful and even ruthless businessmen who were gay. No, she said, it was simply that the independent, courageous, and determined spirit that had made our ancestors so successful had seeped into Daddy’s genes more easily than into Uncle Perry’s. Uncle Perry, she said, was more his mother’s child than his father’s. Although she never quite came out and told me so, she surely believed that was true for me as well. She had always thought she was more of a Heaven-stone than I was, and that this was why Daddy would never love me as much as he loved her.

  “However, Uncle Perry loves you more than he loves me,” she had told me, “but believe me, Semantha, I can live with it. I couldn’t care less if he respected me or liked me. He’s all yours.”

  Uncle Perry realized that, too. I knew he had never been very comfortable in Cassie’s presence and had welcomed spending as much time with me, without her, as possible. He never even mentioned her name now. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him I wasn’t as able to forget and avoid any references to Cassie as he was. I wondered what he would think if I told him she was still there, still inside my head—I still heard her. He might want me to go back to regular psychiatric therapy. I certainly didn’t want that, not now. So I decided against even suggesting anything about Cassie.

  I was surprised to learn that both Daddy and Lucille had left the house before I went downstairs. Mrs. Dobson said they rushed out “as if the house was on fire.” She didn’t know why, either, but she did say they appeared more excited than frightened about anything. I could see she was more curious than usual, which made me more curious, but I told her I didn’t have a clue.

  For the first time since I had returned from school, I was alone at home. Mrs. Dobson and Doris had their work, and besides, neither really ever spent time socializing with me. Of course, I had been home alone often while I had attended Collier and returned for the holidays. Daddy rarely took a day off besides Sundays, and often, since Mother’s death, he didn’t even do that. Most of those times, I’d had schoolwork to do. With what I could do on my computer and in our own wonderful library, I hadn’t had to leave the house.

  Now, however, all that schoolwork was behind me, and I had little to occupy my thoughts. Any future plans and ambitions remained vague. I really had little to look forward to and little to do, which was why I was now so eager to participate in Daddy and Lucille’s wedding. Of course, that stirred up dreams and fantasies about my own marriage and wedding ceremony. I didn’t want it to be as grand and as elaborate as Daddy and Lucille’s. I imagined a wedding in a small chapel followed by a family banquet and then a wonderful honeymoon. All I needed was a groom, someone to fall in love with me, someone with whom I could fall in love, but I didn’t even have a date with anyone. None of the boys who once knew me when I was in public school ever called or wrote e-mails. I was sure for them it was as if I never had existed.

  The thought depressed me, but for the moment, at least, I could look forward to Uncle Perry’s visit. I told Mrs. Dobson that he was coming for lunch and asked her to prepare her chicken salad. Uncle Perry really enjoyed it the way she made it with apples and pears. I knew she liked him very much. She referred to him as “a refined gentleman,” someone who reminded her of her last employer in London. She said she would set up the table on our back veranda and would put out flowers and dress it up “like a Sunday high tea.”

  While I waited for him to arrive, I went on a tour of our home. I was curious to see what, if any, changes Lucille had already accomplished or begun. The door to the room that had been going to be little Asa’s nurs
ery was still locked. I was happy to see that. And aside from the way Lucille had set up her vanity table in the master suite, nothing there had been changed. I went into the room and, feeling a little like a voyeur perhaps, opened her closet and looked at her fine clothes and shoes. There was already far more than what Mother had had in it. There was a different scent in the room, too, although the room itself was still the way Cassie had rearranged and redecorated it.

  I recalled how she had done it without Daddy’s permission, planning and scheming with the decorator. Even I hadn’t known what she was up to until the day she’d had it all done. I’ll never forget the look of surprise and shock on Daddy’s face when he entered the room that day. It had driven home that Mother was gone. I knew that was why Cassie had done it. She never had trouble facing reality and had expected the same of everyone else, especially Daddy.

  I had told her that I thought it was cruel and I could never do such a thing. She had said that was why she was more of a Heaven-stone than I was. She could do the hard, necessary things without emotions dragging her down.

  “You don’t lower yourself and your beliefs to fit the inferior ones. You force them to rise to your standards, whether it’s painful for them or not. That’s what Heaven-stones do,” she had lectured.

  I thought to myself, if she was right, I wanted to change my name.

  I hated the idea that Mother was completely erased from existence. Even the traces of her in her own bedroom were gone. Cassie had put away their wedding photos and photos of us with Mother as well. Daddy had put them back, at least, but I suddenly realized as I gazed around now that they were gone again. That was obviously because of Lucille.

  “Of course it is,” Cassie whispered, seeing her opportunity to open the floodgates in my head again. “You fool. She gave you that photograph to seduce you. It’s only the beginning. By the time she’s through, you’ll think you were always motherless.”

  I put my hands over my ears and rushed out. After I calmed down, I continued my exploring. Everything was the same in all of the guest bedrooms, and I already knew that nothing had been altered in the rooms below. As far as I could tell, not a thing downstairs had been moved, not even an ashtray in the den. Lucille must really respect and admire Daddy and the Heaven-stone family, I thought. It was either that, or she was afraid to challenge anything. Somehow, however, I couldn’t believe Lucille was the sort of person who would put up with anything she didn’t like. I guess she and Daddy were really a good fit after all, I concluded.

  “Despite what you think,” I muttered at a shadowy corner in which I could see Cassie hovering like a ghost made of cobwebs.

  Uncle Perry apparently had arrived at a similar conclusion. After I thanked him for my watch, all he talked about again at lunch was how changed for the better my father was since he had met Lucille. I had to agree.

  “Sometimes he looks younger to me.”

  “Exactly,” Uncle Perry said. “Sorrow ages you.”

  Then he told me things about my father that he had never told me.

  “There were times after your mother’s death when I thought he might really take his own life, Sam. I’d find him sitting and staring out the window in his office with a pile of work left on his desk. Most of the time, he didn’t even hear me enter, and when he realized I was there and turned to me, I saw how vacant his eyes had become. He looked like a shell of the man he had been. Almost nothing interested or excited him. He was simply going through the motions.

  “And then that day, that fateful day when Cassie fell down the stairs, he put on a good performance for everyone, including you, but he was truly like someone running on fumes. I was doing things at the company that I had never had to do before. Employees were coming to me for answers and instructions about things that were, frankly, quite unfamiliar to me, but because he hadn’t given them answers and there were deadlines, I had to become a quick learner. Somehow, I made the right decisions, and we survived, but after you went off to your private school, he grew so depressed I was even more convinced that he was seriously contemplating suicide.”

  “After I left?”

  “Yes. Alone in this big house, with all of the happier memories echoing and fading, I’m sure it looked to him as though everything was gone, his whole family gone. You can’t even begin to imagine how he would brag and boast about the three of you before all this tragedy came raining down upon him.”

  “Mostly Cassie, I’m sure,” I said.

  Uncle Perry didn’t deny it. He shrugged and drank his lemonade. “He thought she was a good influence on both you and your mother. ‘They’ll both be happier and better because of Cassie,’ he would say if I uttered even the smallest criticism or concern about her. To think that he had to face the reality of that not being true but in fact its being the exact opposite,” Uncle Perry said, shaking his head. “It really destroyed his self-confidence. That was when he was afraid to make the smallest, most insignificant decisions, especially about personnel. And then . . .”

  “What ‘and then’ ?”

  “And then he met and began seeing Lucille Bennet more and more. I swear,” Uncle Perry continued with his young boy’s smile, “whenever he talked about her, he sounded like some lovesick teenager. I was actually embarrassed for him at times, especially when he gushed with compliments about her, making her seem like some sort of gift from the gods. Here was my older, wiser, stern, and correct brother behaving like a schoolboy with a crush, thinking and doing the silliest of things, like putting on two different socks or saying good morning to the same person three times. The employees didn’t know what to make of it, and many were worried he was losing his mind, until, of course, the word spread that he was in love. That seemed to be the excuse they’d accept for anything, and I saw, Sam, that they actually began liking him because of it.”

  “What do you mean? Why would they begin liking him? Didn’t they always like him?”

  He shook his head.

  “Most of our employees respected your father, but they all feared him. I would never have said they liked him, but I can say it now.”

  “Even when Mother was alive?”

  “Maybe in the early days, but my brother can be and was quite a stuffed shirt. He had to live up to that image of what he believed a Heaven-stone should be. He hardly ever smiled or made small talk with an employee. He quickly began to resemble some of the men in those portraits on the walls in there. I’m glad your mother resisted sitting for one of those portrait painters. Anyway, as you admit, you see a big difference in him now, too.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Well, then, I guess we should both count our blessings and be happy that Lucille Bennet’s come into his life, which means our lives, too, eh?”

  “I guess, Uncle Perry.”

  He tilted his head a bit and smiled. “You don’t sound as convinced as I am.”

  “I am,” I said. “It’s a little harder for me because . . .”

  He nodded. “Once you fully accept her, you feel you’ve betrayed the memory of your mother?”

  “Exactly.” I smiled. I’d never deny that Cassie had been right about me. I was so easy to read I really should have a library card for my face.

  “It’s Hamlet, only reversed,” Uncle Perry said. “Right at the start, we learn he felt that way about his father and about accepting his uncle as a replacement.”

  “I know. I love that play.”

  “Well, then,” Uncle Perry said, leaning toward me, “beware of ghosts, Sam.”

  “Mother doesn’t haunt me like that, Uncle Perry. She would never be the one to take away any of Daddy’s happiness.”

  He studied me a moment, and then, again leaning toward me, said, “But Cassie haunts you?”

  I was shocked. I had debated with myself about telling him. How did he know? I was sure I hadn’t given him any reason to think so. Was she haunting him as well?

  “I can’t help thinking about what she would think, Uncle Perry. She never hesitated t
o give me her opinion about anything.”

  He waved it away. “Fight it, or don’t care, Sam. I don’t like speaking ill of the dead, but I never had trouble believing what you told us Cassie had done. Cassie was an evil child, no matter what your father thought. I even saw that when she was no more than four, saw how she clung to your father but not your mother. I could see how she recoiled when she touched her. Why, she wouldn’t even let her brush her hair.”

  I didn’t speak. I had no doubt Cassie was listening. He saw how I gazed about the veranda, and he raised his eyebrows.

  “You’re worried someone will overhear me? Don’t worry. I don’t say these things to your father. I’ll stop talking about her. I can see it makes you uncomfortable. All right.” He changed his tone and folded his hands on the table. “Let’s talk about you instead. Have you given any thought to working with me? You’ve got that fabulous new car now. You can drive yourself, make your own hours, and get as involved as you wish. What do you say?”

  “What would I do, actually?”

  “Lots of things, Semantha. We’re constantly evaluating the new clothing lines, and you know how much I rely on your opinion about that, especially for the teenage market, and then there is the advertising, dealing with the magazines, newspapers, television, and radio. We’re also working with an Internet firm to dress up our Web site and start linking to our products everywhere. There’s a lot for you to do. It’s important we keep the younger perspective on everything.”

  “Okay, Uncle Perry. I’ll really think about it.”

  “Maybe you can start after the wedding. They’ll be off on their honeymoon, and it will be pretty lonely and quiet around here.”