Sand Castles

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  Zina was waiting.

  "Three hundred thousand, Zee," he said softly. "That's your share." He couldn't help adding, "What do you think about that?"

  She slapped her hand over her mouth and stared blankly at him over the polyester daisies. Zack wasn't exactly sure how he'd been expecting his sister to react, but he thought he'd see more ... joy in her eyes, somehow; less blankness. Blankness looked too much like fear. "Zee?"

  She nodded, then whispered, "We each got that much? Each?"

  "Absolutely."

  "But why didn't I get a letter, too?"

  Ah, damn it. He didn't think she'd get there that fast.

  "Okay, here's the thing. I was the actual, named heir—wait a minute, hear me out—but that was because old Aunt Louise didn't know you existed. She was leaving it to Mom's progeny, and she was assuming that I was the only progeny. She must have lost contact with Mom and Dad before you were born; that's what her lawyer surmised."

  "Well, I can't accept it, that's all," she said firmly. "It wouldn't even be legal, I'll bet."

  He had to smile at the irony of it all. Legal! "We can split it any way we want to, Zee," he told her. "There's no law against that. What do I need with all that money? You see how I live—like Thoreau on Walden Pond. I have my wood, I have my music. I don't even have to buy cat food," he teased. "I'll undoubtedly dump my share in a money-market account and forget about it until I'm old and bent and ready for a nursing home."

  Would she buy it? He held his breath. It all came down to that single, exquisite moment.

  The blankness remained, but it looked a little less fearful than before. "Are you sure?" she asked timidly.

  "I've never been more sure of anything in my life." That was the God's honest truth.

  "Because if money ever came between us, I'd die."

  "It won't."

  "Because you mean everything to me, now, Zack. You're all I have in life. Besides my cats."

  He didn't even take offense, he was so happy that his cockamamie scheme was going to fly. Wilbur Wright couldn't have been half as happy when his brother took off at Kitty Hawk.

  "You'll want to quit your job, I expect," he said, trying as he always had to steer her in a definite direction.

  "And open my own shop?" she said. "That sounds like a lot of responsibility. I could lose the money!"

  "Not all of it. Not necessarily any of it. But you won't know unless you try."

  "Oh, I don't know," she said, shaking her head. "I'd have to think about that."

  "Of course. And now you'll have the time and the money to do it in."

  "Maybe I could—what if I opened a shelter with the money instead?" she asked, brightening.

  "If that's what you want to do, if that's what makes you happy, then that's what you should do. But you don't have to decide this minute," he assured her.

  Zack would caution her some other time that without a hefty endowment and nonstop fund-raising, she'd go through the money in no time, trying to keep a shelter open. He hadn't expected her to turn away from the quilting shop idea so quickly; she'd fantasized about having one for years. But right now she was compensating like crazy for the emotional letdown and future void, and cats were obviously more huggable than quilts.

  Her eggs got cold as Zina began spinning an elaborate scenario in which every abandoned cat in Massachusetts had a huge cage, a private run, the best food, a daily brushing, and families lined up four deep to adopt. Her shelter, of course, would be a no-kill facility. If need be, she would sustain every cat for the rest of its natural life. Every cat would be spayed or neutered at the shelter's expense, because it was obvious, even to Zina who loved them, that there were too many unwanted cats in the world. The cats would be content, whatever their fate, and so would she.

  Which is why Zack had come up with the blackmail scheme in the first place, and why he had to make it work.

  Chapter 12

  Hosting the birthday party definitely had seemed like a much better idea on Sunday.

  Wendy's frazzle quotient would've been lower if she hadn't decided to take over coordinating the entire event herself, turning it into a combination birthday-housewarming party. It didn't help that she had insisted that all of the out-of-towners stay overnight at her rented house rather than spread themselves out, as they normally did, over the family's available sofabeds.

  But that's what Wendy had done, and it explained why when she showed up at the construction site on Sheldon Street, Pete interrupted himself and blurted, "What's the matter with your hair?"

  "I don't know. What?"

  She reached up automatically and felt around. Some of her hair was aimed at the sky and some of it was shooting out the side of her head. The rest of it was glommed together in the back.

  "Oh, good grief," she said, pulling out the three clips that she'd used to hold her hairdo together—obviously without success—while she ripped through the house making the beds and setting out flowers and arranging baskets of soaps and bowls of fruit. "I've just gone into four different stores looking like this," she moaned.

  Pete averted his gaze and said diplomatically, "I doubt anyone noticed."

  Wendy heard a soft chuckle and whipped her head around to see Zack walking past with a bundle of roofing shingles slung over his shoulder.

  "Sorry," he murmured, instantly sobering. As he went on his way, he added, "I thought it looked cute."

  Wendy felt heat in every root of her ill-placed hair. Cute!

  And that's as far as she got. Her mind went utterly blank.

  She turned back to her contractor and said, "I'm sorry, Pete. What—what did you want to know?"

  "Did you make up your mind about the banister?"

  "What are my choices, again?"

  "Oak. Beech. Cherry."

  She tried to picture them all and drew another blank. "Oh, I don't know; you pick one. Whatever you think looks right."

  Pete did a double take. " 'Scuze me? You're not going to make this decision yourself? Six different times?"

  It was a first, she realized. "I can't, Pete. My mind's not on it. How important can it be?" she asked, distracted beyond believing it could matter at all. Wood was wood, wasn't it?

  Pete rubbed his chin. Apparently he'd seen homeowners in her condition before. "I'll put the order on hold for now. We've got time."

  She nodded and glanced around. There was something she was supposed to do, something she came there specifically to do ...

  I thought it looked cute.

  Her hand went up to her hair again. She poked at it furtively, unsure whether it looked any better with the clips pulled out.

  Messages.

  That was it; she'd forgotten to check them the day before. God only knew how many members of her family had been trying to get in touch with her.

  She looked askance at the series of red blinks on the machine. "I must have been mad to take on this party," she muttered. There were a dozen messages; the tape had more than likely run out. Which never would have happened if she were still living in the house; she had been on top of everything, up until the move over the weekend.

  Even worse, she found that she was already missing the minute-to-minute pleasure of watching Zack and the others pull the addition together. She would be lying to herself if she said she preferred to see each day's progress all at once, after the crew had left. That kind of CEO approach just wasn't her style; she was more of the shop-steward type.

  Why, again, was she staring at the blinks on the machine?

  Right. Messages.

  She began playing through them. One was from yet another long-lost friend, this time, of Wendy's, who wanted to meet over a meal somewhere and reminisce about their sophomore year in college because it had been, like, such a blast. There was a call from her aunt Genevieve (who announced that her carpal tunnel was acting up and she wouldn't be able to slice any cabbage for cole slaw); a call from her brother Dave (who confessed that he was too chicken to bring his latest and appar
ently thoroughly pierced and tattooed girlfriend to the party); a call from her mother (who said "Oops, wrong house," and rang off); and more than the usual number of hangups.

  One of them stood out from the others and sent a ripple of goose bumps over Wendy. She'd heard it before, and more than once: ominous silence, punctuated by desultory voices in the background, possibly from another room. The acoustics of it sounded to her like a television, but, if so, it must have been a boring program. No one had much to say. A soap? A gardening show? A wildlife program? She strained to make out an identifying sound, and within seconds, she had it: a woman's low cry, followed by her shuddering moan.

  A porn tape. Wendy was willing to bet the addition on it. Disgusted, she hit the erase button. How pathetic, she thought. Dirty callers didn't even do their own heavy breathing anymore.

  She sighed in frustration; she didn't have time for this! After a few words to Pete, she was out the door and headed for her car. With any luck, Mark and Marianne would arrive shortly, and she could put her sister-in-law to work mincing and chopping and shredding. The affair was potluck—her father wanted familiar, homemade cuisine, not some fancy catered "inedibles"—but the pressure was still on Wendy, as the hostess, to make sure there'd be fill-in food and lots of it.

  "How's the water flowing?" came a shout from the roof.

  Wendy stopped and looked up. Thirty feet above her, Zack was standing with hands on his hips like some contractor-colossus, astride the ridgepole.

  Shading her eyes with the palm of her hand, Wendy yelled, "So far, so good," and gave him a thumbs-up signal with her other hand. Meanwhile, she was truly wishing that he'd hold on to something.

  "Glad to hear it," he called down to her. "I was concerned that there might be other scraps of wood floating around."

  She hadn't even considered the possibility! "In that case, you'd better get that roof on quick," she yelled up, "because we'll be right back here, rolling out sleeping bags for everyone on every floor."

  He grinned and waved and went back to work on the roof, and Wendy became instantly aware of an odd ping of disappointment. Just a ping, no big stab. But it was there, and she had to acknowledge it.

  Why did we move out? This is where I want to be.

  The thought came and went in the blink of an eye, and then Wendy went on her way.

  ****

  The little white cat was in pain. Only one of his front pads was singed, and he was medicated; but Zina could see that the fire had traumatized him more than any of the other cats that had been rounded up and deemed well enough to stay in the shelter.

  "Poor thing, look at him, all huddled in the back of the cage," she murmured to Sylvia. "You can see how this has affected him."

  The director hardly heard her; she had her hands full screening the crush of people who were calling with offers to relieve the jam-packed shelter of some of the cats, either temporarily or permanently.

  "Maybe we should just burn a house down every week," Sylvia said in a surprising display of gallows humor. "At least we'd make the evening news and get some attention focused on the animals."

  Zina had already gone straight to Sylvia and told her that since she was coming into an inheritance, the shelter could expect a generous donation from her. So it wasn't exactly a bolt out of the blue when Zina said, "Since TV is such a great tool, maybe we should try renting a spot on the local news once a week; we could feature just one cat—you know, a pet-of-the-week kind of thing."

  Sylvia Radisson let out one of her rare laughs. "Buy TV time? What was your great-aunt's name? Bill Gates?"

  The phone rang and Sylvia picked it up, and Zina went back to comforting the new arrivals, some of them crowded two in a cage; she was watching carefully to see who got along and who didn't.

  The two young tabbies sharing one cage definitely looked like siblings, but the jury was still out on that: there had been a little too much swatting and hissing in the cage, and everyone was nervous about them. And they couldn't ask the cats' elderly owner; disoriented and confused, he was being held in a hospital overnight for observation.

  The poor owner; Zina's heart went out to him. Usually they were women, these kind souls who took in animal after animal until they were completely overwhelmed. This man had done it in memory of his wife, he had told the firefighters. His wife was fond of cats and always fed the strays.

  Compensating—that's what Zina had read that people like him were doing. They were compensating for being sad and alone and unloved. But that wasn't Zina's problem; she just loved cats. How could she feel alone and unloved? She had Zack, after all, a wonderful, caring brother. Her thoughts went back to the restaurant, to the amazing breakfast they'd shared. (She would never look at bacon and eggs the same again.)

  Zina was hardly surprised and yet deeply moved by Zack's generous offer to split his inheritance with her. Who would do something like that besides him? She couldn't think of anyone less interested in money than her brother was. She accepted his statement completely that he didn't need it.

  Actually, it would be nice if he did need it—for college or for kids' braces or something. But he'd always sworn up and down that marriage was overrated, that men and women weren't meant to be monogamous.

  Until just recently, he used to tease her about that. "Look at the animals you love so well," he liked to point out. "Are they monogamous? Fat chance."

  "Some of them are," she'd argue. "The crow and the swan and the wolf."

  "Myths. All myths. Animal behaviorists are debunking them left and right. Just because some animals mate for life doesn't mean that they're faithful for life. Animals cheat. People cheat. What's the point of denying it?"

  As far as Zina knew, no one had ever cheated on Zack; he'd never given any woman a chance to. His terrible attitude about relationships was strictly because of their parents. And Zina could understand that; she could understand how he might always look at a woman the way their father had looked at their mother that horrible night. But still. If only he could have more faith in women.

  "Look at me. Who do you know," she'd ask him with a laugh, "who's more faithful than I am?"

  And he would laugh, too, sadly and softly. But the look in his eyes always said the same thing: There's something wrong with you, Zee.

  There wasn't, Zina was convinced. Not with her. But as much as she hated to admit it, she was convinced that there was something wrong with Zack. If there weren't, he would be using that inheritance to buy a house and fill it with family.

  Poor Zack ...

  She opened a cage and lifted out an especially loud-purring cat who was rubbing her cheek along the inside of the cage grid, begging for affection.

  Lifting the animal gently, Zina carried her over to a vinyl-covered armchair in the get-acquainted room next to the one in which the cats were kept caged. She sat with the peach-and-gray cat in her lap, petting and stroking and reassuring it.

  "I'll bet you're the one who always got to sit on the old man's lap, aren't you?" she murmured. "Your purr is too loud for anyone to ignore you. Poor little baby," she said, stroking the calico's chin. "Don't you know that cats are supposed to be detached and aloof? What's the matter with you?" she teased in her most melodious voice. "Do you want to ruin everyone else's reputation?"

  She continued murmuring silly things, trying to soothe the achingly affectionate animal. The cat's purr was even louder than Cassie's, no small feat. Zina began to think of Cassie, and of Zack who wouldn't take Cassie, and in her revery she forgot to continue stroking the cat in her lap. The pale gray calico became impatient; she turned and nipped Zina's finger in an exquisitely tender reminder to keep on doing what she'd been doing.

  "Well! Excuse me," said Zina, smiling, and she resumed her stroking.

  And then she stopped.

  Stopped and heard, not the loud, rhythmic purring of the cat, but the sudden, wrenching pounding of her heart, banging against her rib cage. Déja vu. She was experiencing déja vu.

  Zina had had
moments like this one before in her life, and she had always given them her absolute attention, because she believed that not all knowledge came from facts and figures and the observable world. Sometimes revelations flew fast and in a straight line just below the radar screen, or they hovered somewhere on the periphery, like a buoy on a foggy ocean.

  This particular revelation came to Zina straight and fast, and it shot right through her heart.

  Through the haze of her personal history, she remembered being perhaps four years old and sitting in her mother's rocking chair, the one that now sat in her own living room. She had a cat on her lap. The cat was purring and Zina was petting it, marveling at its soft fur. She wanted to keep it for her own, but it belonged to the old—very, very old—lady who sat on the sofa across from her, watching her with dark, beady eyes.

  She remembered feeling brave enough to ask the lady, "Can Ginger stay here? She could sleep in my bed."

  And she remembered her mother, pretty in bright blue, saying quickly, "Oh, honey, no, the cat won't be able to stay over for a visit. Aunt Louise is going back home to Omaha, far, far away, and she's taking Ginger with her. They're going on the train tomorrow, back to their home in Omaha."

  "I don't want Ginger to go," Zina remembered saying. "She likes me."

  Four-year-old Zina had stopped petting the cat while she argued her case, and Ginger, loud-purring Ginger, had suddenly turned her head and nipped Zina on her forefinger, exactly the way the gray calico had done a minute ago.

  And the very, very old lady called Aunt Louise had smiled and said to a startled four-year-old Zina, "She likes you, Zina."

  And her seven-year-old brother, fidgeting in the easy chair next to the sofa, had said, "Well, that's a stupid way to show it."

  And her mother had told Zack to be quiet and to stop pounding his hands on the arms of the chair.

  Zina. Zack. And Aunt Louise. They had been in a room together once, all three of them. So Aunt Louise, or Cousin Louise or whoever she was, had to have known that Zina existed.