"The date's on the photo," he said, holding it out to her. "It hasn't been digitalized, so don't go accusing me of it."
She folded her arms and said, "I'm not interested."
"Look at it, Wendy. Or are you afraid of what you'll see?" he taunted.
She hesitated and then said, "Fine. I'll look at it. And then get out of my house." Taking two steps forward, she gave the photo a cursory glance.
A low gasp escaped her, and Zack thought he had her convinced at last. But then she said, "So that's your game. Jim made the mistake of dating her once, and based on one crummy photograph, you think you're going to convince me that he went off and married her. And then didn't divorce her. And then married me. Based on one lousy, crummy, shitty photograph. Please."
"It was taken on their honeymoon, believe it or not," Zack said evenly. "My sister has a thing for early American."
"Which my husband obviously doesn't. We went to Bermuda."
God, she was determined not to believe the worst. Zack didn't know whether to admire her or pity her.
She gave him a fierce look that suddenly glazed over with tears. "Why did you have to come here, Zack?" she asked. "Why?"
Devastated to know that he was the one breaking her apart, Zack said, "Zina saw the AP photo in our paper. She said it was Jim; I said it wasn't. She'd had false sightings before, over the years. Frankly, I thought that this was one of them. But rather than let her run around on a fool's errand, I offered to run around for her." He added wryly, "It takes a really proficient fool to do that, you know."
Holding back her tears somehow, Wendy waited for him to continue.
"After I saw for myself that Jim Hodene was her Jimmy Hayward, I found I had two choices," Zack explained. "I could have told my sister the truth and destroyed her, or I could have tried to, well, make the situation work to her advantage."
"The money." The glaze of her tears dried up, and her voice got harder, a steel chisel that she began methodically to pound through his heart. "You had a third choice," she said. "You could have walked away from here and lied to her. Period."
"A lie is still a lie."
"Obviously you never went to Catholic school."
"All I wanted—all I still want—for her is a little security. Why shouldn't she have it? God knows she's suffered enough because of him."
Wendy answered his question with one of her own. "You didn't think that you were playing a dangerous game?"
"I did."
"You didn't think that lives might be destroyed in the process?"
"I did."
"And still you took the chance."
"Yes."
"And are you pleased with the results?" she asked in a scathing tone.
"What do you think?"
"I think you're the most—"
She got herself back under control and backed up a few thoughts. "Let's go back to why you're here now. Today. I want to know that."
"I told you: to keep an eye on Jim," Zack said.
"This isn't the most logical place to pitch your tent anymore if you want to see Jim," she said, making no effort to hide her contempt for his answer.
Zack may have been being truthful, but he wasn't being completely forthcoming. He said, "Okay: and to keep an eye on you."
"Why? Did you think I'd rip off your so-called sister's share of the lottery?"
"No."
"Then what?"
He didn't answer.
"Damn it, why?" she cried, exploding at last. "Why are you back here, haunting me?"
"I'm here to make sure that Jim doesn't play faster and looser with you, either," he said quietly.
She threw her head back and said, "Ha! That's so ... incredible! You're unbelievable, you know that? How can you possibly say that you're concerned about me when you're the reason I'm in this shape in the first place? What are you, totally warped?"
"I've been asking myself the same question lately," he admitted.
She threw her hands up and began pacing the narrow hall that ran alongside the stairs. "Well, you can't keep working here, you know that. I want you out."
"Pete needs me," Zack said. And I need you.
"Pete was doing fine without you," she countered.
"No, he wasn't; he was tearing his hair out. His help is willing but inexperienced, or haven't you noticed?"
His last little jab made her round on him. She said, "I don't care. He'll have to make do. I want you off the premises. Be grateful I don't have you thrown in jail. You and your so-called sister."
"If I go, the house will slow to a crawl," he pointed out without much hope. His argument was so desperate that it was laughable.
"Bull. I'll hire someone else."
"There is no one else; no one reputable, anyway."
"I'll pay them double."
"I repeat: no one reputable."
"In that case, I'll feel right at home having them work here, won't I?"
"Okay, I deserved that. But it doesn't change the fact that you'll end up either with a shoddy house or staring through a bunch of two-by-fours for the indefinite future."
She was livid. He could see it in the way she caught her lower lip between her teeth, trying mightily not to be baited by him. He was surprised he didn't see fire coming out of her nostrils.
She walked back to the screen door and held it open for him without a word.
Mission accomplished, Zack thought, numb from the realization. He had shown up basically to blow up her marriage, and he'd done a darn good job. True, the structure might still be standing; but clearly the foundation was gone.
If only he'd been able to blow himself up with it. He passed within the reach of her breath, close enough to see the glaze of tears rimming her lower lashes. It was anyone's guess whether she'd let them fall or not; she was incredibly strong.
"Wendy—"
Looking down, she shook her head, and Zack saw a flyaway tear roll quickly off her cheek.
It was that single, vulnerable tear that emboldened him to reach out and remove the tiny bit of plaster that still clung to the shining strands of her hair. It symbolized something they were agreed on, that little speck of dust. Maybe the only thing.
He slipped it in his pocket and walked away.
Chapter 19
A liar. He talked like a liar. He acted like a liar. He looked like a liar. How could anyone know what was going on behind that mask of stone? Showing up suddenly ... without any history ... with blackmail on his mind ... brazen enough to admit it ....
Liar. How could he not have known about the scar? Everyone knew about the gash Jim got jumping over an iron fence when he was twelve.
He should have known about the scar.
As for all the rest: lucky guesses. What male didn't like the Rolling Stones, Butch Cassidy, steak? Regis Philbin would give you the same answers!
Liar, liar, liar. It was so clear to her now. He'd shown up, had tried to blackmail poor Jim, had been rebuffed, had raised the stakes by shoving his ... his whoever she was onto the scene. Well, it wouldn't work. He had done his lying best, and his lying best wasn't good enough.
Liar.
Wendy had only one regret: that she hadn't snatched away the photograph. She had no doubt that it had been doctored. That was why he'd made that sneering remark about it not being digitalized: because it had been digitalized. You could do anything with pictures nowadays. Look at Forrest Gump, and that was how many years ago. Look at the last Star Wars entry, Harry Potter, the cover girls on magazines ... nothing was real anymore. It was all fake. Fake fake fake.
Liar.
****
She walked into the beach house just in time to give surprised good-bye hugs to Frank and Sharon and their kids: Sharon had managed to snag a much earlier flight back home to California.
Wendy was dismayed. "You should have called; I could have gotten here earlier to be with you."
"We assumed you were busy with your house," said her sister-in-law with a cursory embrace.
> The hug and her ironic tone were evidence enough that they were offended by Wendy's early morning escape. If she needed more proof than that, it came from Jim, who said, "Maybe you shouldn't be trying to wear a hostess hat and a contractor's cap at the same time."
Over his brother-in-law's protest, he lifted the biggest, heaviest suitcase and walked out with it to the car.
Clearly he was still angry at Wendy for the inquisition she'd been putting him through. Wendy couldn't blame him—but somehow she couldn't seem apologetic, either.
All because of Zack. How she hated him just then.
"Who's driving you to the airport?" she asked her brother. "Let me do it."
"No problem," Frank told her. "Jim's got it under control."
Jim had everything under control. He had always enjoyed good relations with her mob of relatives, insisting that they were the family that he, an only child of an only child, had never had. She used to love that about him; now, she wasn't so sure. Wendy had the vague feeling—based on nothing, really—that Jim was pitting her family against her.
She turned to her two-year-old niece. "Give Aunty Wendy a big, big good-bye hug," she coaxed. "And a big, big smooch, too."
At least Clarissa didn't play favorites. She threw open her fat little arms and let herself be scooped into Wendy's embrace. Wendy inhaled the child's innocence the way she would a deliciously scented rose as she rocked her in a wistful, almost mournful embrace.
"Good-bye, good-bye, I love you," she said against Clarissa's soft pink cheek. "You come back to see Aunty Wendy soon, okay?"
The child nodded, not quite comprehending. Her mother said with a sprightly smile, "Maybe next time Aunty Wendy won't be under so much stress."
The remark was such an understatement that Wendy couldn't help snorting. "One can only hope," she said dryly as she threw her arms around her older brother. "I'm sorry about yesterday," she said to him.
"Hey, that wasn't your fault. Blame Dave for letting in a cuckoo. Mom's not speaking to little brother, by the way. He's gonna be on her shit list for a long, long time."
"Frank. Not in front of the children."
Big Frank, all two hundred and sixty pounds of him, crumpled up into a little ball and said, "Sorry, dear."
He picked up half a dozen pieces of luggage and baby paraphernalia and began lumbering toward the front door. Wendy glanced around and said, "Don't tell me Mark and Marianne have left, too."
"Still here, but going," said her oldest brother as he emerged from the kitchen with a bottle of water in his hand. "The car's all packed. Since it's clearing up out, we decided to dip down to Newport for the jumping derby before we head back to New Hampshire."
Wendy didn't try to talk them out of it. Of everyone in the family, she had the least in common with Mark and his wife. They were thoroughly into selfish pleasures, whereas at the moment the only selfish pleasure that Wendy coveted was the conviction that she wasn't shacking up with a bigamist.
There was another round of unusually restrained hugs as the departing family stood in a huddle on the slate-tiled floor of the cavernous entry hall, and then very quickly they were gone.
With a start, Wendy realized that Tyler hadn't been there to see them off.
She found her son on the beach, halfheartedly poking at the remnants of an elaborate sand castle that the kids had made the day before. The in-and-out sun glinted on his red hair and brightened the green of his T-shirt, making him look even more Irish and boyish than usual. Not for the first time, Wendy was struck by the complete absence of any evidence of her own genetic material in him; he was so much the spitting image of Jim.
I might just as well have been a surrogate mother. For whatever reason, the thought pushed her a little more deeply into thick anxiety.
"Hey, kiddo. Did you get a chance to say good-bye to everyone?"
He nodded, then kicked off the top of a spire into the moat below.
"I hope you thanked your aunt Marianne for the cool video game. I've never even seen that one. What was it called? 'Beast in the Jungle'?"
He shrugged an assent. "It's not that good. And the graphics suck."
"Stink."
"That, too," he said with a quick, resentful glance at her.
She began to toe out the filled-in sand from the moat; she hated to see the joyous creation come down. "Well, she made an effort just for you, and that was nice of her."
"Fine."
Gently probing, Wendy said, "I guess you're sorry to see your cousins leave so early?"
He shrugged. "Justy's such a know-it-all. All because he's going to be thirteen. Big deal. I don't even like him."
"You shouldn't say things like that, honey; Justin is family."
"So? He says things."
"Like what?"
"Like—" He took aim at another spire and whacked it so expertly that Wendy wasn't sure where all the sand went. "Like things about you."
"Me?" said Wendy, taken aback.
"That you're not really married to Dad."
"That's ridiculous," she said in a shaking voice. "When did Justin say that?"
"When I had to sit at the table and couldn't leave it."
Wendy racked her brain to recall the sequence of events. It was all a blur, a rush of water into an unplugged tub. "Well, that was when things were still very confused. Everything got straightened out, Ty; you know that. I thought we talked about it last night."
She had stopped in his room at bedtime and had gone away reassured that he was so blasé about the disruption, accepting it simply as yet more goofy fallout from having won a lottery.
Obviously he'd had second thoughts since then. "Weren't you listening when I told you that the lady was probably ill?"
He looked at her through owlish glasses, a red-haired Harry Potter. "You mean, a nut?"
"That's a very rude word to use," Wendy said, thrown back to her exchange with Zack about wackos. "All I'm trying to say is that the lady had ideas in her head that weren't true."
Ty stood on the lone bridge, a scrap of old wood, that spanned the tunneled-out moat and jumped; the bridge collapsed under his weight. "She didn't look like a nut to me."
He was provoking her, but Wendy refused to take the bait. She said instead, "I'm surprised that you're smashing down the castle. It would have been a nice memento of ... of the party."
"Mom! That wasn't a party, it was an earthquake. People were running around like ants. Besides, this castle is doomed. An extra-high tide will wreck it. Or rain. And besides, this tower wasn't even my idea. It was Justin's, and it ruined the whole thing, but he had to have it here. He just had to," he said, kicking hard at the base. It was too massive to knock down, so he fell to his knees and began clawing the sand away with both hands.
"Well, obviously you're bored," Wendy suggested, trying to lighten his mood. "Do you want to take the little dinghy out for a sail with me?"
"You don't know how to sail." He declined to mention that he didn't, either.
"I know a bit about it," Wendy said. "Enough to get us out and back."
"No."
"Granted, we wouldn't win any races, but—"
"Mom, I said no," he said, flashing an upturned palm at her.
"Okay; no, then." She sighed, exasperated and uncertain how to reassure him without unnerving him more.
She stood there, mindlessly watching him level the fortress and then Zamboni the sand smooth.
"Could I still be an altar boy?" he asked without looking up.
"Still be—if what?" she said uneasily.
"If you and Dad weren't, you know: married." He glanced up at her. "Would God allow me?"
"What a question! Your dad and I are married!"
"I know, but—would He?"
"Yes," she said, looking down at her son with an aching smile. "He wouldn't have any problem with you, either way. Ask Grandma, if you don't believe me; she knows all the rules."
Tyler stood up and slapped the sand off his shorts. "I was just wondering,
" he explained offhandedly; but he looked relieved.
Wendy wanted to brush off the granules of sand still stuck to his knees, but she didn't dare. All she could do was swear to him that she was married.
And offer him lunch. "Since Dad's off to the airport, how about if you and I go out for pizza?" she volunteered, despite having two refrigerators jam-packed with food.
"Yeah. Pizza. Good idea."
They plodded over the sand to the house together, and Wendy yielded to her impulse to reach an arm around her bookish and introspective son. She saw evidence of her genes in him, after all: in the way he mulled and assessed and chewed on life as if it were a leather bone. For better or worse, she was in him, too.
Tyler didn't slip his arm under hers, as he once might have done freely; but he didn't pull away, either. In Wendy's present mood, that was no small comfort.
****
When Jim got back from the airport, Wendy was in the process of wrapping two dozen raw beef filets in aluminum foil and stacking them in the Sub-Zero pull-out freezer. They had enough food left over to survive a nuclear war.
"Have you eaten?" she asked her husband automatically.
"Thanks; I had something at the airport."
With all this stupid food? she wanted to scream. It wasn't a good sign, the instant hostility she felt.
She kept her voice calm as she said, "We have to talk, Jim."
"Not about yesterday," he warned. "The subject's over and done with."
"Not exactly. There's been a new twist."
"What, are we ratcheting up from the bizarre to the surreal?" he said, going to the fridge and pulling out a beer.
Wendy followed his movements, looking for signs, she didn't know of what. Fear? Amusement? Indifference?
"Call it what you like: Zack Tompkins dropped a bombshell on me earlier today."
"Zack? Was he here? What is this, Grand Central Station?" He set the bottle on top of the fridge and decided to take out a plate of cold shrimp, after all. "Do we have any cocktail sauce left?"
"In the door."
He was completely unperturbed. Wendy regarded his casual grousing, his predictable appetite, and his halfhearted attentiveness as life buoys floating around her in the sea of her uncertainty. She began to believe that she was going to live; she was going to survive.
Sand Castles Page 18
