Sand Castles

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  Resisting a mother's pull to follow the kitten, Wendy said, "Tell me about Jim."

  Without pausing in her chores, Zina answered in a voice that had not a trace of bitterness in it, "Why would you want to know? To find out if I'm lying, or to find out if Jim is?"

  Taken aback by her candid response, Wendy said, "One of you is."

  "I'm telling the truth," Zina said, glancing up from the cage she was cleaning. "We're married to the same man."

  "No, you think we're married to the same man," said Wendy. She simply could not be more generous than that.

  "My brother thinks so, too."

  "That's only two. Are there any more of you? Family, friends, a mailman or a papergirl?"

  "From back then? I wouldn't even know, anymore," Zina said, removing a chewed-up section of newspaper that had lined the cage and stuffing it into a trash bag.

  "You're saying that there's absolutely no one who can corroborate that you were married to ... to my husband twelve years ago?"

  Zina moved the bag to the next cage. "Zack and I have always kept pretty much to ourselves," she explained.

  I'll bet. "Do you have a marriage certificate? A wedding photo? Anything at all?"

  "Of course I have," Zina said with more spirit than Wendy had seen so far. "I have a marriage license from City Hall in Springfield, and one from St. Joseph's." She added with a faraway smile, "I really wanted to be married in church. But we didn't go on a honeymoon the second time."

  "Where did you go the first?"

  "You'll laugh: Plimouth Plantation."

  Well, of course she'd say that, thought Wendy. It went with the doctored photo.

  "I suppose it was an unusual place to go," Zina admitted. "Jim wanted to go to Bermuda. But I just love American history. And besides, we didn't have much money. We were so young."

  Wendy was knocked back a little by the revelation about Jim until she remembered that she herself was the one who had revealed the fact of Bermuda—to Zack. So Bermuda didn't prove a thing.

  But, God, they were quick. Her next question to Zina was posed less gently. "Why did you wait twelve years to find him? Why did you wait until he'd won a lottery?"

  "Because I didn't know his name," Zina said, blinking her blue eyes in wonder at the question. "He changed it."

  Ah. Right. It was hard for Wendy to keep that alleged fact in mind, no doubt because she had been calling herself Hodene for so many years. Annoyed at her own lapse in investigative expertise, she said, "Why didn't you divorce him after a while? For Pete's sake, you could have had him declared dead by now!"

  Nodding in agreement, Zina blinked back tears. "I was sure he'd come back. I really was."

  Wendy had to steel herself to keep up the interrogation. "Why did he leave in the first place?"

  The shrug of Zina's thin shoulders could have been heartbreaking—but Wendy was trying particularly hard to stay heartless just then.

  Zina said with a sigh, "Zack thinks that Jimmy just wasn't ready to settle down."

  Hard as she was making herself, Wendy could not follow up with questions about failed pregnancies. She herself had gone through the utterly heartbreaking experience. Twice.

  "I can't believe a word of what you've told me." Even as she said it, another question came to mind: did liars feed kittens?

  Probably not. But victims might. Maybe Zack really was her brother—but a bullying one, forcing her to go along with his schemes. It was an even more depressing thought than the idea that Zack and Zina were willing accomplices. But it had to be considered.

  "Was your brother behind the blackmail scheme?" she asked, more gently now. "Is it Zack's fault that you're in so much pain?"

  Wendy expected Zina to become wary, or maybe, shockingly, to agree. She did not expect Zina to become animated and even angry.

  "My brother's intentions were totally honorable! He didn't want me to get hurt. He didn't want me to learn that Jimmy had remarried—which I should have assumed in the first place."

  Wendy stood without speaking and watched as Zina, obviously upset, poured dried food from a big bag into the small bowl, overflowing it and sending pellets skittering everywhere.

  With a little moan of distress, she began to hunt down the stray bits, but Wendy said sympathetically, "I'll clean them up. You just go on with what you're doing."

  Maybe it was the offer of help, maybe it was the tone in which it was made, but Zina gave Wendy a remarkably grateful smile and said, "Thanks. There are so many cages to go."

  As she relined the cage, she said more matter-of-factly, "Zack made up this story about an inheritance—after he went to Jimmy for the money—because he thought it would make me feel better if I owned my own quilting shop, or used the money to do something for abused and abandoned animals. And normally it would. But not at that price."

  Wendy sat back on her calves and blurted, "So he was there to blackmail—"

  "No, that's not fair! Did you hear anything I said?" Zina said, more distressed than angry. "Please, please don't talk about Zack that way. He's the most honorable man I know. You don't realize what he's done for me!"

  "Zina, what else can I think?" Wendy said, fighting an emotional meltdown of her own.

  "Don't blame Zack," Zina repeated, scooping up first one kitten and then its mate. "And I'll tell you why."

  She put the kittens back in their cage and automatically opened the next one. A fat tabby, asleep in a corner, was reluctant to leave; Zina had to lift him and place him on the floor. He went nowhere; Wendy had never seen a cat actually look bewildered. Wendy read the card on the cage: "Walter, age fifteen, brought to the shelter when his eighty-two-year-old owner was admitted to a nursing home."

  Poor Walter. Wendy took a seat on a small wooden chair at one end of the room and waited for Zina to tell her story, and instinctively she reached down and made little pss-pss sounds, rubbing her fingers at Walter-level. The cat made timid progress toward her and eventually allowed himself to be lifted onto her lap. She rubbed his ears, his throat, his nose, searching for his favorite comfort zone. He began to purr, first hesitantly, then loudly.

  But from Zina, she heard only the workaday sounds of his cage being cleaned.

  Chapter 21

  Zina had convinced herself that the shelter was a magical place where nothing could hurt her. Now, suddenly, she wasn't so sure.

  She saw that the other woman was watching her with a look of complete absorption: her straight white teeth were nowhere in evidence, hidden behind full lips meeting in a somber line. It unnerved her. She felt as if Wendy were the judge, jury, prosecution, and defense, all rolled up in a single package. What if she didn't understand Zina? Or worse, didn't believe her? Or even worse: didn't care?

  Walter was sitting curled up on Wendy's lap, the first time that he had done anything like that in his more than three months at the shelter; even from where Zina was working, she could hear the old cat's purr. Surely that meant that Wendy was a good person. Surely she would forgive Zack for what he'd tried to do. After her own initial anguish at learning the truth, Zina had looked deep in her heart and had seen Zack's love there, just where it had always been. Zina had forgiven him—it wasn't really that hard to do—and she desperately wanted Wendy and her family to do the same.

  What Zina was about to say, she had told no one except the therapists, and that had been years ago. She wasn't sure that she could relate it all again; but she had to try.

  "When I was seven and Zack was ten," she said, hardly looking at Wendy, "we went to live with my grandmother."

  She realized that she was cringing inside. She had gone as far as she could in her time machine. To travel back another three months was more than she felt she could do.

  Wendy waited with obvious, baffled interest through the long pause that followed. Finally, in the uncomfortable, almost unbearable silence, she said gently, "That must have been hard, not being with your parents at that age."

  It was the gentlest of nudges.


  Zina sighed and said, "It was hard. I was crazy about my mother. She was the warmest, most outgoing woman I've ever known. And beautiful! She looked nothing like me; Zack's the one who has some of her features: her hair, her eyes. He's not as exuberant as she was ... but then.

  "My mother loved to play with us," she continued, trying to make Wendy understand the depth of their loss. "She was never distant or short the way overworked mothers can be today, because she didn't have a job. She was a stay-at-home mom, and any time that we wanted her, she was right there for us."

  She smiled at an image of her mother that was both vivid and welcome: of her pushing Zina higher and higher on a playground swing in their Brattleboro neighborhood. Those were the good years—when Zina was four, five, six—before the seventh, catastrophic year.

  "What was your father like?" Wendy ventured to ask.

  She was still petting old Walter, who looked amazingly content. Zina decided that the cat was responding not only to Wendy's touch, but to her voice: it was soothing, concerned, reassuring. If Wendy had been Zina's first therapist, she might never have needed to switch to another one after Jimmy left her.

  "My father was harder to know," Zina admitted. "He traveled a lot. He was regional sales rep for a granite company in Vermont, and he would be gone—not for long periods, but for one or two nights at a time. He worked long hours. When he was home, he always seemed to have papers spread out in front of him."

  She relined the cage and this time dipped the food bowl in the bag instead of the other way around. "There was a fair-sized desk in the family room," she went on, "but my father used to work at the kitchen table just so that we'd still be able to watch television while he worked. He was that kind of a person."

  She saw Wendy incline her head in apparent approval. Of her willingness to talk? Of her father? Maybe just of the cat.

  "If my father finished his paperwork in time, he'd sometimes read to me before bed," Zina explained. She folded some newspaper into the right-sized square and laid it in the cage; but she had drifted to another place, secure in the curve of her father's arm and happy under his spell.

  "He was a wonderful reader. He never stopped to let me make comments the way my mother did; he'd just keep rolling along. Maybe that's why the stories always jumped to life when he read them." Smiling, she looked up from her work and said, "He would have been perfect for recording books on tape."

  "You had a good relationship with him, then," Wendy said. She seemed to be in another place, too.

  "Oh, yes. With both of my parents. They were good, good parents. I loved them very much. Zack and I both did."

  Zack. Zina remembered now: this was about Zack. Not her, not her mother or her father. Zack.

  She made herself go on, so that Wendy would understand about Zack. "My parents were good with us, but ... they weren't as good with one another. My father was a suspicious man, I realized later. Maybe all salesmen are, or maybe they end up that way; I'm not sure."

  "Ah."

  That's all Wendy said, but it was enough to make Zina shake her head and say, "No. If you're thinking that my parents got a divorce or something because my mother was a cheat, then you're mistaken. That's not how it was." She sighed again and said, "I'll tell you exactly how it was."

  "If you don't want to—" Wendy began in an even softer voice.

  "But I do," Zina protested. She inhaled deeply, as she'd been taught to do, and went on. "At some point, when I was seven, my parents began to argue. I don't remember much except that there was a lot of yelling, and there were no bedtime stories unless my father was away. And then one night ..."

  She faltered and had to start over. "And then one night," she said, lifting each word out of the granite vault of her memory for Wendy to see, "long after my mother had read to me and turned off my light ... my father returned home, unexpectedly. He was supposed to be in Connecticut. He—"

  Zina was about to round up Walter when she realized that she hadn't changed his water. She carried the bowl over to the sink in the pantry adjacent to the cage room and emptied and filled it again.

  I can't do this. I can't.

  She closed her eyes and saw her brother, Zack. Zack at ten years old. Zack. This was about Zack. After another deep breath, she carried the filled water bowl back and placed it carefully in Walter's cage.

  She couldn't look at Wendy as she said, "I suppose you can guess some of the rest. My father found my mother in bed with another man—a neighbor who was going through a divorce and who was a good friend of his. We used to have barbecues all the time at one another's houses."

  She glanced at Wendy and saw that she was pressing her lips together in a hapless smile. She had stopped petting Walter, which made Zina feel guilty that he wasn't being coddled; he was getting so little of that, after years of being adored. "Please—don't stop," she whispered to Wendy, gesturing toward the old tabby.

  She watched gratefully as Wendy resumed stroking the cat, and over the rhythmic rumble of Walter's purr, she plunged back into the nightmare of her trauma.

  "I woke up when I heard my father's shouts and my mother's screams. I heard someone run down the hall past my closed door and go into the family room ... and at the same time, I heard the sound of glass breaking ... I opened my door a little, and I saw my father running back to the bedroom ... Right after that, I heard three loud bangs, louder than anything I'd heard in my life. I thought they were firecrackers going off outside ... but ...."

  She shook her head. "Anyway, I was afraid—but not as much as when I heard Zack begin to scream hysterically. I ran to where he was, in my parents' bedroom, and ... I saw my mother in bed, covered with blood. Her eyes were open. She was looking at the ceiling. I'll never ...."

  Zina closed her eyes, and the image went away; her mother was pushing her on the swing again.

  No, her mother was in the bed again.

  "There was no one else in the room except Zack, screaming something at my father, who was standing like a statue ... and of course my mother, in bed ... so I didn't understand. I thought she had got cut on the glass. So I ran back to the kitchen, and I pulled lots and lots ... of paper towels from the roll, all in slow motion ... and I ran back to the bedroom with them ... to stop the blood, to clean it up, I still don't know... and Zack, he was crying and shouting to my father, you killed her, you killed her, you killed her. That's all. Just ... you killed her, you killed her. And then I was too afraid to go near my mother ... and I'm still so ashamed of that... so I started dragging the trail of paper towels over to my father and I was saying, what should we do, Daddy? Should we call a doctor? And my father was crying, too, like Zack; they were both crying. And I was trying to shove all the paper towels at my father to wipe away the blood from my mother, but he already had something in his hand. He had a gun, it was a gun in his hand, and he opened his mouth and he ... had a gun. And he lifted it to his mouth, oh, God. And the blood, it just went everywhere. On me ... on Zack ... everywhere. And Zack saw me spattered ... and right away he grabbed the paper towels from me, and he began to try to wipe me clean."

  Zina took a long, shuddering breath and let it back out. Tears were streaming down her face, but she was done. She had told Wendy all about Zack. She hadn't broken down in wrenching sobs; she had made it through. Zack would be so surprised if he knew.

  She fished in the pockets of her jumper for a Kleenex but came up empty and had to wipe her eyes with the sleeve of her top. She was about to wipe her runny nose on the back of her hand when she noticed the roll of paper towels nearby; she tore a sheet off the roll to use, but then she remembered ... about paper towels. She laid the single sheet back down and used the back of her hand, after all.

  "Sorry," she said, looking down. She turned back to the cleaned cage and closed the door, then stared blankly inside it. Something was different.

  It had no cat. "Oh! Walter," she murmured, and turned back to gather him up from Wendy's lap.

  But Wendy had put Walter down on the floor a
nd was facing Zina. She looked as if she were in a trance. No, that wasn't the right way to describe her. She looked as if she were a battlefield, and enemy armies were marching on her.

  Wendy began to say something, stumbled, tried again.

  "I shouldn't have put you through that," she said, searching Zina's eyes but then looking away. A huge battle was going on, Zina could see.

  She smiled wanly. "All my life, Zack has looked out for me," she explained, even though Wendy had to understand that now. "Before. Then. Since. See?"

  Wendy nodded and said in a strained voice, "Too well."

  Zina didn't say anything after that, because she couldn't imagine what else Wendy would want to know. All she knew was that the cats were hungry and needed their cages cleaned. She was becoming anxious, as she always did when the creatures she loved were being denied. "Would you like to see the marriage certificates or anything?" she asked awkwardly. "Because otherwise—"

  But Wendy was shaking her head and, Zina could see, trying not to cry.

  "There is something I'd like," Wendy finally said, "and that's to take Walter home. He's available for adoption, isn't he?"

  ****

  Wendy had been determined not to put Walter back in the cage. He had become too important to her, too intimately bound with a life-altering event. It had taken a call to the director of the shelter—and a generous check—to spring him on a Sunday, but Wendy had got great value for her money: a feather toy, a doughnut-shaped bed, a cardboard carrier, a bag of litter, and an overweight, scared, but hopefully someday contented cat.

  He didn't look very happy in the cramped carrier, so Wendy pulled over, took him out, and set him in his doughnut.

  He still didn't look happy.

  He will be, she vowed. She understood full well that the imprisoned cat had become important in a symbolic way: he was a material witness in her transformation from Wife in Denial to Seeker of Truth.

  Had she just heard the truth? She didn't see how it could be anything else. Zina would have to be a world-class actress to have managed a performance like that. Besides, Wendy instinctively felt that con artists were good at faking sympathy, not at needing it.