Sandcastles

by April Hill

  “You could have told me, Josh,” she said softly, “instead of letting me blunder around like a fool trying to get answers and getting more angry and confused. All you had to do was tell me.”

  “All you had to do was ask,” he countered “instead of acting like a goddamned paparazzo.”

  Gwen sighed. “I was afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “Maybe of what it was that made you lie to me in the first place... about your wife’s death.”

  “Were the details of it that important to you? Do you think I murdered Susannah?” he demanded. “Is that what’s bothering you?”

  “Of course not!” Gwen cried trying hard not to burst into tears. “I just don’t understand!”

  Denning stood up and opened the sliding doors to the deck letting the cold air rush in. When he went outside, Gwen shivered, wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and followed him onto the deck. He pointed in the direction of the studio. “I never really believed she fell from the cliff the way the police thought. From the way I found her body that night, I knew she’d jumped from the studio window.”

  Gwen gasped. “But why?”

  “After the biopsy, they recommended to us that Susannah have an abortion because of the chemo-therapy and radiation treatments she was going to need. But she refused. I begged her and the doctors told her that to wait any longer was impossible, not just dangerous, but fatal. But she wouldn’t do it, and she wouldn’t risk treatment, either. She just wanted to wait... to get beyond her first trimester.

  “The symptoms began to get worse, of course. At first, she had had the headaches and then a few small seizures. Her personality seemed to change. She flew into rages, sometimes, and depression. Then she began to have trouble walking and keeping her balance. The worst happened and she began to lose her eyesight. The terrible ironic finish was a couple of weeks later she miscarried anyway. They wanted her to start the treatments right away then—to not even leave the hospital after that, but she said she wanted that weekend to think, so I took her home.

  “There was a bad storm that night and the ocean was rough. The next morning I was fixing a damaged railing, working right here, when I saw her walk out into the lagoon then start to swim toward the rocks. I didn’t have to guess what she was trying to do. Susannah had never been a good swimmer. By the time I got down there and dragged her out, she’d almost finished the job.

  “Of course she tried to claim it was an accident... that she’d been looking for shells, but I knew. After that, she simply refused to go back to the hospital. She started e-mailing some quack clinic in Mexico and arranging to go down there for these insane treatments made from the brain tissue of goats and sheep. When I refused, she became violent, then took the car and disappeared for three days.

  “When she came back, she was calmer and agreed to go to San Francisco to see another doctor I’d heard about. She promised me she’d enter the hospital there. We hadn’t been in town for two hours before she disappeared. I looked everywhere I could think off... called a couple of her friends that I thought she might go to, but nothing. The next morning, just about the time I was ready to call the police, one of her friends called me back at the hotel and told me that Susannah had phoned the night before to say she was flying to Vermont to see her mother. I called her mother, but she hadn’t heard a word from her, of course, so finally, when I couldn’t get any information from the airlines, I just checked out and drove home, hoping she’d be here.

  “I found her body the next morning... on the beach below the studio. The tide had come up during the night and pretty well washed away any kind of evidence, so I moved her down the beach under the highest part of the cliff. She liked to walk there. I knew that she’d jumped, of course, but I did what I could to make it look like a hiking accident. I don’t know why, but it didn’t seem like anybody’s business but ours. We had come all this way from a place she had loved, for privacy and to avoid the press and now.... Maybe I was thinking of myself at that point more than of her. To tell you the truth, I don’t really know any longer what I was thinking.

  “I’m sorry I lied to you, Gwen. That day when it came up, all I could see was....”

  “It’s all right,” she murmured. “I know how much you loved her and none of it was any of my business.”

  He hesitated for a moment. “No, it isn’t all right, but it was easier.”

  “May I confess something to you without your hating me?” Gwen asked.

  Denning nodded.

  “If you had told me the truth that day,” she said softly, “That Susannah had killed herself... I can’t be absolutely sure that I wouldn’t have run back to Seek! with a story that sensational. Now it seems impossible that I could have been that conniving and greedy and... but then? I’m sorry, Josh but at that time dishonesty was kind of a way of life for me. I made my living at it, and I didn’t know you.”

  He smiled a bit sadly. “Have you ever been to Rome?” he asked suddenly.

  Gwen shook her head. “Dire poverty, remember?”

  “Well there’s a little church in Rome and just outside in the courtyard there’s this huge stone disk with a face carved into it... the ‘Boca de Veritas’. The mouth... the ‘boca’ of the face is wide open and there’s a legend that says if you tell a lie with your hand, inside it’ll be bitten off at the wrist.”

  “Nice,” she grimaced. “A primitive lie detector. You think it works?”

  “Susannah and I saw it on our first trip to Europe just after I sold the book. I don’t think either one of us really wanted to risk putting a hand inside, but neither of us would admit it, either, so we both closed our eyes and chanced it.”

  “What did both of you ask about?”

  “I don’t remember, exactly, but probably what every other couple asks. All I remember is the little stab of superstitious fear.”

  “You lied?”

  “I think we both did.”

  Gwen felt her legs go weak.

  “I thought you and Susannah were....”

  “In love? We were for a few years, anyway. We were great together... me the frustrated assistant professor, reading freshman lit papers and writing all night, trying to write something more esoteric and inaccessible than Finnegan’s Wake so everyone would know how fucking brilliant I was and being supported by a beautiful, talented wife. And Susannah, who looked and smelled like sunshine and the ocean and who wanted nothing in the world but to paint sunny landscapes and love me and have babies.

  “They shaved most of her head, you know, for the first exploratory surgery. Susannah had hair the color of corn silk and she’d never cut it... not since she twelve years old. I used to joke that she’d get whiplash from sitting down on it, someday.

  “Anyway, we’d gotten down to living on this crappy little houseboat at the marina when she started to sell really well. She changed her style and started painting these half-assed pieces of crap for the tourists. She looked the part, you know. Very ‘down east’. Tall, slender with long legs... always tanned. Out there on the wharf, painting lighthouses that didn’t exist and charming dunes and sunset beaches she’d made up. She was selling her soul and she didn’t even care... just so we were together and planning on a family someday. And then Jezreel hit the best seller lists and everything changed.”

  “God! It was wonderful!” Gwen said. “I read it first when I was a freshman in college. Of course, I didn’t understand all of it.”

  Denning gave a bitter laugh. “Nobody understood it! I’d have been disappointed if they had! Hell I didn’t understand it. Susannah tried and told me she couldn’t breathe... it smothered her. Probably the most honest review I ever had. Anyway, after that, every piece of crap I’d ever written popped up again in hardcover and people started yammering about when I’d write the ‘second’ novel, when Jezreel was really the fifth. I sold the damned thing to Hollywood the first time they knocked on my door and then couldn’t stand all the crap that came with it. I turned down the Puli
tzer because I was so bloody ‘pure,’ and besides, it was only 10000 bucks and a free lunch at Columbia, and thumbing my nose at THAT made me a bloody genius or an iconoclast... take your pick. After a few years, I got so sick of people asking when the second masterpiece was coming I insisted on moving here, changing our name and building this house, hoping Susannah would learn to love it. She hated it. Hated the fog and the isolation—and me, probably. Not that I would have noticed, being the self-involved asshole I’d become.”

  “We were on the verge of splitting up, but decided to give it one more try and finally have a baby. She got pregnant that summer. Two days after the pregnancy test she told me that the baby wasn’t mine.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Last night I dreamt that I went to Manderly again.”

  Gwen read the familiar opening line once more and replaced the book on the shelf where she’d found it. Finding even a highly respected romance like Rebecca on a bookshelf in Joshua Denning’s home had surprised her at first, but when she opened the cover she realized that the book had belonged to Susannah. The inscription in the front was from Josh on a long-ago birthday—from the date, probably right after they were first married.

  Since Josh had told her what he had about Susannah and their marriage three days earlier, he had kept to himself and Gwen knew he was giving her time to think. She also knew, as he did, they would have to talk again. There were so many questions to be answered and decisions to be made and neither of them seemed to have the will to deal with any of it.

  All discussions and progress on “the book”—her unfinished and perhaps never-to-be-finished manuscript—had come to an abrupt halt since that terrible day, and Gwen spent her days since then moving aimlessly about the house or napping.

  As she always did when faced with hard choices, Gwen slept—long dream-laden sleeps from which she woke unrefreshed and groggy. When sleep failed to ease her anxiety, she spent hours on the beach wrapped in a blanket and reading. Rebecca had been a bad choice, though. Josh found it on the kitchen counter on the third morning.

  “Are you thinking of trying your hand at suspense novels now, rather than short stories?” he asked, pouring a cup of coffee. It was the first time they had really spoken in days. “Or are you looking for parallels?”

  “Neither,” she stammered. “It was just something to read.”

  He nodded. “I see. A cold, secretive, domineering bastard with a dead wife he may or may not have murdered. Interesting choice. You might want to try Jane Eyre next. Another cold bastard with another dead wife.”

  Gwen tried a small laugh. “And you call me melodramatic!”

  He put his coffee cup down and took her arm, turning her to face him.

  “Where are we right now, Gwen—you and I?”

  Gwen sighed. “I’m where I always am, Josh—lost and confused. On the outside of my own life and looking in on it like a useless idiot wondering what’s going to happen.”

  “Will you take a walk with me?” he asked, and when Gwen agreed, they left the house and walked down the sloped lawn to the garden—talking, but not touching.

  “We’re going to the studio?” she asked, nervously. Josh nodded and opened the gate, and as they stepped onto staircase, it groaned in complaint, its timbers creaking as they climbed down to the first landing and the darkened studio.

  “We need to talk,” he said softly, “and maybe this is the right place, after everything that’s happened.” He opened the door, turned on the light switch and stood aside as Gwen entered the room. With all the windows closed, the big room smelled damp and musty and somehow suffocating. Josh walked over and opened one of the tall windows facing the ocean then turned to look at her. “Sit down, Gwen, please.”

  She pulled a chair from its place under the large worktable in the center of the room and sat down, her hands clasped before her on the scarred tabletop. Josh went into the alcove opened a drawer in the small chest and withdrew a fat photo album. He placed it on the table before her and opened the book to the first page.

  In no discernible order or chronology, the book’s first page contained perhaps a dozen fading Polaroid shots of a lithe blonde woman in cutoff jeans and a white tank top. Susannah, of course—as tanned and beautiful as he had described, sitting at the end a wharf with her elegantly long, tanned legs dangling over the side, smiling at the camera. Then Susannah again, laughing holding a paint can and a brush and pointing to a freshly painted fence, splotches of white paint on the tip of her nose and on her slender arms.

  Gwen turned the pages slowly. Here and there a photo of them together, Josh’s hair longer, without the gray. Smiling, laughing, young. A few pages later, obviously in New York—Washington Square with Susannah holding a copy of Jezreel aloft and a copy of the “New York Times.” Central Park again, by the sailboat pond, eating a hot dog, laughing.

  There were many pictures of what Gwen assumed were Maine and the houseboat where Josh had told her they’d lived when they were first married. Places in Europe she recognized from reading. Photos of the house on the cliff during construction—an empty lot with a view of the sea and then in the next photo a foundation. Susannah again, sitting on one of the concrete piers, looking at the ocean. Older now and pensive, her face thinner and unsmiling. Gwen found herself thinking that if all of these hundreds of pictures were stacked together, she could simply flip through and see the story of these sad, beautiful peoples’ lives—like watching a jumpy silent movie.

  The last section of the album included pictures of Susannah’s work—dazzling cerulean-blue skies and cadmium suns shining on emerald-green oceans. Sunshine everywhere and white sailboats with billowing striped spinnakers and scudding clouds. Warm summer afternoons and shingled gray Nantucket cottages covered in roses. And always the same bright yellow-orange sunshine. Paintings of wind and sea grass and long empty beaches—in the sun again. Moments of endless summer and sun.

  “She was beautiful,” Gwen said simply. “And she seems so happy most of the time. That’s a lot, Josh.”

  He nodded. “I didn’t kill her, Gwen.” Before she could form a reply, he continued:

  “Please don’t say it hasn’t crossed your mind. And you’re right, of course. In some ways I did kill her.”

  “Josh,” she said softly, “this disease would have happened anywhere. All I need to know—and then we’ll never talk about it again, if you don’t want to—I just need to know why you told me what you did—about how she died, I mean.”

  He took a deep breath before answering. “I lied because I thought you wouldn’t be here that long—long enough to need the whole story from me. It’s not an easy story to tell, Gwen. But you surprised me and stayed. You still surprise me.” He smiled sadly. “You can’t blame me, though. I gave you every reason in the world to hate me and to get out while you still had time.

  “The truth is, I lied to everyone about Susannah’s death. It was important to me that people remember her the way she is in those pictures—in most of them anyway. Oh, I didn’t do it for noble reasons and not even to protect her image, probably but to protect mine—along with my precious privacy, of course. Suicides bring publicity especially suicides by beautiful unfaithful women.”

  “And the baby .…” she began, hesitantly.

  “She wanted a baby from the day we got married, even before, probably.” He shook his head, remembering. “But a child didn’t fit into my plans then or for years afterward. I kept telling her that when we got settled secure—then we’d think about it. After we came out here and the marriage began to fall apart, neither of us really admitted it. We just kept going through the motions, hoping things would get better. They did improve a bit that spring. She wanted to get away, so we leased a boat and sailed down the coast of Baja. Susannah was never happier or more relaxed than when she was on a boat. I had agreed we’d try for a baby on the trip.

  “Anyway, a few weeks after we got back she told me she was pregnant. Two days later she admitted she’d been seeing s
omeone and that she could have been pregnant even before we went to Mexico. Susannah was just too damned honest to keep her mouth shut and let me think it was mine. Anyway, neither one of us thought there was any real way to know whose child it was at that point and the guy wasn’t in the picture any longer, so we decided to go through with the pregnancy and see where we stood afterward.

  “We were still trying to deal with that when she was finally forced to see a doctor because of the headaches, and we found out about the tumor. Her pregnancy became an issue immediately, of course, but Susannah wouldn’t even talk about radiation or chemo, let alone an abortion.

  “After that, everything happened pretty fast. Even before Mexico, I’d begun to notice changes—in her moods, her temper, everything. What she had was like some terrible worm eating through her brain, destroying everything about her in stages. When I finally agreed with the doctors about the abortion she accused me of wanting to kill the baby—which I was trying to take away the only thing she’d ever really wanted. She began spending most of her time in the studio, sleeping there, eating there—only coming up to the house when she knew I wouldn’t be there. Then she lost the baby.

  “One day just before she died I came down here to try to talk to her again, to try to convince her to go for the treatments. I promised her that after we dealt with the cancer we could have another baby and that seemed to help for about a week or two. Before the miscarriage, she’d been working on an upcoming exhibition in San Francisco, and I was happy that she was working again. She seemed to be involved in her work again, but she was obviously driving herself. She had stopped eating, basically—even bathing, combing her hair, things like that.

  “She wasn’t in the studio when I got there, so I looked around for the new canvases. She’d told me and Paul Ludlow, as well, that the new canvases were the best things she’d ever done.”

  “Then why did you destroy them?”

  For a moment it seemed that Josh wasn’t going to answer, but finally he went into the alcove and opened a closet door in the paneled wall that Gwen had never noticed. The door was flush with the wall—almost invisible to someone unaware of its presence. He reached in and removed several large canvases and brought them closer then turned one around.