Sandcastles

by Luanne Rice

  Honor and Bernie laughed and cheered as John and Tom finished filling their wheelbarrows, then raced at top speed over the hill to the longest wall, stretching down from the chapel to the water—the same wall where, several years later, Honor, John, and Regis would find Sisela.

  The women walked over to meet them, Bernie’s hair blowing in the sea wind as she tucked it back under her hat.

  “Some things never change,” Bernie said. “They’ve been trying to one-up each other since they were twelve.”

  “I remember,” Honor said. “Look at them now—John’s trying to prove he’s got the stonemason genes…”

  “And Tom’s got his working-class-hero bravado going,” Bernie said. “Trying to make everyone forget his great-grandfather owned all this land. But look—he does seem to be doing a pretty great job.”

  The existing wall was five feet high, a foot and a half wide, a dry wall built without mortar. Its ancient stones were covered with lichens. They watched Tom choose a section where the land sloped and the wall was lower, placing the new stones flat on top, as they would have lain on the ground. He had a knack for arranging them, working them in so no continuous lines appeared, making the top of the wall even with the stretch that rose up the hill.

  “Not bad, Kelly,” John said. “You might be the better sculptor after all.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Sullivan? That’s just your hobby—this is man’s work!”

  “Oh, yeah? I’ll show you man’s work,” John said, flashing a grin straight at Honor as he lifted the biggest stone from his wheelbarrow. His knees bent under the weight, and Honor watched him stagger over to the wall, jump up, hold the rock over his head. His hands must have been slick with sweat, because he bobbled it like a basketball, nearly dropped it, recovered, and then sent it crashing into the old stones, falling in after it, headfirst into the wall.

  Honor cried out, and Bernie ran to him, but Tom was already there—giving him a hand and pulling him out.

  “Good one,” Tom said. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” John said. He had smashed his elbow into a jagged rock, was raising it up to look at the damage. Honor’s stomach clenched as she saw blood.

  Bernie handed him a handkerchief. “I don’t think you have to show off for Honor anymore,” she said. “I’m pretty sure she already likes you.”

  “Are you all right?” Honor asked, holding his hand, helping him hold Bernie’s handkerchief to the cut.

  “I’m an idiot,” he said, bending to kiss her, stumbling as he came close, steadying himself against her, one hand on the wall as he laughed at himself. His hand found unfamiliar purchase, and he let out a low whistle.

  “Look at this,” he said.

  “What is it?” Tom asked, moving closer.

  All four of them huddled close to the wall, trying to see what was there. John reached in, pulled out a dirty, ragged piece of dark blue cloth. The fabric was dry and ancient and torn, edges frayed, wrapped around an object vaguely square, a cube. As the others stood watching, John unwound the cloth. It was stuck with spiderwebs and a thick white cocoon, and it fell apart at his touch. Bits of acorns spilled out.

  “It’s old, that’s for sure,” John said.

  “It’s gone,” Bernie said. And it was true—the fabric had just disintegrated, fallen to the ground like dust. What was left inside appeared to be a stone box. There were markings on the lid, the shape of a Celtic cross, and words in what might have been Latin.

  “Oh, open it,” Honor said, holding John’s arm, feeling the excitement of discovery, finding something so old and incredible together—there with the man she loved and their best friends.

  And he did. He opened the box that would change all four of their lives forever.

  She took a breath now, remembering all those years ago. She burrowed deeper into the paint case—looking for something much more recent. It was the letter from John, delivered straight to her door, and she pulled it from its envelope and reread the last part, the section she hadn’t read out loud to Bernie and the girls.

  Here is what I want, Honor. One question keeps coming up, and I have to ask you:

  Will you let me see you?

  If you do, I know that the other questions will be answered. Do you remember the box we found, how we felt that day? How all those mysteries spread out before us, and we couldn’t imagine solving them if not together? There had been love before us—deep, impossible love. We went to Ireland to understand it, because we knew no love was deeper than our own, and we wanted to trace those predecessors.

  We have to find a way for us all to go forward from this.

  Let me come home, Honor. If not to return for good, then at least to hear you say goodbye, so I’ll really believe it. Let me be at Regis’s wedding. Please, as her father and as the man who until now has loved her more than anyone.

  As I still love you.

  John

  She didn’t know the answer. She wasn’t sure what she would say or do when the moment came and she saw him again. Replacing the letter in the case, she sat beside Sisela on the window seat.

  Stroking the old cat, she gazed out the window, at the stone wall that ran along the crest of the distant hill. A figure appeared—Tom, pushing a wheelbarrow.

  Her fingers brushed lightly over Sisela’s fur. The cat purred softly. Honor’s easel beckoned. Staring at it now, she thought back to that day long ago, when she and John were painting in the summer air. Their hopes and dreams had been so exciting and sustaining, their need to make art. Honor felt that need flood through her again.

  “Where is he?” she whispered to the cat.

  Sisela meowed, sounding exactly like the tiny kitten who’d been starving until the Sullivans had found her on the old wall. Honor kept petting her now, staring at her easel, feeling the stone in her chest, where her heart used to be. Then she picked up her palette and began to mix colors.

  Six

  The Academy grounds were deep and green, even in the heat of summer. Thursday morning, Tom Kelly wheeled a barrow full of stones toward the grotto, his T-shirt soaked in sweat. He had been down to the beach cottage, getting it ready. Damp and musty, it needed about a month of airing out. Well, there was time….

  Two young novices walked past him, said hello. He acted polite, even though he wanted to tell them to leave while they still had a chance. Who would willingly lock herself inside this place?

  As he pushed the wheelbarrow, he thought of how often he had walked these paths. As a young boy, he and his whole family would arrive here for the annual Fourth of July picnic in a cortege of black Cadillacs. His mother and father, his brothers and sisters, his aunts and uncles, all his cousins.

  They would drive down from Hartford, all in a row, black cars following close, almost bumper to bumper. No cop would dare stop or ticket them. They were the Kellys, Connecticut’s unofficial first family. They had gone from poverty to power, and—just like in Ireland—their ranks included lots of cops, politicians, lawyers, and judges. No one messed with the Kellys.

  Tom knew that his father and most of their ancestors would roll in their graves to see him carting stones on what had once been the crown jewel of the Kelly real estate empire: Stella Maris, Star of the Sea. That Irish immigrants could buy and own the most beautiful piece of property in New England, where the great Connecticut River flowed into Long Island Sound—and could then turn around and donate it to the nuns, establishing one of the finest girls’ schools in America—well, that had filled Tom’s family with great pride and a big “in your face” to the Connecticut Yankee establishment.

  But to Tom, it had seemed that his family was just like the WASPs. All they cared about was climbing up in the world. The richest of them had owned property on Merrion Square in Dublin, and over the decades their goals included owning the newest Cadillac, living in the best houses, buying more property, building the tallest skyscraper in Hartford. The family had sent Tom’s father’s generation to Jesuit schools; they h
ad sent Tom and his siblings and cousins to Hotchkiss and Taft and Miss Porter’s, as if trying to forget where they’d once come from.

  Tom had found a book of poetry at school, and it woke him up: Brendan Kennelly’s My Dark Fathers. It was about the Irish famine, and how it had killed the spirit of a people:

  When winds of hunger howled at every door

  She heard the music dwindle and forgot the dance.

  Tom began wondering about his own family. None of his relatives ever mentioned the famine; they never talked about the old country. They only talked about winning, getting ahead, beating their opponents. But Kennelly’s poetry had unlocked a curiosity in Tom, and a need to find out about that dance they’d all forgotten.

  As he approached the Blue Grotto, Tom’s heart pounded. While he had learned about Irish pain from John Sullivan, he’d learned about the dance from John’s sister, Bernie. She had come here for the Fourth of July parties with her family, stonecutters in the Kellys’ employ. She was so tall and beautiful, with a willowy body and soft gold-red hair, but some kind of superstrength behind her blue eyes.

  The first time he’d met her, they’d been twelve years old. She and her brother had climbed the steep stones to get on top of the grotto, where no kids were supposed to go, to look out over the mouth of the river. Tom had spotted them and walked over.

  “Hey, get down from there,” he’d called up to the red-haired girl in a yellow dress.

  “We’re just looking at the water,” she’d said.

  “Yeah, well, you’re not allowed. That’s off-limits.”

  “Our great-grandfather built this grotto,” she’d said, gazing down with her arm around her younger brother, and the most withering expression Tom had ever seen. “I don’t think he’d mind.”

  “Well, my great-grandfather paid him to do it,” Tom had retorted. “And I’m telling you you’d better get down.”

  “Ah. So you’re a Kelly.”

  “That’s right. Now get down. You might fall off and sue someone, Red.”

  She had given him a long, hard stare. It wasn’t exactly defiant—at least, not by Kelly standards. But it was thorough, and it definitely took his measure. Tom had shivered, turned inside out by the way she’d looked at him with those dark blue eyes. He’d thought she was the coolest thing he’d ever encountered, but the funny part was, her gaze was so warm.

  “Come on, John,” she’d said, holding her brother’s hand.

  “Let me help you,” Tom had offered.

  “That’s okay, Kelly,” she’d said. “We can take care of ourselves.”

  And she’d jumped down, catching her younger brother. They had run off to join the picnic; Tom could see her still, yellow skirt flowing behind her like sunshine over the green grass.

  From then on, he’d always looked for her at the family parties. Her red hair and blazing eyes made her hard to miss. But it wasn’t until they were seventeen that she’d taught him about the dance. It was right here, he thought, entering the grotto with his wheelbarrow. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end, as if the ghosts of the teenagers he and Bernie had once been were right here beside him, dancing in the moonlight to the music of the wind.

  “Tom,” she said now.

  He jumped, startled.

  There, in the semidarkness of the grotto, she knelt before the Virgin’s statue. She must have heard him coming; she was half turned around, her black veil shielding her face. He saw her pale skin and delicate cheekbones, her blue eyes catching the dim light.

  “Sister Bernadette Ignatius,” he said. “I didn’t expect to find you here.”

  “I knew you were coming today,” she said, blessing herself and standing up. There were grass clippings and smudges of dirt on her long skirt, from kneeling on the ground. It killed him every time, seeing her in her nun’s habit.

  “I have a lot of work here on the grounds to finish before school is back in session. I was just down at the beach cottage. How’d you know I’d come to the grotto this morning?”

  “Intuition.” She smiled.

  “So you came here to meet me?” he asked, something in his chest catching and tugging like a fish on a line.

  “Yes,” she said. “To give you instructions.”

  “Instructions?” he asked, laughing. “You think I need help fixing the stonework?”

  “No, of course not,” she said. “I just want you to make sure to leave the words uncovered.”

  “The words?” he asked, looking up at the spot where someone had gouged the stone. “That’s vandalism,” he said.

  “That’s the Song of Songs,” she said, standing beside him to read what had been scratched into the granite. The grotto was damp, the north wall covered with moss. The place smelled of earth. But Bernie gave off warmth that got right into Tom’s skin, made him remember other times they’d come here, when he’d held her in his arms. She looked up at him; was she recalling those days, or had she buried them forever?

  “Is that a song you can dance to?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

  She didn’t reply, and she looked away.

  “Sing it to me, Bernie,” he said.

  “Don’t, Tom,” she said.

  He closed his eyes. Even with Bernie standing beside him, the chill was back. Being in the grotto reminded him of a tomb, or a prison cell. He thought of the Bible she had given him to take over to John at Portlaoise. It had belonged to her great-grandfather, who had carried it over on the boat from Cork. Tom wondered whether John had taken comfort from it, whether he had read it much during those long six years.

  “Sister Bernadette,” he said now. “You didn’t have to come all the way here to tell me that.”

  “Maybe I just wanted to make sure,” she said.

  “That I didn’t cover it over?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, why are you saving it?” he asked.

  “Being Irish, you ought to know the power of words, of expression, when a person is trapped.”

  “I don’t see any guards, or locked doors or barred windows,” he said.

  “There are many ways of being trapped,” she said.

  “Who carved it?” he asked. “It’s someone you know, I can tell.”

  But she just ignored him; if she did know the author, she was choosing to remain silent.

  “Isn’t the grotto like a chapel?” he pressed. “Are you saying it’s okay for crazy people to carve their messages into the altar? Prayers that will never come true anyway?”

  She’d been staring up at the words, but now she turned to look at him. Maybe it was the fact that she’d spent most of her life out of the sun, but her skin looked as smooth as it had those summers so long ago, her eyes as blue and still as the deepest rock pool at the sea’s edge.

  “Prayers aren’t wishes,” she said. “They don’t ‘come true.’”

  “Spoken like a true nun,” he said.

  She opened her mouth to reply, seemed to think better of it. Her unspoken words hung between them, shimmering like ghosts. Water from yesterday and Tuesday’s rain trickled onto the rock floor in a steady drip, drip, drip.

  “For all your idealism and poetry, all your Irishness, Thomas Kelly,” she said quietly, “I’d say that you’ve stayed very bitter.”

  “How can I not be, after—”

  “Don’t, Tom.”

  “Do you ever think of him, Bernie? That’s what I want to know. Tell me that, at least…do you ever?” Tom stared into her eyes, wanting to take her by the shoulders and shake her. They had worked together without trouble all this time, but suddenly he wasn’t sure he could stand it another week. John’s release had tipped the balance.

  “What I’m thinking about right now is my brother coming home. He’s paid his debt, and now he’s free.”

  “Free,” Tom said, thinking about the word. He traced the words in the stone. Funny, how Bernie was on the same wavelength regarding John’s release.

  “You think he wrote this?” Tom asked, gesturing at
the words. “Sneaked back in the dead of night and left a message for Honor?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said abruptly.

  “I don’t know. I wouldn’t put it past him,” Tom said. “And we both know he has stonecutting in his Sullivan blood.”

  She just stared at the wall.

  “It’s what took us to Ireland, remember?” he asked. “We went there wanting to find out where we came from, and we ended up leaving our hearts behind.”

  He had gone too far. She whirled around and walked out of the grotto, leaving Tom alone with the broken wall and the mysterious words. He read them again:

  I WAS SLEEPING, BUT MY HEART KEPT VIGIL.

  He wouldn’t have given Bernie the satisfaction of knowing that he had looked up the passage again last night:

  I was sleeping, but my heart kept vigil.

  I heard my lover knocking;

  “Open to me, my beloved, my dove, my perfect one.”

  He took out his trowel, began mixing the mortar. His shoulder ached. It always did when he worked in the rain or places that were very damp. The pain didn’t stop him, didn’t even slow him down. He had a job to do, and he did it. That had been his way, ever since he’d become an adult—single-minded focus, eye on the ball, finishing what he started.

  The quality had gotten him more trouble than he’d ever bargained for: him and Bernie, both of them.

  Fireflies twinkled in the tall grass, a big yellow moon was rising out of the sea, and Paradise Ice Cream was hopping. Twenty-eight flavors and a short-order grill were housed in a small white cottage on the edge of a marsh, with beach traffic meandering past on Shore Road. Bright, colorful lanterns swung from a wire above the packed parking lot. People sat at picnic tables under a willow tree, gazing across the mouth of the river toward the lighthouse on the other side.

  Regis wore her embarrassing uniform—chinos and a blue shirt with the Paradise logo over the breast. She’d felt nervous and on edge—a cross between Christmas morning and final exams—ever since her father’s letter had come, and especially after the talk with her mother that morning. Twice tonight she had dropped scoops of ice cream—splat on the counter, instead of into the cone or cup.