Sand Castles (44 page)

Rodger had shrugged offhandedly as he scooped the oozy egg with a monogrammed spoon into a porcelain bowl. "She's growing up, your little girl; it's bound to be hard for you to let go. That's natural,
Sara
," he had said, looking up with a quick, sympathetic smile. "You've raised her yourself. You two have always been a team. You've done—you're doing—a great job. But Abby's twelve now, and feeling her way."

Sara
had responded with a vehemence that surprised even her. "She's not just feeling her way, Rodger; she's roaring like a freight train toward a washed-out bridge!"

"It's only a phase,
Sara
," he had reassured her, and then he had come around to her side of the table and had wrapped his arms around her in a show of support. "She's at an age when knowing about her
birth
father is important to her. You can't really blame Abby," he had said. "If you're going to blame anyone, blame the teacher who dreamed up the family-tree project. Personally, I've never been a fan of assignments like that; they can be unnerving for
some
parents. Family skeletons aren't always six feet under, after all."

He had kissed
Sara
's cheek in sympathy and added, "It's hard on a kid when a parent dies before the child is old enough to remember him. Sooner or later Abby will have picked your brain all she can, and then she'll stop. Trust me. It's only a phase."

Instead of being grateful to him,
Sara
had
snapped
, "Don't tell
me
what phase Abby's in, Rodger; I'm her
mother!"

And then she'd wrenched free of him, grabbed her purse and jacket, and left him standi
ng flabbergasted on the quarry-
tiled floor of their two-hundred-year-old kitchen.

That was this morning, and although
Sara
had called her husband at the Academy later in the day and apologized, she was still feeling guilty.
He'd
been trying to help.
She'd
behaved like a shit.

She glanced at the low-lit clock on the dashboard: seven fifteen. So much for the chicken with citrus sauce. The fixings for Rodger's favorite dinner were sitting uncooked in two brown bags behind her.

She drove down dark and winding
River Street
, then pulled onto the graveled
drive of the wine-red, gambrel-
roofed house, known all around as Tidewater, that Rodger had lived in all of his life. Lights were on both upstairs and down, pouring their soft glow through multipaned windows onto fat-budded rhododendrons and leafing summersweet that lined the
granite
foundation.

Sara
glanced up at her daughter's bedroom.
She's at that damned computer again,
she realized with a sinking heart. Her daughter's obsession with the Internet had become a source of constant bickering between them.
Sara
wanted to allow Abby enough access to be stimulating but not too much to be addictive. It was a tricky balancing act.

The light was on in Rodger's study downstairs. He was either slogging through a pile of papers or he was on the phone, managing some crisis or other.
Sara
didn't envy her husband his position as headmaster of
Faxton
Academy
. It entailed a ridiculous amount of stress and pressure, more so because he was grandson to the academy's founder: he couldn't walk away if the going got tough, or accept a better offer at another boarding school.

Probably the only thing more str
essful than managing kids with attention deficit d
isorder was managing
privileged
kids with AD
H
D: Rodger was
always meeting with their high-
powered parents, who were themselves impatient, demanding, and used to getting their way. After working in the headmaster's office for several years,
Sara
had seen firsthand how well Rodger was able to keep his cool. Still, the stress factor at the exclusive academy—either despite its small size or because of it—was sky-high.

Poor Rodger. She wasn't making his life any easier.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry," she said to her husband at the door, handing the grocery bags
to him
. "I stopped to check on the shop. The contractor was still there and he had a lot of questions. I would have called—"

"But you left your cell phone on the kitchen counter," Rodger said with a wry smile on his handsome face. He set the bags carefully on a marble-topped table that sat in the hall, then pushed his reading glasses over the top of his receding hair and arched his back, easing out the fatigue.

"I was worried about you," he admitted as she hung up her rain-spattered jacket. "I think you ought to have a second cell phone, this one just for the car."

"Oh, one is enough—really,"
Sara
said.
I won't forget it again. I won't.

Wanting to move past the painful issue of her breakfast tantrum, she hugged her husband and said, "You're right, I think; it
is
Abby." On tiptoe, she gave him a kiss on his cheek. "She's driving me cr—up a wall lately, and I'm taking it out on you. I'm sorry."

Rodger kissed the top of her rain-dampened hair and said, "Nothing to be sorry for. I never should have put in my two cents."

"But I
want
you to put in your two cents! We're both her parents now, you as well as me—I. And think of all the kids that have passed through your doors. Who knows more about children than you do?"

He answered quietly, "Just about any real father."

He hadn't had children of his own during his first marriage, but it was still hard for
Sara
to believe he felt so humbled by the fact. "Oh
-
h, you know that's not true," she said, reassuring him. They had been trying to have children for nine months now, which wasn't very long; it would only be a matter of time.

She ran her fingertips across his cheek, already stubbly with the day's growth. She preferred him this way—slightly rumpled, without his tie, a man instead of a headmaster. He seemed more approachable. It made it easier for her to accept the astonishing fact that she was his wife now, and not merely the assistant to his secretary.

Sara
had a sudden, vivid flashback to the night of his proposal. She had been working late, determined not to drop the ball while she filled in for his ailing secretary. Rodger had offered to take
Sara
to a late supper, but she had declined because Abby was alone at home and waiting for her.

Despite having worked at the academy for four years,
Sara
had been uneasy about spurning her employer's friendly offer. But far from taking it personally, Rodger had shrugged and said, "If we were married, Abby wouldn't be alone and on her own right now."

Sara
had no answer to that except
... yes. After a whirlwind engagement, they were married in a
small
, tasteful ceremony. She was
so
grateful to Rodger for her new life.

She shook herself free of the memory. "You must be starved," she said, taking up one of the grocery bags.

Rodger picked up the other and followed her into the kitchen. "Actually, I figured Abby might be hungry, so I heated up the stew from last night for us."

"Oh, good."

"But she didn't come down. She said she would later."

"What? Rodger! You have to put your foot down with her. She can't just—"

"Yes, she can,
Sara
," he said, shrugging. "I won't go ordering her around," he added as he took out a bag of oranges. "She has to come of her own free will."

"Baloney! She'll come to dinner when she's called, period. Damn it, I wish you'd take my side just
once
whenever—"

She was doing it again, picking a fight again. She reined herself in and changed the subject altogether. In a more offhand tone she said, "Any good mail?" and picked up the stack on the counter.

Rodger, in a mild snit of his own now, said, "I've taken all of my mail out; the rest is yours. Well, I've got work to do." He left her to put away the groceries herself.

Sighing,
Sara
began flipping through the hefty pile, surprised again at how a marriage to someone of stature could instantly quadruple her mail. The day's haul included
Art and Antiques, Colonial Homes,
a dozen upscale catalogues, appeals from three or four charities, an equal number of VISA applications, an invitation to a lecture on historic architecture, another one to dinner—and a bill that she'd just paid, returned for lack of postage.

She stared at the envelope, to which she clearly remembered attaching a peel-away stamp. It would take a fireman's hose to get one of those things off.

I did stamp this envelope. I did.

Didn't
I
?

Sara
felt a familiar rush of heat to her cheeks. She laid the envelope carefully back on the pile and, just as deliberately, finished emptying the second bag of groceries. After that she turned a low fire under the pot of stew still on the stove, and whispered in a shaking voice to no one in particular, "
Abby
will come when she is called."

****

Abigail Johnson Bonniface sat hunched like an elf owl in front of her computer, searching through cyberspace for only God knew what.

Standing in the doorway of her daughter's room,
Sara
had to make an effort to control her rising irritation as she said, "It was rude not to come down after your father heated up supper especially for you."

"Oh, please," Abby said without turning around. "Speaking of rude, don't you ever knock anymore?"

Sara
gritted her teeth and said, "Fair enough. I'll knock from now on. But it would be a lot easier to be nice to you if you were nice to others."

"When am I not nice?"

"Right now. By not looking at me when you speak to me."

She saw her daughter's shoulders rise and then fall on an aggrieved exhale.

Bracing herself on the arms of her swivel chair, Abby spun it slowly around to face her mother. Intelligence and anger flashed from heavily lashed blue eyes.

"Tell me who my father is."

Here we go again.
"I've told you, Abby. Many, many times. A man named Nick McElwyn."

'Then why was our name Johnson instead of McElwyn until you got married last year? Why were you using your maiden name all my life?"

"I've told you that, too: lots of women had begun to keep their own names by the time you were born."

"Then why did you all of a sudden decide to take the name Bonniface when you got married this time?"

"Because your stepfather isn't like your birth father. Rodger wanted us to share his name."

"So my real father was ashamed of us, is that what you're trying to say?"

Surprised to find herself in new, dark territory,
Sara
said carefully, "Your father just
never insisted the way Rodger did. And I'm a different person now than I was then."

Like a cat who smells fear, Abby pressed on with the hunt. "Why don't we have more pictures of my birth father?
Only one tiny photograph of some people sitting around a couch. And it's overexposed. It sucks."

"Oh, Abby. I've explained it to you so many times. There was a fire in the apartment we lived in, and my shoebox of photos was burned."

The fire had been a
small
grease
flareup
, and Abby had slept peacefully in her crib through the whole thing, but never mind; at least there'd been a fire. As for a so-called photo collection, there'd never been one of those. There'd only been the one snapshot, which
Sara
had kept tucked in her wallet for years. The only reason she had shown it to Abby at all was because it
was
so overexposed.

Sara
locked gazes with her bright, calculating offspring and felt suddenly
exposed
. And more than a little
uneasy
. She added in a tiptoe voice, "Doesn't it matter to you at all that we have a thousand pictures of you and me together?"

Sensing weakness, Abby lashed out. "You don't know who my father is, do you. You don't have a
clue."

"Abby!" The swipe of her
cat-daughter's
paw was swift
and
deep
.
But yes,
Sara
did know
: Nick McElwyn, an up-and-
coming attorney, had been run over as he dashed across the street against the light, in the rain, at twilight. It was a terrible, terrible tragedy, and he was dead. That was
Sara
's story, and by God, she was sticking to it. She took a step backward and began to turn, ready to run.