Heavenstone 01 - The Heavenstone Secrets

tense and even frightening.
    As I turned to enter my room, I gazed through Cassie’s open bedroom door and stopped so fast anyone would have thought I had walked into a wall. The furniture looked rearranged. What was going on? Slowly, I stepped through her bedroom doorway and looked around. It was shocking. Cassie had moved Mother’s vanity table into her room, and it was covered not with Cassie’s things but with Mother’s. Even the gilded oval vanity mirror that had hung above Mother’s table was now hanging on Cassie’s wall. I could see Mother’s bathrobe hanging on the door of Cassie’s bathroom. By the bed were Mother’s pearl-colored fur slippers, the ones with the light pink ribbons. Cassie’s own vanity table was gone, aswere many of her other things, including the pictures she had had hanging on her walls. I even recognized that the bedding had been changed, replaced with a set of Mother and Daddy’s. How strange.
    I turned and hurried to Mother and Daddy’s bedroom. Without Mother’s things—her vanity table, mirror, pictures—and with her closet stripped, the room looked half-naked. I couldn’t help it. I started to cry. I didn’t even realize I was crying until I felt the tears on my cheeks. Now my own temper started to pound. I turned and hurried down the corridor and the stairs. Cassie was absorbed in her meat loaf when I stepped back into the kitchen. She didn’t hear me at all. I was taken aback by the happy tune she was humming. A week hadn’t even passed since our mother died, and she was humming a happy tune?
    “Cassie!” I cried.
    She turned, a look of confusion on her face. “What’s wrong? Someone idiotic call you, one of those stupid girls from school? I didn’t hear any phones ringing.”
    “No, no one called me. How could you … how could you take all of Mother’s things like that and put them in your room, even her wall mirror?”
    She stared for a moment and then wiped her hands with a dish towel. “Ordinarily, I would be very angry at you for constantly questioning everything I say and do, Semantha, but I understand what you’re going through,” she said calmly. “You see all this only from your own pain. It’s typical of an adolescent to think, feel, and act as if the whole world revolves around her, but it doesn’t.”

    She sat at the kitchenette. I thought she wasn’t going to say anything more, but she nodded and continued.
    “Can you stop thinking about yourself for one moment and think about Daddy? Can you shove your personal worries and thoughts out of your mind and imagine, try to imagine, what it must be like for him to go into that bedroom and look at Mother’s things and know she is gone forever? Can you even feel a little of that pain for him?
    “Do you know what he told me last night? He told me he turned and for a moment thought he saw Mother at her vanity table brushing her hair, and it filled him with a rush of hope that everything had been a bad dream. Of course, that image popped, and there was no one sitting at the table, but the table haunted him. Why, her perfumes, colognes, everything that has a scent was still in the air of that bedroom. He smelled it every night when he went to bed. He told me he still smelled the scent of her hair spray on her pillow beside him, and he told me he took her hairbrush and took some hairs from it and put them in his wallet, the wallet he carries in the inside pocket of his sports coat, the pocket closest to his heart. You mention the mirror. Do you know he told me he thought he saw her face in the mirror?”
    “But … we’re not getting rid of those things. You put them in your room,” I said in defense of myself, even though her words had taken the air out of my anger.
    She smiled. “Exactly. Soon, he’ll see them as my things and not Mother’s, and besides, Semantha,we’re not out to rid this house of every reminder of Mother, are we? Should we?”
    “No. Of course not. I didn’t mean—”
    “In time, Daddy will see that I’m … we’re … more grown-up, and he won’t be so worried about us. My wearing some of Mother’s things, having some of those things, lets him see me as older, more mature. I know most of this is quite beyond you, but—”
    “No, it’s not.”
    “You understand, then?”
    “Yes,” I said weakly. I didn’t understand it completely, but I knew I couldn’t stand her making me feel like some vapid adolescent.
    “Okay.” Her face hardened. “I’ll let