Heavenstone 02 - Secret Whispers

have seemed sinful for him to be happier than when he was with Mother, but tonight I could deny him nothing.
    How different I felt when I went to sleep this time. Something Lucille had advised appeared true. She had said that the way she handled bad memories was to pile on good memories, deliberately do things to please herself, to create happy times, and after a while, the weight of all of that drives the bad memories farther and farther down until they don’t come back so often, and even when they do, they’re easy to push away.
    Today was certainly proof of that. I hadn’t thought much about Ethan or Ellie or any of my unhappy experiences at school. I wondered if I could do it tomorrow and the day after as well. I wanted to. For one thing, Cassie still had little or nothing to say. She was mute in her grave, and my mind danced with all sorts of wonderful and delicious new possibilities. Maybe I would go to work with Uncle Perry. Maybe I would find someone better than Ethan. Maybe we would be a family again.
    Like a dying ember in a fireplace, the image of Cassie’s angry face dwindled and went dark. I could sleep, and for once I would not be afraid of my dreams. The Heaven-stone house sighed with relief. There were no moans and groans of age in the pipes, floors, ceilings, and walls. Downstairs, our ancestors opened their eyes again. Maybe Daddy was right. We were too powerful a family. Fate would pause at our gates with her bag full of trouble and disaster, look up our driveway, and quickly move on to the homes of weaker and more vulnerable families.
    I imagined a sign on the lawn: beware of the Heaven-stones.
    I smiled to myself and fell asleep, no longer afraid of the morning to come.
    But before morning, I had a terrible nightmare. In it, Lucille was shoveling dirt into Cassie’s grave, covering her coffin.
    And Cassie was screaming my name, pleading with me to stop Lucille.
    I let her keep shoveling.

Beware of the Heaven-stones
    T HIS TIME , I was grateful for the morning sunlight rushing through the opened curtains to wash the nightmare out of my head. It popped like a bubble, and I rose quickly to shower and dress to go down to breakfast. Uncle Perry had left a message that he was coming to have lunch with me. I was surprised he would make the trip during the workweek, but I knew he was very concerned about me and my adjusting to Daddy’s marriage to Lucille.
    During the dark period after Cassie’s death, when Daddy was so withdrawn and sullen, it was Uncle Perry who had spent hours talking with me, taking me for rides, eating dinner with me, trying to help me recover from what anyone would have thought was an impossible series of tragedies. He had always been a candle in the darkness for me.
    Although I could never put it into the proper words the way Cassie could, I had always seen Uncle Perry as the softer, kinder side of the Heaven-stone family. It wasn’t that I thought Daddy an unkind man, but he was more of what Cassie liked to call man tough . She said Daddy had inherited far moreof the pioneer spirit of rugged individualism than Uncle Perry had. She didn’t imply that it was because Uncle Perry was gay. She said that had nothing to do with it. There were many strong and successful and even ruthless businessmen who were gay. No, she said, it was simply that the independent, courageous, and determined spirit that had made our ancestors so successful had seeped into Daddy’s genes more easily than into Uncle Perry’s. Uncle Perry, she said, was more his mother’s child than his father’s. Although she never quite came out and told me so, she surely believed that was true for me as well. She had always thought she was more of a Heaven-stone than I was, and that this was why Daddy would never love me as much as he loved her.
    “However, Uncle Perry loves you more than he loves me,” she had told me, “but believe me, Semantha, I can live with it. I couldn’t care less if he respected me or liked me. He’s all yours.”
    Uncle Perry realized that, too. I knew he had never been very comfortable in Cassie’s presence and had welcomed spending as much time with me, without her, as possible. He never even mentioned her name now. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him I wasn’t as able to forget and avoid any references to Cassie as he was. I wondered what he would think if I told him she was still there, still inside my head—I still heard her. He might want me to go back to regular