Wicked Forest Read online

  anger, and loneliness. Linden's lips twitched and his

  eyes moved rapidly behind his closed lids. Then he

  opened his mouth and moaned softly. After that he

  was very still again, his breathing regular. quiet. Satisfied he would be all right. I returned to my

  own room and tried to go back to sleep, but that

  wasn't to happen very quickly. Chasing after him and

  bringing him back to the house had put needles and

  pins in my stomach. It actually took hours for me to

  fall asleep again, and just as I did, the bright sunlight clapped its hands in front of me like a mesmerist snapping me out of a hypnotic state and made me

  open my eyes.

  I could hear the muffled sounds of the servants

  above preparing to go to work at the main house for

  the Eatons. and I could also hear my mother talking

  softly to Linden. I did not hear him speak. My body

  moaned complaints from toes to the top of my head

  when I forced myself to rise. After I washed my face

  in cold water to shock out the sleepiness and brushed

  my hair so I could at least tie it back. I put on my robe

  and went out to the kitchen where my mother and

  Linden were having breakfast.

  "Oh. Linden," she cried as soon as she saw me

  approaching. "look who has returned, just as I told

  you. She arrived last night after you went to bed." He didn't turn his head or lift his eyes toward

  me at all. "Hi, Linden," I said "How are you feeling?" He stared down at his oatmeal and then, as if he

  hadn't heard a word I said, he sipped some coffee. "Willow is back. Linden." my mother said.

  "Don't you want to say good morning to her?" He looked at our mother, but he didn't look at

  me. Again, he sipped some coffee.

  My mother and I exchanged a look of concern, and then I smiled back, closing and opening my eyes

  gently.

  "Are you hungry, Willow?"

  "I'll just make myself some toast with jam," I

  said.

  'I didn't expect you would be up so early after

  driving all day and late into the night, and especially

  after I kept you up so long talking.-' she told me as I

  went to make the toast.

  "Neither did I," I said. "I was awake earlier," I

  added, wondering if Linden had eventually realized

  what had happened during the night. I glanced at him

  to see if he was going to sneak a glance at me, but he

  didn't. He pushed himself back from the table and

  stood.

  You haven't finished your breakfast yet.

  Linden," our mother said.

  He shook his head.

  "I'm not very hungry this morning," he said,

  still not looking my way.

  I was beginning to wonder if he would speak to

  me at all. Why wouldn't he at least say hello to me? I

  guess he truly was angry at me simply for existing, for

  dropping my mother and father's past in his lap like a

  ball of cold lead. Perhaps it was the age-old fury that

  required recipients of bad news to kill the messenger. He turned, his eyes brushing over me like a

  passing feather, and walked out and down the

  hallway.

  As soon as I thought he was out of earshot. I

  told my mother about being woken by footsteps in the

  hallway.

  "I came out because I thought it might be you

  and something was wrong. I discovered it was Linden

  and he was out there." I said, nodding toward the

  beach, "walking in his sleep."

  I described what I had done and how he had

  remained asleep the whole time.

  She pressed her lips together and closed her

  eyelids as if to keep the tears contained. Then she

  sighed so deeply, I thought she had cracked her heart. "It's been one thing after another like this since

  he came home from the hospital. His therapist there

  predicted his depression would deepen and suggested

  a more intense therapy with medications. She wanted

  me to have him admitted to a nearby psychiatric

  hospital, but I could not do it, even though I have

  always wondered if he has inherited my manicdepressive condition."

  "No. Mother. Your condition wasn't anything genetic," I said firmly. I had read my father's reports

  about her.

  She nodded,

  "I was hoping that the medicine they gave him

  would bring him back to an even keel, that somehow

  he would improve and we would at least have what

  peace we had before. but..." She swallowed hard and

  continued. "This is new. this sleepwalking. though."

  She shook her head. "What will we do? Lock his

  bedroom door?'

  "Maybe it will pass. It might never occur again.

  It's still too soon after the whole event." I suggested,

  buoying up her hopes. She nodded, her shoulders and

  back softening with another sigh.

  "Yes, maybe. but I suppose we do have to

  consider what to do if it doesn't. In any case. I'll call

  his doctor and tell her about it, even though I know

  she will only repeat her suggestion to put him in the

  clinic."

  We stopped talking when we heard him

  returning. He had put on his windbreaker and was

  headed for the door.

  "Where are you going. Linden?" Mother asked. As if the question required a great deal of

  consideration, he took a moment to respond. "For a walk." he said.

  "I'll come out to join you in a while." I

  suggested. "If you don't mind."

  He paused. For a moment I thought he was

  finally going to turn and speak to me, but he didn't

  respond. He continued toward the front door, "Don't go too far," my mother called to him

  with urgency in her voice.

  "I've already gone too far." he said, opened the

  door, and left us both looking after him wondering

  what that meant or if there was any sensible meaning

  at all in that twisted cloud of thoughts, dreams, and

  memories that swirled about like a tornado in his

  troubled head.

  As with the answers to so many new questions

  about my life and my future, it waited out there for me

  like the fruit on the forbidden Tree of Knowledge.

  Pluck it at your own peril, Willow De Beers, I

  thought.

  And hope that, like poor Adam and Eve, you

  don't get driven out of paradise,

  1

  Return to Joya del Mar

  .

  Now that I was here. that I had made the firm

  decision to be involved with my real mother's life and family. I felt like someone who had gotten off the roller coaster. I was a bit shaky regaining my footing, but finally, time had slowed down for me. I could take a deep breath and let my memories, especially my most recent, the ones that had been stringing along behind me like so many ribbons in the wind, catch up and be stored in the safest places in my brain. They were no longer to be ignored. but I could draw upon them for lessons and wisdom to guide me through the days ahead.

  Right before I left for my second year of college. Daddy and I had a wonderful after-dinner hour or so together on the rear patio of our South Carolina house. Quiet moments together like that were as rare as shooting stars. I hadn't the courage to ask for them. Puppies unabashedly snuggle at the feet of their loving masters, hoping to be stroked. I envied them for th
eir obvious play for love. Growing up in a home in which my adoptive mother always made me feel like an uninvited guest made me timid and quite withdrawn as a child. It took very little to get her upset with me. I clung so hard and so close to my nanny Amou's skirt, I am sure people who saw us thought I was attached to her hip.

  I remember I would try to turn and twist in a way that would keep me hidden from my adoptive mother's critical eyes whenever she was in the same roam or passing by Those eyes stabbed me with accusation and contempt. Amou was truly my shield, my protection. Her warm voice and touch gave me enough reassurance to challenge nightmares and keep the dark clouds away most of the time.

  I wasn't afraid of going to Daddy for comfort, but now, of course. I understood that in those early years, when he was concerned about pleasing my adoptive mother and keeping his secret life and love just that, secret, he put up a wall of firm, correct authority between us and, especially in front of my adoptive mother, remained as aloof and objective as he could. He was, in other words, the psychiatric doctor first, the counselor, the therapist, and my father second.

  Always the one who relied on reason and logic, he put me through the behavioral catechisms as soon as I was capable of answering a question with a yes or a no. My adoptive mother would rail against my sloppiness or my forgetfulness. She would pounce on my failure to keep my things well organized, even when I was only three. Even then I noticed how she would turn to my father and, like a prosecutor in a courtroom, make an argument for declaring me guilty of some horrid imperfection, some mental weakness, and demand a punishment. By the time I was five. I thought she would ask for the death penalty.

  Daddy rarely contradicted her openly. He would show some form of agreement with a nod or a widening of his eyes and then turn to me, the defendant, and begin his soft but well- constructed series of reasonable questions.

  "You want your room to look nice, don't you. Willow? You want to be able to bring your friends here? You want to make less work for Isabella. right?"

  Isabella was Amou's real name. I called her Amou from the first day I could pronounce a word. She called me Amau Una, which in Portuguese means "loved one." and I just picked up on that. My adoptive mother hated nicknames and tried to get me to stop calling my nanny Amou. but I resisted, even in the face of her fiery eyes of anger that threatened to sweep over me, engulfing me in the blaze.

  Of course. I nodded in agreement with every question Daddy would ask, and somehow, my acquiescing to that sort of reprimand satisfied my adoptive mother enough to lower the flames of her rage and enable me to escape from her circle of heat. My eyes were glassy with tears, of course, but most of the time I didn't permit a single one to escape. It was almost as if I instinctively knew as an infant that weeping in front of my adoptive mother was some sort of acceptance of how she characterized me. the child of a mentally ill woman, a bundle of promising new problems just waiting to give themselves expression.

  Afterward. I sometimes caught the look of sadness and disgust on Daddy's face, but it was there for only an instant or so. He had to maintain his selfcontrol. He had to treat me like the child of a stranger. the charity case my adoptive mother believed I was, I could only imagine what havoc she would have wreaked upon Daddy if she had known the truth. Not only would she have put him through a nasty divorce, but she would have driven him out of his profession and, therefore, out of his reason to be. Keeping their love affair buried in their hearts was a price and a sacrifice both my father and my real mother knew they had to pay in order for me to exist at all.

  I feel certain now that Daddy would have told me all of the truth in a face-to-face meeting eventually and not left it for me to read as part of some postmortem. He was just waiting to be sure I could handle it and not be harmed or horrified by it. In a real sense, he had to reinvent himself for me first, change from one sort of man to another, from a guardian to a father, from someone merely full of concern and responsibility to someone full of love. He was in the process of doing just that before he died. Perhaps he waited too long, but none of us ever really believes in the end of ourselves. We always feel there will be one more tarn to make, one more mile to go, one more minute to enjoy, and the opportunity to do what must be done will not be lost.

  Fortunately, after his death. Daddy had left me his diary, his insurance policy for the truth, and after reading it, I knew more about who I really was and what I had to do. My closest relative. Aunt Agnes Delray, my father's widowed sister, tried to stop me. Like everyone around me, she wanted to deny reality and truth.

  "I'm so glad you're enjoying college, Willow," Daddy began that warm spring evening that now came up vividly out of my pool of memories. I recalled how the stars had burned like the tips of candle flames growing stronger with every passing minute.

  "I am. Daddy. I love all my classes and enjoy my teachers. In fact, some of my new friends think I'm too serious about my work."

  He laughed.

  "I remember that I had to work so hard to enable myself to attend the university that I would feel

  some sort of ridiculous guilt if I relished my studies and wallowed with pleasure in my assignments and challenges."

  "That's how I feel.' It wasn't supposed to be fun." he continued, gazing out at the fields and the lake and forest beyond as if he could look past the present, back in time to happier days. His smile said all that. "It was supposed to be hard work. What an incredibly unexpected reaction to it all. Like your new friends, some of my closer friends thought I was bizarre. 'Psychiatry is a good place for you, Claude.' they would say. 'Eventually, you can treat yourself and send yourself the bill.' "

  We both laughed at the idea, and then he turned to me, his face as serious as it had ever been, "If we don't love what we do," he told me. "then we don't love who we are and the worst fate of all is not liking yourself. Willow, being trapped in a body and behind a face you despise. You hate the sound of your own voice. You even come to hate your own shadow. How can you ever hope to make anyone else happy, wife, children. friends, if you can't make yourself happy?

  It seems like such a simple truth, but it remains buried beneath so many lies and delusions for most people. I know now that won't happen to you," he said assuredly.

  As I walked on the beach after breakfast this morning, that conversation and those words of Daddy's helped me to understand Linden. He was out there, wandering, trying to find a way to escape from himself. from what he now perceived to be who and what he was. Suicide was of course, one avenue to take, and he had evidently tried that, but there had to be something better. I was determined to help him find it.

  Perhaps it was truly arrogant of me even to think I could be of such assistance to him. I was still quite a young woman, tentative and unsure of myself, of my own emotions, still haunted by my own childhood fears. For me, the daughter of a worldrenowned psychiatrist, and someone who wanted to follow in his footsteps, it seemed like a natural thing to do. But would it be like the blind leading the blind? Would I cause him even more harm, drive him even deeper into that darkness in which he now spent so much of his time? How I envied my father for the confidence he had behind all his decisions. Most of those decisions could have a significant effect on other people's Eyes. How could you know that and still speak with such authority, such self-assurance? I wondered. When would it be like that for me? Would it ever be?

  Laughter coming from the rear loggia of the main house pulled my attention from the ocean and my own heavy thoughts. I had just come up the small rise in the beach and I was nearly directly behind the loggia. To my surprise. Bunny and Asher Eaton, who usually partied late into the evening almost every night during the so-called Palm Beach Season, sometimes even into the next morning, were up and dressed in their pink and white, blue and white tennis outfits and having breakfast with Thelma and Brenda Carriage, two friends of Bunny Eaton's I had previously met. She herself described them as great gossips who knew where to look to find everyone's dirty laundry. She called them "core Palm Beach
" and had told me their husbands were big Palm Beach developers, two brothers who had married two sisters, now both widows.

  I knew they couldn't help but notice me. They were all facing in my direction. However, neither Bunny nor Asher said a word.

  Even from this distance. I could see the displeasure in Bunny's face at the sight of me: she was probably. like me. recalling our nasty confrontation just before I left for South Carolina, She turned back to her guests quickly and, a moment later, released another peal of exaggerated laughter as if I were some sort of clown who had wandered too far from the circus. She mumbled something else and then they all laughed,

  I was about to ignore them when Thatcher suddenly appeared, obviously dressed for work. He had his back to me so he couldn't have known I was here on the beach, Neither Bunny nor Asher was about to tell him. I thought, but one of the Carriage sisters must have asked about me because he quickly turned to look in my direction. For a moment we gazed at each other. My heart began to pound so hard and fast. I had to take a deep breath. He didn't call out and he didn't set out to greet me. As if it had a mind of its own, my hand wanted to lift and wave, but I kept it down and chastised my heart for its weakness, threatening my pride.

  Thatcher said something to the group and then went into the house. As if to gloat, Bunny Eaton turned my way quickly and laughed again.

  I lowered my head and continued to walk the beach, searching for Linden. I soon suspected he had gone in the opposite direction because I saw no sign of him ahead, even as far as the adjoining property. Suddenly. I felt terribly alone and again experienced those pangs of doubt that tormented every decision I was making.

  I paused and looked out at the sailboats in the distance. The warm but strong easterly breeze paraded a line of puffy, milk-white clouds toward the horizon and a passenger jet lifted off the runway at the West Palm Beach airport. I watched it climb, turning toward the clouds.

  "You look like you wish you were on that," I heard, and spun around to see Thatcher coming down a pathway between a row of bushes.

  He had obviously gone out of the main house and then to the left to follow an approach to the beach. I glanced back in the direction of the house. I quickly realized that what he was doing was sneaking around to meet me. The heat of indignation built so quickly in my face, I felt as if someone had put a lit match close to my cheek,