Wicked Forest (DeBeers 2)

Yes.

"Then you didn't waste any time," he said. "I would suggest you came inside, take a cool shower, and get something on your skin before you peel and suffer."

"Okay," I said, and gat up quickly.

We returned to our suite and I did exactly what he had suggested. Then we had a cocktail on the patio and I described some of the gifts I had bought. I didn't tell him about the gift I had sent to Professor Fuentes, Instinctively, I felt he might be a little jealous about it, although he had no reason to be.

That night we had a wonderful dinner. Thatcher was right about the view. Afterward, we sat outside and looked up at the stars and down at the water. It was a very romantic end to what had started as a disappointing day.

When we left Eze, I truly felt as though we were returning to the real world. We had been in a dream, floating on love, touching the stars. Our plane would bring us back to earth. I remember thinking as the wheels touched down that this was it, the beginning of a new life with all the questions to be answered, the roads to travel.

A whirlwind of events and revelations had brought me to this place. In a sense. I'd had little to do with it I was born to it. Now, perhaps for the first time. I had something to say and some control of my own destiny. Into what kind of world would I bring my children? What gifts and what burdens would I bequeath to them? How many questions would I leave unanswered, and how daunting would be their effort to answer them?

I loved Thatcher. He was the most exciting, handsome, and confident man I had ever met, other than my father, but there were so many dark areas in him I had yet to explore and to understand. It takes a long time to get to know someone, even someone you love very much. There are layers and layers to lift away, and all you could do and all you could hope for was that when you went deep enough, you would discover wonderful things and not something that made you regret ever having begun to explore and discover.

Most married people don't bother. They live on a superficial layer of thin ice and skate carefully around each other. They don't ask. They don't think about it They turn away and distract themselves, and if one day they fall through, they pull themselves up and skate off to find another companion on another layer of thin ice, a companion just as eager not to look too deeply at them.

How do they sleep? What do they dream? My adoptive mother surely must have known how far out of love with her my father had fallen, but she chose to pretend it wasn't so or it wasn't very important. Just before she died, did she have a suddenness of regret? Did she remember her fantasies, those romances on the screen and in books that she had hoped would be true for her? Is it more painful to die with

disappointment?

That will never be me, I thought with confidence.

I reached for Thatcher's hand, and he smiled.

-Happy to be home:" he asked.

"No," I said, and he laughed.

"We'll go back someday," he promised.

No, I thought. You could never go back. Every moment was fresh and special. You could only go ahead and hope to have similar ones or better ones.

Love is like a good book: You turn the page to go on and wish it would never end.

I turned the page.

14

Brothers and Sisters

.

When we arrived home, we discovered that

Linden had gone ahead and arranged for the hanging of my picture above our bed. He had also done what I thought was a strange thing-- he had moved out of the room he was in and into the infamous room in which Kirby Scott had seduced Mather. It was closer to Thatcher's and my suite, actually right behind our bedroom, but with all the bad energy and memories associated with that room, it was curious that he had done so.

I had an opportunity to ask him about it that very day. We arrived fairly early, and Thatcher went off to his office. He had been on his cell phone almost the moment we entered the airport, and told me he had a list of problems an arm long to solve.

Mother. Linden. and I had lunch together. I thought Mother looked tired. but I didn't say anything about it until we had a chance to be alone. She was interested in hearing about our trip, and she loved the hand-painted silk skirt and blouse I had bought her, as well as the glass figurines. I had found some interesting hand-crafted and hand-painted leather masks for Linden. I thought they were unique, and so did he.

Despite moving into Mother's old room.

Linden seemed chipper and more alert than before Thatcher and I had left for our honeymoon. He talked about new works he was contemplating and some more ideas he had for sprucing up Joya del Mar, always thinking about ways to restore its previous character and eliminate any trace of the Eatons.

After lunch Mother told me Linden was doing well and had shown no signs of the melancholy that had so worried her and threatened to drive him to the brink of some new disaster.

"I did try to stop him from moving into that room, but he was determined. He said we have got to eliminate all the old ghosts, confront the past and bury it once and for all. He claimed it was something you had once told him. I was surprised at his show of new strength, so I didn't put up any mare opposition and, as you can see, he's happy. Maybe he was right, but it did worry me for a while."