Wicked Forest (DeBeers 2)

As Whitney had made a point of remarking. Thatcher was staying. Even though we weren't getting married for almost another six weeks, there was no point in his moving himself out and then moving himself back in. We didn't expect it to be any great shock in Palm Beach.

"I'll be so busy. getting ahead on my work to make time for our wedding and subsequent

honeymoon anyway." Thatcher said, "that I'll practically be nonexistent."

During the first week of our settling in, he was going on a fishing trip with a client. It was something he had been promising to do for some time, and he'd decided it might be a good time to do it.

"To give you, your mother. and Linden a chance to get settled in and adjusted without me hovering about." he explained. "Although I'll miss you."

He was to be gone four days. They were going down to the Keys and then around through the Gulf and back. Between my college work with finals approaching and our moving into the house, I didn't have all that much time to spend with him anyway.

If we thought that Bunny's having moved away would slow down her planning and plotting of the wedding, we were in for an immediate surprise. She actually returned the day we moved in to discuss the bridesmaids' gifts. A friend of hers whose daughter had married in Rome recently had what she thought was a wonderful idea: a picture of the bride and the groom and their immediate families put on the face of a table clock.

"Every time they check the time, they'll be reminded of your wonderful affair, and instead of an ordinary alarm, it will play your wedding song. What do you think?"

"I think a picture of the wedding party itself would make them happier. Then they could see themselves in the photograph," I offered,

Her face flooded with disappointment.

"Oh. But wouldn't that be too many?" she followed up quickly, hoping to change my mind.

"We'll just get a bigger clock. Bunny. No problem." I said.

She thought a moment, then smiled and said. "I might do one of the immediate family, just for myself, as well."

There was no defeating her if it came down to simply a matter of spending more money, I thought. All of her life she had bought happiness.

But would there be a time years and years from now when she would be surrounded only by things, when she would realize something important was missing?

What was it? she would surely wonder. Was it more jewelry? More high-style clothing, new furniture, a painting, a new car?

Wrapped in her furs, she would still shiver. The chill of something dark and dreadful would pass through her bones, and she would look out at the sea from her mansion or from her expensive patio and see a flock of birds moving as one, sailing with grace against the azure sky.

And suddenly she would know.

It was loneliness.

That deep darkness in her heart was loneliness.

And nothing she had bought and nothing she had been given would take it away.

11

My Own Boo Radley

.

A week after we moved into the main house.

Linden finally brought up the new portrait he was going to do of me and how he was going to do it. "I know how busy you are with your

schoolwork and getting ready for this grand wedding ceremony," he said. "I have therefore decided not to ask you to spend hours and hours posing for me in my studio.

"'Really?"

"Yes, but what I have to do is develop an idea and plant it in my mind, and do you know how I am going to do that without your posing?" he asked. He was so excited and enthusiastic about it that all I could do was shake my head and smile.

"How?"