Wicked Forest (DeBeers 2)

"Maybe," I said. "but I don't enjoy it half as much as you think. Isn't it time to go?"

Despite the front I put up and how easy the first weeks had been. I did experience some discomfort over the next two months. I didn't have any bouts of nausea and vomiting, but I did find my energy sapped more often and took more naps than I usually did.

As soon as I'd told him I was pregnant. Thatcher had taken me to an obstetrician he considered one of the best in the area, a client of his. Dr. Herman Marko, a man in his late forties. Dr. Marko was very good at explaining everything, but he had a contrived pleasantness about him that gave me the impression he was kind and friendly only to the point of necessity. I told Thatcher I thought he was a man who counted his smiles and spent them as efficiently as an IRS examiner.

Thatcher retorted with his standard response to comments I made about the friends and associates to whom he introduced me: "You're analyzing too much. Just relax. Stop being the psychiatrist's daughter."

I was sensitive enough about it to consider that he might be right, so I put aside my negative feelings. After my sixteenth week, I had an ultrasound that Dr. Marko declared proved without a doubt I was going to have a girl. That was when I suggested the name Hannah to Thatcher. He didn't seem very excited about it and simply replied, "We have time to decide."

Whenever I returned home after a doctor's visit. Linden was there to greet me and question me about it. He was, as was Mother, very excited to hear that we were having a girl. In the beginning, I thought Linden's interest in my pregnancy was sweet and loving, and both Mother and I were amused and delighted with his questions, the way he doted on me, and offered suggestions: but gradually, something about the intensity of his questions and the way he reacted to some things I told him-- pressing his lips together hard, turning his eyebrows in under the folds of his forehead, stiffening his body-- began to concern me.

He was, it became evident, second-guessing the doctor. He began to challenge his opinions. offering me contrary documentation about the recommended vitamins, exercises, and diet, and about the doctor's reactions to my symptoms and complaints.

"You're better off staying away from doctors," he muttered one day. "Get a good midwife."

Of course. I thought he wasn't really serious. but the comments and complaints he made to Mother assured us both he was. Eventually. we had to sit him down and talk to him to try to relieve his anxieties.

"It's going fine. Linden," I said. "I'm doing very well. Nothing I am experiencing is out of the ordinary."

"Some of the things they do can affect the child," he insisted. "Later on, I mean. They treat you like just another statistic, another scientific fact, and nothing more. There's nothing personal about modern medicine. They think we are all here to support the bottom line. Doctors, he spit.

After he left us. Mother turned to me and said she was beginning to understand.

"What do you mean?"

"Linden blames some of his difficulties on the way I gave birth to him. As you know, my pregnancy was something Jackie Lee and I hid from the Palm Beach world. It was her idea that we would try to get people to believe she was Linden's mother. and that way, I wouldn't suffer any disgrace. I think in retrospect it was her way of protecting her own reputation as well. for she didn't want to be known as the woman who had failed to see Kirby Scott's lecherousness and protect her only daughter. People would wonder where she was while all this was going on.

"Jackie Lee found a doctor who would be discreet, and as you know. I gave birth to Linden in the house. I'm sure in his mind he considers all that-- the subterfuge, the cover-up. the subsequent lies and deceptions, my condition, all of it--responsible for his difficulties,

"Despite his anger and his refusal to be social, he does understand that he is not mentally healthy."

She dabbed away the tears.

"He has told me many times he knows what he is like and what's wrong with him, but he accepts it, just like any disabled person."

"Yes," I said. "I understand. We shouldn't cause him to feel bad about caring. I'll speak to him later."

She smiled.

"He's so lucky to have a sister like you."

And I'm lucky to have a mother like .you," I replied.

We smiled and hugged each other. Despite the majesty of our estate, the beauty of our property, and the protection it gave us from the problems most people had to face outside our walls, we still felt vulnerable.

We walked on marble floors. We had servants to help us. We had an army of professionals out there to call upon when we needed them, but we couldn't help looking over our shoulders from time to time or pausing to listen for the footsteps of malevolent fate lurking behind the curtain of some shadow, waiting eagerly for an opportunity to lunge at us and steal away the happiness and hope we had so recently enjoyed.

There was no doubt "It" was out there. Like that dark ship Linden often saw slinking over the water in the darkness. It came from the horizon, rising and falling with the waves. relentless. Its prow directed at Jaya del Mar, Its ghostly sailors poised. eager.

The buoys sounded in the night.

Warning.

All we could do was wait and hope It would somehow turn and pass by us.

It didn't.

I wasn't deliberately looking for excuses not to join Manon and the women of the Club d'Amour for lunch when they called a few weeks later. but I had a conflict at school that I couldn't avoid. Manon sounded very annoyed.