Wicked Forest (DeBeers 2)

They laughed again.

No matter what happens to me, I vowed silently. I'll never become what they have become.

Was I crazy?

I narrowed my eyes at their cynical smiles, my spine turning to steel.

"Laugh if you want, but my father used to say that dreams, that fantasies are as important as vitamins," I said "If flowers didn't believe that cloudy days would end, they would wilt and die. Bitterness feeds on itself. It consumes you and, in the end, you become the very thing you hate,

"This, too, shall pass," I said, smiling at them. "All of it will end. The clouds will move away. We will have sunshine penetrating the black leaves of our wicked forest and we will be happy. Above all, no matter what, we will be happy. That should be the motto of your Club d'Amour," I admonished.

They all looked like little girls again, but little girls who had been lectured and set straight.

"Maybe you're right," Manton said. "I can' deny I hope you are."

Sharon nodded.

Marjorie looked away like someone who wanted to hide her tears. and Liana smiled.

Despite the terrible and ugly news they had brought me. I actually felt better and stronger myself-- until I saw Jennings standing in the doorway. The look on his face told me immediately something was wrong.

Something was very wrong, "Jennings?"

"It's Miss Montgomery," he said. "One of the maids just called down to me."

"What?" I asked, shooting to my feet so quickly, I felt my heart bob like a yo-yo. I pressed my palms against each other between my breasts.

"She's collapsed by the side of the bed."

18

An Empty House

.

Mother's eyes seemed to be sewn shut. I felt for

a pulse and found a very low, weak beat. Even before I started up the stairs to see what was wrong with her, I had told Jennings to call for an ambulance. Since there was no hospital in Palm Beach, she was taken to Good Samaritan in West Palm Beach.

The uproar brought Linden out of his room. He stood like a stone statue and watched as the attendants lifted Mother onto a stretcher and placed her in the ambulance. Then he came along with me in my car, moving like a robot, his silence made me babble continuously. The girls of the Club d'Amour all went home, each promising to call. From the looks on their faces and the hollowness in their voices, I knew they didn't really want to call. Thatcher once told me that sickness and death were so abhorrent to the residents of Palm Beach that no hospital or cemetery was permitted within its precious boundaries.

Linden was as quiet at the hospital as he had been at home and in the car. He sat with an almost expression-less mask over his face, the only hint of emotion evidenced in the slight trembling in his lips from time to time. His eyes were steely gray, his neck stiff, his hands clasped in his lap as he waited with me in the lounge. When I asked him if he wanted something to drink, he just shook his head. He looked like he was sleeping with his eyes open.

Nearly two and a half hours after we had arrived with the ambulance, the doctor finally came out to see us. He was tall and thin with curly black hair, and so baby-faced it was difficult to have any faith in anything he said, but he did speak with authority and medical expertise.

"I'm Dr. Hersh." he began. "We've examined your mother and concluded beyond a doubt that she has suffered a stroke or, as we say, brain attack. A CT scan has revealed an intracerebral hemorrhage.. I'm afraid it's rather massive. We've determined that she has suffered a recent myocardial infarction, which created the blood clot."

"A heart attack? But wouldn't we know if that had happened to her?" I asked.

He shook his head so casually, it was almost as if we were discussing some very insignificant thing.

The patient suffers symptoms, doesn't report them to anyone, and lives with the damage until a blood clot is created in the heart that breaks off and travels to the brain, cutting off the supply of blood and eventually causing the hemorrhage. It's not as uncommon as you might think." he said.

He looked from me to Linden as he spoke, but something in Linden's face frightened him enough to keep him from looking at him at all.

"What can we expect?" I asked, my heart pounding so hard, I wasn't sure I had spoken loud enough for him to hear me. "The prognosis is not optimistic. I'm afraid," he said.

"She's in a coma, of course. She's not feeling any pain."