Wicked Forest (DeBeers 2)

"I know what we'll do," I said firmly. "We'll both go to the beauty parlor this week. We'll have it all: facials, body wraps, mud packs, paraffin baths for Our hands and feet, pedicures, manicures, everything, and we'll do something exciting with your hair. too."

She started to shake her head and back away as if the idea were so forbidden and terrifying, it could bring a hurricane of new disasters to her doorstep.

"Why not? It will be fun to spoil ourselves and be Palm Beach royals."

She stepped farther back, continuing to shake her head while her eyes betrayed a wish to agree,

"I couldn't... I just wouldn't know how to..."

"I'll be there with you. I need to do something with my hair. and I haven't spoiled myself for some time now. Look at me." I stepped before the mirror and tugged on the strands of my hair. "It isn't just a whim. I have to do something if I'm to become competitive with the women here. right? You've got to help me." I said, making it seem as if she were going to do it all for me.

The idea was beginning to become a possibility. Her eyes softened with memories and excitement.

"I can't remember when I last did anything like that. It was obviously before I went to the clinic, but after your father and I..." She paused as though she had said too much. "I mean, that was part of our therapy, to permit the volunteer beauticians to come to the clinic and help us feel better about ourselves, but afterward, when I came home. I just didn't have any reason to continue."

"Now you do," I said. "Soon, we'll all be moving back into the hacienda again. There will be people visiting, dinners and teas. All the good things will come flooding back to you, Mother."

"Will they? Do I dare hope for such a thing?" she asked, almost rhetorically.

"Why not?" I countered angrily. "Why should people like the Eatons be the only ones who dance with happiness here? What makes them more deserving than you?"

They didn't live in so much darkness," she said sadly. "Darkness they inherited from their own family, darkness of their own making."

"How do you know that? Everyone, especially everyone here, if you ask me, has his or her own closet full of dreads. Mother." I said, recalling the things Thatcher had told me. "They might be richly dressed and well attended, but they have to stand before mirrors, too, and wipe off their makeup, and take off their jewelry and their wigs. Naked, they are full of their own wrinkles of sin, and they drink themselves to sleep or take their little pills or pay people to create a world of fantasy for them so they can ignore and forget. That's why they are so frightened of you,"

"Frightened? Of me?" She started to laugh.

"Of course they are." I said sternly, and her smile ceased. "You're right in their faces with the truth, and that forces them to look at themselves. In their heart of hearts, they all know they are just as vulnerable as you were and they could just as easily shatter like so much of their precious Tiffany."

"I never thought of it that way. Willow."

"Well, now you will, and you'll get strong again and be as beautiful as you want to be, as you art," I insisted.

She studied me for a moment, then nodded.

--There is a lot of your father in you. He used to tell me what I would do and what I would overcome with just as much confidence and even with just as much anger running beneath his words. He hated my illness more than I did, and made me think of it as something outside of me. something I could attack and defeat."

"Then don't stop now," I said. "Okay." She smiled. "Okay, Willow De Beers, daughter of the doctor, I won't stop."

We both laughed.

"Do you have any preference in beauty salons?" I asked. "I wouldn't even know where to begin."

"All right. I'll do my own research and make our appointments," I promised.

I left her turning back to the mirror, putting the shawl neatly an again and doing what every woman has done since the beginning of time: envisioning herself more beautiful. I felt like a Wiccan, a good witch who had truly brought her some magic woven in silk.

However, my powers weren't to be as great when it came to Linden.

I found him sitting by the win

dow in the room he had used as his studio. I almost passed him by because he was as still as a storefront mannequin. He was staring out at the beach and the sea. He had left the door open. I gazed around the studio.

Unfinished works were covered with cloth, and those that had been finished were piled against each other on the floor and against the wall. His paints and brushes were locked away. On an easel in the far right corner was a canvas covered with a sheet, standing like an obedient servant, waiting for orders that weren't coming.

I knocked on the door. It was time to confront him. I thought, to force him to see me, to hear me, but to do it as gently as I could.

"Hi, Linden," I said. "Do you mind if I come in?" He didn't turn from the window,