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    Willow
    Willow
    Willow
    Ebook444 pages7 hours

    Willow

    By V.C. Andrews

    3.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    • Self-Discovery

    • Mental Health

    • Family Relationships

    • Family Secrets

    • Adoption

    • Fish Out of Water

    • Love Triangle

    • Forbidden Love

    • Prodigal Child

    • Secret Identity

    • Riches to Rags

    • Family Drama

    • Secret Heir

    • Estranged Family Members

    • Rich People Problems

    • Art & Creativity

    • Parent-Child Relationships

    • Love & Relationships

    • Personal Growth

    • Identity

    About this ebook

    High society was too much for her. One of the most popular storytellers of all time, V.C. Andrews (Flowers in the Attic, My Sweet Audrina) layers psychological suspense with seductive glamour in this provocative first book of the classic De Beers Family series.

    All that glitters isn’t gold...

    Wealth. Extravagant parties. Celebrity status. These are the things Willow knew only in her wildest dreams—until now. After discovering deep family secrets in her adoptive father’s journal, she leaves behind her North Carolina college town and sets out in search of her birth family amid the high-class society of Southern Florida.

    Using an assumed name and pretending to conduct a study of one of the nation’s wealthiest communities, Willow takes the city by storm and quickly becomes entangled with Thatcher Eaton, a young lawyer who sweeps her off her feet. But as Willow spirals into a passionate love affair and becomes intoxicated with the lifestyle of the rich and famous, the dark truth about her birth family threatens her fancy new life, pushing her to the brink of insanity...
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPocket Books
    Release dateJan 10, 2002
    ISBN9780743421690
    Willow
    Author

    V.C. Andrews

    One of the most popular authors of all time, V.C. Andrews has been a bestselling phenomenon since the publication of Flowers in the Attic, first in the renowned Dollanganger family series, which includes Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday, and Garden of Shadows. The family saga continues with Christopher’s Diary: Secrets of Foxworth, Christopher’s Diary: Echoes of Dollanganger, and Secret Brother, as well as Beneath the Attic, Out of the Attic, and Shadows of Foxworth as part of the fortieth anniversary celebration. There are more than ninety V.C. Andrews novels, which have sold over 107 million copies worldwide and have been translated into more than twenty-five foreign languages. Andrews’s life story is told in The Woman Beyond the Attic. Join the conversation about the world of V.C. Andrews at Facebook.com/OfficialVCAndrews.

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    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      Willow...a woman torn between a man who she isn't sure she can trust and a brother she longs to protect. Gideon...a man torn between a woman he planned to married to gain wealth and a woman he unknowingly married and could possibly love. Great story. Linda Lael Miller at her best. Definitely worth the time to read...
    • 3/5
      Willow Gallagher, who spent early childhood in an outlaw camp until her father finally found her. Newly married to railroad baron, Gideon Marshall, who happens to be her stepmothers son, she discovers he is on a mission to capture Willow's outlaw brother, Steven. A good read. This is one of LLMiller's first books.

    Book preview

    Willow - V.C. Andrews

    Prologue

    I walked hesitantly down the corridor to my sophomore English class at the University of North Carolina as if I already knew the trouble that awaited me. I could actually feel the increasing trembling in my body, the quickening of my heartbeat, and the spreading of the small patch of ice at the base of my spine. The moment I had awakened this morning, I sensed something was seriously wrong back home. It was as if a dark storm cloud had floated by earlier and had paused overhead long enough to rain a chill down into my heart. Almost as soon as I opened my eyes, I wanted to call Daddy, but I didn’t. My boyfriend, Allan Simpson, a prelaw student, was fond of teasing me whenever I had what my Portuguese nanny, Isabella Martino, used to call the dreads—dark, ominous feelings that moved up your spine like mercury in a thermometer.

    I can’t believe you let a superstitious old woman affect you like that, he said. The dreads? The ability to feel trouble coming? Really, Willow, you’re almost nineteen. You’re not a child.

    I knew I wasn’t a child, but how could I not have been influenced more by her than by anyone else and carried that influence into my adulthood? Up until I was nearly seventeen, when she finally left us to return to her family in Brazil, Isabella, whom I fondly called Amou, had more to do with my upbringing than my own mother, who had leaped upon the opportunity to let me know I was adopted as soon as I could understand what the word meant. Afterward, she didn’t hesitate to put the word in front of mother whenever she used it in reference to me. Other children my age had mothers; I had an adoptive mother.

    My father never did that, and so I never thought of him as anyone other than my father, Daddy.

    I began to call Isabella Amou just about the time I began to speak. In fact, I feel quite certain that I pronounced that word way before I said any other understandable word. Amou’s eyes were always full of laughter when I said it, full of sparkling lights.

    Amou, Amou, she would cry, and began to refer to herself the same way. Do it for Amou, Willow. One more spoonful, she would urge, and I would eat one more spoonful.

    She had been referring to me as amou um from the moment she had begun to care for me, to hold me in her arms and rock me to sleep as she sang one of her favorite Portuguese children’s songs. In Portuguese, amou um means loved one, and I simply echoed it back at her, only choosing to shorten it because it was so much easier for a two-year-old to do so. I insisted on calling her Amou despite my adoptive mother’s always correcting me and lecturing me, sometimes quite emphatically, to call her Isabella and not Amou, especially if I did it in front of my adoptive mother’s friends, who would grimace and ask, What did she say? It was practically impossible for any of them to understand, which made my adoptive mother angrier and angrier.

    I can recall her seizing me by the shoulders when I was no more than three, three and a half, and shaking me roughly as she chastised me, screaming, Are you an absolute idiot already, Willow De Beers?

    When my adoptive mother was angry at me, she always used my whole name. It was as if she were reminding me that the entire family would suffer for any mistakes I had made, reminding me that I carried the family name and I should consider it a greater gift than life itself, for, after all, wasn’t it true that I had been born without a name, without an identity, almost without blood?

    Don’t you understand what I am telling you? Her name is Isabella, Isabella. Say it. Say it! she demanded, and I cried and pressed my lips together because I was terrified that somehow the word Isabella would escape my mouth and bring a stab of pain to Amou, who stood by, holding her breath and feeling guilty but too frightened to come to my defense, I’m sure.

    Willow De Beers, you say Isabella. Say it. I want to hear that you can say it. Say it! she insisted. She had her face so close to mine, I could see the tiny blood vessels in her temples. I remember thinking her blood was blue. Mine was red, but hers was blue. Why were we different? Did this mean something really was wrong with me, just as she often claimed?

    She shook me again, and I stared with frightened eyes at a woman I hardly recognized as my mother, adoptive or otherwise. It took my breath away to see that she could speak and look so out of control. How could I help but cringe and swallow back any words, much less say the one she wanted me to say?

    Say it, or I’ll stuff you into one of my luggage trunks and send you away to one of those countries where other little adopted girls have nothing to eat and have to sleep on beds of hay. Isabella can tell you about that. Would you like that? Well? Would you?

    I started to cry softly, my body shaking almost as hard as it had when she had seized my shoulders.

    Fortunately, my father was nearby, which wasn’t often enough for me, because whenever he was home, he always came to my defense. He interceded in his calm doctor’s voice.

    I’m afraid you won’t get anywhere with her that way, Alberta. You are frightening her, and when an infant is frightened, she cannot accept information, much less imprint it, he told her.

    Please, Claude, spare me your psychiatric jargon. We are not all patients under your tender loving care in your mental hospital, she threw at him as if she were tossing a gift back in his face.

    I can vividly recall the look on his face. I remember all of his expressions, but those he reserved for my adoptive mother were truly special. Now that I’m older and can put it into words and ideas, I realize he looked back at her that day and on many similar occasions afterward as if he really were looking at one of his patients. She either ignored it or didn’t realize it.

    She turned from him and glared at me. I thought she still might lash out and slap me, but she turned away and slapped at her own ankle-length flowing skirt, snapping the material as she rushed off, the heavy scent of her perfume lingering like a constant reminder of her fury.

    I often looked back on those early days and thought that married to a woman like my adoptive mother, my father couldn’t have been a happy man, despite her physical beauty and despite his great success and his national reputation as a psychiatrist with his own clinic, which he called the Willows and after which I had been named. My adoptive mother claimed she had nothing to do with naming me. She made that clear to anyone and everyone who remarked about it. I remember thinking there was something wrong with my name. It was probably why I was too shy to reply when anyone asked me who I was. That embarrassed my adoptive mother, who, ironically, was really the cause of it. However, she was not about to take the blame for that.

    Who would name a child after a nuthouse, she ranted at me one day, even if it was where you were conceived and where you were born?

    Where I was conceived and born?

    I didn’t know this until I was nearly eight. Daddy tried to keep her from ever telling me, but my dear sweet A.M., as I often referred to her years later in my thoughts and when I spoke about her to Amou, had been permitting it to slip out in various innuendos and suggestions for years, until she simply sat me down in the living room one afternoon and told me.

    Pay attention! she ordered. These were nearly always her first words to me, as if she were afraid I would fix my gaze on something else and ignore her completely, just the way Daddy often did. She wouldn’t start until she was satisfied my eyes were directed at her.

    You should know how you came to be living here with us, she began. Maybe then you’ll be a little more appreciative and be more obedient and listen to me when I speak, for I am trying to help you, she added in a much sweeter, softer tone of voice. Even then, I knew enough to brace myself for some terrible aftermath whenever she was too nice to me.

    She pulled herself up, staring at me a long moment, the displeasure suddenly so clear in her face, in the cold glint in her otherwise beautiful blue eyes, that I couldn’t deny it even if I wanted, even if I could pretend she cared about me. She was the only one permitted to have illusions and fantasies in our house. My dolls weren’t permitted to speak back to me; my toy teacups were forever empty.

    After a short moment of hesitation, confirming her decision to do it, to tell me what my father had forbidden her to tell me, she brought her face close to mine and asked in a dark, throaty voice, Do you know how you were made? Do you have any idea at all?

    Of course, I shook my head. How would I know such a thing? My little body tightened with anticipation. It felt as if I had lightning inside my stomach and thunder in my bones.

    One of the assistants at your father’s precious clinic apparently raped a patient. So much for his so-called exceptional professional staff, she said, her lips hinged at the corners with disgust. Do you understand what I am telling you, Willow De Beers? You were born as a result of a rape!

    I didn’t know what rape meant, but she was determined that I would understand.

    You’re only in the third grade, but I know how street smart kids are nowadays. I know you know babies don’t get brought here by storks or any other fairy tale, right?

    Babies come from the hospital, I said.

    Normal women have their babies delivered in a hospital, yes, but first they are made at home or somewhere else convenient. Half the country was probably conceived in the back of an automobile, she muttered. She always tilted her head down toward her right shoulder when she said something that disgusted her. It was as if she were going to spit the period at the end of her sentence.

    I was really confused now. Why was she telling me all this? At first, I hoped she was just being a good mother, trying to get me to understand something important, but I soon realized she had a different purpose.

    The man through his pee-pee puts his part into the woman through her pee-pee, and there’s an egg in the woman that grows into a baby. You don’t need to understand much more than that to understand what I’m saying.

    I know I grimaced. It all sounded awful. Why would a woman permit a man to pee into her? Surely, my adoptive mother was trying to frighten me again.

    When a woman doesn’t want a man to do it and he does it anyway, forcing her to have a baby, that’s called rape. Understand? Well? she asked quickly.

    I nodded, afraid to say no even though it wasn’t all that clear to me yet, especially why a man would want to make a baby with a woman if the woman didn’t want him to do it.

    This patient, this mentally disturbed young woman, according to your father, never knew what was happening inside her until she was quite far along in her pregnancy. How everyone could be so oblivious to it, even including that mental case, is beyond me, but what do I know about the inner workings of Dr. De Beers’s looney farm? she muttered.

    How strange it was to me to hear her refer to her husband and my daddy as Dr. De Beers, as though he were a complete stranger, but she did that often, including right to his face, especially at the dinner table. Why she would ridicule the clinic Daddy was so proud he had created was another mystery and surprise to me.

    Our Dr. De Beers is not permitted to talk about what goes on there. Everything has to be kept so secret. All that stuff about doctor-patient confidentiality. If you ask me, it’s because either the doctor is ashamed he is taking money for what he is doing, or the patient is ashamed of what she or he has been saying and doing. That’s all there really is to that, she lectured as if there were a number of other people besides me in the living room. I didn’t know it, but Amou was just outside the door, listening and trembling for me.

    I don’t know how I was so weak as to agree to permit him to adopt you and bring you here in the first place, but I did. Anyway, this is why I have to be so stern with you, Willow, she said, turning calmly reasonable again. Then she leaned toward me, her eyes widening. You might have inherited some madness, she whispered, which left me so terrified that I couldn’t speak or sleep for days. I might have inherited madness! Even then, I understood what that could mean.

    On the few occasions I had been at Daddy’s clinic up to that time, I had seen patients who looked so disturbed and terrifying to me even from a safe distance that I had nightmares about it. Was she right? Could I be like one of them? Would I end up in Daddy’s clinic, too?

    For days, I moped about, afraid to look at myself in the mirror and terrified of what everyone else saw when he or she looked at me. I felt myself shrinking more and more into that small hiding place in my brain where I could feel safe and unafraid, even if that place felt like a cage. The more introverted I became, the more mentally ill I appeared, especially to my A.M.

    Daddy finally noticed and asked Amou why I was looking so unhappy those days. When Amou told Daddy what my adoptive mother had done and said, he was very upset with her and tried to reassure me that there was absolutely nothing wrong with me. He called me to his office and spoke softly, reassuringly, to me, wiping away an errant tear or two with his soft thumb.

    Who should know better than I do, Willow? he asked with a smile. Evaluating people, judging whether or not they are sick, is my profession.

    That seemed reasonable, but he wasn’t with me that often. Maybe he didn’t know enough or see enough. That seemed just as reasonable.

    And then he told me a startling thing. That doll you love so much—remember I told you someone had made it for me to give to you? Well, your mother made it for you, Willow, and it’s very pretty, isn’t it? Someone who’s so sick couldn’t have done that.

    That did make me feel a little better, but unfortunately, his being upset about what my A.M. had done didn’t stop her from complaining about me whenever she saw something she considered wrong. She was determined to paint everything as evidence that I had indeed inherited a mental sickness. I didn’t like listening to her, so I ignored her, and she complained that I had an attention deficit disorder, even though there was no evidence of that at school. She claimed the teachers were simply too burdened to notice or, worse, not qualified.

    She heard me talking to myself, so I must be a schizophrenic. Once, she even tried to stop me by making me wear tape over my mouth when I played in my room, especially when she had guests visiting and feared they would overhear me. She mistook my mixture of Portuguese words with English words as a sort of insane gibberish.

    When Daddy learned about what she had done with the tape, he put an end to it, too, but that didn’t stop her effort to establish that I had mental problems. Because I cried at the drop of a pin, or dropped my eyes when she looked at me, I was a paranoid. How could I help but be afraid of her? Even when she spoke nicely to me or stroked my hair and complimented Amou on how well she kept me, I was waiting for some ugly or terrible comment to be tagged on at the end, even if it was just a wagging of her head and a sigh to indicate that I was somehow beyond hope and all that was done for me would be wasted. She was that convinced I carried the seed of some mental aberration inside me.

    One morning, she even scooped up my drawings and my coloring books to show Daddy how I was revealing some deep-seated mental disturbance through my distorted faces and figures. I think she suspected some of them were depictions of her, and she couldn’t imagine how anyone, especially me, could see her as anything but beautiful.

    You’re supposed to be such a great expert, she told my father, rushing into his office and waving the childish artwork in his face. "I don’t know how you can’t see this, see what you have brought home. She’s an embarrassment. I see the way my friends look at her. I was a fool to agree to it, even with Isabella here to do most of the dirty work.

    You should put her someplace where she can get the proper treatment and not leave her here to be a burden on me.

    She doesn’t have to go anyplace, Alberta. There is nothing abnormal about those pictures or her behavior, Daddy insisted in his typically even tone of voice. You simply don’t have experience with children, Alberta, or you would know.

    Go on, throw that in my face. Throw it in my face that I have been unable to have children! she screamed at him, and marched out of his office, slamming the door behind her hard enough to shake even our big house.

    Amou and I would have had to be deaf not to have heard it all. She would embrace me and whisper, "Don’t cry, pequeninho, little one. Amou always be here. No one is going to give you away."

    Knowing that my mother, even my adoptive mother, didn’t really want me was like living in a house made of cards, a cardboard home that would fall apart in a heavy rain or blow apart in a strong wind and leave me naked and alone or falling forever down a deep, dark tunnel. My nightmares were an ongoing series of such horrid events.

    I wasn’t the only thing that my A.M. complained about, however. In fact, she seemed never to be without some grievance, whether it be about me, Amou, the other servants, or the people who worked on our grounds—anyone and everything. She often paraded her complaints through our home, stringing them behind her like rattling cans tied to the rear bumper of a just-married couple’s car. Maybe that was why Daddy spent so much of his time away from home and, consequently, away from me.

    How many times had I glanced in at him in his sacrosanct home office in the evening without his realizing I was there and seen him just staring out the bay window that looked west on our South Carolina property just outside the small community of Spring City? From the corner of the doorway, I would catch that wistful expression playing on his lips and in his eyes as he gazed up at the moon. It shone through clouds so thin they looked like smoke and captured shadow after shadow in its golden net of light.

    When I was older and I caught him sitting alone in that office, I could almost see the will-o’-the-wisp regrets of all the things he should have done differently. Of course, I worried that I was included, that maybe he thought my adoptive mother was right, that he shouldn’t have brought me home. Later, if I even so much as suggested it, he would reassure me that he had never had the slightest doubt or hesitation.

    There were other regrets playing on his face: lost opportunities, moments not seized, too many ships he just let pass him in the night. I had no idea how deep and troubling those regrets were for him, and I would have none until I went home this time, this dark and horrible time that justified my dreads.

    1

    Saying Goodbye

    I recognized the dean of students’ secretary, Mrs. Schwartz, standing in my classroom doorway. She was shifting her weight nervously from one foot to the other and rubbing one palm against the other as if she were sanding down a block of wood. She gave each of my classmates a flashbulb smile as they entered, then quickly turned back to the hallway. I didn’t know for certain yet, but I had a hunch she was waiting there for me. As usual, she was dressed in her navy-blue suit with her lace-trimmed white blouse and stiletto shoes—practically her work uniform.

    Oh, dear, she said, reaching out for me as I approached. She seized my hand and drew me closer. We have received a rather frantic call from your aunt Agnes Delroy. Apparently, she was unable to reach you at your apartment last night or this morning and has been burning up the telephone lines between here and Charleston, she ran on, obviously infected by my aunt’s histrionics. Aunt Agnes often had that effect on people.

    I could not tell her why I hadn’t been able to receive Aunt Agnes’s call. I had spent the night at Allan’s apartment, and that wasn’t anyone’s business but mine. I was positive, however, that Aunt Agnes had been suspicious, especially if she had tried late in the evening, and had overdone her exasperation over failing to reach me. My father’s fifty-one-year-old sister was the sort of person who expected that anyone she called or beckoned was just waiting to serve and fulfill her requests. She and I never got along, anyway. She never came out and said it in so many words, but she considered an adopted child somehow inferior, despite my achievements, especially a child whose mother was a patient in a mental clinic.

    But even if my adoptive mother had given birth to me, Aunt Agnes would have been critical. I always knew she believed my father had married beneath the family. My adoptive mother came from one of those old Southern families that had lost most of its wealth but desperately clung to its heritage. That was not good enough for Aunt Agnes. Money, heritage, position in society, and certainly power were the pillars upon which she built her church, and if one was weak, the church would collapse.

    My father tolerated Aunt Agnes rather than loved her as a sister and once told me that her husband, Uncle Darwood, probably had welcomed the Grim Reaper with open arms, seeing death as an avenue of escape, even though it wasn’t any sort of pleasant death. He was a very serious closet alcoholic and had drowned his liver with all his unhappiness.

    Talking about Aunt Agnes and Uncle Darwood was one of the few things Daddy and I could have a warm, loving time doing together, basking in each other’s laughter, soaking in the warm intimacy of a private hour when we were just father and daughter, alone, almost discovering each other for the very first time. This was some months after my adoptive mother’s death, which ironically was the catalyst that finally drew us closer. It was almost as if she had cast a long, deep shadow over Daddy and me, keeping us both hidden from each other most of the time.

    What’s wrong, Mrs. Schwartz? I asked, sucking back my breath and swallowing it down into my lungs, already burning with anxiety.

    A few of my classmates lingered just behind her in the room, waiting to hear.

    Your aunt says your father’s been rushed to the Spring City General Hospital and you should come as quickly as you can. She pressed her right palm against her chest. It was as if those words had been burning inside her and now she was relieved.

    Why? Has my father been in an accident? I asked.

    It was how my adoptive mother had died less than two years ago, rushing home in the midst of a winter storm that dropped tiny icicles as sharp and as deadly as tiny knives out of the grumbling sky. She was hurrying home to get ready for a charity event. The police said she misjudged a turn and spun in circles in her small Mercedes before she hit the guardrail and went over and over, down into oblivion. I was sure she died upset that she wasn’t properly dressed for it.

    I remember thinking how horrible it all was, but I also remember I didn’t cry as any other daughter would have done. I didn’t feel that wrenching in my gut that comes when someone close to you is ripped away, and I felt guilty about that afterward. I even considered that my lack of emotion was indeed evidence of some mental problem, that maybe she had been right about me all along.

    No. It’s heart trouble, I’m afraid, Mrs. Schwartz replied, her face so dark with sorrow she looked as if she were already at his funeral. She said you should get right there. I’m sorry, dear. I’ll see that all of your teachers know why you’re not attending classes.

    There is a moment after you hear bad news when your body goes into rebellion. You’ve heard shocking words. Everything is processed in your mind, but your brain becomes like those change machines that keep sending your dollar bill back out at you because it’s creased or torn or put in upside down. The bad news has to be reprocessed and reprocessed until, finally, it takes hold and sinks down through your spine, ordering your defiant shoulders and hips and legs to obey the commands and turn you around so you can leave.

    My lungs seemed to fill completely with hot air, threatening to explode. I was sure I would be blown to pieces right in front of everyone. All I could do was hold my breath and bite down on my lower lip to keep myself from bursting into tears.

    As I walked away, I heard Mrs. Schwartz’s stilettos clicking over the floor behind me, building in rhythm like a drumroll, chasing me out the door and to my car in the student parking lot. Daddy had made me a present of the car a week before I was to leave for my second year of college. My intention was to go into psychology myself and perhaps become a school psychologist. I wanted to work with young people because, based on my own experience growing up, I thought I could have the best effect on someone’s life if I could get to him or her early enough.

    When I arrived at my apartment, I played back my answering machine and heard Aunt Agnes’s annoyed voice crying, Where are you? Why aren’t you home at this hour, especially when I need to talk with you? Call me immediately, no matter how late. Her voice trailed off with I wouldn’t think a college student could stay out this late.

    I phoned Allan and told him the news. I knew he would still be at home. He had a late-morning class and then a full afternoon, including an important exam for which he had to study.

    I’ve already called for a cab to take me to the airport, I told him.

    I hadn’t, but I knew how he hated distractions whenever he had an exam. Still, I wished he would volunteer to come by and take me to the airport. It wasn’t only because I didn’t want to leave my car there. I wanted to be hugged and reassured before I boarded the plane.

    Allan and I had been going together for nearly a year. We had met at a college mixer when I was a freshman. Barely eighteen at the time, I was hardly a worldly woman and, unlike most of my girlfriends, could easily count on one hand how many boys I had even cared to consider as boyfriends. I used to worry that I was incapable of a serious relationship, but the truth was most of the boys I had known always seemed immature to me. Maybe I was too demanding, expecting somehow to find a younger version of my father: serious but not solemn, confident but not arrogant.

    Allan seemed that way to me the first time I met him. Besides being a very good-looking man with a strong, masculine mouth, a perfect nose in size and shape, and strikingly dark blue eyes, Allan had a sureness about him, a steady focus that caused him to stand head and shoulders above the young college men around me who were still very obvious and insecure. Their laughter gushed like broken water pipes. Their courage came from beer and whiskey and shattered in the morning with the light of reality. Like vampires, they avoided mirrors. If they were so disappointing to themselves, I thought, what would they be to me?

    Good, Allan said. Call me as soon as you find out what’s happening, he added, hurrying me off the phone, which was a great disappointment to me, even though I knew he was doing it to get back to those books and notes and pursuit of his career. Sometimes, I wished I were competing with another woman. At least then I’d have a fighting chance.

    Okay. My voice cracked even over one simple word. I was already in a tight ball. Still, I managed to throw together a carry-on bag and call for the taxi.

    I had to fly to Columbia, South Carolina. It wasn’t a long trip, but the next scheduled flight wasn’t for another hour and a half, and I found that nothing I did, read, or looked at on television in the airport calmed me down very much. If I glanced at my watch once, I glanced at it twenty times. I was still far too numb to take note of any of the people around me, the activity and noise. Finally, I heard the call for my flight and went to the gate. My heart was thumping.

    Daddy’s heart had given him trouble? How could this be? He was only fifty-nine. I knew of no warnings, but I also knew my father was capable of hiding something like that from me. I had no idea yet how much he did hide, how much of a man of secrets he had been.

    As childish and unrealistic as it was, I simply saw my father as invulnerable, someone so strong and so powerful that he was beyond the reach of ordinary tragedy and illness. It would take the act of some supernatural being, some wicked mythological god, to bring him down into the real world where mere mortals lived. I couldn’t recall him ever being seriously ill. Except for an occasional cold, he seemed above it all. Even with a cough and a cold, he managed to go to work.

    Everything he did in his life was always well organized, methodical, measured. For as long as I could remember, he ate the same things for breakfast: half a grapefruit, a mixture of oat and wheat bran cereals with strawberries, a cup of coffee, and, occasionally, a slice of four-grain bread. On weekends, he substituted the homemade date and nut bread Amou prepared, and on special occasions, he had her cheese and mushroom omelet with pieces of fruit cut perfectly to frame it on his plate.

    Everything that was his in our house was kept in its proper place. I doubted that I would ever meet or get to know a neater man. He used to joke about himself and say he was obviously an obsessive compulsive. If the pen and pencil holder on his desk was moved an inch to the right or the left, he would notice. Amou was terrified whenever she went in there to clean, afraid she would move something and disturb him.

    For exercise, Daddy took long walks on our property, for we had one hundred fifty acres with wooded paths, two rather large ponds, and a stream that twisted itself over rocks and hills to empty into a larger stream that fed into the Congaree River. He walked twice a week, and the walks lasted exactly two hours. I could adjust my watch around his walks, in fact.

    As far as I knew, my adoptive mother never walked with him. He liked walking alone and told me once that he did a great deal of his creative thinking on those walks. I would have thought the wildlife and the scenery would have conspired to keep him from doing much of that, but my father seemed to have the power to turn off the world around him at will and fix his mind on whatever he wanted to focus on at the time.

    Certainly, no one was better at ignoring my A.M. She would rant and rave about something, and most of the time he would stare at her, nodding at the proper moment, never changing his expression much more than occasionally lifting one of his dark brown eyebrows as a sort of exclamation point. He always promised to do whatever he could about the problem. Sometimes he did do something, but most of the time

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