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"Sometimes. I think about my poor patients and I feel so sorry for them. I can't help it." he told me.
'Because they hurt themselves and they were bleeding?"
"No," he said. "My hospital is different. Willow. My patients are very unhappy or sad people. Sometimes they hurt themselves deliberately and they are taken to the sort of hospital you are thinking of, but after that, they are brought to see me, to see if I can help them feel better about themselves." "How do you do that?" He smiled.
"It's hard. but I talk to them a lot.. I give them medicines that help and they do things that make them feel better about themselves. They work an art projects or handicrafts, just like you do at school. In fact." he said, brightening even more. "I have something here that I was told to give you a long time ago. but I kept it safe until I thought you were ready for it, old enough far it," he said. '1 think you might be old enough now."
"What's that?" I asked. intrigued.
"Just a minute." he said, and went to his office closet, where he took down a box and uncovered it. For a moment he just looked at what was inside as if he was afraid to touch it. Then he lifted it out and showed it to me.
It was a doll, stuffed and sewn with a variety of colorful cloth patches, a real mishmash. Even though the doll's face was made of material similar to my other dolls, it wasn't like any doll I had or any doll I had ever seen in a toy or department store, but it was still very nice.
"It was made especially for you by a very special patient of mine," he told me. "Will you take very good care of it?"
I nodded.
"Okay. Here it is. then. Keep it in a special place in your room."
I took it gingerly into my hands and studied the face. It reminded me of someone. I thought. but I couldn't think of who that was until I had taken it up to my roam and stared at it for a long time.
Then it came to me. after I realized the hair color was similar to mine and the face was just like the face in the one picture of me that the Doctor had on his desk, a picture in a silver frame of me when I was about one.
To be sure, when the Doctor was at his clinic and my mother was out shopping, I brought the doll to his office and placed it beside the picture.
The doll face really was my face.
There was no doubt, and this was the biggest mystery I had ever known, and maybe ever would.
2
Rebirth
.
For me, the darkness really began when I was
born again, but not reborn in any good, religious sense. Instead. I was forced to reenter the womb and then be ripped out to discover I was not who I thought I was, My name was not really mine. What was really mine was as insubstantial as smoke, blown away the day I was crea
ted, and left to be an unsolved mystery with the title, Who Am 1?
It had been the Doctor's decision to keep all this from me until he believed I was capable of fully understanding it, and therefore not be deeply emotionally or psychologically harmed by it. The truth had been circling our home like some confused bird, caught up in a harsh wind from time to time and dropping a feather here and there. It tickled my imagination, made me curious and yet confused. I could sense it lingered there on the tip of my mother's tongue, and it was taking all her self-control to keep it locked behind those beautifully shaped lips. She certainly had planted enough hints about our lives, little seeds of ugly truth she wanted to water and sprout.
Finally she couldn't keep it contained any longer, and decided my time had come. I was only eight when she reached this decision, but she was furious at me because she had discovered I had been into her makeup. I had been pretending I was much older and I was going on a date. Actually. I had seen something similar on a television show, where a girl not much older than I was had dressed up in her mother's clothes, put on her mother's makeup and one of her mother's wigs, and then was caught pretending she was her mother speaking to her father. Her parents thought it was cute and everyone had a good time.
However, when my mother caught me at her vanity table, she looked like the blood rising up her neck and into her face would blow off the top of her head. I never saw her swell up as quickly or as tall. The mere sight of her made me cower. How could someone so beautiful, so elegant, someone who drew the admiration of so many other women and so many men look so ugly so quickly?
"WILLOW!" she screamed, and ripped the lipstick out of my hands. She brought it down inches from the edge of my nose. "I put this on my lips!"
It was one thing to be angry I used her things, but another to make me feel as if I was a walking plague, full of disease. I was afraid to cry, to utter a sound, even to breathe. She stared at me a moment. fuming.
"This is ridiculous," she said. "Come with me. Once and for all, you will be made to understand."
She marched me down the stairs and into the living room ahead of her. I felt as if I was being led to a firing squad. If I slowed, she poked me with her forefinger, the long painted nail cutting into my back. Amou, preparing a roast in the kitchen, looked up as we passed by. One glance at my face told her I was utterly terrified, but she would never dart come between me and my mother.
"Sit!" she screamed, pointing to the La-Z-Boy the Doctor loved. I did so quickly.
"Pay attention!" she ordered. They were nearly always her first words to me, as if she was afraid I could fix my gaze on something else and ignore her completely, just the way the Doctor often did. She wouldn't start until she was satisfied my eyes were directed at her.
