Wild Orchid (22 page)
Authors: Cameron Dokey
Many women are beautiful, including those who don’t resemble my mother in the slightest. But her beauty was my mother’s greatest treasure, more important to her than anything else. And the feature she prized above all others was her hair, as luxuriant and flowing as a river in spring. As golden as a polished florin.
When my father brought the sorceress into the house, my mother was sitting up in bed, giving her hair its morning-time one hundred strokes with her ivory-handled brush. Even in their most extreme poverty, she had refused to part with this item.
“My dear,” my father began.
“Quiet!” my mother said at once. “I haven’t finished yet, and you know how I dislike being interrupted.”
My father and the sorceress stood in the doorway while my mother finished counting off her strokes.
“Ninety-six, ninety-seven, ninety-eight …” The
white-backed brush flashed through the golden hair. “Ninety-nine, one hundred. There now!”
She set down the brush and regarded her husband and the stranger with a frown. “Who is this person that you have brought me instead of the rapunzel that you promised?”
“This is the sorceress who lives next door,” my father replied. “It’s her rapunzel.”
“Oh,” said my mother.
“Oh, indeed,” the sorceress at last spoke up. She walked into the room, stopping only when she reached my mother’s bedside, and gazed upon her much as she had earlier gazed upon my father.
“Madam,” she said after many moments. “I will make you the following bargain. Until your child is born, you may have as much rapunzel as you like from my garden. But on the day your child arrives, if it is a girl, and I very much think it will be, you must swear to love her just as she is, for that will mean you will love whatever she becomes. If you cannot, then I will claim her in payment for the rapunzel.
“Do we have a deal?”
“Yes,” my mother immediately said, in spite of the fact that my father said “No!” at precisely the same moment.
The sorceress then turned away from my mother and walked to my father, laying a hand upon his arm.
“Good man,” she said, “I know the cost seems high. But have no fear. I mean your child no harm. Instead, if she comes to me, I swear to you that I will
love her and raise her as my own. It may even be that you will see her again some day. My eyes are good, but even they cannot see that far, for that is a thing that will depend on your heart rather than mine.”
My father swallowed once or twice, as if his throat had suddenly gone dry.
“If,” he finally said.
“Just so,” the sorceress replied.
And she left my parents’ house and did not return until the day that I was born.
On that day my mother labored mightily to bring me into the world. After many hours, I arrived. The midwife took me and gave me my very first bath. Exhausted from her labors, my mother closed her eyes. She opened them again when I was put into her arms. At my mother’s first sight of me, a thick silence filled the room. The sound of my father’s boots dashing wildly up the stairs could be heard through the open bedroom door. But before he could reach his baby daughter, his wife cried out, “She is hideous! Take her away! I can never love this child!”
My father gave a great cry of anguish.
“A bargain is a bargain,” the sorceress said, for she had come up the stairs right behind my father. “Come now, little one. Let us see what all the ruckus is about.”
And she strode to the bedside, plucked me from my mother’s arms, and lifted me up into the light. Now the whole world, if it had cared to look, could
have seen what had so horrified my unfortunate maternal parent.
I had no hair at all. Absolutely none.
There was not even the faintest suggestion of hair, the soft down of fuzz that many infants possess at birth, visible only when someone does just what the sorceress was doing, holding me up to the light of the sun. I did have cheeks like shiny red apples, and eyes as dark and bright as two jet buttons. None of this made one bit of difference to my mother. She could see only that I lacked her greatest treasure: I had no hair of gold. No hair of any kind. My head was as smooth as a hard-boiled egg. It was impossible for my mother to imagine that I might grow up to be beautiful, yet not like her. She had no room for this possibility in her heart.
This lack of space was her undoing, as a mother anyway, for it separated us on the very day that I was born. And it did more. It fixed her lack so firmly upon my head that I could never shake it off. For the rest of my days, mine would be a head upon which no hair would grow.
But the sorceress simply pulled a dark brown kerchief from her own head and wrapped it around mine. At that point, I imagine I must have looked remarkably like a tiny walnut, for my swaddling was of brown homespun. Then, for a moment or two only, the sorceress turned to my father and placed me in his arms.
“Remember your words to me,” my father said,
when he could speak for the tears that closed his throat. “Remember them all.”
“Good man, I will,” the sorceress replied. “For they are written in my heart, as they are in yours.” Then she took me back and, gazing down into my face, said: “Well, little Rapunzel, let us go out into the world and discover whether or not you are the one I have been waiting for.”
That is the true beginning of this, my life’s true story.
About the Author
C
AMERON
D
OKEY
is the author of nearly thirty young adult novels. Her most recent titles in the Once upon a Time series include
Wild Orchid, Belle, Sunlight and Shadow
, and
Before Midnight
. Her other Simon & Schuster endeavors include a book in the Simon Pulse Romantic Comedies line,
How NOT to Spend Your Senior Year
. Cameron lives in Seattle, Washington.
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