Lost in the Forest (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

by Sue Miller

  As Mark and Emily stepped toward the doorway, Daisy, who had flopped down onto her bed, was starting a game: “How big are you, Theo? Big as a … lion?”

  “Yes!” the boy cried.

  As soon as Mark shut the door to his room, Emily sat down heavily at the foot of his rumpled bed and said, “Oh, Daddy, it’s John. John’s dead.” Her face twisted, and tears immediately began sliding down it, as though she’d been waiting until this moment to allow herself her full measure of grief.

  “What do you mean?” John was Eva’s husband, the girls’ step-father. Theo’s father.

  “He’s dead, Daddy.” Her hands came to her face now and covered her opened mouth. She inhaled sharply through her fingers, and then closed her eyes. “He got hit … by a car. A car hit him.”

  Mark pictured it. He pictured it wrong, as it turned out, but he saw John then—his large body, bloody, slumped behind the wheel of his ruined car. He saw him dead, though he still didn’t believe it.

  Mark sat down next to his daughter and held her, and she wept quietly and thoroughly, as he couldn’t remember her weeping since he had told her he was moving out—long shuddering inhalations, and then a gentle high keening as her inheld breath came out. From the other bedroom he could hear Theo shrieking, “Bad! Bad!” and Daisy’s voice trying to distract him.

  “Sweetheart, it’s okay. Cry, cry,” he said. And then he said, “Shhh.”

  Though he was still thinking of John, still trying to take it in, he was also aware of thinking that it felt good, holding Emily. And of wondering when he had last held her, her or Daisy. He couldn’t remember.

  When she had calmed down a little, he stretched away from her to grab the box of tissues from the stand by the bed. She blew loudly, using several, and wiped her face. His shirt was wet where she had leaned against him.

  “How did it happen?” he asked at last, keeping his voice gentle. “When?”

  She seemed stricken again at the question, her eyes swam and grew larger, but she held on and whispered back, “This afternoon. A car just … hit him.”

  Mark cleared his throat. “He was driving?”

  “No.” Her hair swung as she shook her head. “Walking. With Eva and Theo.”

  “Jesus. They were with him?”

  “Yes. In St. Helena, on that busy corner when you come into town. Just … I guess the guy was just driving too fast and he didn’t see them.”

  They sat together. There was a mirror above the wide bureau they were facing, and Mark watched Emily in it, her reversed face somehow older than her seventeen years, foreign to him.

  “Your mom is okay, though,” he said after a moment.

  She nodded. Then stopped. “Well, she’s all doped up actually. Actually that’s why we had to come here.” Her voice had gotten practical again. “She’s a mess.”

  “But … unhurt.”

  “Unhurt.” She snorted wetly. “Yeah,” she said, and then keened again.

  “Honey, honey,” he said, rocking her against him.

  “How can stuff like this happen, Dad?” she whispered against his chest. “John … John was so good. He was so nice.”

  John was good. He was nice. This is what Mark had thought from the first time he’d met him—that Eva had found herself a nice man. He had felt some pain about this, some sense of loss, but also relief. If Eva held on to him, if she married him, it would make everything better. John would take care of her; he would ease everything that was hard in her life. She wouldn’t be so angry, so closed away. Things might actually improve between the two of them.

  And that’s how it had happened. Eva had married John, five years earlier. And a couple years later, she’d gotten pregnant with Theo.

  Mark remembered discovering that. He had come by to get the girls one summer day. When he pulled up, Eva was kneeling in the garden, weeding—the basket next to her overflowed with bright green tufts of this and that. She sat back on her haunches when she saw him, and then, laboriously, slowly, she stood up. She had on worn faded denim overalls with a T-shirt underneath, and a large straw hat with a curvy brim, a flowered band around the crown. Her dark hair was tucked up into the hat, but curling strands looped down at her neck, her ears. Her feet were bare, small and tanned and slender. He noticed all this. Then she put her hands on her hips and arched her back slightly. He recognized the gesture instantly from her pregnancies with the girls; and that made him aware, suddenly, of what he hadn’t noticed before: the downdrooping heaviness of her belly pulling against the overalls.

  The world shifted for him. He knew he’d lost her. He understood that, and only then understood also that he hadn’t truly known until now that he would. And while he was registering this, feeling the confusion of these thoughts, he was also aware of the sharp, keen bite of wanting her anew.

  He was careful to give no sign of any of this. After only a few seconds’ pause, he continued up the walk, and when she smiled, that dazzling, sleepy smile—a mark of pregnancy too: he should have remembered—and asked him how he was, he lied. He told her in his steadiest voice, Fine, fine.

  “Poor little Theo,” he said now to Emily. “Does he realize, do you think?”

  “I don’t think so.” She sat still for a moment, her lips slightly parted, breathing through her mouth. “Well.” She looked at him. “Yes. He sorta does. He told me John had gone away, that his daddy was gone, a car hit him.” Her mouth firmed. “But that doesn’t mean he understands anything.”

  “No,” he said.

  She blew her nose again. They sat together glumly, looking at themselves in the mirror, looking at the closed bedroom door next to it. The dogs were barking again.

  “And what about Daze?” he asked. “She seems pretty lifeless.”

  Emily sighed. “She’s just not talking.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “Well, that’s just the way Daisy is, Daddy.”

  And he realized, suddenly, that he knew this about his younger daughter. He knew that Daisy sank into torpor, into silence, when she was overwhelmed. Even after the divorce, when she was so little—only five—she’d been that way: too quiet, absent, unresponsive. He’d tried to make a joke of it sometimes, tapping lightly with his knuckles on her head. “Hello, hello. Anybody home at Daisy’s? Anybody in there?”

  “So how long will you stay, do you think?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Gracie was over and she suggested it, ’cause Mom is like, out of control. She said she’d phone you.”

  Gracie was Eva’s closest friend, called on to witness every celebration, to help at every tragedy. When he and Eva split up, it was Gracie’s presence at their house that let him know it was final. She’d answered the door when he came over hoping to talk to Eva, and when she saw him, she said, “You! You dim-witted asshole!” and slammed the door, before he could speak.

  They were friends again now. They’d even joked sometimes, before Gracie got married, about getting together themselves—a safe joke, he thought, since neither was even slightly attracted to the other.

  “Let’s figure this out then,” he said to Emily, hoping to appeal to her organizational strengths. “Where do you think Theo should sleep?”

  “I don’t know. He still has a crib at home.”

  “Ah!”

  “But he can climb out anyway, so he usually sleeps with someone else.”

  “Who? Eva?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes John and Eva, sometimes me or Daze.” She shrugged. “It’s like he chooses different people for different reasons at different times.” She made a face. “Sometimes he sleeps in the hall. On the floor. You have to be careful not to trip on him if you get up in the night.”

  He had a vision of this suddenly, the little boy asleep with a blanket on the floor. Emily in her nightgown stepping around him. The routine of this, the jokes that would be made in the morning. All that was settled and domestic in his children’s lives, all that he hadn’t been able to hold on to for their sakes. He said, “
Maybe he should stay in with me. I’ve got the biggest bed.”

  Someone knocked on the door. Daisy called, “Dad, the dogs are going crazy out here.”

  Mark got up. At the door he turned back to Emily. “You okay for now?”

  She seemed better. Less blank, less turned in. She looked away from her own reflection and up at him. She nodded.

  “Well, come help me out with this three-ring circus then.”

  She stood and sighed, put-upon, as she followed him.

  A DEATH IN THE FAMILY. That’s what he said when he called Marianne to cancel their evening, feeling that he was somehow using it, falsifying it, even though there was nothing in it that wasn’t true.

  Her voice changed instantly—falsely too, he felt—to sympathy and concern. “Oh, Mark, I’m so sorry. Who?”

  There was a little pause after he said, “The children’s stepfather,” and he felt he had to explain. He said, “They were very close to him,” though he realized he didn’t really know if this was the case.

  They arranged to talk in a couple of days, when things straightened out a little. “I can’t wait to see you, babe,” he said, before he pushed the button to disconnect them.

  Mark had taken the telephone into the back hallway, off the kitchen, to make the call. While he talked, he’d been looking out the window at his truck, drained of color in the deepening twilight, at the shadowy shapes of the dogs padding around in the driveway, at the blackened fig tree and the looming, dark shed, the tractors parked beyond it: the familiar elements of the world he’d made for himself when he lost Eva and the girls.

  When he turned back into the kitchen, Daisy startled him, standing as she was in its bright light between the cooktop and the island, everything about her frozen, observant, as though she’d been there a long time. He smiled at her, but her face didn’t change. “What’s up, Daze?” he asked, setting the phone in its cradle.

  “I was going to ask you something,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  She looked steadily at him. “But I forgot what it was.”

  “Maybe it’ll come back to you,” he said.

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  GRACIE CALLED after dinner. The kids were in front of the TV, watching an old video of Time Bandits and waiting for a cake they’d made together to finish baking, a project concocted by Emily when things began to seem a little aimless after dinner, when Theo started getting wild. For once Mark had been grateful to her for managing things, for being the adult, for getting Theo—and even somber Daisy—to help her decide what flavors the cake and icing should be, to measure the ingredients out.

  “Mark!” Gracie cried. “I meant to come out when you stopped by to get the kids, but I couldn’t right then ’cause of Eva, and then you were gone. How’s it going?”

  “We’re okay,” he said. He stepped again into the little hallway off the kitchen and lowered his voice. “How is Eva?”

  Her voice lowered in response to his. “Oh, God, what a mess!” she said. “She’s finally asleep, I think, but she’s got enough stuff in her to knock out a Clydesdale.”

  “She saw it happen, Emily told me.”

  “My God, yes. Can you believe that? It’s just so unbelievable. The bastard came caroming around the corner and wham! he just sent John sailing, I guess. With Eva and Theo standing right there watching.” Her voice changed. “He hit the light post, you know.”

  “No. Emily didn’t tell me that.”

  “Well, she doesn’t know. I figured the girls didn’t need to hear every single horrible detail.”

  “No,” he said. And then, thinking about it, “God, no.”

  “Precisely,” she said. “I think he probably died right then.” Her voice had sailed off on these last few words, and she stopped abruptly. Then she whispered, “Just a sec.” The phone clunked. She stepped away, into a silence. After a minute or two, he heard her walking back, blowing her nose. She came on again. “Anyway,” she said hoarsely. “Afterward they still had to play out the sad scene where they hold him and the ambulance comes and all that.” Her throat made an odd clicking noise. “Oh, it’s just too horrible, isn’t it? You just don’t know what to say or do.”

  “Gracie,” he said.

  “Hold on,” she said. He could hear her blowing her nose again.

  When she picked up the phone once more, he said, “It’s easier for me than you. I’ve got the kids here. I feel useful, in a way, fixing burgers for dinner, something as stupid as that.”

  “I envy you.”

  “I know. I don’t envy you.”

  “I’m not complaining, Mark,” she said quickly. “She needs me. Eva.”

  “I know.”

  They let a silence gather on the line. Finally he said, “So you’re staying overnight?”

  “Oh, at least. You can’t believe … I mean, I’d always thought, Eva, with the children … you know. Well, she was someone who always held it together for the kids.” She sighed. “Boy! Not this time.”

  They arranged to talk again in the morning. He’d get the kids to day care and school. Or maybe he’d let the girls stay home. He’d figure it out, what seemed best. He gave her the number of his car phone. She promised to call if anything changed.

  When Mark got off the phone and was extracting the cake from the oven, he was thinking of Eva, weeping, hysterical. He had seen her like that more than a few times in the early days of their marriage, when they fought fiercely about things—about principles, it seemed to him now, recollecting it. She’d been that way for a while around the time of their breakup too. Once when he came to pick the children up for an overnight, he’d gone back to the house after he’d gotten them into the truck. He wanted to remind her of the time he planned to return them. But he stopped still in the doorway, unable to go farther. Somewhere inside, shut behind walls and doors in what she thought was privacy, Eva was wailing, the terrified, abandoned cries of a child, one shriek of pain after another, so loud and desperate that you couldn’t imagine how she had enough breath to go on.

  And now she was suffering for John. For a moment he let sorrow flood him—a soft, virtuous sorrow that it took him only a few seconds to realize was as much somehow for himself as for Eva or John. This seemed so crazy, so wrongheaded—wrong-hearted—that he slammed the oven door to stop himself, and after a second Daisy’s terrified voice called out from the living room, “What happened? What was that?”

  IN THE NIGHT, Mark woke. What woke him? Not Theo, who lay sound asleep where he’d wound up—jammed against Mark’s headboard, breathing phlegmily, his mouth open. Around the little boy were the stuffed animals he’d pulled out from his paper bag, one of whom, Miss Owl, Mark recognized as having been Daisy’s years before.

  “That was mighty nice of you,” he’d said to her after he’d put Theo to bed, after they’d all said good night to him.

  She had shrugged. “Not really,” she said. “I like seeing her, actually. She was living in a box, before.”

  He’d looked at her, tall, gangly, and thought how odd it was that at one moment she could speak like this, as though she were still connected to the child who had believed in the life of her toys, and then a moment or two later gesture in a way that made her seem an adult, even sexual.

  Before she’d gone to bed, she’d come into the kitchen again and said she’d remembered what she’d forgotten. “You know, what I wanted to ask you before.”

  “Oh, yes. Shoot.”

  “Where’s John? Where is he, now?”

  And Mark had answered her wrong, he’d answered the child in her. “I really don’t know, Daze. It depends, I guess, on what you believe. If you believe in an afterlife—”

  “No!” she said impatiently, shaking her head. “I mean where is he? Where is his body?” And her hand had swept down her own body in a dancer’s motion.

  He’d stood there a moment, looking at her, fierce and utterly focused in a way he’d hardly ever seen her be. “I don’t know that either, Daze,” he
said sadly.

  He turned and lay on his back now. He’d left a living room lamp on because Theo was scared of the dark. His bedroom looked somehow disordered and unpleasant in this half-light.

  After a few minutes, he became aware that he was timing his breathing with Theo’s. This perhaps accounted for the constricted feeling in his chest. But when he consciously regulated himself, when he forced himself to breathe at his own pace once more, he realized the constriction was his alone—that he was thinking of John, hurtling upward, upward, smashing into the post. Of Eva, watching, crying out. He swung his head from side to side on his pillow.

  The last time he’d spoken to John had been maybe ten days earlier, an ordinary exchange: how’s it going? what have you been up to? John was a large man, big-boned and homely, with sandy hair and whitish eyelashes. He always looked a little sunburned, a little defenseless. When he asked Mark even the most banal question, he seemed honestly to want to know; he would lean forward, frowning, to hear the answer. Mark often found himself responding at too-great length—he’d be bored himself by the time he was done. He was bored this time too, answering John, talking about his business, about the harvest—the crush—about how long his days were right now, about getting the grapes in at the right time, about overextending the crews.

  But John had seemed as interested as he always did. He asked Mark more questions, he poured him another glass of wine.

  This was on a Sunday in late September. Mark had stopped by to pick the girls up and walked in on a party, a lunch that had apparently gone on and on. It was in its last stages now—the table was littered with crumbs and stained with wine from earlier in the meal: the pale pinkish rings had softly expanded on the white cloth, the droplets were furred. The sun glinted low through the opened door and the air smelled dry and sweet.

  Mark was greeted warmly. Another piece of apricot tart was cut for him, John filled his glass, he was introduced to everyone at the table. The girls, who had stood around for the first few minutes after he arrived, disappeared again once they realized he was staying awhile. After some minutes, you could hear the bass of their music thumping somewhere upstairs.