Lost in the Forest (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

by Sue Miller

  The conversation had resumed. The topic was books, literature, as it usually was at Eva and John’s house. One of the guests was a writer, someone who taught too, apparently. They were trying to ascertain how many of them had read Proust. Only two hands went up, Mark was relieved to see, since he hadn’t. One was John’s and one was the woman’s named Cynthia, the writer’s wife. And then, looking around, she said, “Well, partway, I must confess.”

  Her husband asked if she would have confessed if everyone else had read it.

  She laughed. She was attractive, Mark thought, in a nervous-looking, over-made-up way. “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” she said. “Or not.”

  They wondered what it meant that so few of them had read Proust. They were fairly literate as a group. How many could there be, in the wide world of readers, if in this population so few had? They joked about it. Maybe seven? “Maybe everyone is a liar,” Eva said.

  And so Mark had ended up, as he often did, talking to John. John, who seemed fully interested in Mark’s description of the variability in timing of the grapes’ ripening, of the possibility of cutting it too close. Of the problems of having too few workers now and too many around at other times. How could you know whether John even cared? You couldn’t. He was too nice.

  A nice man. What had Eva said when Mark had used this word about him? When he’d said, after the first time he’d met John, “He seems genuinely nice”?

  She hadn’t been looking at him, she was kneeling on the floor in front of Daisy, helping wedge her feet into red boots that were almost too small to go on over her shoes. “Yes, I thought I’d try nice this time,” she said. “I thought maybe I deserved it.”

  Mark was standing above her. All he could see of her was the back of her head and the knobbed vulnerable curve of the white nape of her neck where her hair fell forward off it. But he knew by her voice, weighted with harsh accusation against him, how her face would have looked, and he hadn’t answered her.

  He tried now to imagine John after the accident. Was his face damaged? His head? It must have been. How could it not? He imagined Eva kneeling, holding him. Eva, streaked with blood. He imagined himself, how he would have looked, lying there; and then Eva bending over him, wailing.

  He was feeling, he recognized with a pinch of shame, an oddly intense interest in this scene, even a yearning for it, for the drama of it, for Eva’s panicked love. He lay there a long time, listening to his own uneven breathing, and under it Theo’s—steady, apparently dreamless, thick.

  Chapter Two

  IT WASN’T UNTIL months later that Eva could bear to think of it as a process, her grief. When people suggested it to her in the days and weeks after John’s death—New Agey, sloppy people. Hateful people, she thought—she was sometimes speechless in her sense of affront at the notion, as though they had unexpectedly slapped her. She wouldn’t, couldn’t think of this roil of pain that swept in and out of her life as having either a predictable shape or an end point. It seemed to her a monster she’d bedded, one she’d come to love in some way. When it was gone, when it decided on some days—whimsically, it seemed to her—not to be there, not to torment her, then she was tormented by that, by its very absence.

  Sometimes in those early days of October and November she felt amazed that life could happen around it: the things of life, the things that had always meant life. The children woke, and their waking woke her—their voices downstairs in the house, their bare feet thudding on the old wood floors. She got up; she urinated and felt the familiar physical sense of pleasurable relief at that, her body’s work. That it should work, that she should go on feeling anything because of that, seemed preposterous to her. She brushed her teeth, she made the children’s breakfast and got them launched into their day. She went to the bookstore she owned, though the two women who worked for her often sent her home those first weeks after John died if it wasn’t a busy day in the office. She came home. She went to see Daisy play basketball, to see Emily cheerleading at a football game. She bought groceries, she picked up Theo at day care, she made dinner.

  But anywhere, anywhere in all of this, the monster could arrive and literally take her breath away. Sometimes she felt so overwhelmed when it happened that she squatted or knelt where she was. Once Daisy had found her in the kitchen, crouched on the floor, holding a partly peeled carrot in her hand.

  “What, Mom?” she cried. She had stopped in the doorway, confused and frightened. “What happened?”

  And with that it was gone, as though Daisy had broken a spell cast upon her. Eva felt only embarrassed. She stood up, and found the scraper she’d set down so hurriedly. “It’s nothing,” she said, turning her back to Daisy. And because that was so blatantly a lie, she added, “I just felt a little dizzy.”

  Another time she sat weeping through an entire parent conference at Theo’s day-care center. The woman talking with her was so young, so unfamiliar with the possibility of this scale of grief, that she took Eva at her word when she said that it was all right, really, it sometimes just happened, please ignore it if you can; she went carefully and thoroughly through her notes—tidy writing in black ink on five-by-eight cards—while tears and clear mucus streamed steadily down Eva’s face. When she’d finished, the teacher looked quickly and with some embarrassment over at Eva and asked if she had any questions. “No,” Eva whispered. “None.”

  Sometimes in the first months after John’s death, she woke in the night and staggered into the bathroom and threw up, threw up even when there was nothing more there. She thought of it as her whole body’s grieving, as a form of clenched and useless weeping.

  It was the most ordinary kind of memory that set her off. Once, just after she’d lain down to sleep, she thought of a night when she’d waked at the touch of John’s foot on her calf—the bottom of his foot, a soft pad. She remembered that before she had even registered what it was, she had had a sense of it as so intensely dear, so charged for her with love—that light, steady contact, that connection with him—that she had turned to him in the dark and begun to stroke his shoulders slowly and tenderly, bringing him back from sleep to her. Thinking of this as she lay there alone—his dear foot, his body awakening and turning over to her, his big shape in the dark rocking above her—she’d begun to weep, softly at first, and then so loudly that, to her shame, Emily had to come in to quiet her so she wouldn’t scare Theo.

  And then there were all the small things, the signs of how much she lived elsewhere. The time they were stopped at a light on the way to Gracie’s, and when it turned green she had to ask the children where they were going—she simply had no idea, no memory. (“Jesus, Mom,” Daisy said. “Are you going crazy on us now?”) The two times at breakfast when she’d poured orange juice instead of milk into her coffee, to Theo’s loud delight.

  It was like being in love, she thought—grief. It was like the way you were stunned with love when you were young. She remembered performing the orange juice trick when she’d been so wildly in love with Mark she couldn’t think straight. There was that same sense of having lost yourself, of being taken over by some feeling you weren’t in control of. Though of course, in neither case did you really want relief.

  But relief came in this case, wanted or not. As the process went on, as Eva took the first steps toward recovering from her sense of having lost everything, as she was more able to spend sometimes a whole day without being swept by sorrow, then she began to grieve for her very grief, her letting go of John. She didn’t want to let go of him! She didn’t want to speak lovingly and in the past tense of him. She didn’t want not to be furious at his death, at how he had died, at the memory of holding his ruined head in her arms so Theo wouldn’t see it. So no one would see it, not even the EMTs, who had to pry him from her grip when they came for him.

  A normal day, a day in which she didn’t weep, in which she wasn’t felled by rage or sorrow, was like a betrayal of what had happened to him.

  But they came, the normal days,
more and more of them, and by degrees they stole her grief from her—her last connection to John, she felt then.

  And here she is now, six months after John’s death, having lived through just such a day, setting the table for what will be, after all, a family dinner. Mark is bringing the girls back at about five—he’s had them for the weekend—and he’ll stay and eat with all of them as he sometimes does, as he used to do occasionally too when John was alive.

  She’ll be grateful for the adult company. She’s spent the day with Theo, who’s been, as he always is with her now, alternately wildly active and wanting her to be active with him; and then silent—withdrawn, it seems to her.

  She’s worried about him. But then she’s worried about all the children.

  Well, not Emily, actually. Though she’s better now, Emily had seemed the most grief stricken of the three earlier, and grief stricken is what you’d expect. What you’d want, Eva thinks.

  Grief stricken is what Daisy and Theo haven’t seemed. Though Eva knows that Daisy’s withdrawal, her silences, are part of her sorrow, as she knows that in some sense Daisy was the most deeply attached to John of the children. The most in love with him. Emily and Theo relied on John, took John for granted—as, Eva recognized, she had too. Though what did that mean? That she knew he’d always be there? Maybe something as simple as that. But that was a something that meant almost everything to Eva.

  Daisy, though, limp unpretty Daisy, with her horrible posture, her unkempt hair, her droopiness—Daisy who probably mostly didn’t believe that anyone would always be there—Daisy seemed to have pinned the little hope she held on to in that department on John. The wooing of him! He and Eva had laughed about it occasionally alone in their bedroom at night. Only last year he’d shown her an elaborate card Daisy had made and left on his desk, inviting him to her piano recital. And one night when she was about ten, they found a poem from her pinned to his pillow, a poem that galumphed along to the final line, “Oh stepfather, man among men!” (Eva had used this as a sexual joke once. She had whispered the line to John as he entered her, and they had laughed; but she felt a kind of sad guilt about Daisy afterward, and she didn’t do it again.)

  It was Daisy who would go anywhere with John when he leaned in and offered his open, careless invitations: “I’m heading to the bakery”—to the grocery, to the dry cleaner, to the wine shop. “Anyone want to come along?” Daisy always put aside what she was doing and volunteered, as though she couldn’t bear to think of his being alone.

  It’s difficult to tell how hard it is for her now, she’s so private, but even when Eva is most lost in her own pain, she tries to remind herself that Daisy is suffering too. That the more you can’t tell Daisy is suffering, the more she is. Eva hasn’t known what to do about it beyond trying to get to all the recitals, the games she can manage. Beyond letting Daisy see her own grief, her tears. Beyond touching her as much as Daisy will allow, which isn’t a lot—she’s expert at shrugging away from Eva’s hand on her shoulder, at turning out from an attempted embrace by her mother.

  But Theo is even harder, because Eva simply has no idea what he feels. Not once has he truly wept. Or even in any real sense acknowledged that John is dead, though Eva has tried often to speak of it with him. Not so much the event of John’s death—that would be too terrible, too cruel to discuss. But simply the fact that he is dead, gone. And sometimes it seems Theo does understand that, without being able to talk about it. There are even moments when it seems to Eva that he accepts it, as a premise, an underlying fact of his life.

  But then no. Today, for instance, in the car on the way back from swimming in the pool at Gracie’s, he said, out of the blue, “When I get big, I’m going to show my dad how good I swim.”

  Eva, who was planning dinner, surveying her open refrigerator in her mind, wondering if she could get by without stopping for groceries, was startled to attentiveness. She looked over at him. He was wrapped in a striped towel, his thick brown hair still dark with dampness, his eyes and nostrils pinked from the chlorine and water.

  After a minute, she said, “I wish you could show that to Daddy.” She was considering each word. “He’d be so proud.”

  “I’m gonna,” the little boy said fiercely.

  Eva felt a heaviness forming in her midsection. She tried to keep her voice mild. “But you know Daddy is dead, Theo.” He was looking out the passenger window—though he was so low in the car, so small, that surely all he could see were the overhanging trees by the road and the cloudless sky behind them. “Right?” she said.

  Now he turned to her. “Right. But I mean I’m gonna show him in heaven.”

  Eva was startled. She had never said to Theo that John was in heaven. She knew Mark or Gracie or Gracie’s husband, Duncan, would never say such a thing either. Had someone in day care, hoping to be kind? Would one of the girls have thought this was the right thing to say, the comforting thing?

  She knew she should ask him more about this. She knew she should say something to him. But what? That if he were with John in heaven, he’d be dead too?

  Hardly that, of course.

  That she didn’t believe in heaven? That they didn’t believe in heaven?—since he was part of what she thought and believed.

  And then what?

  They were driving.

  They were driving! How could she instruct him in what death meant, in the horrible enormity of his loss, when they were driving down this sunny highway with the acid yellow of the mustard bright between the rows of pale, greening vines? When she was thinking only seconds ago about whether she should swing into the supermarket for lettuce, a lemon?

  What she said to him in the end was, “I think your dad would be happy that you’re such a good swimmer.”

  “Yah,” he said, and turned his head back to look up at what was passing above him.

  Eva blames herself for part of this. She thinks sending Theo away to Mark for those few days right after the accident, not letting him see her wildest grief, was a bad mistake. She thinks it’s made it all unreal to Theo—John’s death. That in some way he doesn’t accept it, he’s fighting off the knowledge of it. No wonder he collapses in on himself, Eva thinks. No wonder he falls silent. Imagine the work involved!

  But then she had said, “You’re my absolute hero, Theo.” She gripped the cool small knob of his bare knee. It tensed and jumped under her hand. “My superhero, not to put too fine a point on it.”

  He looked over at her and smiled vaguely. “I know that,” he said.

  WHEN MARK arrives with Daisy and Emily, he calls from the front hall and Eva emerges from the kitchen, drying her hands. The girls greet Eva distractedly and disappear upstairs to check their phone messages. Theo trails after them. He misses them when they’re away. And they miss him. They’ll let him hang around them tonight. By tomorrow things will be back to normal. In the kitchen, Eva puts water on to boil in a big pot. Then she goes to the butler’s pantry off the hall and pours a glass of wine for herself and Mark from the bottle he’s brought; and they go down the hall into the living room, where he’s lighted a fire, at her request—the air outside has started to get cool. The fire is popping noisily from time to time, spewing hot orange sparks onto the stone hearth, sparks that slowly dim and turn black. Mark sits in a chair near it, the poker in his hand, and Eva tucks her legs up under her on the couch.

  It’s odd, she thinks, to sit here with Mark in this big Victorian house, the heavy wood trim painted an elegant creamy white, the furniture so solid and comfortable. Their life together had been such a struggle financially, and the places where they’d lived with each other had always had an improvised air: borrowed and secondhand furniture, threadbare couches covered with Indian spreads, tables made from solid-core doors, bookcases of cinder blocks and planks. And the bookcases themselves filled with paperbacks: hardcover books were an extravagance reserved for birthdays or Christmas. The money came later for both of them. For her, by marrying John; for Mark, as his work was more hi
ghly valued. And though they’re both well used to it now, it still feels a bit like playing a part to face him surrounded by all this ease.

  He has aged well, she thinks. That tall ranginess has filled in, bulked up, but there’s still a vaguely animal quality to him: his pale eyes in his long dark face, his slightly feral way of moving—smooth, almost stealthy. Even now, sitting forward to watch the fire, then getting up to put another log on, he conveys a sense of inheld power in everything he does that makes him beautiful.

  Maybe she’s forgiven him for that, she thinks.

  They’ve lowered their voices slightly to talk about the children. They talk about Emily, about how pleased they are that she’s been accepted at Wesleyan, how good it will be for her to be away from the family. They agree again that she has to learn to relax, to let herself be funny, which happens from time to time. They both try to call up funny-Emily stories, and can’t, which makes them laugh. “There you have it,” she says.

  And now they move on, feeling generous to each other, expansive. He tells her about his work, about his crew members, about their idiosyncrasies, their jokes. She tells him about a reading series she’s arranging. They talk about the shade of blue in the dining room, which she wants to change. “The problem is I can’t stand the names.”

  “The names?”

  “The paint names. Who thinks them up?”

  “Ignore them. They’re just words.”

  “I can’t. I can’t ignore them. Words count. If I had a dining room named seafoam, I’d think of it every time I stepped in.”

  He grins. “And you’d feel …?”

  She shrugs and laughs. “Wet, I guess.”

  All of this is easy and comfortable, as it hadn’t been in the years before she married John, when she was still so angry with Mark she didn’t like to stay in the same room with him if the children weren’t there. She thinks of this, this newly companionable relationship with her ex-husband, as another gift John has given her.