Lost in the Forest (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

by Sue Miller

  You would think that her own thievery, and maybe even her resentment of Eva, would make her capable of saying something kind, something that lets Theo know she doesn’t really care, that he hasn’t done anything so terrible. But something else is at work in Daisy too. Something that makes her mean to Theo. So she waits with an exacting, hard-hearted distance as he says, “I’m very sorry, Daisy.”

  After a moment she answers, “Yeah, well. Don’t do it again, is all.”

  “He won’t,” Eva says. “Will you, my poupée?” She holds her hand out to him, and he crosses to her and takes it, shaking his head sadly, remorsefully.

  THREE MORE TIMES in August Daisy steals from the register, waiting for a moment when no one is around. The last time Eva is actually in the store, but working in the office with the door closed.

  Just as Daisy shuts the cash drawer, she sees him: Duncan, Gracie’s husband. He steps forward from behind the shelves where he’s apparently been standing, watching her.

  For how long?

  You can’t tell from his face. It’s perfectly pleasant, in the mannered way he has of looking pleasant. He’s a medium-sized man, gray-haired and handsome in a tight, almost forbidding way. He has a high forehead and dark, blank eyes. His skin is unusually pale. He doesn’t look like a Californian. He always dresses elegantly, even Daisy has noticed that, and he’s always sarcastic. Even to Daisy. Even to Theo.

  He has a terrible limp—some accident he was in. Daisy doesn’t like him.

  “Eva here?” he asks amiably.

  Daisy lifts her chin toward the back of the store. “She’s in the office.”

  He’s smiling at her, his lips slightly parted. Why didn’t she hear him? The creaky floor, his limp. He lurches up to the counter now. He leans on it. He gestures at her body, her hip, where she has shoved the money into her pocket. He says, “I think you should share that with me.”

  Daisy feels breathless. She looks away quickly. Then back. She shakes her head.

  “No?” he says, and smiles at her.

  She doesn’t smile back. She’s watching him. Everything he does seems somehow false. Constructed.

  “You sure?” His voice is light, entirely friendly.

  She nods.

  “Well then, I guess I better tell.”

  Daisy shrugs. A sick feeling, a dizziness, overwhelms her.

  Duncan is watching her too. Can he see her fear? Her weakness? He turns, he starts toward the back of the store.

  And stops, three steps away. He turns partway around. She hasn’t moved. He smiles again. “You’re tough, aren’t you, Daisy? I’ve always liked tough.”

  Daisy watches him. She knows he’s toying with her, teasing her. She knows he’ll tell in the end—how can he not?—but she decides that she won’t let him humiliate her too.

  Or she doesn’t even decide. Her will simply rises to deny him.

  He steps forward, close to the counter again, and he speaks more gently. “You know, if I don’t tell, if I keep our little secret, it’s as though I’d taken your mother’s money too. I become an accessory. An accessory after the fact.” He pronounces this carefully, but oddly, dramatically, as though there were something funny about it.

  There’s nothing funny. Daisy’s heart is slowing. Venom slows it. She hates him.

  “That must be worth something to you. My … complicity. For your sake.”

  Daisy watches him.

  He picks up a pen. He is fiddling with a pad on the counter, a stack of sheets gummed together that Eva and Callie write notes on. On its side it says, “Freudian Slips: now you can write what’s really on your mind.” It strikes her that he’s nervous. More nervous than she is. Nervous, or maybe excited. The pen scratches on the pad. Stops. He looks up. His eyes are dark and cold.

  “What’s it worth, Daisy?” he asks.

  After a long moment, she says, “How much do you want?” Her voice sounds dry and scratchy.

  He laughs. “Daisy,” he says. He sets down the pad. “I want it all.”

  Daisy thinks of it all, all the folded bills in the box at the back of her closet. She knows he isn’t referring to that. She knows that he doesn’t—that he can’t—know about it.

  But maybe somehow he does. Maybe he’s seen her take the money earlier too. Maybe he’s been spying on her for a while? All summer?

  Looking at him steadily, she shakes her head.

  “No?” He steps back. “Well, we’ll have to think about this, Daisy. I’ll think about it. You ponder it.” He nods, a series of smaller and smaller motions of his head. “I’ll get back to you.”

  Now he smiles broadly, almost genuinely, and turns to go. She watches him: slide, lurch; slide, lurch. It seems to her he’s exaggerating his limp for her benefit. How can she not have heard him? At the door he turns and looks back at her, still smiling. He fans his fingers in an arc at her, like someone lighthearted, like a character in a television sitcom.

  When he’s gone, she looks down at the pad. On it he’s written yes three times: yes yes yes. She tears off the top page of the pad. You can still see the press of the words on the next page down, though, so she tears that one off too, and crumples them both and throws them away.

  Chapter Seven

  IN MID-AUGUST, almost ten months after John’s death, Mark discovered—Gracie told him—that Eva had begun to date “a little bit” again. They were in a funky antique store in Sonoma, shopping together for Eva’s birthday. Her forty-third. Gracie was holding a vase she was thinking of buying. She told him this in an offhand way. Deliberately offhand, he thought.

  For a moment he was startled. He turned away from her. But then, standing among the tables laden with china, with linens and baskets and glasses, he thought that if you looked at it in a certain way, it could be said that Eva dated him too, though their times together were unfreighted and family-focused. But they’d had picnics with the children along, they’d gone to stupid movies they could all laugh at, they’d fixed meals together and sat down at opposite ends of Eva’s table and talked. Talked until Theo and Daisy got up and drifted away to television or music, until the old clock in Eva’s living room struck nine, and then ten.

  Still, he was hurt.

  It didn’t make sense. He understood that. After all, he had been dating all along, himself. Or sleeping with women occasionally anyway. Not anything serious, not anyone he cared about. Just with a sense that it was part of life. His life.

  Maybe, he thought, that’s what Eva had decided too. That she should be going out. That she needed to begin to live again.

  But was she sleeping with someone?

  He asked, “What do you mean, a little bit?”

  “You cannot be jealous!” Gracie set down the vase and stared openly at him.

  What had she heard in his voice? He’d said it casually, he thought. “Well, I guess I can be whatever I like. But I’d still like to know what you mean by dating.”

  She made a dismissive gesture. “Well, it doesn’t matter anyway. It’s nothing serious.” She moved ahead of him down the aisle, touching this or that.

  “How can you tell?” he asked after a minute. He’d stopped looking. He couldn’t concentrate.

  “It doesn’t matter. She’s not ready for anything serious.”

  “Because of John, you mean.”

  “Of course, because of John.”

  “Because of how he died?”

  Gracie looked at him. “How he died, how he lived. John.” She lifted her hands. “John the person. The person she loves.”

  “Well, she’ll still love John when she falls in love with someone else.”

  “Now what on earth does that mean?”

  Why had he said it? “I don’t know, Gracie,” he answered honestly. “Just … she can love him all she wants, but there’s part of her that must want to be … actively in love too, to be, in life, with her love, with whoever she loves. You know.”

  Gracie looked at him oddly. “Well, that’s just kinda sweet, Mark
,” she said, drawling widely. And then, after a moment, “You know,” she grinned, “maybe you and I should have got together.”

  He laughed.

  “Oh, laugh, cruel man.” She laughed too.

  As they were standing at the cash register—she’d found an antique painted wicker basket for Eva—Gracie suddenly said, “I don’t know, Markie-boy, but I don’t think you should get your hopes up.”

  “Hey, who says I do? Who says I have?”

  She shrugged, and then laughed again. “I don’t know. Forget it. Forget I said anything. What do I know?”

  Exactly, he thought. She didn’t know. She hadn’t seen them alone together, hadn’t felt the deepening trust between them. Sometimes when he dropped Daisy off in these summer evenings—or Daisy and Theo—and he and Eva sat together talking lazily about their lives, he felt close to their old intimacy, he could imagine that something had already started which was going to go on and on.

  MARK ARRIVED at Gracie’s house for Eva’s birthday party, rattling up her long driveway in his truck, light brown dust pluming behind him in the slanted sunlight. Parked in the driveway were the two cars and the truck that Gracie and her husband, Duncan, owned; and the vintage Jaguar that belonged to Eva’s old friends Fletcher and Maria. The usual crowd was assembled, he thought. He grabbed the wine he’d brought—three bottles clanking in a paper bag—and his present for Eva, and crossed the gravel yard.

  Gracie had come into big money in the mid-eighties, like everyone else along for the ride in Napa. Hers came directly from the source: she became a real estate agent just as the boom times hit, a pure coincidence. She’d been a nurse before then, and after more than fifteen years at it, including one in Vietnam, she had burned out. He could remember her telling him that she knew she’d had it when she actually struck a patient, a drunk with a broken arm who kept trying to smoke in the emergency room, even though she’d explained to him several times why he couldn’t. “I mean, at the moment I was doing it I thought of it as fundamentally therapeutic. You know, he was going to blow the whole place sky high if he lit up near some oxygen tank or something. But later I realized I was just pissed off. I was pissed off and I hit him.” She shook her head. “Not good nursing, man. I was out of there the next day.”

  She still lived in what had been a tiny house on the valley floor—her “nursing home” she used to call it before she fixed it up; but the house had grown and changed since she came into money, and then changed some more after she married Duncan. The party tonight was to be out in back, where she’d put in a lap pool a few years earlier, and a large stone patio encircled with rosemary and lavender. The added-on French doors to the living room were flung open, front and back, and as he walked up to the house—a pavilion when it was opened up like this—Mark could see directly across into the space behind it, and even into the vineyard beyond that, at the near edge of which Duncan was setting up fireworks.

  Eva’s birthday was August 21, and Gracie and Duncan threw this party for her every year, complete with fireworks and ritualized games. Gracie organized the games, her own elaborate version of Charades. Duncan was in charge of the fireworks. It was among his many interests, interests that alternately puzzled and intrigued Mark, as Duncan himself puzzled and intrigued him.

  Gracie spotted him from the kitchen, off on one side of the living area. “Sweetie, yummy, come and kiss me,” she called out.

  He smiled at her. “If I must,” he answered.

  She was pink with heat and exertion. As he embraced her, he inhaled her scent. She smelled of herbs he couldn’t have named, and of her own perfume, and the musky odor of perspiration. Her face glistened. Her heavy, blonde hair was pulled up and held in a clip at the crown of her head, but it showed darkly, damply at her scalp. Her lipstick was gone, and her face seemed to him somehow innocent, generous, without it.

  “Oh wine, delicious wine,” she cried when he handed her the bag. She lifted the bottles out and looked at the labels. “Man, you shouldn’t have,” she said, grinning. She knew these little wineries because of what they were doing to real estate values in a way that paralleled Mark’s knowledge of them for what they were doing to prices in the wine business.

  He opened one of his reds to let it breathe, and she poured him a glass of an already opened sauvignon blanc that was sitting in an ice bucket. She took her apron off and followed him outside. She was wearing a loose, flowing sleeveless dress and sandals.

  As they stepped out onto the patio in the slanted, warm light, Duncan and Fletcher were returning from the edge of the vineyard. Maria sat at the long wooden table, which was already set for dinner, the tall wine and water glasses turned upside down. When Duncan spotted Mark, he raised his glass—a martini glass, he never had wine before dinner—and called out, “Ah, the farmer! In the dell, as it happens.”

  Mark nodded and raised his glass in return, though he wasn’t sure whether or not a kind of joke was being made at his expense. “Sir,” he said, and drank.

  “Now can someone tell me what the heck a dell is, exactly?” Gracie asked.

  Was she trying to distract Mark from what he might have found offensive in Duncan’s remark? Maybe. Often enough Gracie seemed to want to shelter others from what Duncan said or did that might be uncomfortable.

  Eva had once called Duncan “congenitally ironic.” Did this mean she didn’t like him? Mark wasn’t sure. Gracie and Duncan had met after Mark and Eva split up, so whatever talking she’d done about Duncan and what she thought of him, she’d done with John, not Mark.

  Duncan gestured now. “A dell: this valley, my dear, from which you extract such a pleasant livelihood, even as you make it less livable for most of the rest of the universe.”

  Gracie laughed her big laugh: haw, haw, haw. They had all sat down by now, their chairs pushed back slightly from the set table. The evening was still fully light, the air just beginning to freshen after the day’s heat. Mark stretched his legs out. He was aware of a kind of tension in himself. He was just waiting, really, for Eva’s arrival.

  He listened to the conversation though, to Duncan, who had started to explain the fireworks. He knew a man in San Francisco who designed them, and he was full of technical information. He was talking now about how multibreak shells worked, about how long the fuses had to be to allow a certain height to be reached before the shell burst, about the names of the shapes they’d see tonight—willows and palms and roundels and chrysanthemums—and about how each was packed.

  He and Gracie certainly were an odd couple, Mark thought, watching them. Gracie was open and voluble. She was attractive, he supposed, but she was also large and blowsy. Horsey, he might have said, if that didn’t seem unkind, and also unsexy. Because Gracie was somehow sexy. She gave off a sense of availability, of openness, of animal energy that did that for her. She had the ease and generosity he associated with nurses—a kind of tough-minded sweetness. And then layered over that was the intelligence and shrewdness, the understanding of people that made her successful in real estate—though there was a way, he supposed, in which it would have been hard to be unsuccessful in real estate at the moment she entered the profession in the valley.

  But Duncan. Mark looked at him, speaking quietly in his contained, precise way. He was wearing a soft linen shirt of the palest gray. His eyes were small and dark, hooded slightly. His skin was pale, lightly lined, especially around the eyes, and somehow almost luminous. Duncan was a tough nut, Mark thought. There wasn’t an interpersonal bet he didn’t hedge—with sarcasm, with mockery. Even, sometimes, with a certain facial expression—a slight lifting of his upper lip.

  What Mark knew of him, of his life, he knew in bits and pieces from Gracie or Eva. He’d wanted to be an actor when he was young, but had ended up a stuntman for some years—a good one, as it turned out, Gracie had said. She had spoken proudly of this. That he was naturally athletic, utterly fearless. But then he’d been injured in a terrible accident at work. He still limped as a result. He’d spent m
ore than a year in various surgeries and several years after that in pain. He moved always with economy, maybe because it hurt to move. The effect, though, was of control. Steely control, Mark thought, given his lack of expressiveness otherwise. His eyes settled on you, steady, observant, but somehow not connected to you. Cold.

  Gracie maintained that the accident wasn’t all bad. That the rehabilitation had changed his life in many ways for the good. For one thing, he learned woodworking and slowly became a kind of master furniture maker, which was how he made his living now. And for another, it had given him time to read, widely and deeply. He became an avid reader. This was how he’d met Gracie, actually, four years earlier—at Eva’s bookstore, where each of them had taken to dropping in regularly, for different reasons: Gracie to schmooze, to gossip—about neighbors, about the kids and Eva and John and Mark and life; Duncan to talk about books. And to buy them, ten or a dozen at a time. Eva introduced them, and they married a few months later.

  What could have drawn them to each other? Watching them, Mark was thinking that he couldn’t have answered that question. Gracie was talking now, telling a joke actually, imitating a haughty British accent—Princess Anne on a quiz show. Duncan’s eyes were steady on her with no emotion Mark could recognize, except a mild, disinterested amusement. There was something in his constraint, though, his self-containment, that Mark could see would be attractive, might have drawn Gracie. When she got to the punch line, delivered in the fruity voice, “Oh! I know! It’s a horse’s cock!” Fletcher and Maria laughed out loud. Nothing changed or shifted in Duncan’s face.

  Maybe he’d wanted her money. She was quite well off by the time they met. But then Mark remembered that Eva said there’d been a huge settlement after the accident.

  But maybe he’d already run through it. Maybe the medical care used it up. He did all right with the furniture he made, more than all right: it was written up in arts magazines, in Architectural Digest. But all that kind of work must be a little irregular anyway—steady commissions or purchases for a few years, and then maybe a barren stretch. So money could have been part of it.