Lost in the Forest (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

by Sue Miller

  Daisy got up from the island, unhungry. She took her plate to the sink and watched the half-eaten toast slide from it. She turned the water on and punched all the food into the disposal. The machine roared and gurgled as she ran it.

  Theo had climbed onto a chair. “I am hungry,” he announced when Daisy turned the disposal off.

  “Then fix something for yourself!” she said, and left the kitchen.

  She lay in her room and listened to the rest of the house wake up. She heard Emily in their bathroom, taking a shower, then the long silence while she fixed her hair and fussed with makeup. She heard Eva’s radio in her room, tuned to the news. She heard them talking when they went down to the kitchen. Someone else made French toast too, she could smell it.

  She was thinking of her options. She could just not go, but she’d have to explain why, and if she told the truth, she’d seem like a baby. “I thought it was just going to be the two of us.” How pathetic! She didn’t want to seem so foolish, so hungry for Emily’s attention.

  Which, of course, she was, wasn’t she?

  She was not going to admit to it, though.

  She could lie, but a lie would lock her into all kinds of complications. If she said she didn’t feel well, Eva would get involved—thermometers, no going out. If she had something else she was doing, she’d need to disappear and do it. Or disappear and do something. It didn’t seem worth it. And she had to get the Christmas shopping done anyway.

  When Emily called up that they were leaving in ten minutes, Daisy hollered back that she’d be there.

  Eva left just before they did, headed to the store. She beamed at them as she said good-bye. “Have a great time,” she said—and Daisy could tell that Eva was delighted by the very thing that was upsetting to her: that all three of her children were doing something together.

  In the car on the way to the outlet stores, Theo needed to go over the math again and again. Since he had five dollars in his wallet and wanted to keep one for himself, he had four dollars to spend on a present for Eva. Emily was patient; Daisy was silent in the backseat, watching the silver rain streak across the windows.

  They went first to the department store to look at clothes. Emily thought they could get her a blouse. Or maybe, as they passed a display of them in the aisle, a sweater. She held out the one she’d noticed, cashmere, widely striped horizontally in blue and white. It cost $120. “We could all buy this together,” she said.

  “I don’t like it,” Daisy said.

  “But Mom would, I think, and that’s the point, isn’t it?”

  “Well. I can’t afford it.”

  “What’s afford it?” Theo asked.

  “I don’t have enough money, dummy,” she said. She looked at him. He was holding Emily’s hand.

  “I’m not a dummy. You are the dummy.”

  “Who cares?” She turned to Emily. “Anyway, let’s not.”

  “You are the dummy, ’cause you do too have enough money, Daisy.” His voice was louder.

  Daisy felt tense, suddenly. “I just said I didn’t, Theo. Shut up, why don’t you?”

  “But you do so.”

  “No, I don’t.” She turned to Emily. “Let’s go look at house stuff,” she said.

  “House stuff! That’s a horrible idea.”

  “Well, it’ll be cheaper.”

  “God. I didn’t ask you to go shopping so we could be stingy,” Emily said. “God! What were you planning to spend on Eva anyway?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t think of it like that.”

  “Well, what you said was, ‘I can’t afford it.’ So you must have some idea of what you can afford.”

  “What can I afford, Emily?” Theo asked. Emily had put his wallet in her purse for safekeeping. When he had it, he took the money out all the time, because he liked to touch it, to hold it.

  “We told you, Theo. You have five dollars, and if you spend four on Eva, you’ll have one dollar left, so four is what you can afford.” Daisy started ahead of them through the aisles, away from the sweaters.

  “Daisy has much more than that,” she heard him say.

  “Shut up, Theo!” Daisy said, without turning back to him. A woman passing her stared—a gigantic crazy girl talking to herself.

  “She has hundreds and hundreds. I saw.”

  “Hundreds and hundreds?” Emily said, in a teasing voice.

  Daisy stopped and turned. She waited for them to catch up to her. “You’re a liar, Theo,” she said. Her voice was low and threatening.

  Emily made a face at Daisy: let him talk. What’s the big deal?

  But Daisy wanted him to shut up. “He’s imagining stuff again.”

  “I’m not ’magining.”

  “Yeah? You’re always imagining stuff. Just like you imagine John is alive, when he’s dead.”

  Emily said, “Cut it out, Daisy,” just as Theo was saying, “He’s not dead anymore.”

  “Yeah, and I have a lot of money. ‘Hundreds of money.’ ”

  “Yes, you do so have it.”

  “See?” Daisy said to Emily, her hand lifted. See how crazy he is?

  They were standing in front of the perfume counter now, and Emily suddenly switched gears. Perfume, she suggested. Daisy, eager to end the conversation, quickly agreed. They knew Eva’s favorite, Cristalle. Why not? And at the last minute, because the perfume cost them less than they’d planned on, they bought her a scarf too, the kind Eva liked and used as a shawl.

  When they got home, Daisy went straight to the kitchen. She was starving, having thrown most of her breakfast away. She was standing in the open door of the refrigerator when she heard them above her, and knew instantly—knew because she saw it so clearly in her mind’s eye—that they were in her room, that Theo was showing Emily the shoebox that contained her money.

  She took the back stairs two at a time, and when she got to the doorway to her room, they were just as she’d imagined them. The double doors of her closet were flung open, and they were standing in it, as if on a stage. Emily was holding the shoe box in the crook of one arm, and in her other hand, she had some of the bills. They were looking across at her, agape. The word actually flashed in Daisy’s mind, as words sometimes did. Agape. Stupid-looking. Theo looked scared. They stood across the room from each other, and finally Emily said, “There must be a couple of hundred dollars here, Daisy. Where’d you get it?”

  In three steps Daisy was on her. “It’s mine. Give it to me.” Emily didn’t resist. She held the box out, she held the money up to Daisy.

  “I told you, Daisy,” Theo said. “I told you you had a lot of money.” He wasn’t scared now. He was excited. Daisy hadn’t hit him, or yelled, and Emily wasn’t backing down. He was safe. “Didn’t I tell you, Emily?” he said.

  Daisy turned to him. “Yeah, so what?” she said. Her voice was flat and mean. “This doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean you’re right about anything. It doesn’t change anything. John is still dead, you little jerk. Your dad is dead, Theo. Dead.”

  “Don’t tell me that.”

  “He’s dead.” Daisy’s voice shrilled. “And he’s never, ever coming back. Not this year, not when you’re ten, not ever. Ever. Ever.” Daisy was so angry she threw the money at him, and it scattered all over the floor.

  “Don’t tell me that,” Theo wailed.

  Now he’s going to cry, Daisy thought. And Emily will comfort him.

  And she watched as that happened, as his face crumbled and the wailing started in earnest, as Emily scooped him up—he was like some animal, a monkey, clinging to her front—and carried him out of Daisy’s room.

  She could hear them down the hall in Theo’s room, their voices—Theo’s slowly calming down, Emily’s steady and reassuring. She stood listening for a while, and then Daisy got down on all fours and began to pick up the money, crawling around. She put it in the shoe box, and this time, put the shoe box in the deepest drawer at the bottom of her desk.

  It was quiet in the house now.
Emily’s and Theo’s voices were just an occasional murmur. Daisy lay down on her bed and almost instantly a desire for sleep came over her, a desire so profound it made her feel dizzy, even though she was already lying down. She was about to succumb, to fall heavily into it, when Emily was back, standing by her bed.

  Daisy moaned. “Go away,” she said.

  “Where did you get it?” Emily asked. “Where did it come from?”

  Daisy groaned. It was like being tortured, this request to come up from where she wanted to be—to attend, to speak. To think.

  “Where’d you get it, Daze?” Emily’s voice was kind.

  Daisy roused herself, she made herself answer. “The store,” she said.

  “The bookstore?”

  “Yes.”

  “Eva’s bookstore?”

  “What other bookstore is there? Yes!”

  “It’s what you earned? At Eva’s store?”

  A way out for Daisy opened here, but it felt too late, she was too tired to take it. “No, I didn’t earn it,” she said heavily. “I took it.”

  It seemed to her she might have slept for a while, but then she heard Emily’s voice, whispering: “So you just, stole it?”

  Daisy opened her eyes and looked at her pretty sister. Emily was sitting down now, at the edge of the bed.

  “Yes,” Daisy said. She closed her eyes again.

  “And Eva doesn’t know? She doesn’t suspect?”

  Daisy opened her eyes. Emily was frowning, earnest, concerned. Concerned for her. “No,” Daisy said. Her eyes closed.

  “We could put it back,” Emily whispered.

  Daisy didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure Emily had really said this.

  “Did you hear me, Daisy? We could easily put it back.” Daisy moaned.

  “Don’t you think? Come on, Daisy, wake up.”

  Daisy pulled herself up to a half-sitting position. She licked her lips. “What’s the point of that?” she asked. “It isn’t like she even noticed it was gone.”

  Emily was chewing on her finger, frowning. Daisy could feel the nod of her own head, her eyelids yearning to close.

  “You didn’t even use it,” Emily said.

  “Yes,” Daisy admitted. She sat up straighter.

  “What did you take it for in the first place if you didn’t want to spend it on anything?”

  “I wanted it.” She cleared her throat. “I wanted it.”

  “But why, Daisy?” Emily looked anguished. “You have enough money.”

  For a moment Daisy smiled, thinking how Emily sounded just like Theo, thinking how everyone thought she had enough, how, of course, she did have enough, how that wasn’t the point. “Why indeed?” she said in a mocking tone.

  And then suddenly she started to cry. It hurt, at first—her throat felt swollen and sore—and then it eased. “I don’t know,” she blubbered. “I don’t know.” And though she was speaking of the money, somehow everything else in her life—her aloneness with John’s death, the solitary life she led at school, the secret of sex with Duncan, all the things she couldn’t speak of to anyone else—all of these seemed part of why she wept.

  Emily reached out and awkwardly rubbed her sister’s shoulder for a moment. Then abruptly she swung herself up onto the bed and lay down next to Daisy. She put her arms around her in what they had called, a long time ago, a bear grip. They lay together as they had when they were little girls and their world was sliding out from under them and they had turned to each other for safety. And Daisy, because she knew there wasn’t any safety anymore, even here, folded that memory into her grief and deepened it.

  Chapter Twelve

  MARK WAS BACK HOME, in Nebraska, for Thanksgiving. He stood staring out the window over the sink as he did the dishes from the holiday meal. Three of his brothers were here too, at his mother’s house, with their wives and some of their grown children. There had been fourteen of them at the table today, and his mother had gone all out: the old, worn white tablecloth, heavy linen napkins and her real silver, and the full array of traditional dishes, including sweet potatoes with marshmallows, and three kinds of pie. She had been up at five this morning; he had heard the noise in his half sleep from upstairs, in what was now the guest bedroom, and experienced it as he would have a dream, a dream of his boyhood, when he’d wake to the noise of his mother fixing breakfast for all of them—the distant clatter of pans and dishes, the steady low vibration of the radio tuned to the morning news.

  His sisters-in-law and brothers were moving in and out of the dining room now, carrying dishes and what was left of the food. Mark had volunteered to wash, not wanting to have to keep up with the running conversation of the others as they passed each other going back and forth. Here, among his married brothers and their wives, he was thinking of Eva again, of Eva as he had spoken to her last more than a month ago, in the parking lot of the Auberge de Soleil—of her saying to him then that this was all she wanted: touching him, being with him. But then she’d left, quickly, and in some pain, it seemed to him. Pain brought on, he supposed, by what was hard, what was full of conflict for her in acknowledging that to him and mourning John at the same time. He’d watched her go, watched the car pull away, turn out of the parking lot, out of his sight, not knowing what to do, how to help her.

  And he hadn’t seen her again after that. They had talked a few times on the phone, arranging a visit with Daisy, and one with Daisy and Theo together. And there had been a problem Eva called him about—it turned out that Daisy had been cutting piano lessons without telling her. In fact, lying about it. “That’s what upsets me the most,” Eva had said. “These completely invented stories about where she was, or what she was doing. Now I don’t feel I can trust her at all anymore.” She’d asked him to pick Daisy up from the teacher’s house on the night he was to have her over, just to be sure that she’d actually been there, she’d had the lesson. But through all these conversations, they kept their tone businesslike—or parental, anyway. They never mentioned their last time alone together or what Eva had said to him.

  And then, of course, life seemed to intrude; or he let it. First there had been all the frantic work of the crush, the harvest; and then he went on a long-planned vacation; and now he was here on this visit home, which it would have been unthinkable to cancel.

  He had considered, actually, canceling the vacation, but decided against it. And that had everything to do with Eva. He wanted to give her time. She needed time, he understood that. But he could wait. He would show her he could wait. The last thing he wanted was for her to feel he was putting pressure on her.

  He looked up from the sink again, out the window at his nephews and one of his nieces playing touch football on the frozen ground. They wore puffy bright parkas. Their breath made quick clouds. As they shouted back and forth to each other, laughing, their voices carried in through the window, over the gossipy conversation moving from the kitchen to the dining room among the adults.

  Beyond the young people and their game, the fields came up almost to the fence at the end of his mother’s yard. He had been startled on his first day home—as he always was when he arrived—by the flatness, the monochromal quality of these fields, of the land generally. Shades of brown, gray, black, stretched for miles in every direction from the edges of town. Snow had fallen that day, just a light crust that melted by midafternoon of the next day, but enough to make him remember the cold, the desolation during the winter months of his childhood, when all you saw were the long hopeless planes of white, broken here and there by tree lines along the creek beds or at the margins of someone’s land. How did they endure it? How had he endured it?

  He had known early on that he didn’t want to stay. He’d gotten out as soon as he could, going to California to work for a year after high school, and then enrolling at Santa Cruz. Before he had left, he had sometimes dreamed of California as he thought it would be—the warmth, the light, the sea—but the reality of it had surpassed anything he could have imagined. He was stunn
ed by the touch of the air, by the lushness of the vegetation.

  And in the early days of his life there—before the malls sprang up at the edges of every town, before the vast sweeps of cheap housing blanketed the lower reaches of the hills—there was a sweetly old-fashioned quality to the dazzling pastel cities, to the sleepy little villages he drove through with his friends. Plus of course, he had no past, no history in California. He felt a sense of possibility for himself there that the landscape itself seemed somehow to confirm everywhere he looked.

  And even though he no longer thought of California in quite that way—or at least not often—he was still stunned in reverse sometimes when he came home. Before his brothers had arrived, he spent a couple of long days in the car with his mother, doing errands. Driving around in the emptied, sere landscape, you’d catch the whiff of a hog farm every now and then, or stronger yet, the stench of the feedlot some miles down the highway. When this happened, he’d look over at his mother’s face and see nothing in it change. She was, simply, used to it—how it looked, how it felt, how it smelled.

  Only three of his five brothers were around for the holiday—the other two lived too far away, on the East Coast. Of the three who were here, one—Bill—had stayed in town and taken over their father’s small lumberyard. The other two had come from Lincoln and Chicago, respectively. Eric was a lawyer, Robbie an editor for the Herald Tribune. Distinguished men, Bill and Mark joked, casting themselves as yokels, guys who worked with their hands. Though even Bill, Mark knew, did more of his work in the office at the back of the big lumber shed, and most of that work was numbers, figures; and over the years they’d all come to understand that Mark’s work wasn’t anything like the farming they’d grown up with. Eric and Robbie actually knew something about wine and sometimes sought out labels that bought grapes from Mark’s clients. And Mark’s mother, having read in her AARP magazine that a glass of wine a day was good for her, had asked his advice on what to buy.

  But on these visits they all fell into the old patterns, they pretended that nothing had changed. That Bill and Mark were hopeless students who would do physical labor for the rest of their lives, that Robbie and Eric were intellectual escapees, but escapees tied to the treadmill of overwork, overachievement. Mark participated easily, he knew his role, but it weighed on him; it reminded him of all the old feelings of inadequacy and failure that had been part of growing up here. Impossible, though, to reinvent any of this. It would be seen as shocking, offensive, if he were to say, “You know, I’m tired of this, I’m tired of pretending I’m slow, I’m nothing but a good old boy.” It was why you had to leave; it was why you sought a new place, a new set of terms under which to live your life.