Lost in the Forest (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

by Sue Miller

  He and Lorie had already bought tickets and popcorn and had taken their seats when Eva and the man she was with walked past them and moved into a row about halfway down the theater. They hadn’t seen him, Mark was pretty sure. While he and Lorie talked, he watched Eva. She was attentive to this guy, a large, solid man, almost totally bald. You might even have said she was flirty—Mark recognized the behavior: the too-bright laughter, the toss of her hair. He watched them during the film too; he had a clear sight line down to the back of their heads. Twice she leaned over to whisper to this guy, something she used to hate when others did it, something she had chastised him for in the deep past.

  When the movie ended, Mark stood up immediately. He wanted to get out of there, to get Lorie out of there, before Eva saw them.

  But it wasn’t going to work. Lorie was in no rush. She was fussing around, she’d lost something—her scarf. She bent down, flipping seats up around her. He was still standing there when Eva and the man she was with walked past, up the aisle. Mark was facing away, so he wasn’t sure Eva had spotted him, but he looked over at them just before they reached the open door to the lobby, and Eva turned to him and waved. She was smiling, mischievous.

  He wasn’t certain what to do about this. Over the next week, over the next several weeks, he pondered it. Should he call her? Should he explain himself when he saw her?

  But he didn’t see her, that was the problem. Daisy was busy with work and basketball and the last tests and papers before the Christmas holidays, so she canceled several visits with him. He did call Eva once, but when Theo summoned her to the phone, he was suddenly confused about what it was he wanted to explain, what he needed to tell her; and he made up a question about the girls’ schedule over Christmas to cover himself.

  He felt that everything he’d worked for over the past year was slipping away from him. He felt powerless to help himself.

  Ten days before Christmas, there was a sudden return of warm weather. The sun was low and buttery, the air was soft. That afternoon, Mark stopped into the cantina for a beer after work—Amy had long since left her job there. The door was open to the sunny street, the bar was noisy and friendly, a warm breeze rode through every now and then. There were guys playing pool, Mexicans, and they kept feeding the jukebox and dancing around the table to the Latin music. Mark settled into the odd valley conversation at the bar, the combination of standard rough stuff about women (“You can’t get pussy in the valley anymore, the whole place is too upscale for fucking around the way we used to”) which veered suddenly to what would be sophisticated anywhere else, but here was just talk about farming: the nose on a certain wine, its bouquet, its rating in the last Wine Spectator. It always amused him, this incongruity.

  He was listening, smiling, when he saw Eva walking slowly by—Eva and Theo. She was holding on to Theo’s hand, her head bent down to hear what he was telling her.

  Mark pushed his glass forward along with a five-dollar bill, and walked quickly to the door. He called her name. She stopped and turned. She smiled at him, the slow smile that caught his heart. Theo smiled at him.

  He caught up to her and lightly kissed her cheek, touched Theo’s head.

  “How are you, Mark?” Eva asked. “We haven’t seen you forever.” They were going to the store, she said—her bookstore. She had just picked Theo up at day care, and now she was going to close up for the night. Theo was going to help her. “Won’t you, my sweet?”

  Theo was carrying a small motorcycle in his hand. He wore a brightly colored backpack. “Yah,” he said.

  They talked about the amazing weather, the sense of blessing, as Eva put it, in the touch of the sun.

  “Listen,” Mark said after a moment. He’d adjusted his pace to their amble. “Remember that woman I was with?”

  She frowned. “What woman?”

  “That woman, the one I was with at the movies when I saw you.”

  “Oh! Well. Sort of.” She grinned at him. “Not really.”

  “Well. That was …” He gestured uselessly. “She was, just a friend.”

  “Mark!” Eva stopped walking. Her hand rose to her chest. She saw his intention, what he was thinking. Something in it surprised her, clearly.

  “Oh, Mark!” she said. “But you see, I thought you understood. That’s really, it’s not, any of my business.” She smiled and lifted her hand dramatically. “She could be your paramour.…”

  She saw something in his face and stopped. Her hand fell. When she spoke again, her voice had changed. “Mark,” she said gently. She touched his arm, a light touch. “It’s truly not anymore—it isn’t—my business.” She shook her head, her lips pressed together.

  They were at the corner now, at the light. The walk signal came on, and Eva suddenly turned to Theo. “Hold my hand, sweetie,” she said. Her voice had changed again. It was no-nonsense, strict.

  What was it? what convergence?—the shift in Eva’s tone, the presence of a man who might have been Theo’s father, the car that swung suddenly around the corner—which of these made Theo remember, at last? Which made him look up at his mother and gravely announce, “My dad flew.”

  Standing next to her, lost, confused, Mark heard her breath rush in.

  “That time he died, remember?” Theo said. Mark looked at him now. Theo was frowning, laboring. He was working to call it up. “When my dad flew?”

  And Eva sank to him suddenly, grasped his head, kissed him twice. “Oh, darling,” she said. “Yes! Yes he flew.” Her voice was thick with sorrow, alive with love for his memory.

  “Like an angel, didn’t he?” she said. “He flew.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  CLEANLY, SHARPLY, his ankle broke. He heard it and felt it.

  Up until the second it happened, he had thought he wouldn’t fall, that he’d be able to catch himself, to hold on to the limb he was slipping from. He had been pruning, late in the afternoon, cutting off the low-hanging tree branches that were encroaching at the edge of a small vineyard he managed on a hillside above St. Helena. He had been sitting too precariously, as it turned out, on the branch he was sawing off. Now he was half lying on the ground below the tree.

  Though his ankle hurt, he was surprised it didn’t hurt more, that it was a pain he could bear. No, what was flooding his mind, even as he lay there waiting for the first wave of pain to ease, were images of how amazingly inconvenient this was going to be. Driving. Working. A big how? loomed. It can’t be, he thought.

  Maybe it was just a sprain. When the first pain had ebbed, he struggled to get up, keeping his weight on his good foot. His hands were muddy, his pants damp. He tried shifting his weight onto the other foot, his injured one, and knew instantly he was in trouble. It hurt like a sonofabitch. It was already swelling, he could feel it. There was no question of even hobbling to the truck.

  He was standing at the edge of the vineyard, near a small stream that was running freely with thick brown water. It was dusk, perhaps a little after dusk, and he probably shouldn’t have been in the tree by himself out here in the first place.

  He tried hopping. The jounce sent the pain shooting into his ankle. And the ground was treacherous—too uneven to try getting around this way in any case. The truck was maybe sixty feet away, he had walked over here in a matter of seconds, a few strides; but it was going to take him a long time to get back to it. Gingerly, grimacing, he got down again to his hands and knees.

  The earth was wet and rocky. His pants soaked through instantly. His hands and knees were chilled and wet. His ankle, dragging, shot pain when he slid that leg. Placing his knees was difficult, there were so many rocks. It was cold out, but he was very quickly in a sweat: fear of the pain, the pain itself, the effort it took to move forward slowly. He had to stop every three or four feet to let his body get ready to be hurt again, and it was dark—night—by the time he straightened his back and pulled himself to a standing position by his truck, holding on to the door handle. It had taken him almost an hour to get here.


  He opened the cab and pulled himself up, using the steering wheel. In the seat, he slowly turned, moving his legs in. He sat there for some moments. He was so grateful to be in this familiar space—a kind of home—that he almost wept. He rested his head on his arms while he considered his next move.

  He couldn’t drive, that was clear. The foot and ankle were huge now and throbbing with pain. They were going to have to cut his boot off to treat him. Or he hoped they would. The idea they might slide it off came briefly to him in an image too excruciating to think about. In any case, he couldn’t use his foot on the accelerator. He reached for the car phone and called Gracie.

  Half an hour later, he was lying across the cab with his hurt leg elevated through the open window on the passenger side, his jacket resting under his calf where it touched the door. The emergency lights were blinking steadily, the engine was on, the heat high, and the radio, turned on softly, was bringing him news of Noriega’s surrender, in Panama. He had unlaced his boot, and that had eased the pressure on his foot slightly.

  Suddenly Gracie was there, in the passenger’s-side window by his foot. She smiled in at him. She was wearing no makeup, and her big face looked girlish and sweet and infinitely welcome to him.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey, yourself. You look entirely too comfortable for a man who just interrupted my dinner preparations.”

  “Well, I’m not, if that makes it any better.”

  “What’s the plan?” she said.

  “I don’t know. You’re the one who used to be a nurse. You tell me. The hospital, I guess.”

  She was looking at the foot. “This mother’s big, huh?”

  “It is. It’s a big foot. Big-foot syndrome.”

  She touched his ankle, delicately. Her face was concentrated, thoughtful. She looked up. “You’re sure it’s broken.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “ ’Cause even a sprain could swell up like this.”

  “No, it’s broken. I heard it. I felt it.”

  She was shaking her head, smiling ruefully. “Markie, Markie, Markie,” she said.

  “Help me out here, Gracie.”

  “Okay. I’ll come around that side, and you try to get yourself up. We’ll go in my car, I think, so you can lie in back and keep it elevated.”

  “Okay,” he said. He smiled. “Boss.”

  She disappeared, and he began, as slowly as he could, to pull his foot in, to sit up, to bring the leg over to the driver’s side and turn his body to the front. Gracie was behind him now, he heard her through the closed window. “Tell me when I can open the door.”

  “Okay,” he said, and she did. He leaned forward. The night air was cold. His jacket had fallen out the window on the passenger side, and he told her this. She went around the truck again and retrieved it while he pushed the button to roll that window up, while he cut the engine.

  It was silent suddenly, the sounds gone—the hum of the heater, the ticking rhythm of the warning lights, the muted radio.

  Gracie was there again. “Let me get my backseat set while you maneuver out of there,” she said. “I’ll use the coat for a cushion again. Mine too.” She moved away, struggling out of her jacket.

  He was already feeling the increased pressure of the blood in his foot now that he’d lowered it. He turned completely, dangling his legs out the side of the truck, and then dropped down onto his good foot. “Christ!” he said, bending over in shock.

  Gracie heard him. “Hold on, stay right there,” she called. When she came back, she lifted his arm around her shoulders and put her own arm around his waist. He could smell her hair, a Gracie smell. “Now use me like a crutch,” she said. “Stand on your good foot. Then all your weight on me and swing yourself forward. I’m a big dame, remember. Lean on me. We’ll go slow.”

  She was big, and she didn’t buckle under his weight, but she grunted loudly with every step. It took six to get him to the open back door of her car. Then she stepped away from him and he laboriously crawled in. When he was on his back, wedged half sitting against the far door, she put his coat and her own, rolled up, on the seat. He stretched his leg out and rested it on them.

  “You’re an angel,” he said, as they pulled away.

  “Not by a long shot, sweetie,” she said. “But it’s fine for you to pretend to think so.”

  At the hospital, he waited.

  He waited in a wheelchair in the emergency room with Gracie for his ankle to be X-rayed, and then, when the break had been revealed and discussed, he waited for the cast. He’d been drugged by then, though, and he was lying down in relative comfort in a space made private by curtains hanging from a curved track that encircled his bed. Outside this space, beyond it, he could hear the noises of other accidents, other catastrophes. Gracie sat in a chair next to him. When he came up from his doze, she set aside the copy of People magazine she’d brought from the waiting room, and smiled at him.

  “What did I interrupt?” he asked.

  “I told you. Dinner. Well, dinner preparations.”

  “But what were you having? Let me imagine it.” Gracie was a famously good cook.

  “Pork. A little roast. A nice pasta dish with white beans and wilted escarole. That was the plan anyway. Duncan’ll have to have a sandwich, I guess.”

  “He’ll survive.” As soon as he’d said it, he worried that she would have heard his dislike of Duncan in his tone, in the remark itself.

  “Oh, that’s not the issue,” she said.

  “What is the issue?” He sat up a little more. “What issue?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. She made a face, an odd shape with her mouth: I don’t want to talk about it. “I was going to fix a nice dinner, that’s all. Something’s up, with Duncan. One of those … bumps, in matrimony.”

  “Ah, those,” he said. He sank back on his pillow.

  She grinned at him. “So well known to you, my darling.”

  He smiled weakly. It seemed to him that he drifted off for a while. When he came back, his mouth was dry. He licked his lips. “What kind of bump?” he said.

  She looked up from the magazine. “Damned if I know,” she said. “Just, something’s up. He’s gone far, far away from little me.” She rolled her eyes, but he could hear the worry in her voice. “I mean, the guy is unreadable anyway. But now it’s like—he’s unreadable in another fucking language.”

  He laughed. And then sobered. After a minute, he asked, “An affair, you think?”

  She sighed. “Maybe. Maybe something exactly that trite.”

  “It never feels trite when you’re in the midst.”

  There was a silence. Mark shut his eyes.

  “Didn’t it, Mark? Didn’t you know how dumb it was, how little it mattered, really?” He looked at her. She was earnestly asking.

  “I didn’t,” he said. He was thinking of Amy, of how much he had wanted her, while never not loving Eva. He closed his eyes again. After a while, he said, “If it is an affair, Gracie, what will you do?”

  She pulled her chin in and stared at him. “Do?” she asked. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, will you leave him?”

  “Why would I leave him? I love him.”

  “You left him before.”

  She smiled. “I love him better now.” She turned back to her magazine.

  Mark drifted off, woke again. “So what will you do?” he asked.

  “I will not know, darling. I will assiduously not know, something you didn’t allow Eva.” She started to read again.

  “You would rather not know?” he asked.

  “Are you serious?” Now she folded the magazine and set it down. “Why should I want to know?”

  “Because. To love someone, you need to know them.”

  “I know him. I know Duncan.” She smiled ruefully. “That’s hard enough. I don’t need to know everything he does, too.”

  “But how can you love him—really love him—how can you say you do, if you don’t know everything he
does?”

  “I know him,” she protested. “I know his … capacity. His capacities. I know what he’s capable of.”

  Mark thought for a while. He thought of Gracie and Duncan, and himself and Eva. He said, “But what if he wanted you to know?”

  “Why would he want that?”

  He felt almost dizzy from the drug, but he struggled to say what he meant. “So you would know him.”

  “But I do know him, I just said that.”

  “But he might feel you didn’t, unless you knew certain things about him.”

  “He would be wrong then. He would be, I would say, indulging himself.”

  Mark lay still, resting. His eyes closed and opened, closed and opened. Some time passed. Someone dropped something metallic outside the curtain and loudly defamed all the members of the holy family.

  He could feel Gracie lean forward. He turned to focus on her. She was resting her arms on the bed. She said, “Look, Mark, we know we were talking about you and Eva. I’m not saying you meant to hurt her or you were deliberately cruel. But don’t you think that what you did, finally, was selfish? Oh, I don’t mean the sleeping around. We all know that was selfish.” Her head bobbed in agreement with herself. “But you wanted some fucking drama, of estrangement and reconciliation. You wanted some recognition of your drama. Of what you had renounced or something.” She sat back. “But sometimes happiness is … less dramatic than that. Is just keeping your mouth shut and making the pork and pasta for dinner. Is putting one foot in front of the other and going forward, day after day.” She caught at a strand of hair that had pulled loose from her clip. “Is a kind of preemptive forgiveness, I suppose, that doesn’t need the drama of the instance.”