Lost in the Forest (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

by Sue Miller

  He was shaking his head. “But it’s the particular, the instance that …”

  “That what?”

  “Needs forgiveness.”

  “No, no, no, no, no. It’s the particular person that needs forgiveness. You.” She tapped his chest. “You, you sorry son of a bitch. Not so much what you did, but that you did it.”

  “I’m too tired for this, Gracie. I don’t get it.”

  She sighed. “Oh, forget it anyway,” she said. “You’re a good person, Mark. You just keep barking up the wrong trees. And mostly I’m talking about Duncan anyway. And Duncan and I are going to be fine.”

  The next time he rose from his druggy sleep, they didn’t talk. She insisted on reading him a short article on Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, on their ideal relationship, distant and close at the same time.

  IT WAS GRACIE who thought of having the girls come and live with him for the rest of the time Emily was home on her Christmas break. He didn’t know what she said to them, he didn’t know whether she had to pressure them or whether they came willingly, but they showed up the next day, in his truck, which they’d retrieved—Emily was driving. They carried in suitcases and their backpacks and the bags of groceries Gracie had helped them buy. He would never have asked them—he probably wouldn’t even have thought of it—but he was grateful for their arrival, for their noise and attention.

  Still, it made him feel his life was not his own. And that feeling only intensified when, on Sunday night, he called Angel, who’d been his work boss for six years, and asked for his help. The next day, Angel pulled into Mark’s driveway in his old Chevrolet and parked. Mark hobbled out and they both got into the truck, Angel in the driver’s seat.

  And that was how they worked it. Angel drove him to client meetings, to get supplies, from vineyard to vineyard, to the wineries. At first, Mark tried to get out of the truck at the vineyards, he tried to move around at each site to see what the issues and problems were; but it was clear that this wasted everyone’s time. So after the first day, it was Angel who got out, who checked the work and reported to him as he sat in the truck. Mark asked questions, he made suggestions and requests, and then Angel walked back out into the vineyards and passed the orders along. This meant Mark lost the use of his best worker, which was an enormous loss, but Angel had called down to his hometown in Mexico and found him two extra workers, second or third cousins of his, who would be up in a week or so. In the meantime, work was a little slow anyway. If he’d had to pick a season to break his ankle, Mark thought, the only better one would have been late fall—November and December.

  It seemed to him as though he ought to come home at the end of the day with almost as much energy as he’d had when he started it since he’d done nothing but sit on his ass the whole time, but he was exhausted when Angel dropped him off each night and he hobbled in. And so he was glad for the girls, for their noisy presence in the kitchen, for the food they made, even for their arguments and routines at dinner.

  After they’d cleaned the kitchen, they went their separate ways. Emily almost always went out. Sometimes with female friends, sometimes with a young man, but either way, she left. For Daisy, school had started again after the Christmas break. Every weekday night, she spread her books on the dining room table and worked, talking only occasionally to Mark. For the first couple of nights, Mark watched TV with the volume turned low, but he could tell this bothered her, so finally he turned it off and read, slowly but with some pleasure, a novel Eva had sent over with the girls, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, one of a box she’d put together for him. She’d tucked a note into it, on top. “Now that you have so much time on your hands, maybe there’s enough to work your way through these. I think you’ll like them.”

  Eva. He was almost grateful for the accident because it made a sensible context for her kindness to him. Her pity, as he felt it. He couldn’t forget her hand on his arm in consolation in the moment before Theo spoke of John and she knelt, so grateful and excited to have John remembered as he’d been, even as he’d been, dying; to have Theo begin finally to grasp what it was he’d lost.

  “Like an angel.” She’d said this, of John, and Mark had understood by her voice, by her eagerness and joy, that she still loved John. That anything he could offer her would simply not be of enough importance, of enough use to her.

  FOR THE NEXT week and a half, until Emily went back to Wesleyan, the girls had a kind of routine. Eva or Gracie helped them, writing out shopping lists, making suggestions for meals when they ran out of ideas. Only once were things thrown off, when Daisy arrived late one afternoon after a basketball practice, and Emily had to do everything herself. He heard from Emily about this, partly because she was going out that evening. He tried to excuse Daisy.

  “Dad,” she said. “This is not a little late.”

  “Well, maybe she had trouble getting a ride home.” They were already eating—grilled mozzarella cheese sandwiches with tapenade and basil leaves, and a soup Gracie had brought over.

  “She said she had a ride. She was supposed to have arranged everything ahead of time. She could have called, at least.”

  “Well, it’s not as though it killed you, Em. Gracie made the soup.”

  “That’s not the point, Dad.”

  “What is the point, then?”

  “Just, she said she’d be here.”

  He looked at her, her pretty small face, so full of indignation now. Maybe they shouldn’t have gotten her the braces, he thought. They made everything about her too regular: the pretty dark eyes, the perfect small nose, the even, straight teeth. “You’re not her mother, Emily,” he said. “Don’t get all bent out of shape.”

  “But you are her father, aren’t you? Why aren’t you at least a little bent out of shape?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it just doesn’t matter that much to me.”

  “Well, it should.”

  Should it? he wondered. Was this something Eva would have worried about, would have felt required discussion? Or even, perhaps, punishment?

  It was going on seven when Daisy showed up. He was reading and Emily was already gone, picked up by the guy she seemed to have settled on to amuse her on this visit home. George somebody. He seemed years younger than Emily to Mark: a goofy kid with running shoes as big as milk cartons on his feet, and a strange dent in his hair that Mark assumed was from a baseball cap.

  He hadn’t heard Daisy’s approach; she was just suddenly there, letting herself in at the front door. The dogs, startled out of sleep, barked halfheartedly.

  “Hey,” he said, when she stepped into the hall.

  She was flushed. Her long hair was wild, tangled. She looked sexual to him, her lips reddened from the cold. “Hey, Dad,” she said. “Sorry I’m late.” She turned away, taking her jacket off. The dogs had padded over to her and were milling around, hoping for attention.

  “Yeah, we missed you at dinner. Em left a sandwich for you.”

  “Oh. I could have made it.”

  “Well, she was already doing ours.”

  She went into the dining room and set her books on the table.

  “I didn’t hear the car,” he called.

  “Oh. Well. Natalie dropped me at the road, and I walked in from there. She was in a big hurry.”

  “I see.”

  Daisy went into the kitchen, the dogs following. He heard the clunk of dishes. The refrigerator door opened. In a few minutes, she appeared in the living room, carrying a plate and a glass of milk.

  “Emily was pretty pissed,” he said. “She left the dishes for you.”

  “I saw.” She sat down opposite him, set her plate on the coffee table, and picked up her sandwich. The dogs were sitting at her feet. They watched her hand, holding her food, with rapt attention.

  “How was practice?” he asked.

  She shrugged. The long strands of cheese stretched from her mouth to the sandwich, and she didn’t answer until she had broken them off and brought the ends to her mouth. “Ok
ay,” she said, chewing.

  “He’s working you pretty hard, for a girls’ high school team.”

  She chewed a moment more, and swallowed. “We don’t mind.”

  In the night, he waked. Something had broken into his sleep. For a minute he thought it was Emily, arriving home—some noise outside—but that wasn’t it. It was inside, somewhere in the house. His door was shut, but he sat up in bed and listened, hard.

  It was weeping. One of his daughters was weeping. It must have been Daisy—he was pretty sure Emily wasn’t back yet. He sat and listened. He thought perhaps he should go to her, and then decided he shouldn’t. The weeping, or his ability to hear it, was intermittent. After a while, it stopped, and he lay down again and went back to sleep.

  At some point later, a car waked him. He looked at the clock. It was two-thirty. He lay there awhile, and then he had to take a piss. He sat up and grabbed the crutches, made his way to the bathroom in the dark. There was a small, high window next to the toilet, opening out onto the driveway and the backyard—the cement pad, the shed, the fig tree. After he flushed, he turned his head and looked out through it. He could see the car, George Somebody’s car. The windows were silvery with fog. Shapes moved inside, they pushed rhythmically against the driver’s-side window. Mark knew he should turn away, but he didn’t. He stood leaning on his crutches and watched for a while, feeling a response that combined arousal and shame.

  These were his daughters’ lives, their real lives. The deep, submerged nighttime world of love and pain and sex. And he knew nothing at all about it. Nothing. Where had he been living? Why hadn’t he understood any of this before? Or cared to understand?

  He’d left it to John, he thought. All of this. Because he didn’t want to understand this. Because he wouldn’t have known—because he didn’t know—how to be a father to them through all this. That was it, wasn’t it? It was why he had stayed in bed when Daisy was weeping, why he couldn’t begin to imagine what she was weeping about. It was why he was standing here in a kind of prurient shock, watching Emily fuck this unattractive idiot.

  When they were little, when it was easy to love them, he had loved his daughters. He’d entered their games, he’d roughhoused with them, he’d been tender to them. He’d loved being their father then. But now, now that they were young women, he felt confused about how to do it, not ready yet to be a parent to them.

  “Not ready,” he muttered as he turned away from the window, full of contempt for himself.

  THE NEXT Saturday night, he and Daisy went to Eva’s house—Emily was out on her last date with George. Eva was having a small party, what she called a post-holiday party. Gracie and Duncan, and Maria and Fletcher were there, and several of Eva’s neighbors had been invited too—the Bauers, the Fields.

  When they arrived, Eva asked Daisy to help serve wine and drinks, and she began to move in and out of the butler’s pantry, carrying glasses to the adults. She was wearing a white blouse and a black skirt and heels—high heels. She had lipstick on, which he’d noted in the car on the way over. She looked years older than she usually did. And lovely, he would have said. Somehow the stillness, the heaviness that had seemed part of who she was when she was younger had lifted, who knew how or why. Now a kind of nervous animation livened her face, made it striking.

  Everyone was milling around, greeting one another, talking about their holidays. There was much discussion too of the Fields’ dog, a chocolate lab, who had had puppies three days before. Naomi Field invited Theo to come over and see them, and somehow, within the first fifteen minutes or so of the party, it was decided that the whole group would make a pilgrimage. Mark, who had just laboriously made his way up the front steps, who had gratefully sunk into one of Eva’s overstuffed chairs, leaning his crutches against its arm, who had just been served a drink, shook his head no when Eva ducked back in to the living room to ask if he wasn’t coming along.

  She raised her eyebrows at him.

  “It’s just too much work, Eva.” He held his hands up: This. Me. Life.

  “Okay,” she said. She left.

  He heard them all troop out the kitchen door; he heard their voices and laughter crossing the backyard. He sat back in his chair and drank his wine. The living room was picked up for the party, the usual books and objects put away somewhere. Eva’s tree was still up, by the front windows. It was strung with small white lights, and decorated, as always, with old small toys of the children’s—tiny stuffed animals and dolls, little cars. He remembered the ritual of decoration, and Eva’s insistence on certain ways of doing things. It had irritated him occasionally. Now he felt sorry for himself for having lost this, too.

  When they returned, they stayed in the kitchen with Eva, talking, as people often did at her house while she cooked and assembled the meal. They had forgotten him. He’d have to get up and go in there in a minute. He heard someone in the butler’s pantry behind him again, opening the small refrigerator there. Daisy, no doubt. It wasn’t Eva. She was still in the kitchen—he could hear her talking.

  And then he heard Duncan’s voice behind him too, in the butler’s pantry, pitched low, for Daisy alone to hear. “Perhaps you could pour me a glass of gin while you’re pouring. Gin lightly touched with vermouth.”

  There was what sounded like a too-long silence. Then Daisy said, “Well, perhaps I could. But would I? Will I?” Her voice was light, teasing.

  Mark was electrified, suddenly.

  “Let me rephrase, then,” Duncan said. “Under what conditions would you consent to pour me a glass of gin, Daisy, my dove?”

  After a moment, Daisy said slowly, “Well, first of all, you’d have to say please.”

  Mark’s heart was pounding. But why? None of this was so remarkable. Daisy had spoken in something like this slightly snotty way even to him.

  “Ah, how could I have forgotten?” There was a silence, and Mark had the conviction—he would have sworn it—that Duncan was touching Daisy. “Please.” This was spoken softly, like a caress. “Please, Daisy.”

  Daisy was almost whispering when she answered him: “And then you’d have to say, ‘Pretty please.’ ” There was something so sexual, so breathless, and to Mark, so horrifying in this that his hands lifted involuntarily.

  Duncan’s voice was low too when it came, intimate. “Pretty please, Daisy.” Mark waited for a long moment. “Pretty please,” Duncan said. “Will you?”

  Mark was up before he thought about it, and in his sudden motion, he knocked his crutches off the edge of the chair where he’d leaned them. They clattered to the floor. He picked them up laboriously, and set them under his arms. By the time he’d hobbled around the corner, there was no one in the butler’s pantry; and when he entered the kitchen, Daisy was standing with her back to him, filling Naomi Field’s wineglass from the bottle she carried, and Duncan was leaning against the counter, seemingly listening to Gracie talking to Harry Field.

  “Oh, Mark! What you missed!” Eva cried, spotting him. “They were adorable! Enough to make you believe in the possibility of perfection in this life.”

  His heart was still pounding in his ears, his breath still felt short, but he smiled at his ex-wife and said, “Well, that’s something I’d like to believe in. I’m sorry to have missed it, then.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  DAISY AND MARK were the first to leave—he was tired, he said, and Daisy didn’t mind, she was ready to go. They drove in silence, Daisy at the wheel of the truck, laboriously shifting when she had to. She was glad to get out of St. Helena so she could just drive.

  Her thoughts were jumbled, moving around fast, partly because of the two glasses of wine she’d had. She was thinking of the events of the evening. Of Duncan and the terrible fight they’d had a few days before. Then of his touch tonight, his hand moving up her leg under her skirt in the pantry—thank God they’d heard Mark in the living room and gotten out of there before he saw anything!

  She was thinking of something Andrea Bauer had said to her�
��that she looked ravishing tonight. Ravishing, Daisy thought, and smiled. Then she was thinking of the puppies, helpless and dependent, curled blindly together against their mother, and of how they smelled, sweet and slightly urinous, when she picked them up and held them. She was thinking of how glad she was that she no longer had to invent things to talk about with Mark. Of how she’d gotten used to being with him, these last few weeks. How she liked being with him, her handsome father. She looked over at him, and met his gaze, looking back. His face seemed sad, somehow. His hair was a little too long, curling over his collar.

  He said, “Know what I think, Daisy?”

  She smiled. “You know, Dad, I can’t say I do.”

  “I think we should make this arrangement permanent.”

  “What arrangement?”

  “This one. Where you live with me.”

  She was startled. It was inconceivable. Where was this coming from? She had a room, a life, at home. She stared at him for a few seconds. He was watching her steadily. “Have you talked to Eva about this?” she asked. “Is this something you guys worked out together?”

  “Not a word. I swear.” He seemed to be thinking for a moment. He said, “But would that be so bad, if Eva and I were concerned about you? Talked about you?”

  “But why would you be concerned about me?”

  “Why.” His voice was toneless.

  She looked over at him. “Yes. Duh. Why?”

  Again that steady gaze back. He didn’t say anything. Then he looked away from her, out the window. His hand came up, his chin rested on it. His crutches, riding between them, had slid over and were resting on her arm, she was suddenly aware of their touch.

  “I mean, I’m doing fine in school. I help out at the store.”

  He said, without looking at her, “There were the piano lessons.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  So Eva had told him. They had talked.