Lost in the Forest (2 page)

He could feel Emily’s gaze on him, and he looked at her. She was frowning—her dark eyebrows made fierce lines. She shook her head. “We can’t … we shouldn’t … talk about it now.” She gestured at Theo, sitting between them, watching them soberly.

Mark nodded. After another long moment he said, “But at some point it will be revealed.”

“Yeah,” she said. She turned away, and when he looked over again, he saw that she and Daisy were holding hands. What the
hell was going on? Daisy’s mouth hung open stupidly, as though she’d been sucker punched.

They drove in near-total silence the whole way to his house. Everyone’s eyes stayed devoutly on the road, as though the familiar scenes rolling past—the valley as it widened out and spread the fall colors of its vineyards before them, the deep green of the hills riding along above it all—were some new and fascinating nature movie. Once Daisy said in a near-whisper, “Are those pills supposed to knock her out or something?” and Emily shrugged. That was it.

Knock
who
out?
Not Eva
, he thought. He imagined her, his ex-wife—small, dark, quick moving, graceful. Her sudden sexy smile. Not Eva.

Above Calistoga, he turned in at the unmarked dirt road to his house. There were sparse, newly planted vineyards on either side of it. He had to swerve and dance the truck to avoid the ruts. He could feel Theo’s weight swing against his side. After about a quarter of a mile, he pulled into his driveway and then up onto the cement pad where one day he planned to build a garage.

As soon as he cut the engine, they could hear the dogs barking in the house. The children started to unbuckle their seat belts, and he swung himself out of the truck. He began to gather their possessions from the back. They came and stood behind him—silent, oddly passive, waiting for their things to be put into their hands.

He led the way. When he opened the back door, the dogs shot out and started jumping around, abruptly quieted by their joy in being released. Their heavy tails whacked everyone.

Theo made a little noise of terror and delight and stepped between Mark’s legs, gripping his thighs. Mark put his hands on the boy’s narrow shoulders, and was instantly startled.

Why? Why did it feel so strange to touch the little boy?

Perhaps because he had anticipated the way the girls felt when they were Theo’s size, when he had loved to touch them, to hold them. Theo’s body was wiry and tense, utterly unlike theirs at the same age. It felt hot with energy.

“It’s okay, big guy,” Mark said gently. “They like you. They like kids like you.”

Theo looked up at Mark, wide-eyed and alarmed. “They would like to
eat
me?” he asked. He was lighter-haired, lighter-skinned than the girls, and this difference somehow struck Mark as sad.

“No, no, no,” Mark said. “They like to lick you, and play with you. You’ll see. They’re nice.”

He squatted by Theo and held his own hand out to Fanny to be licked. When Theo imitated him after a moment, Fanny’s long, rough tongue came out and stroked the boy’s hand too. He snatched his arm back and jigged a little in fear and pleasure, a prancey running in place. He wore miniature red high-top sneakers. His striped socks had slid down almost entirely into them. One of his knees was thickly scabbed.

Emily and Daisy had disappeared immediately into the house, to put their things away, Mark assumed. He stood up. Theo grabbed his hand, and walked right next to Mark, into the kitchen, through it, virtually riding his left leg and talking all the while to the dogs: “No bite me! Bad dog! Bad, bad dog! No bite!”

Mark was feeling a rising, irritated frustration, which he didn’t want to focus on the little boy. He gestured across the living room, toward the back of the house. “Let’s go figure out what everyone’s up to, shall we?”

Theo looked up at Mark. “Yah,” he answered.

Theo shadowed him to the doorway of the back room. The girls’ beds nearly filled its narrow space. It was dark and underwatery in here—the one window faced out into an overgrown evergreen shrub, which Mark kept meaning to prune, and hadn’t. The light that filtered through it was weak and greenish. Daisy was carefully spreading her unzipped bag out on her bed, as she always did. This was her strategy to avoid making it, a chore she hated. Emily was already lying down, one arm under her head, staring out the window at nothing. Ignoring him, Mark felt.

“A word with you, Em?” he said, his voice carefully neutral.

Both girls looked at him. They seemed startled, like sleepers
he’d wakened. He turned to his younger daughter. “Daze, could you keep an eye on Theo for a minute? He’s scared of the dogs.”

She nodded.

“I
not
scared,” Theo was instantly shrilling. “I a big boy. I not scared.”

As Mark and Emily stepped toward the doorway, Daisy, who had flopped down onto her bed, was starting a game: “How big
are
you, Theo? Big as a … 
lion
?”

“Yes!” the boy cried.

As soon as Mark shut the door to his room, Emily sat down heavily at the foot of his rumpled bed and said, “Oh, Daddy, it’s John. John’s dead.” Her face twisted, and tears immediately began sliding down it, as though she’d been waiting until this moment to allow herself her full measure of grief.

“What do you mean?” John was Eva’s husband, the girls’ step-father. Theo’s father.

“He’s dead, Daddy.” Her hands came to her face now and covered her opened mouth. She inhaled sharply through her fingers, and then closed her eyes. “He got hit … by a car. A car hit him.”

Mark pictured it. He pictured it wrong, as it turned out, but he saw John then—his large body, bloody, slumped behind the wheel of his ruined car. He saw him dead, though he still didn’t believe it.

Mark sat down next to his daughter and held her, and she wept quietly and thoroughly, as he couldn’t remember her weeping since he had told her he was moving out—long shuddering inhalations, and then a gentle high keening as her inheld breath came out. From the other bedroom he could hear Theo shrieking, “Bad! Bad!” and Daisy’s voice trying to distract him.

“Sweetheart, it’s okay. Cry, cry,” he said. And then he said, “Shhh.”

Though he was still thinking of John, still trying to take it in, he was also aware of thinking that it felt good, holding Emily. And of wondering when he had last held her, her or Daisy. He couldn’t remember.

When she had calmed down a little, he stretched away from her
to grab the box of tissues from the stand by the bed. She blew loudly, using several, and wiped her face. His shirt was wet where she had leaned against him.

“How did it happen?” he asked at last, keeping his voice gentle. “When?”

She seemed stricken again at the question, her eyes swam and grew larger, but she held on and whispered back, “This afternoon. A car just … hit him.”

Mark cleared his throat. “He was driving?”

“No.” Her hair swung as she shook her head. “Walking. With Eva and Theo.”

“Jesus. They were
with
him?”

“Yes. In St. Helena, on that busy corner when you come into town. Just … I guess the guy was just driving too fast and he didn’t see them.”

They sat together. There was a mirror above the wide bureau they were facing, and Mark watched Emily in it, her reversed face somehow older than her seventeen years, foreign to him.

“Your mom is okay, though,” he said after a moment.

She nodded. Then stopped. “Well, she’s all doped up actually. Actually that’s why we had to come here.” Her voice had gotten practical again. “She’s a mess.”

“But … unhurt.”

“Unhurt.” She snorted wetly. “Yeah,” she said, and then keened again.

“Honey, honey,” he said, rocking her against him.

“How can stuff like this happen, Dad?” she whispered against his chest. “John … John was so good. He was so nice.”

John was good. He was nice. This is what Mark had thought from the first time he’d met him—that Eva had found herself a nice man. He had felt some pain about this, some sense of loss, but also relief. If Eva held on to him, if she married him, it would make everything better. John would take care of her; he would ease everything that was hard in her life. She wouldn’t be so angry, so closed away. Things might actually improve between the two of them.

And that’s how it had happened. Eva had married John, five years earlier. And a couple years later, she’d gotten pregnant with Theo.

Mark remembered discovering that. He had come by to get the girls one summer day. When he pulled up, Eva was kneeling in the garden, weeding—the basket next to her overflowed with bright green tufts of this and that. She sat back on her haunches when she saw him, and then, laboriously, slowly, she stood up. She had on worn faded denim overalls with a T-shirt underneath, and a large straw hat with a curvy brim, a flowered band around the crown. Her dark hair was tucked up into the hat, but curling strands looped down at her neck, her ears. Her feet were bare, small and tanned and slender. He noticed all this. Then she put her hands on her hips and arched her back slightly. He recognized the gesture instantly from her pregnancies with the girls; and that made him aware, suddenly, of what he hadn’t noticed before: the downdrooping heaviness of her belly pulling against the overalls.

The world shifted for him. He knew he’d lost her. He understood that, and only then understood also that he hadn’t truly known until now that he would. And while he was registering this, feeling the confusion of these thoughts, he was also aware of the sharp, keen bite of wanting her anew.

He was careful to give no sign of any of this. After only a few seconds’ pause, he continued up the walk, and when she smiled, that dazzling, sleepy smile—a mark of pregnancy too: he should have remembered—and asked him how he was, he lied. He told her in his steadiest voice,
Fine, fine
.

“Poor little Theo,” he said now to Emily. “Does he realize, do you think?”

“I don’t think so.” She sat still for a moment, her lips slightly parted, breathing through her mouth. “Well.” She looked at him. “Yes. He sorta does. He told me John had gone away, that his daddy was gone, a car hit him.” Her mouth firmed. “But that doesn’t mean he understands anything.”

“No,” he said.

She blew her nose again. They sat together glumly, looking at themselves in the mirror, looking at the closed bedroom door next to it. The dogs were barking again.

“And what about Daze?” he asked. “She seems pretty lifeless.”

Emily sighed. “She’s just not talking.”

“That’s what I mean.”

“Well, that’s just the way Daisy
is
, Daddy.”

And he realized, suddenly, that he knew this about his younger daughter. He knew that Daisy sank into torpor, into silence, when she was overwhelmed. Even after the divorce, when she was so little—only five—she’d been that way: too quiet, absent, unresponsive. He’d tried to make a joke of it sometimes, tapping lightly with his knuckles on her head. “Hello, hello. Anybody home at Daisy’s? Anybody in there?”

“So how long will you stay, do you think?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Gracie was over and she suggested it, ’cause Mom is like, out of control. She said she’d phone you.”

Gracie was Eva’s closest friend, called on to witness every celebration, to help at every tragedy. When he and Eva split up, it was Gracie’s presence at their house that let him know it was final. She’d answered the door when he came over hoping to talk to Eva, and when she saw him, she said, “You! You dim-witted asshole!” and slammed the door, before he could speak.

They were friends again now. They’d even joked sometimes, before Gracie got married, about getting together themselves—a safe joke, he thought, since neither was even slightly attracted to the other.

“Let’s figure this out then,” he said to Emily, hoping to appeal to her organizational strengths. “Where do you think Theo should sleep?”

“I don’t know. He still has a crib at home.”

“Ah!”

“But he can climb out anyway, so he usually sleeps with someone else.”

“Who? Eva?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes John and Eva, sometimes me or Daze.” She shrugged. “It’s like he chooses different people for different reasons at different times.” She made a face. “Sometimes he sleeps in the hall. On the floor. You have to be careful not to
trip
on him if you get up in the night.”

He had a vision of this suddenly, the little boy asleep with a blanket on the floor. Emily in her nightgown stepping around him. The routine of this, the jokes that would be made in the morning. All that was settled and domestic in his children’s lives, all that he hadn’t been able to hold on to for their sakes. He said, “Maybe he should stay in with me. I’ve got the biggest bed.”

Someone knocked on the door. Daisy called, “Dad, the dogs are going crazy out here.”

Mark got up. At the door he turned back to Emily. “You okay for now?”

She seemed better. Less blank, less turned in. She looked away from her own reflection and up at him. She nodded.

“Well, come help me out with this three-ring circus then.”

She stood and sighed, put-upon, as she followed him.

A
DEATH IN THE FAMILY
. That’s what he said when he called Marianne to cancel their evening, feeling that he was somehow using it, falsifying it, even though there was nothing in it that wasn’t true.

Her voice changed instantly—falsely too, he felt—to sympathy and concern. “Oh, Mark, I’m so sorry. Who?”

There was a little pause after he said, “The children’s stepfather,” and he felt he had to explain. He said, “They were very close to him,” though he realized he didn’t really know if this was the case.

They arranged to talk in a couple of days, when things straightened out a little. “I can’t wait to see you, babe,” he said, before he pushed the button to disconnect them.

Mark had taken the telephone into the back hallway, off the
kitchen, to make the call. While he talked, he’d been looking out the window at his truck, drained of color in the deepening twilight, at the shadowy shapes of the dogs padding around in the driveway, at the blackened fig tree and the looming, dark shed, the tractors parked beyond it: the familiar elements of the world he’d made for himself when he lost Eva and the girls.