Lost in the Forest (29 page)

“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.”

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.

I
T 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.

F
OR 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. “Okay,” 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.