Lost in the Forest (3 page)

When he turned back into the kitchen, Daisy startled him, standing as she was in its bright light between the cooktop and the island, everything about her frozen, observant, as though she’d been there a long time. He smiled at her, but her face didn’t change. “What’s up, Daze?” he asked, setting the phone in its cradle.

“I was going to ask you something,” she said.

“Yeah?”

She looked steadily at him. “But I forgot what it was.”

“Maybe it’ll come back to you,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” she said.

G
RACIE CALLED
after dinner. The kids were in front of the TV, watching an old video of
Time Bandits
and waiting for a cake they’d made together to finish baking, a project concocted by Emily when things began to seem a little aimless after dinner, when Theo started getting wild. For once Mark had been grateful to her for managing things, for being the adult, for getting Theo—and even somber Daisy—to help her decide what flavors the cake and icing should be, to measure the ingredients out.

“Mark!” Gracie cried. “I meant to come out when you stopped by to get the kids, but I couldn’t right then ’cause of Eva, and then you were gone. How’s it going?”

“We’re okay,” he said. He stepped again into the little hallway off the kitchen and lowered his voice. “How
is
Eva?”

Her voice lowered in response to his. “Oh,
God
, what a mess!” she said. “She’s finally asleep, I think, but she’s got enough stuff in her to knock out a Clydesdale.”

“She saw it happen, Emily told me.”

“My God, yes. Can you believe that? It’s just so unbelievable. The bastard came caroming around the corner and wham! he just sent John sailing, I guess. With Eva and Theo standing
right
there watching.” Her voice changed. “He hit the light post, you know.”

“No. Emily didn’t tell me that.”

“Well, she doesn’t know. I figured the girls didn’t need to hear every single horrible detail.”

“No,” he said. And then, thinking about it, “God, no.”

“Precisely,” she said. “I think he probably died right then.” Her voice had sailed off on these last few words, and she stopped abruptly. Then she whispered, “Just a sec.” The phone clunked. She stepped away, into a silence. After a minute or two, he heard her walking back, blowing her nose. She came on again. “Anyway,” she said hoarsely. “Afterward they still had to play out the sad scene where they
hold
him and the
am
bulance comes and all that.” Her throat made an odd clicking noise. “Oh, it’s just too horrible, isn’t it? You just don’t know what to say or do.”

“Gracie,” he said.

“Hold on,” she said. He could hear her blowing her nose again.

When she picked up the phone once more, he said, “It’s easier for me than you. I’ve got the kids here. I feel useful, in a way, fixing burgers for dinner, something as stupid as that.”

“I envy you.”

“I know. I don’t envy you.”

“I’m not complaining, Mark,” she said quickly. “She needs me. Eva.”

“I know.”

They let a silence gather on the line. Finally he said, “So you’re staying overnight?”

“Oh, at least. You can’t believe … I mean, I’d always thought, Eva, with the children … you know. Well, she was someone who always held it together for the kids.” She sighed. “Boy! Not this time.”

They arranged to talk again in the morning. He’d get the kids to day care and school. Or maybe he’d let the girls stay home.
He’d figure it out, what seemed best. He gave her the number of his car phone. She promised to call if anything changed.

When Mark got off the phone and was extracting the cake from the oven, he was thinking of Eva, weeping, hysterical. He had seen her like that more than a few times in the early days of their marriage, when they fought fiercely about things—about principles, it seemed to him now, recollecting it. She’d been that way for a while around the time of their breakup too. Once when he came to pick the children up for an overnight, he’d gone back to the house after he’d gotten them into the truck. He wanted to remind her of the time he planned to return them. But he stopped still in the doorway, unable to go farther. Somewhere inside, shut behind walls and doors in what she thought was privacy, Eva was wailing, the terrified, abandoned cries of a child, one shriek of pain after another, so loud and desperate that you couldn’t imagine how she had enough breath to go on.

And now she was suffering for John. For a moment he let sorrow flood him—a soft, virtuous sorrow that it took him only a few seconds to realize was as much somehow for himself as for Eva or John. This seemed so crazy, so wrongheaded—wrong-
hearted
—that he slammed the oven door to stop himself, and after a second Daisy’s terrified voice called out from the living room, “What happened? What was
that
?”

I
N THE NIGHT
, Mark woke. What woke him? Not Theo, who lay sound asleep where he’d wound up—jammed against Mark’s headboard, breathing phlegmily, his mouth open. Around the little boy were the stuffed animals he’d pulled out from his paper bag, one of whom, Miss Owl, Mark recognized as having been Daisy’s years before.

“That was mighty nice of you,” he’d said to her after he’d put Theo to bed, after they’d all said good night to him.

She had shrugged. “Not really,” she said. “I like seeing her, actually. She was living in a
box
, before.”

He’d looked at her, tall, gangly, and thought how odd it was that at one moment she could speak like this, as though she were still connected to the child who had believed in the
life
of her toys, and then a moment or two later gesture in a way that made her seem an adult, even sexual.

Before she’d gone to bed, she’d come into the kitchen again and said she’d remembered what she’d forgotten. “You know, what I wanted to ask you before.”

“Oh, yes. Shoot.”

“Where’s John? Where
is
he, now?”

And Mark had answered her wrong, he’d answered the child in her. “I really don’t know, Daze. It depends, I guess, on what you believe. If you believe in an afterlife—”

“No!” she said impatiently, shaking her head. “I mean where is
he
? Where is his
body
?” And her hand had swept down her own body in a dancer’s motion.

He’d stood there a moment, looking at her, fierce and utterly focused in a way he’d hardly ever seen her be. “I don’t know that either, Daze,” he said sadly.

He turned and lay on his back now. He’d left a living room lamp on because Theo was scared of the dark. His bedroom looked somehow disordered and unpleasant in this half-light.

After a few minutes, he became aware that he was timing his breathing with Theo’s. This perhaps accounted for the constricted feeling in his chest. But when he consciously regulated himself, when he forced himself to breathe at his own pace once more, he realized the constriction was his alone—that he was thinking of John, hurtling upward, upward, smashing into the post. Of Eva, watching, crying out. He swung his head from side to side on his pillow.

The last time he’d spoken to John had been maybe ten days earlier, an ordinary exchange: how’s it going? what have you been up to? John was a large man, big-boned and homely, with sandy hair and whitish eyelashes. He always looked a little sunburned, a little defenseless. When he asked Mark even the most banal
question, he seemed honestly to want to know; he would lean forward, frowning, to hear the answer. Mark often found himself responding at too-great length—he’d be bored himself by the time he was done. He was bored this time too, answering John, talking about his business, about the harvest—the crush—about how long his days were right now, about getting the grapes in at the right time, about overextending the crews.

But John had seemed as interested as he always did. He asked Mark more questions, he poured him another glass of wine.

This was on a Sunday in late September. Mark had stopped by to pick the girls up and walked in on a party, a lunch that had apparently gone on and on. It was in its last stages now—the table was littered with crumbs and stained with wine from earlier in the meal: the pale pinkish rings had softly expanded on the white cloth, the droplets were furred. The sun glinted low through the opened door and the air smelled dry and sweet.

Mark was greeted warmly. Another piece of apricot tart was cut for him, John filled his glass, he was introduced to everyone at the table. The girls, who had stood around for the first few minutes after he arrived, disappeared again once they realized he was staying awhile. After some minutes, you could hear the bass of their music thumping somewhere upstairs.

The conversation had resumed. The topic was books, literature, as it usually was at Eva and John’s house. One of the guests was a writer, someone who taught too, apparently. They were trying to ascertain how many of them had read Proust. Only two hands went up, Mark was relieved to see, since he hadn’t. One was John’s and one was the woman’s named Cynthia, the writer’s wife. And then, looking around, she said, “Well,
partway
, I must confess.”

Her husband asked if she would have confessed if everyone else
had
read it.

She laughed. She was attractive, Mark thought, in a nervous-looking, over-made-up way. “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” she said. “Or not.”

They wondered what it meant that so few of them had read Proust. They were fairly literate as a group. How many could there be, in the wide world of readers, if in this population so few had? They joked about it. Maybe seven? “Maybe
everyone
is a liar,” Eva said.

And so Mark had ended up, as he often did, talking to John. John, who seemed fully interested in Mark’s description of the variability in timing of the grapes’ ripening, of the possibility of cutting it too close. Of the problems of having too few workers now and too many around at other times. How could you know whether John even cared? You couldn’t. He was too nice.

A nice man. What had Eva said when Mark had used this word about him? When he’d said, after the first time he’d met John, “He seems genuinely nice”?

She hadn’t been looking at him, she was kneeling on the floor in front of Daisy, helping wedge her feet into red boots that were almost too small to go on over her shoes. “Yes, I thought I’d try
nice
this time,” she said. “I thought maybe I deserved it.”

Mark was standing above her. All he could see of her was the back of her head and the knobbed vulnerable curve of the white nape of her neck where her hair fell forward off it. But he knew by her voice, weighted with harsh accusation against him, how her face would have looked, and he hadn’t answered her.

He tried now to imagine John after the accident. Was his face damaged? His head? It must have been. How could it not? He imagined Eva kneeling, holding him. Eva, streaked with blood. He imagined himself, how he would have looked, lying there; and then Eva bending over him, wailing.

He was feeling, he recognized with a pinch of shame, an oddly intense interest in this scene, even a yearning for it, for the drama of it, for Eva’s panicked love. He lay there a long time, listening to his own uneven breathing, and under it Theo’s—steady, apparently dreamless, thick.

Chapter Two

I
T WASN’T UNTIL
months later that Eva could bear to think of it as a
process
, her grief. When people suggested it to her in the days and weeks after John’s death—
New Agey, sloppy people. Hateful people
, she thought—she was sometimes speechless in her sense of affront at the notion, as though they had unexpectedly slapped her. She wouldn’t, couldn’t think of this roil of pain that swept in and out of her life as having either a predictable shape or an end point. It seemed to her a monster she’d bedded, one she’d come to love in some way. When it was gone, when it decided on some days—whimsically, it seemed to her—not to be there, not to torment her, then she was tormented by that, by its very absence.

Sometimes in those early days of October and November she felt amazed that life could happen around it: the things of life, the things that had always meant life. The children woke, and their waking woke her—their voices downstairs in the house, their bare feet thudding on the old wood floors. She got up; she urinated and felt the familiar physical sense of pleasurable relief at that, her body’s work. That it should work, that she should go on feeling anything because of that, seemed preposterous to her. She brushed her teeth, she made the children’s breakfast and got them
launched into their day. She went to the bookstore she owned, though the two women who worked for her often sent her home those first weeks after John died if it wasn’t a busy day in the office. She came home. She went to see Daisy play basketball, to see Emily cheerleading at a football game. She bought groceries, she picked up Theo at day care, she made dinner.

But anywhere, anywhere in all of this, the monster could arrive and literally take her breath away. Sometimes she felt so overwhelmed when it happened that she squatted or knelt where she was. Once Daisy had found her in the kitchen, crouched on the floor, holding a partly peeled carrot in her hand.

“What, Mom?” she cried. She had stopped in the doorway, confused and frightened. “What happened?”

And with that it was gone, as though Daisy had broken a spell cast upon her. Eva felt only embarrassed. She stood up, and found the scraper she’d set down so hurriedly. “It’s nothing,” she said, turning her back to Daisy. And because that was so blatantly a lie, she added, “I just felt a little dizzy.”

Another time she sat weeping through an entire parent conference at Theo’s day-care center. The woman talking with her was so young, so unfamiliar with the possibility of this scale of grief, that she took Eva at her word when she said that
it was all right, really, it sometimes just happened, please ignore it if you can
; she went carefully and thoroughly through her notes—tidy writing in black ink on five-by-eight cards—while tears and clear mucus streamed steadily down Eva’s face. When she’d finished, the teacher looked quickly and with some embarrassment over at Eva and asked if she had any questions. “No,” Eva whispered. “None.”