Lost in the Forest (7 page)

Mark was twenty-five. It had taken him six years to get through two and a half years of college—he was dyslexic—and he’d only recently decided to stop, to quit. He could do it—he could have done it—he was sure of that. But that would have been the point, the only point: proving that to himself. It didn’t seem worth it. Everyone else he knew was moving on, entering life, thinking about work, about what came next—getting married—and Mark figured it’d be two or three more years anyway at the rate he was going before he even got a degree. A degree that would equip him to do nothing in particular.

He was drinking too much. It was the way he’d gotten through all of the weddings. This one was of a woman he’d dated several
years earlier. They’d since become “good friends,” and when she bent to enter the getaway car in her pale suit and he saw her long, nicely shaped legs, legs he’d once pushed this way and that with the ease of sexual ownership, he felt somehow abandoned.
Damaged goods
, he thought. Unexpected tears of self-pity sprang to his eyes.

Eva was in bad shape because she’d just graduated, and her graduation meant the end of her yearlong affair with one of her English professors. She hadn’t quite believed in this ahead of time. She’d thought it was possible they’d continue to meet. She’d thought it was possible he might end his marriage and join himself to her forever.

But he’d said he mustn’t stand in her way. Those were the words he’d used. He’d sat down behind his wide desk, a desk on which they’d made love more than once, using it now like a barrier between them. He’d said, not unkindly, that she must move on.

Move on? To where? To whom?

As the car pulled out, as the other, lucky couple turned to wave together out the rear window—like royalty: the pretty tilting back and forth of one hand of each—she felt herself begin to cry. She reached into her shoulder bag for a plastic packet of tissues and began to extract one. When the car pulled out onto the country road at the end of the driveway, Eva stepped blindly back and bumped into Mark. They turned and faced each other in the crowd of happy people, two weepy wedding guests. “Got an extra one of those?” Mark asked, and Eva handed over a tissue. As one, they blew their noses. Then, looking at each other, each still holding the tissue to his face like a kind of mask, they began to laugh.

“There’s just nothing like a good honk, is there?” Mark asked after a minute.

“I’ve always said so,” she answered.

And they walked slowly back to the tent together, where they ordered coffee and didn’t move again until, in the gathering dusk, a young woman on the catering staff asked for the folding chairs they sat on.

They’d stumbled into each other, Mark liked to say, and he
often described the early years of their marriage as “further stumbling.” Neither knew what he wanted, what she’d be good at. Eva taught high school English in San Francisco and hated it. Mark did construction, got a union card. They moved north, out of the city. Eva waited tables and hated it. Mark worked on a housing development at the edge of Napa, a crummy development using the cheapest possible materials. Eva got a job in a stationery store, first selling, then running it.

At night she sometimes read to him, books he’d never read himself, or struggled so hard just to get through that he hadn’t been able to think about them. She read him Conrad, and they talked about honor, and when it became too costly—a foolish, expensive notion. She read Chekhov, who amazed them both by the way he turned his stories around with just a phrase or two at the end and made you wonder what in them was meant to be taken as true. They took long walks. They made love, they argued about life, about where they were headed, what they wanted to do. About what one
should
do. They argued fiercely, dramatically, in a way that Mark realized only later that he loved, that made him feel alive.

Then Mark was hired by some friends who had bought land outside Calistoga with family money and were going to plant a vineyard, doing the work themselves. He spent the next year and a half with them. It felt like a new life starting, a door opening. The land was rocky and uncultivated, but it was level, on the valley floor. They cleared it, they pulled out trees and the biggest rocks. They ripped the soil. He came home every night dirty and exhausted, having pushed himself all day long to the edge of what he was capable of. If they hadn’t been the age they all were then, they could never have done it.

One of the others had been a vineyard manager for a big winery, had gone to UC Davis before that. But all of them had read up on the valley and its long story, and they knew a great deal that he didn’t—how the land had been formed in prehistory, what chemicals and nutrients the different soils in the valley contained, what the differences were in temperature and rainfall from north
to south, from hillside to valley, what kinds of grapes would be best suited to the land they’d purchased, and what they would need to do to those grapes to make them flourish.

They started the vineyard in the spring, driving stakes into the still-rocky soil. In the fall, they planted their rootstock, irrigating it by hand with water hauled in a truck from a nearby stream. That winter, when the work slowed, Mark went back to construction, but the next spring and summer, he came back to help dig a pond and install an irrigation system.

They made mistakes, and they certainly did everything the hard way. But neighbors were generous, once they saw they were going to stick with it. They offered advice and equipment, and the work got done. Those long days were the ones that cemented Mark’s relationship with the place, the land. He felt he’d found a home. This was exactly the work he wanted to be doing, exactly the person he wanted to be.

Eva got pregnant with Emily that year, and they rented the house on the hill with the little vineyard of their own. She quit her job, and Emily was born. They didn’t argue so much. Eva ran the house and grew vegetables and baked, and played with Emily. Mark started his own business, managing a few small vineyards using what he’d learned. They were, he would have said—he did say—happy. His business expanded slowly but steadily as wine and winemaking became chic, as people in the money descended on the valley, people who wanted vineyards of their own; as the number of vineyards exploded—now twenty-five, now forty, now one hundred. They made love, it is true, with less frequency than early in the marriage, but with a comfortable ease, a knowledge of each other’s body and pleasure that only occasionally seemed too practiced.

They had Daisy. They had talked about wanting a boy, but when the doctor held the baby’s slicked body up above Eva’s knees and Mark saw the deep cleft between her incurving helpless legs, he felt flooded with a loving relief, with gladness. He realized that he’d been frightened all along of a boy. He didn’t want him—a dyslexic, wild boy, like himself.

But it was after this that things began to seem too much, that Eva became withdrawn, angry. That Mark turned away from their dreamy stumbling and made a mistake, fucked Amy for eleven months. That Eva got so mad at him that she threw him out. And then settled for a nice man—older, calm, devoted.

Was that it, was that what had happened?

That was it, Mark felt. She’d
settled
for John. And it seemed to have worked, it seemed to have made her happy. She and John moved into the derelict old house in town and fixed it up. John bought the bookstore for her. She had Theo. She seemed at peace. When Mark dropped by to get the girls, when he came over for birthday parties or holiday celebrations, he could feel the calm and the sense of order that surrounded her. It had to do with money, of course. But it had to do also with John, with his steadiness, his
niceness
.

Sometimes though, watching Eva move so efficiently across her big, expensive kitchen, watching her turn her slow, lovely, slightly gap-toothed smile on one guest or another, Mark would catch himself wondering if she didn’t miss their old life too, their questions, their passionate talk, the fights, the times they woke in the night afterward and wordlessly, wildly, began to make love. As much as anything, he felt, it was his betrayal that had made her available for a man like John. His fault.

I
T WASN’T UNTIL
about eight months or so after John died, on a hot day in May, that Mark understood what he was doing, what he’d been feeling all along. That he realized he was wooing Eva. That he saw that he was trying to reclaim her, to reclaim her through the children.

It hadn’t started that way. Early on, when Eva was so miserable, taking the girls more often had just felt the necessary, the right thing to do. Anything, to help. But it probably shifted, something shifted in Mark, when he’d started sometimes to take Theo too, along with the girls.

This had happened for the first time in early December, two
months after John’s death, when Theo appeared at the top of the stairs with his backpack just as Mark was leaving. Daisy and Emily were already outside, and he was standing in the hall talking to Eva.

They heard Theo on the stairs at the same time, and they both turned and looked up, watching his slow descent in silence.

Mark broke it as Theo reached the bottom. “What’s up, big guy? Whatcha doing?”

“I got my stuff.”

“I see you got your stuff. Where are you taking it?”

“To Mark’s house. To you,” Theo said.

“Oh, sweetie,” Eva said, squatting to be at Theo’s height. Her dress fell in a circle around her on the floor. It was made of a fabric printed with tiny sprigs of flowers everywhere.
Sprigs
. Mark would have liked to offer her the word.

“See, honey, just the girls are going to Mark’s this time,” she said.

“Why?” he asked.

“Why,” she said. She turned her face up to Mark. She looked stricken.

“Because I’m their father,” Mark said. “Because Emily and Daisy are my girls, so I like to have them come stay with me.”

Theo had looked from one of them to the other. “That’s no fair,” he said.

No one answered him.

He sat on the bottom step. “It’s not
fair
,” he said again. And then he started to cry.

Mark had looked at Eva. It seemed to him that she was about to cry too, for life’s unfairness, for Theo’s pain. For her aloneness. For everything.

“I sure don’t mind taking him, if you think it’s okay,” he’d said.

He watched as her face lifted to him again and changed—opened in relief.

“Would you, Mark?” she said.

After that, it had become an easy, comfortable thing. If Theo
wanted to come, if Eva hadn’t planned something special to do with him in the girls’ absence, Mark brought him home too. He told himself he was doing it for Eva, but he also truly liked the little boy—for his enthusiasm, for his sweet, vulnerable presence lying in bed at night next to Mark, for his wiry physical energy, so like what Mark remembered of himself as a kid. Sometimes, when he rocked Theo at night, or kissed him as he put him down to sleep, he had a sense of loving himself, of healing some part of himself—a sense that he couldn’t have explained clearly to anyone else.

He had rationalized all this, he had told himself that the girls didn’t need him anymore. When they were at his house, they spent hours in their room with the door shut. He could hear them talking, or Emily on the phone. Sometimes they did each other’s hair. Emily often went out, with friends, on dates. Daisy stayed in their room. As he moved around the house, he could see her there reading, or working on something at the desk, or lying on the bed listening to music on her Walkman. If he were honest, he would have to say he didn’t know them anymore. And they didn’t seem to care to know him.

No, it was Theo who was interested in Mark, who wanted to do the activities he planned for the weekends—so that when Mark bought a picture puzzle the girl in the shop said was age appropriate for a three-and-a-half-year-old, when he helped Theo set up an elaborate marble chute with blocks that stretched from the living room into the dining room, when he knelt next to the tub and reached over to soap the little boy’s smooth, soft skin, singing him the bathtub songs he’d sung to the girls, it seemed to him that he was just responding to the situation—that it took nothing away from Emily and Daisy, who had moved on anyway.

But then on that day in May, because both girls turned him down, he took Theo alone out for an afternoon of fishing. After they’d returned, Daisy sulked around the kitchen while he fixed dinner, not so much helping as getting in the way. At one point, when Mark asked her to pass him a colander, he addressed her as
Miss Grumps
. This was a mistake. She burst into tears. She accused him of loving Theo more than he loved her, she said she didn’t know why he even bothered to have her over.

Mark was so pained for her he couldn’t answer, he just reached out his arms and pulled her in.

It was at this moment, actually, holding his grieving daughter, feeling a pang of deep sorrow at misunderstanding her—ungainly Daisy, so tall she had to bend her head slightly to rest it on his shoulder—that he realized why he was doing it, all of it. That he understood he was trying to earn his way back to Eva’s love through the children. Most of all, through Theo. The sense of recognition he felt, the quick jolt of shame, lasted only a moment. He was holding Daisy. He would do better by her. He did love her.

He loved her and Emily, and he had come to love Theo too. There was nothing false about any of it. It had happened because he loved Eva. He still loved her, and loving the children, all of them, was a way of coming back to that.

He stood in his kitchen and stroked his daughter’s hair and whispered, “Sweetheart, of course I love you”; and what he had moved on to thinking was that he could do it, he could make it happen. He knew he could. He just needed to be slow and patient. He would approach this the way he had approached college, he thought, with the conviction that though it might take him longer than it would take someone else, there was no reason he couldn’t do it. None.

Chapter Four