Lost in the Forest (Ballantine Reader's Circle) Read online

  When John died, Daisy felt it was wrong that they were sent to Mark’s house. She had wanted to stay at home, where John was being mourned by Eva; where, she felt, he might still in some sense be present. They were at Mark’s only two nights and the day between before Eva called and wanted them back, but Daisy felt it as a kind of exile, an exile where they were not supposed to talk about what had just happened—she supposed because of Theo. An exile where life seemed to have rolled on, right over John’s death, where it seemed they were supposed to pretend everything was unchanged.

  Who had decided this? It seemed to have been Emily, but it must have been Mark too, somehow. He was the grown-up, after all.

  The night John died, Daisy had heard Mark talking to his girlfriend on the phone, she had heard him call her “babe.” She had never heard anyone use this endearment except in rock songs. It seemed cheesy to her. It seemed, she recognized suddenly, sexual. Standing in Mark’s kitchen, overhearing this, Daisy had understood what her father’s relations with this woman were. He was having sex with her. He was sorry he wouldn’t be having sex with her tonight. That’s what John’s death had interrupted for him. What did he care about John?

  He didn’t. It was wrong that they had to be there, with him.

  They had made a cake that night—Emily’s idea, as Daisy remembered it—and Theo had licked the frosting bowl. Daisy sat across from him at Mark’s dining room table and watched him methodically scrape out every bit of the chocolately goop. He had a little clot of it in his hair; his face was smeared.

  His piggy eagerness, his animal forgetting, revolted her. She wanted to hit him, to take a little of the soft, pretty flesh of his arm and twist it, hard.

  How mean! How mean could you be! He was the one who had lost his father. Daisy knew that she was wrong, that her feelings were unjustifiable. She’d left the room abruptly and gone to lie on her sleeping bag in the dark, until Mark came to the door and asked her to say good night to Theo. Full of remorse, she’d pounced on Theo in Mark’s bed and given him gobbling kisses that made him laugh and yell her name.

  But afterward, lying on her own bed again, thinking about it, even that made her feel uncomfortable. To laugh! To play! When John was lying alone, dead somewhere. She got up to find Mark, to ask him a question that had occurred to her earlier too, about what had happened to John’s body, about where he was.

  But Mark didn’t know. He didn’t even care, she could tell.

  It was Daisy who answered the phone when Eva called to summon them home. Her mother’s voice sounded exhausted but peaceful, slowed. And that’s how she looked when they drove up an hour or so later and Daisy saw her, standing on the porch waiting for them—as though she’d newly recovered from a long illness. She had always been thin, but suddenly she looked very much too thin. Her eyes were so shadowed that they seemed sunken in her head and darkly bruised. It didn’t make her less pretty though. In fact, to Daisy she seemed even more beautiful than usual—small and vulnerable and suffering. Suffering so hard that everyone could see that, and love her more.

  When they got out of the truck, Eva started down the porch steps to them. She crouched on the cement walk and hungrily pulled them in around her.

  Daisy felt awkward. She was too big for this embrace. It was meant for someone the size of Theo. She stood looking down at her mother’s head, at the white waxy skin of her scalp at the part in her hair; and then, because this seemed somehow too naked, too exposed, she looked over at Mark, who was watching them. His eyes met Daisy’s. He seemed almost frightened.

  Then his gaze shifted, his hand came up, and Daisy turned. Gracie was standing above them in the open doorway on the porch.

  Eva released them and stood up, and Daisy turned and went up the stairs. She stepped into Gracie’s open arms—perfumed, bosomy Gracie. “Sweetie,” Gracie said. Daisy had the sudden notion that she wanted to stay in this embrace forever. Gracie rocked her for a few seconds. Then she stepped back and touched Daisy’s hair. And now everyone was on the porch, at the door, and Gracie was hugging Emily in just the same way.

  “Come in, Mark,” Eva said. Daisy turned. Her father was still on the walk, alone, looking up at all of them. Eva blew her nose. “Come in for a minute, why don’t you? Have something to drink.” Her voice sounded hollow.

  Daisy watched him come up the steps and approach her mother. His arms lifted and came around Eva, and she disappeared against his chest. He held her. Watching them, Daisy remembered abruptly the way they had looked when they were still married, when they held each other then—how they went with each other, somehow, in a way John and Eva hadn’t. They stood there together a long time. The others had drifted away, into the house, but Daisy stood and watched. When Mark was done, when he let Eva go, he was still touching her shoulder. “Eva,” he said. “I’m … so sorry.”

  “Don’t … don’t make me cry again, Mark,” she said. “But, thanks. I know. I know you are. But come on in. Come in.” She gestured vaguely, expansively, and he walked into the house, past Daisy, still standing there like a lump in the doorway, past Theo, who’d knelt a few feet into the hall and dumped out his bag of toys and bedding so they all had to make their way around them.

  Now Emily’s voice rang from the kitchen. “God, look at this food, at this huge amount of food. Is all this food for us?”

  As if in response to her, everyone moved to the kitchen doorway. Eva stepped just inside it. “People have been so kind,” she said hoarsely, almost apologetically. The wide island in the kitchen was covered with dishes—casseroles, bowls, aluminum pans shiny with plastic wrap, fruits in ribboned baskets. There were little labels on some of them.

  “Look at this.” Emily began to read: “Blueberry muffins. Heat twenty minutes at three hundred fifty degrees.”

  “I want blueberry muffins,” Theo said. The top of his head was at the level of the island’s surface, and he stood beside Emily on tiptoes trying to see.

  “Or how ’bout, listen to this! Sesame chicken wings. Hey! Also three hundred fifty for twenty minutes.”

  “Don’t like sesame,” Theo said.

  “But I do,” Emily said, and bonked him lightly on the head.

  Daisy said, “It’s chicken, Theo. Like fried chicken. You like that.”

  “Do you, sweetie pie?” Gracie asked. “Maybe we should make a feast then. Eva?” she said, raising her voice a little as though Daisy’s mother were hard of hearing, or a child. “Would you have some lunch now? Shall we use up a little of this stuff?”

  Eva was like a sleepwalker—amiable, absent. “Of course,” she said mildly. She turned to Daisy’s father. “Mark, you’ll stay, won’t you? We have more than enough.” Her arm rose. “Funeral meats,” she said.

  Mark said he would, he would stay.

  Gracie bossed them all around, and gradually they found napkins and silverware and plates. They set the table, they got out different drinks for everyone, arranged the serving dishes they were using on trivets and hot pads. Eva moved slowly, robotically, and Daisy wondered if that was something the medicine had done to her.

  “Oh, my darling,” she said after they’d sat down, and then nothing more. Her face was blank. She was looking into some middle distance.

  They all avoided one another’s eyes, no one willing to answer her, and their knives and forks clinked loudly in the silence.

  DAISY HAD FELT herself stop inside after John died. For months, it was simply as if she were frozen. She compared herself to the others and saw that there was a way to do this, this grieving, that she couldn’t somehow get to. Eva wept often. You would come upon her in the living room, in the kitchen, with tears streaming down her face, and she would blow her nose quickly and sometimes apologize. You could hear her at night, crying or wandering the house.

  Emily was tearful for the first few weeks too.

  Daisy knew that she should weep, but she didn’t, she couldn’t. She understood that everyone thought that Emily was doing it right. That even here, mou
rning John—whom Daisy had loved the best!—her older sister was doing a better job of things. As the weeks went by—November, December—she could feel too that her parents were worried about her, even irritated at her for her silence. For her nothingness. And because they thought she must have a sadness she wasn’t showing, they kept at her. They asked her questions. They wanted her to talk.

  She overheard them discussing her once in the kitchen when Mark had come to get them. He was asking about everyone, how they were doing, and when he came to her at last, he just said, “Daze?”

  There was a silence, and Daisy knew her mother would be answering with a gesture, a face, a rolling of her eyes.

  “Yeah,” Mark said. “Well: Daisy.” What would he be doing? Shaking his head?

  Daisy was sitting on the back stairs, which came off the kitchen at a sharp angle. They were narrow and steep. She had stopped where she was, partway down, when she heard Mark come in and call to her mother, whose voice had answered from just below Daisy. The walls here had been stripped and left unpainted, and Daisy was moving her hand slowly over the cool, bumpy surface of the old plaster as she listened.

  “I’m at a complete loss,” Eva said. Things clunked—cooking things.

  “Have you asked her directly, ‘How are you doing, Daisy?’ ” His voice exaggerated each syllable.

  “Pretty much. And the answer is ‘Okay, fine, sure, whatever.’ ” She sighed and did something. She said, “It’s like waiting for a baby to begin to talk—waiting for him to figure out that all this noise everyone around him is making means something—that’s exactly how I feel waiting for Daisy to understand that having feelings is the way most people experience life. Like it’s some code she hasn’t cracked.”

  After a moment, Mark said, “The thing is, Daisy has plenty of feelings.”

  “Oh, I know, I know. I just wish she’d let us at them, that she’d figure out how to say something about them.”

  “That she’d learn to talk,” Mark said.

  “Yes!” Eva said passionately.

  Daisy knew they were right. That she should talk about it. But what could she say to them? “Why didn’t you die?” “I don’t need you.” She knew it wasn’t fair to be angry at Eva, at Mark. But she was.

  As the winter rains began and deepened, the grief of the others began to ease. Eva often moved at her old familiar speed through the days. Sometimes you could hear her laughing when she talked on the phone in the evenings. Oh, she still turned in on herself when she was alone with Daisy, or with Daisy and any of the others—at home or in the car. Then everything about her dimmed and quieted; she had nothing to say. But in the world, more and more she was herself: bright, lively.

  Emily, who’d sobbed at the service for John so brokenheartedly that Daisy knew her own silence, her stillness must seem, by comparison, cold and unfeeling, was once more caught up in the world of her friends—in holiday parties, in deadlines for applying to colleges, in writing those essays, in going off with Noah, who was home from college. In sleeping with him, fucking him.

  Daisy knew this because Emily had talked about it with her. And though it was nothing Daisy wanted to hear, she was incapable of not listening to the details: where they did it (in the car mostly), how it felt (exciting beforehand, sort of boring during). Emily told her what he said, what she said, who knew about it, who else was doing it too, who else was doing other things—hand jobs, blow jobs—and on and on, Daisy taking it all in and not knowing what to say in response, or even what she thought about it.

  She felt a thickening of her aloneness and anger at the others. She remembered that Theo, who had worn new, hard shoes to the service, shoes he didn’t like, had kicked at the wooden back of the pew in front of him, had kicked so fiercely and relentlessly, despite Eva’s hand on his legs and her tearful, whispered admonitions, that Gracie had finally carried him outside and they had sat in the sun on the front steps of the church until it was all over and the others came out and found them there. Gracie was singing to him when they arrived, the simple, repetitive songs that always worked with Theo.

  Daisy thought that kicking was exactly what she felt like doing. Kicking, hard.

  Kicking whom?

  Eva, for one. Eva, for laughing, for getting excited about taking some writer out for dinner. Emily, for sailing off into her own life. Mark, for his obliviousness, for bringing Theo around all the time. Even Theo, for forgetting John, for acting as though Mark were his, as though he would make a perfectly good new father.

  Sometimes things would seem all right for a few days. Mark would come over for supper, they would all hang out together, it would feel natural and familiar and Daisy would forget that Mark shouldn’t even be there. That John should.

  Or Daisy would be at basketball practice and lose track of everything except how her body felt moving forward, lifting for a layup. There were nights doing homework with Emily at the dining room table when she could experience a near physical pleasure at finishing a geometric proof; at the slow untangling of a sentence in Latin; at the way the overhead light fell over the contours of Emily’s face, a face as familiar to Daisy as her own. At those times it seemed possible that the minutes, the hours would carry her forward in some safe way.

  But then everything would shift and go wrong again.

  Early in January she jammed her thumb in the car door. She watched this happen as if in slow motion, knowing in the half second before the pain began that it was coming and that it would be bad.

  A bone had cracked. It swelled up. Of course she couldn’t play basketball. For a few days she went to practice anyway and sat on the bench, watching the other girls go through the drills, looking at the splint on her hand, feeling that her body itself had betrayed her. And then, unable to stand that, she quit the team, despite the coach’s assurance that he would hold her spot, that she could come back and play as soon as her hand healed.

  It was raining one afternoon when she came out of school, one of the lashing rains of winter, which she’d watched arriving from inside her science classroom. Mrs. Pagels had had to turn the lights on, it grew so dark outside, and everything in the room had suddenly looked cheap and worn. Daisy knew that she shouldn’t ride her bike home, that she wouldn’t be able see well or to use the brakes, so she left it in the rack and walked.

  The next day when she passed the rack on the way in to school, her bike was gone—stolen. Daisy felt such a sense of shocked betrayal that tears came to her eyes.

  They had to write an essay for English describing something in their lives that had made them happy. “There’s a house up in the hills beyond St. Helena where I don’t live anymore,” Daisy wrote. “And in it there’s a man waiting who isn’t alive anymore.” She turned these two sentences in and got a D, and her English teacher asked to see her during study hour. When Daisy arrived outside the classroom, Miss Gaines was still talking to someone else, a boy Daisy didn’t know. The door was shut, but Daisy could hear their voices rise and fall. She watched them through the glass pane. The boy’s face was friendly and animated.

  When it was Daisy’s turn, she knew her face was nothing like that. She knew the empty, sour way she looked, but she couldn’t help it.

  Miss Gaines was young and pretty, though her nose was too big. She had a British accent. She wore black clothes most of the time, the only teacher Daisy knew—the only person Daisy knew—who did. Her face opened in kindness to Daisy as she spoke of the paper. She told Daisy that, though she had all the sympathy in the world for her (in the world, Daisy thought, and smirked), Daisy still had to respond to the terms of the assignment, and the assignment had been an essay. Did she understand? Yes, said Daisy, feeling a raw, empty rage that would last for days. “I understand perfectly.”

  That same night, Eva had tried to talk to her about her silence, her unpleasantness to others in the house. Why? What was wrong? She wanted to help.

  Daisy hated her mother’s face when she spoke like this, her frowning, sympathetic eyes,
the sad lines pulling the corners of her mouth down. There was nothing wrong, Daisy said. “If you broke your thumb and had your bike stolen, you’d feel the same way I feel.”

  “Which is?”

  “Which is, like a piece of shit.” She turned away, she pretended to be concentrating on her homework, the long passage in Latin in front of her.

  Eva was sitting across from her at the dining room table. Emily, apparently, had been clued in that this conversation was coming—she’d disappeared up to her room to study. Eva was watching Daisy steadily. She cleared her throat. “If you won’t talk to me about what’s wrong, Daze,” she said, “how can I help you?”

  “You can’t help me anyway.” She flipped the page, seeing nothing.

  “I could try.”

  “How? How can you help me?” Daisy looked up. She was furious, suddenly. She slammed her book shut. Eva started slightly. “Everything in my life is ruined.” Her voice nearly cracked.

  Eva didn’t answer. She looked away, but Daisy could see that her mother’s eyes were filled with tears. This infuriated her. It seemed like a request, a demand for something from her, and Daisy couldn’t, she wouldn’t, respond. She grabbed her Latin book and the dictionary and left the dining room. She took the stairs two at a time. She slammed the door to her room behind her.

  It was on account of all of this that she was going to have to work in the store, her mother’s bookstore, for the entire summer. Emily was going to France on some program in which she would live with a French family and come back fluent, but Daisy had to work. They were trying to make it seem as though it wasn’t a punishment, a punishment for being who she was, for feeling how she felt, but it was. They wanted to keep an eye on her, to keep her doing something useful. And in truth, they’d offered her other options and she’d turned them all down, so it could be said—she’d heard her mother say it, actually—that she’d chosen to work in the bookstore. But that was a lie.