Lost in the Forest (10 page)

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.

She thought of the question as no one had posed it to her. As John would have asked it:
What is it, do you think, that you’d like to do with yourself this summer?

She thought of John, the last time she’d seen him, the morning of the day he died. She had been the last one to leave the house, which had suddenly fallen silent once the others were gone. When she carried her bike down from the back porch, John came out of the garage, which they’d made into an office for his business. He was wearing a light blue shirt, frayed wildly at the collar, and baggy khaki pants. His big white feet were bare. With his long, sloping jaw, his strawlike lashes, he seemed like a large, homely boy.

“Biking it again,” he said.

“Yes.”

“How come you don’t walk with Emily and her crew, you think?”

She had shrugged.

He came over and stood by the porch. “They’re nice enough to you, aren’t they?”

“They’re okay. They kind of ignore me, I guess. But I can’t talk about any of the stuff they’re into anyway, so that’s fine. The thing is, I’d rather just be alone.”

“You don’t want to be too alone, though.”

“I’m not,
too
alone.” At that point, this was true. She stayed late almost every day for one activity or another, and she was beginning to have a sense of who might be possible as a friend.

Suddenly John grinned. “Of course, you’re talking to a guy who spends his entire day by himself, buried in books. Which isn’t
quite
alone, but some would say, Daisy, that it looks like it. Looks suspiciously like it.” He tapped her handlebars with his freckled hand and stepped back. “Anyway, see you tonight,” he said. And Daisy pushed off and rode down the driveway.

She thought of the fact that she hadn’t looked back. She wished she had looked back. Though she knew it made no sense, she felt as though she had missed some signal, some private message he might have had for her that would have helped her through all this.

And, of course, the thought came to her from time to time that if she
had
looked back, if she’d called to him, if she’d taken up just a few more seconds of his time that morning, everything else in his day would have been off by just that much, and he wouldn’t have stepped into Main Street at the exact moment the car came around the corner.

She thought of her mother those few days later when they’d come back from Mark’s house, how everyone was so careful and loving around her, the way she’d said, “Oh my darling,” when they sat down to eat, as if John were still alive, as if he were there in the room but visible only to her.

What would she like to do with herself this summer?

Nothing. Zero. Nothing.

Chapter Five

E
VA SITS IN THE CAR
for a few minutes after she’s turned the engine off. It’s early evening, but it’s a mid-June evening, so the sun is still high above the hills around her, even at this hour. The face the mountains present is deeply shadowed though—almost black here and there where the pines are thickest. Something in the car ticks lightly, dying. Eva is looking at the house,
her
house—substantial, Victorian, every bit of ornate trim restored by her and John after they moved in, and the clapboard siding painted an historic pale pink. Its front windows are shuttered against the light, and it has a blind, blankened air.

She’s been gone from it for more than a week, taking Emily to visit her parents and then to the orientation that is to precede her trip to France. And though Eva started the trip eagerly, wanting to get away, she has finished it almost desperate to be home. At times during these eight days, she has yearned for home as you might yearn for the touch of a lover’s body.

Now that she’s here, though, looking up at the house from the car, she feels reluctant even to go in. She has the odd sense that this was not what she meant. Not
this
home.

But what other home is there?

The car is heating up slowly now, so she opens the driver’s-side door and steps out into the dry evening air. She retrieves her bag from the backseat and goes up the walk, surveying the plants and the lawn. Everything looks fine, except for the hose lying uncoiled in the front yard. She knows when she lifts it, the grass will be yellowed in a bright, serpentine line where the hose has lain. She mounts the porch stairs, the bag on its wheels banging up behind her.

When the front door swings open and she steps inside, she’s hit by the mustiness, the stale heat. She doesn’t want the air conditioner, though—she hates its hum, its sealed-in feeling—so she moves around quickly, opening the windows at the front and sides of the house. As she walks back and forth, she is almost overcome by the sense she has of seeing things anew—a sense that surprises her, her absence has been so short.

She thinks of the versions of itself the house contains in her memory, of her history with John in these spaces, all the changes they’d lived through. The house was a wreck when they brought it, and they had inhabited it through its messy transformation—the pulling down of the cheap, lowered ceiling panels; the rewiring and replumbing; the stripping of layers of old wallpaper; the replacing of windows; the renovating of the kitchen; the sanding and painting. They had come to know intimately all the possible varieties of dust, which inevitably made their way around the plastic sheeting they hung to keep them out, under the doors they sealed to block them in. They had lived, for months, in odd rooms of the house while other rooms were being worked on.

For a time, this room, the living room, was their bedroom. Standing in it now, she thinks of how it felt, waking on the mattress on the floor next to John, the sun pouring in—of course they had no shutters yet—the light grit that had settled in the night palpable on the mattress when she turned to see if he was awake too.

It is hard to connect that past to this room. It’s orderly and lovely. The ceilings are high, and the casings around the windows and doors and baseboards all have four or five curves articulating
and reversing themselves where a newer house would have one, or two. Or none. The furniture, though some of it is old, has been re-covered with pale fabrics—California colors, as Eva thinks of them. On the walls are the contemporary paintings John collected, and a large N. C. Wyeth oil, an illustration for
Treasure Island
—two men fighting in a ship’s cabin under the light of a swinging lantern. Books are stacked here and there, some of them the books John was reading, or about to read, or just finished with at the time he died. She hasn’t been able to bring herself to remove these last reminders of what he loved, how he thought—though she’s packed his clothes in boxes and donated them to Goodwill, though she’s boxed his papers and stored them in the attic.

A breeze wafts through, smelling of rosemary, of jasmine.

She goes into the lavatory under the stairs and pees, then washes her hands and face. Lifting her head from the water, she looks at herself, hard. The eight days traveling have taken their toll. Her eyes are puffy; her face seems a little swollen. Even her clothes—the white blouse, the black linen slacks—seem tired, wrinkled, and stretched out of shape.

She leaves the blouse hanging out over the slacks and goes back to the kitchen to open the windows there, surveying the backyard as she does this—Theo’s expensive climbing structure over in the corner and the paving stones marking John’s path out to the garage. In front of the garage is the basketball net he and Daisy used to horse around at. She thinks of the noise of the ball on the cement, its reverberation on the backboard, the running commentary John kept up as they played. The way all of that drifted into the kitchen in the late afternoons and made her feel safe, encircled.

She sits down at the kitchen island. She can’t remember when she last came home to an empty house. To no one. Theo is at Gracie’s—he has been staying with her while Eva has been away, though of course he went to day care as usual. Daisy is with Mark. She’s been in charge of herself through Mark’s long workdays, but she will have been busy. She has started a job in the bookstore this summer, and she is supposed to have gone in daily to be trained by
Eva’s assistant Callie. Eva had also asked her to stop by the house each day, to water the plants and take the mail in. These chores she has clearly done, though not with any grace—there was the hose left uncoiled on the grass outside, and here’s the mail, more or less thrown onto the kitchen island. Eva starts to sort through it. Catalogues. Bills. A reminder that her subscription to
The New Yorker
is about to expire.

After a few minutes, she stops. The cross breeze shifts the few envelopes she’s torn, the pages of a catalogue or two. She doesn’t want to do this now. She gets a glass of water and stands at the sink, looking out, drinking. Each window here has six panes. In the lower three are the yard, and the trees hiding her neighbor’s yard. Above them, in the upper panes, the sky is turning a richer blue. “Cerulean,” she says out loud, and her voice startles her.

She goes back to the front hall and lugs her bag upstairs. Before she unpacks, she moves around opening the windows up here too, first in her own bedroom, next in Theo and Daisy’s rooms, then in Emily’s. She stands for a moment and looks around at Emily’s domain—Emily, off to meet the world this summer. The room is as neat and well organized as Emily is. The firstborn, Eva thinks. Like some nursery rhyme she can’t remember. Like herself. Emily has a bulletin board she’d requested, and on it is hung a calendar with the departure for France six days from now inscribed in thick red ink, three exclamation points after it.

Eva had said good-bye to her daughter this morning on the prep-school campus where she was having her weeklong orientation for the trip. She had driven slowly back through the lovely New England countryside to the interstate. There was no rush—she had ample time to catch her plane home. She had a little headache. They’d spent the night before in a New England country hotel nearby, one of those inns with rockers set out in a row all across the front porch. Sitting opposite Emily at dinner in the old-fashioned dining room, listening to her talk about going to college in the fall, about the plans she had, Eva felt old, and she drank too much. It was a feeling that had gathered, she realized, over the course of the trip. There’d been a culminating moment, near the
end of it, sitting in the room with the other parents before their own orientation about their children’s trip abroad, when she looked around at all of them—respectable, well-dressed people in their forties. There was a man opposite her, leafing through the informational material they’d left out. Eva was fascinated by him, in a perverse way—he was so archetypical. He was wearing one of those expensive polo shirts and madras pants. Loafers with tassels. His face was broad, and dark with summer color, a nearly mahogany hue. A boat maybe, or hours and hours of tennis and golf. He was a man she might have married, she thought, if she’d stayed in the East, if she’d stayed an easterner. She’d had a flash of gratitude for her life—for the chance decisions that had taken her west, that had made her, if not a westerner, at least not someone who was recognizable, categorizable, in the way this man was. She thought of her marriages to two men, neither of whom gave off this self-satisfaction.

He turned to his wife now, a blonde in a pale pink sleeveless dress. She was reading a brochure. He touched her knee, and she looked up. It seemed a sweet gesture to Eva. It made her think of how she must look to him, to them—herself middle-aged, in her loose-fitting California clothes, her frazzled hair. How he must think of her: post-hippie, New Agey, a ditz.

And the thing was—here was her revelation—that it didn’t matter anyway.
They
didn’t matter. They were all just who they were, the backdrop to the lives about to be changed by the trip they were waiting to be educated about. They were the
drivers
, for God’s sake. The signers of checks. The wage earners. She had a sense, abruptly, of all of them—and now she looked around the room and took the others in too—of all of them as being simply in the service of the young.

Two nights earlier, at her parents’ house outside Hartford, the house she’d grown up in, she sat and listened at dinner while her parents, gracious to a fault as ever, had quizzed Emily about the colleges she’d looked at and why she’d chosen Wesleyan, about what the summer held for her, and what she could guess at or know about the life she wanted. She listened as Emily talked on
and on, as though there were no reason why everyone should not be fascinated by her plans—and she realized that she, Eva, had no plans, no more ideas for herself.

She had tried to speak of this to her mother after Emily had excused herself, after her wisp of a father had withdrawn. They were sitting in the living room, by the empty fireplace. Everything was dark—the woodwork, the furniture, the old carpets. The house smelled old around them, and things had the threadbare air of the formerly elegant.