The Forrests (10 page)

‘Sorry,’ Daniel said. ‘It was incredible, we had the sweetest run.’

‘Fuck that,’ Evelyn said, and the boy looked up sharply. ‘You can’t just do that.’

‘I said I was sorry!’ He said something to the boy in German and the boy ducked his head as if he wanted to laugh but knew it would be a bad idea. He kept his head low as he followed Daniel up the wooden stairs and past Evelyn, still with the phone in her hand although the patrol coordinator had said, ‘All good? My other line’s going,’ and hung up.

Eve marched to the fire and opened the door and threw the frog in. There. She shut the door, an extra lick of bright flame flaring through the soot-stained glass. The mother beamed at her son and said, ‘Wasche deine Hände.’

The boy tucked into his macaroni and cheese and Eve placed the salad lightly in front of him, the vinegary dressing buzzing in the small atmosphere above the bowl. The boy’s family watched him eat. He told a story, in German, while he was chewing, spearing creamy blond pasta onto his fork, holding it high while he swallowed. He broke a crusty roll in half and wiped it through the pale green traces of olive oil that pooled on the plate.

Evelyn sieved icing sugar over the birthday cake and poked spiralled candles, miniature barley twists, in a circle around the top and lit them, the first couple of matches snapping at the waist, the smell of phosphorous lingering until the cake was safely ablaze. Daniel turned out the living-room lights and the family breathed
in as one and sang the English happy birthday song to their boy. Everyone clapped at the blazing cake. Its candles flickered while the mother and father cleared space in the middle of the table and the father found a woven tablemat in the cabinet drawer.

‘Sorry.’ Evelyn shook a strand of hair out of her eyes. ‘I should have done that.’

The boy leaned forward and blew out the candles and everyone cheered quietly, a hushed happy sound that warmed the whole chalet as though it was crammed full of well-wishers, people standing in every room, giving soft applause for this boy’s life.

As they ate, the family’s conversation became louder, the children talking over each other, the mother laughing when she had to intervene. The father followed Daniel into the kitchen, where Evelyn was washing the dinner plates.

‘Could you take him for another lesson the day after tomorrow? Tomorrow we go to the village. We will spend the day together.’

‘Sure. Kein Problem.’ Daniel stretched out the red rubber band that held the plastic wrap over the punnet of strawberries. He reached under the wrap and drew one out as though it were a large jewel. The father and Evelyn watched as he opened his mouth and put the strawberry in, twisting the green cap and stalk off with his fingers, while the rest of it was chewed and swallowed.

‘Good?’ said the father.

‘Sehr gut,’ said Daniel.

Oh fuck up, Evelyn said, to the sink.

In bed there was the sound of wind shearing the ice, and the noises from the bathroom of Daniel brushing his teeth. He didn’t use
much water; the brushing was loud and healthy-sounding, like someone eating an apple in your face. The light went out; the room was dark except for a bright line of orange beneath the door.

‘Can you turn out the hall light?’

Daniel did, and the room disappeared. The mattress shifted with his weight. He began walking his thumbs between Evelyn’s shoulders.

‘You can’t just be so late when you’ve got a child with you,’ she said.

‘He’s not a child.’

‘He’s thirteen. Don’t you think they wanted to be with him on his birthday?’

‘Sorry.’

‘You don’t sound sorry.’

He flopped over onto his side, away from her. ‘Jesus, I said sorry.’

‘You don’t sound it. You don’t mean it. You make it worse with your fake sorry, how defensive you get.’

‘What am I meant to say?’

‘You’re meant to mean it.’

‘OK, I’m sorry I worried you.’

Evelyn stuck her face into the pillow and growled.

Daniel laughed. ‘I’m not sorry we had the last run.’

She got out of bed. ‘It’s not funny.’ The air through her T-shirt was sharply cold; her feet froze; she climbed back into bed and under the blankets again.

He cupped a handful of her hair and rubbed a thumb over her hip bone. ‘Do you want to have angry sex?’

‘No.’ It was too long since they’d done it, and always weird
when there were people staying. She curled up, facing away, and smoodged her body back into him, his arm slung over her ribcage.

Eve woke in the night to see him sitting on the end of the bed, something in his hand – no, flicking through a pile of something – money. He was counting money. She sat up, pulling the blankets up and her long hair down over her neck to keep warm. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Just seeing how much I’ve got left. It’s payday tomorrow from the ski school.’

‘Looks like you’ve got loads.’ She was pretty sure that wasn’t all of it.

‘I want to …’ He folded the bills back into an envelope and put it in his knapsack, the zip loud as he closed it. ‘I really want to go to New York. Next. I want to stay there. Get some work, bar work or whatever, go and see your folks upstate, spend some time. I mean, Canada’s fine, but.’ His gaze went through the knotted pine wall and out into the lightless snow. ‘Enough mountains, I want to go and live in a city. I just, I’m not sure how I’m going to do it, that’s all.’

‘What about –’ Later, she wasn’t sure where she had got the courage to say it. Daylight would dissolve her: after any more than a moment’s thought, Dorothy would have entered her mind, clapped a hand over her mouth, said no. Daniel’s face was barely visible. ‘I’ve got citizenship,’ Eve said. ‘A green card. We could get married.’ She felt the silence burn.

‘Eve, shh.’ He put a hand on her knee. Over the blanket. ‘Shh, it’s the middle of the night. Let’s not make things complicated. You don’t mean it.’

She did. ‘Goodnight,’ she said, and curled up again and was amazed and grateful to succumb quickly to the iron pull of sleep.

In the morning neither of them spoke of it. She got the family ready for their day and Daniel left in his ski gear straight after breakfast. He called up from the snow if she had seen his frog and she stood on the deck and said she couldn’t hear him. He turned and skied away, knees bent, legs in close, expert parallel. The family raised their arms in a faceless goodbye salute as they skied down towards the car park with packs on their backs, shouting and laughing amongst themselves, and Evelyn closed the ranch slider against the white sky. The vacuum cleaner was in the cupboard in the utility room and she dragged its dwarfish body around on the end of the snaky hose, sucking at the channels of crumbs and dust all over the cabin until the floor was clear.

In the children’s room a tubular bundle of duvet on a top bunk made her heart stop. It looked like a sleeping body. But she had seen the family ski off, all six of them. ‘Hello?’ she said, and took a quick breath and yanked the duvet aside to make sure. Nothing but a rippled sheet.

She adjusted the bunk mattresses and pulled up the bedding and shook out the pillows, which smelled of scalps. There was a dog-eared paperback on the floor, in German, its pages oxidised yellow, the cover dotted with brown like a liver-spotted hand. In the top drawer were neatly piled thermals and socks sausaged into pairs. Some cash tucked down the side, a small torch. Evelyn turned the head of the torch so it glowed, and waved the dot of white over the ceiling, the walls, the floor, light streaking past the
mirror, and blew on it when she turned it off as though blowing out a candle.

Downstairs, she took the washing from the tumble dryer and folded it, picking out clotted dust and peeling away the occasional long single hair. She carried the clothes up the stairs in the latticed plastic basket and distributed T-shirts and knickers and jeans where they belonged. Outside, the snow closed in. The automated service said the chairlifts would stop running at noon. The family might have to stay at a hotel in the village, but in case they made it back Evelyn prepared lasagne. She took her diary out from the bottom drawer in the bedroom and wrote in it.

At noon the lifts creaked to a halt. Eve poured a large neat whisky, the taste abrasive and leathery. The ski-school phone number went straight to the answer service. She called Daniel’s mobile, and heard it ringing down the hall and in the bedroom. ‘Well that was stupid,’ she said.

As soon as she hung up the chalet phone it rang, and she answered expecting a dial tone or the bleeping of a fault, but it was the family’s father, his voice warm and close. ‘We’re stuck down the mountain,’ he said.

Through the whiteout the blurry shape of a chair swung high on its cable. ‘Do you have somewhere to stay?’

‘Yes, we’ve found a hotel with a hot pool, the children are happy.’

‘Good.’ Evelyn tightened the screw cap of the whisky bottle and wiped it all over with the apron for stray drops. ‘Nice treat.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

She opened the door of the wood burner onto the smell of
cooled embers, the inside shardy with charcoal. Using the poker she jabbed around in the squeaking ash, but the frog had gone.

‘Sorry we won’t be back tonight,’ he said.

‘That’s fine. I hope it’s good for skiing tomorrow. The fresh fall.’ Evelyn found that she was holding her breath to try and hear his breathing. ‘Keep in touch,’ she said after a moment. ‘Let me know when you’re going to be back.’

‘OK. For sure. Are you going to be all right up there?’

‘Oh yes. Fine.’

‘Daniel is with you.’

‘… yes.’

In the living room she swept out the wood burner and took the ashes to the bin in the kitchen. Soot dropped on the floor; she spread it around with a foot so that some disappeared into the sole of her slipper and some dispersed into particles too small to see. She crumpled newspaper and laid kindling on top and lit the fire, crouching before it, watching the pale sticks catch along the edges. The whiteout was complete. Evelyn added a chafed, cylindrical log to the fire. In the kitchen she tore a bread roll in half and stuffed it into her mouth.

Nobody picked up at mountain patrol. She left a message about Daniel, disconnected, then pressed redial and got the answer phone again. Looking out at the wall of white she pressed redial. She opened the door onto the snowstorm and pressed redial again. She shut the door and hung up the phone and went to the bedroom to check Daniel’s phone, which registered two missed calls, one from the number here at the hut and an earlier call from a withheld number. The messages inbox stored 340 messages. The hut shook
in the wind. Evelyn covered the unbaked lasagne with cling film and put it in the fridge, then washed her hands. She ate another hunk of bread. The oven fan whirred.

The phone rang; the mountain patrol. They asked what time Daniel had left that morning and where he had been going.

‘I’m not sure. I was in the kitchen, I guess about seven thirty, eight?’

‘Did he say where he was headed?’

‘No, I thought he had a class, ski school. Did he show up?’

‘We’ll check and get back to you. Have you got everything you need?’

The DVDs were kids’ cartoons, their covers yellow, orange and purple. The wind howled. Evelyn stood in front of the whisky bottle and looked at it. From the mantelpiece she took Daniel’s soft blue bag of tobacco, the slice of apple in the bottom tinged orangey brown, and rolled an amateur cigarette.

Overnight, the storm calmed. Morning came with the sound of graders, a pale blue sky over the curving dunes of snow. Cloud wisps hung below the peaks across the valley, as though the mountains were steaming. The patrol leader stood by his snowmobile and shouted up that they’d found no sign of anyone, not in the back country, not on the black runs or in the valleys.

‘A chopper’s been out since light. Nothing. But Liam at the school reckons he was headed down the mountain, into town.’

‘Yeah. Thanks … Daniel left his phone here, so.’

‘Maybe he was hitting the casinos, didn’t want you checking up on him.’

‘No doubt. Thanks, Bernie.’

‘We’ll send him home soon as anyone lays eyes on him. Might have been an all-nighter.’

‘Ha ha.’

There was a clunk and grind and the patroller turned to watch the chairlift swing into action. Red- and yellow-coloured figures, riding on the air, skis pointing upwards. ‘Incoming,’ he said.

Evelyn left a note for the family with heating instructions and a promise to be back after lunch. She placed it under the whisky bottle, which she turned on an angle as though that might make a difference to how much was left. In the bathroom she took a couple of painkillers, the tablets’ smooth coating momentarily sweet, and washed her face with warm water. She checked Daniel’s phone again but there was nothing new and she tossed it back on the pillowy white duvet. Evelyn went downstairs to put her overalls and parka and hat and ski boots on and finally the gloves. About two inches of new snow was piled outside the front door. She lifted her feet in a small march through the powder to the rack, and her skis. A thick length of melting snow slid through the slats in the deck.

WHAT SHE THOUGHT
of as her
situation
, a sleeping bag on her boss’s couch, no utility bills in her name, still living out of the knapsack that had accompanied her travels, Evelyn felt most keenly when visiting Dot. It was all very well being penniless and heartbroken and back in her job at the florist’s as though the past months had never happened, but the romance faded at her sister’s rented house miles from anywhere, ages on the bus to a neighbourhood of charity shops and the TAB, here in the constant turn of the washing-machine drum, the bottles forever sterilising on the stovetop. In this family home she was an alien, the night’s adventures clinging like foreign gas. Dorothy welcomed her, happy to have adult company that came without judgement, but Evelyn wished she would for once finish a sentence. Half the times Dot went to Grace there wasn’t anything the matter, and if she was being fed, or changed, or entertained, the conversation inevitably dwindled, funnelled into the baby’s endless need. It was a surprise of the mildly unpleasant
kind, how time-consuming this small creature was, and Evelyn couldn’t help but suspect, punnishly, that Dottie milked it, let every spill and leakage require maximum clean-up, burped the baby at length, hand-scrubbed a square of muslin and pegged it out after a single use, because it was a way of occupying time. What else was she going to do, home all day long in the new-mum smock costume she had taken to wearing?