The Forrests (9 page)

Instinct made her duck as a dark shape fell from the window – a box that bounced and shed its contents over the small front yard – old schoolbooks and childhood stuff – Daniel’s exercise books, the kid’s microscope Michael had saved up for – ‘No,’ Dorothy called, but now Michael’s guitar landed on the end of its neck, the body thwanging
on the ground. ‘No,’ she shouted. She threw herself into the driver’s seat and leaned on the horn. In the silence that followed, the upstairs window closed. Papers and parts of toys had scattered everywhere and Dorothy collected them, hugged them to her, dropped them in the squashed cardboard box, pushed it onto her pile of clothes inside the car. In the driver’s seat she pulled the seat belt across and stepped on the clutch and turned the key, shaking.

Andrew appeared by the car window. A moment passed in which the two of them watched each other through the glass. She was afraid of him. And then he was the one who looked frightened. Slowly she released the gearstick into neutral and unwound the window.

‘Oh my god,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I did that.’ He knelt on the ground by the car, his eyes red, his voice solid. ‘I’ll buy a new guitar. Please. Help me take those things back inside. Please, Dorothy. Help me.’

On the other side of the road a neighbour emerged from her front door, pulling her dressing gown tight around her, a telephone receiver in her hand. She walked a step towards them, as far as the cord would allow. Dorothy got out of the car and waved to the woman and called that she was Frank and Lee’s daughter, the Forrests’ daughter, everything was all right.

THERE WAS NO
queue yet for the second chairlift, and Evelyn had the bench seat to herself; it rocked under her shifting weight when she yanked the gloves and hat on and rubbed her ears through the wool. The ski-hut roof was icing white and smooth with snow. Up in the mountains, crumbs of rock faced outwards through the snowfall, dark and bumpy. The last of the pine trees passed beneath her feet. The boots hung heavy with the skis. Behind the sunglasses, her eyes stung and watered.

The chair reached the top and she lifted the bar and skied away before it arced the half-circle for its slow return journey. She kept climbing the slope, cutting the skis horizontally into the gradient, heading for a ridge that snaked upwards to a peak. At the ridge she faced up-mountain and was able to walk directly forwards. Her arms and legs worked hard; inside the ski suit was effort and heat. Her vision filled with the whiteness of snow. She panted heavily, thirstily, and lactic acid seared her muscles, and the slim Vs of her
steps in the skis inched closer together until she was shuffling. She pushed on with the poles.

At the top of the ridge, where the ground fell away into a valley that led to another hill, Evelyn rotated the skis like irregular hands of a clock, the ticking spread and smashed in the snow in a five-point manoeuvre until she was positioned to head downhill. She took off the hat and listened to the whistling. Her hot head quickly cooled, the air like fingers through her hair. Velvety blue shadows ran down the side of the ridge’s spine. There were the dotted pines below, gathering further down into a white and black forest. And the car park, and the roads out, and very far away the muzzy village, some farmland, a greenness that was probably trees, and a shining fingernail of silver that might have been the edge of a lake, or a stretch of highway hit by the sun, or the tubing of an industrial greenhouse. Above, nothing but the pressure of the sky. For a moment it thudded closely onto her head, onto the speck that she was. She whooped – a ringing shout bounced back off the slopes – pulled the beanie back on, took a breath and launched forwards.

In the late afternoon, Daniel and the boy from the new family stood on the elevated deck of the hut. Daniel’s wrists hung over the railing and he held a cigarette between his fingers, the acrid smell drifting on a channel of air, and he and the boy looked out across the snowfields towards the pines. The boy was talking; Daniel smoked and listened, and at something the boy said he barked a short laugh. Evelyn waved up and pushed at her ski buckle with the pole to unclick it. A blast of wind scoured her face. As she entered the hut, Daniel and the boy retreated from the deck. In the
shade of the cork-floored entranceway, the drying room and the utility room to either side, their overhead footsteps echoed. A cosy smell of wet wool rose as soon as she levered off the snow boots. The outer socks were thick and tongue-shaped, with a tweed-like pattern, dark around the edges with dissolved snow.

Evelyn stepped around the crusts of ice left by her boot prints on her way into the drying room, where she unzipped the ski jacket and emerged from the waterproof overalls and hung them up next to Daniel’s giant orange ski suit, a discarded lobster shell. She ran a hand down the leg of his overalls, the polyurethane coating slightly stiff. Her fingers found something hard halfway down the leg and she slid her hand into the slit of the trouser pocket. She felt a leathery flatness and drew out the small, dried body of Daniel’s lucky frog, long dead and tanned by long-gone air. How many years had he kept this?

There was other stuff in the pocket and although Evelyn held the entire frog between her fingers, could see its squashed diamond completeness, a dread passed through her that there would be half a frog left behind. But there was just a scrunkled lift-pass sticker and two barley sugars. Daniel wore his lift pass around his neck; he was so known here that his whole face was a lift pass, and the date on this one was from last year, and the last mountain, before she had caught up with him.

Evelyn had never touched the frog before and this was the first time she’d taken a close look. It had no smell; all she could detect on her fingers was the wet-fleece scent from the inside of the ski gloves. There was the sound of boots being scraped and stamped on the grill outside. The new family came in the door and they smiled,
and exchanged hellos in each other’s languages. The father pulled his dark blue beanie off and batted snow from it, his fine blond hair sticking out crazily from his head. Evelyn finished pulling the sheepskin boots on and nodded at the family once more before climbing the pine stairs to the body of the chalet. The frog was in her pocket now.

She called a greeting to Daniel and he called back from somewhere in the hut. Evelyn tightened her ponytail and washed her hands under the kitchen tap. While she waited to feel his warmth behind her, to be enveloped in his arms, Evelyn tried to focus on the food. The onions in the wicker basket were firm, golden orbs, crunchy green beneath the skin where the knife sliced in and left pungent milky droplets on the chopping board. At the industrial-sized oven she turned on the dials, stiff with trapped food crumbs, and kept chopping. The chopped onions were soft and translucent in the frying pan. The kitchen smelled of their cooking and of melted cheese. There was a tumbling sound as she tipped dried macaroni into the boiling water, which fizzed up and almost over the rim of the saucepan in a rush of white froth. The salt shaker clogged in the steam. She put the macaroni cheese in the oven and started on the birthday cake. She cut adze-shaped chunks of butter and wiped them off the knife with a finger into a large bowl with a chip out of its rim the size of a fingernail. The fine white sugar poured into a peak on top of the butter, a mountain in the bowl. She sniffed the wooden spoon, which smelled of onions, and scrubbed it under hot water then used it to beat the butter and sugar together hard. The eggs were thick-shelled, hard to crack, with a taut matt skin between each shell and the contents. In
the bowl they created a separated viscous swirl with the creamed-butter mixture, the yolk trailing through the pale butter, the transparent whites floating jellyishly around the surface. The fragments of shell were tacky and sharp when Evelyn carried them in cupped palms to the rubbish bin. She sifted flour and baking powder over the wet mixture and a fine dust sprayed over the bench, down her apron and onto the floor. The vanilla essence bottle was empty; she shook it over the bowl but only that sweet, oozy smell wafted out, and she threw the bottle over to the bin, and it bounced off the rim and skittered along the floor.

Daniel was not in the bedroom. Evelyn held the banister and swung off the top stair to look down into the entranceway: his boots had gone from the neat row of pairs. In the kitchen she looked at the clustered red heart-shaped strawberries in the plastic punnet the family had brought with them. In winter! She was over the shock of it now.

The family was settled in the lounge, the father on a couch reading to the girl of about eight by his side, the mother and older girl playing a game at the table. There was the hard rattle of blocks inside a plastic shell, and the girl flipped a timer. She said, ‘OK, Mama, go.’ Yellow salt crystals slipped through the timer and the girl scribbled on her paper, an arm crooked over it so nobody could see what she wrote.

‘Dinner is ready in half an hour,’ Evelyn said, aware as she finished the sentence that she was speaking English as if it were her second language, not theirs. She poured the mother a glass of the red wine she liked and tilted the gin bottle towards the father, who shook his head. ‘Daniel and …’ the son, the thirteen-year-old. She gestured to
the window, where there was still sun on half of the field of snow, a grey shadow from one of the rises bisecting it.

The father nodded. ‘One last run,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ said the mother, taking a gulp of wine. ‘Gut, du fängst an.’

The daughter recited the words she had found, her voice like stiff springs.

Although Evelyn had washed her hands she still felt the frog’s body on them, the desiccated skin between the pads of her fingers, the light ridge of bones beneath the skin. It sat in her pocket like a piece of gold. She washed the cooking dishes. Outside the small window, the snow was blue.

In the living room she turned on the lamp, and its warm glow made outside seem darker. ‘Thank you,’ said the father.

There was some exchange between the children and their parents, and she understood the words
video
and
film
. The girl left the room and the older sister shut her book and followed her. Eve hadn’t seen the third daughter; perhaps she was asleep in her bunk. Their mother was holding the edges of the rust-coloured raw linen curtains. She pulled them across a little bit then left them open. ‘Die Scheibe ist kalt,’ she said.

‘Close the curtains,’ said her husband.

‘Nein, not yet.’

Evelyn levered open the door of the wood burner and added another log. A splinter caught in the pad of her index finger. She pressed at the buried end, faintly visible through the layer of skin like a drawing viewed through tracing paper. In the small bathroom off her and Daniel’s bedroom, she took a pair of tweezers from the
cabinet and tried to pincer it out, but her left hand didn’t have the necessary deftness and the splinter buried further beneath the skin.

In the living room she held out her finger, palm upwards, and the tweezers, to the mother, and said slowly, ‘I have a splinter. Splinter? Could you, please?’

The woman nodded and took Evelyn’s finger in her own. Her nails were short, without varnish. She pushed at the sides of the finger pad and a micrometre more of the black wood emerged, emphatic as a speck of dirt. The pointed ends of the tweezers delicately gripped the splinter and the woman drew it towards her, and out of Evelyn’s body, and held it up into the light. A dot of blood emerged from the skin where the splinter had been. The mother passed the tweezers back, the splinter still stuck to one arm. Evelyn took the finger out of her mouth and said, ‘Thanks,’ her tongue tasting a little of the blood and the resiny firewood. In the bathroom she wiped the splinter off onto a tissue and put the tissue in the rubbish bag that hung on a hook on the bathroom door, its contents – wilted tissues like flowers, flattened cardboard toilet rolls – visible innards through the transparent plastic. Far off in the mountains behind the hut there was a crack. The sound registered through the back of her head like the soft pop of a neighbour’s firework; a long second later she understood what it was.

Evelyn reached behind the gathered curtains, opened the ranch sliders as narrowly as possible and squeezed through into the limpid evening air. Light from the living room cut across the balcony. She thrust her hands into her pockets and felt the frog. The white lights on top of the chairlift pylons glistened with a small bright radius. Rope tow poles on a shallow run could
have been skiers crouching in tableau. Down the slope, at the base of the first chair, the ski café lights were still on, an octagonal constellation. She thought of electric fish in the deep. Wind shook over the surface of the ski field like a sheet being thrown on a bed and there was a high, glassy ringing that might have been lift wires or the wind running over the snow.

The door behind her opened and the father said, ‘Excuse me, the alarm in the kitchen is tooting.’

In the living room the parents looked expectant. ‘Well,’ Evelyn said. ‘I think we should call the mountain patrol.’

‘OK,’ the man said, and translated for his wife.

She said, ‘Really? No. They’re OK.’

‘I don’t know,’ Evelyn said. ‘It’s getting dark. It’s Thursday. There’s no night skiing. No lights.’ Her voice was growing louder, a function of the language barrier. She tried to moderate it. ‘How good a skier is your son?’

The man nodded. ‘He’s very good. Very accomplished.’

‘Right. I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m making us all worry for no reason.’

‘You are worried.’

‘Yes. But Daniel is a good skier too and so. Would you like to eat now, or to wait?’

The man and woman consulted each other. ‘Let’s feed the children,’ he said.

Evelyn was on the phone to the ski patrol when there was a knocking sound from downstairs and Daniel and the boy were down there, in the cold entranceway, the door to the drying room open,
ski jackets half off, laughing, stamping feet, the smell of snow on them. ‘Where have you been?’ Evelyn cried. ‘I’ve been freaking out.’