Lost in the Forest (17 page)

Under his other hand, her hands turned up, encircled and held his fingers. A tear formed at the outer edge of her eye. He wiped it with his thumb. He leaned forward and kissed her cheek, then set his lips gently on her mouth.

“Aahhh!”

Eva’s body jumped, and Mark turned.

Daisy stood in the doorway, seeming to fill its frame. She had on a long T-shirt that said “Because I Say So.” Her legs and feet were bare. Her face was open in anger and shock. She held a piece of paper in her hand.

No one spoke. Mark and Eva sat about a foot apart from each other on the couch, not touching each other at all now.

“Daze …” he started.

She shook her head. “Forget it!” she said. “God! I was bringing you this.” She crumpled the paper and threw it at him. He felt its sharp prick on his face. It fell to the floor, and Daisy was gone.

They sat still for a long moment, not looking at each other. Then Eva got up. “This is one I’m going to have to deal with right away, I think.” Her face was drawn, suddenly paler.

“Probably so,” he said. “Yes.”

She started toward the doorway, and then turned. “You better go, Mark,” she said. “I need to be just … with Daisy. I’m afraid this is going to be complicated.”

“All right,” he said.

She disappeared around the corner, and he heard her slow footsteps going up the stairs. A moment or two later, after he heard Daisy’s voice start, accusatory and loud, and Eva’s responding in calmer, muted tones, he bent down and picked up the paper his daughter had thrown at him, and he left.

He kept his window open as he drove. The night air was cool against his face. The moon rode high over the mountains to his left. Only the occasional house had lights on, though when he passed the intersection at Calistoga, the Mexicans were still congregated at the drive-in.

On the dirt road to his house, the jackrabbits scattered into the vineyards away from his lights. When he got home, he let the dogs out and left the door open. He pulled the paper Daisy had thrown at him out of his pocket and laid it on the island in the kitchen, smoothing it out. He saw that it was the poem she’d recited for him in the truck, her face lovely and rapt.

Your thoughts don’t have words every day
They come a single time
Like signal esoteric sips
Of sacramental wine

Which while you taste so native seems
,
So bounteous, so free
,
You cannot comprehend its worth
Nor its infrequency
.

After that, she’d written out another one:

If all the griefs I am to have
Would only come today
I am so happy I believe
They’d laugh and run away!

If all the joys I am to have
Would only come today
They could not be so big as this
That happens to me now
.

Chapter Eight

S
UMMER ENDED
. Emily returned from France transformed—her hair short and swinging around her face, a clear red lipstick shaping her mouth. She’d lost weight too. Her slight tendency to baby fat was gone. She looked like Eva, it seemed to Daisy: small, perfect, pretty.

She broke up with Noah soon after her return, and Daisy thought briefly that this might mean she and Emily would draw close again, but it didn’t happen that way. Instead, it was her girlfriends Emily wanted to see, classmates who were also going off to college in a week or two. She went shopping with them, she made lists with Eva, she packed—and then she was gone.

One night a few days after she’d left, they were having dinner, Eva and Theo and Daisy, when Eva looked around the table and said, “And now we are three.” Daisy was startled. What did this mean? Eva was smiling, but she didn’t seem happy.

Daisy looked away and resumed twirling spaghetti on her fork.

When school started, the leaves were just beginning to turn in the vineyards. Daisy remembered the fall before, when John was alive, when she’d begun high school so full of hope. She had made resolutions and promises to herself in the days just before it all
began again this year—that she would start anew, that she would try, that she owed it to him, to herself, at least to try.

And she did, at first. She signed up for chorus; she told the basketball coach she would come out for the varsity team. She submitted a poem to the literary magazine in hopes of making it onto the editorial board. It was one she’d written over the summer, late one night in her room after a day in which Eva had spoken sharply to her in the store about a mistake she’d made, and then later wanted her to be friendly and conversational when someone she knew dropped in. It was titled “Me.”

Like training a dog to shit in the gutter
You trained me, your good daughter, never to utter
A word. Dutiful mute. Me
.

When company comes, pull me out of a corner
,
Jam in your thumb like Little Jack Horner
.
A smile. Pull out a plum. Me
.

She did make the board, and she went to the first meeting. She went to chorus and got the music handouts. But in the second week of school, a boy, a senior, called her “Stretch” in the lunch line, and she heard others laughing. She felt the sense of her size, her homeliness, her awkwardness sweep her. She left the line and went outside and sat alone at a table. She resolved to hope for nothing, socially. To expect nothing. It would be work, only work, she decided, that she would think about.

And she did become consumed with her schoolwork in a way she’d never been before. For Latin she often did three translations—one literal, one loose, based on the literal, and one cast in the meter of the original. When she got a C on a geometry quiz—they’d had two problems to solve and she missed one—she hung the grade on the wall by her bed so it would be the first thing she’d see every morning, reminding her to work even harder.

In English they had moved on from Emily Dickinson, they
were reading modern poets now, and Daisy was riveted by Sylvia Plath, drawn to her grim fury. “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” Why should this appeal to Daisy? She didn’t know.

She was still working at the store, on weekends and for special events—mostly readings, for which Daisy would arrange chairs and pass books over to the author to be signed. She’d continued to take money, but not as often, and smaller amounts when she did.

She thought about Duncan, about his catching her at it, about his threat to tell. But she thought, too, about her mother’s birthday party and the way he’d behaved to her that night, as though he liked her, as though it didn’t matter, what she’d done in the store. In any case, the weeks went by and nothing happened, and she figured he’d probably forgotten all about it.

And then one afternoon in mid-October as she was walking down Oak Street on her complicated route home from school—complicated, so no one would fall in beside her or try to speak to her—she became aware of a car moving along parallel to her in the street, at her pace. She looked over. It was Duncan. He was steering with one hand, his body leaned across the front seat toward her. When she turned, he called her name, softly. Immediately she clutched her books even tighter to her chest.

But her first clear thought was that she was sorry she wasn’t wearing any lipstick, or a prettier top. And with that response came an unconscious dawning of awareness—awareness of why he was there, and what he was doing, speaking her name, calling her over to him. She couldn’t have articulated it, she wasn’t sure what any of it meant, but she understood that he’d come on purpose, that he had thought about her and sought her out.

Years later when she tried to explain it to Dr. Gerard, she said that it was as though her unconscious mind knew everything that her conscious mind hadn’t a clue about yet; and this was the moment when they began to communicate with each other

All of this might have seemed slow, nearly backward, in another person—a person like Emily, for instance. A person who understood something of her own sexual value, her interest to others. But no one had ever paid any kind of sexual attention to Daisy.
She had been a homely girl, an awkward girl, a silent girl, for a long time, and her ability to read that kind of interest in herself was absent. Beyond that, Duncan, of course, was a grown-up, and a difficult, scathingly critical, sarcastic grown-up at that. And he was the husband of Gracie, who was an institution in her family.

But she knew, as soon as she saw him, that he had thought about her over these weeks, these months. She knew that he had planned exactly this, this moment. She walked over to the car and leaned down to the window.

“Get in,” he said. “I’ll give you a ride.” He was bent across the front seat, his face lifted to talk to her. He looked younger than he usually did at this angle.

“But I don’t
want
a ride.” How could she be saying this? To a grown-up. To a friend of her mother’s.

“Get in anyway,” he said. He sounded unoffended, unsurprised.

Daisy shrugged and straightened up. She opened the door and got into the car. She set her books down on the seat, between them. Her breath was short, her head felt light.

He drove down Main Street and started across the valley, through vineyards.

“Where are we going?” she asked finally.

“I thought I’d show you what I’m working on. My
studio
.” His voice was heavy with his usual sarcasm. It occurred to her abruptly that this sarcasm, maybe much of his sarcasm—which had always frightened her—was directed at himself.

“What if I don’t want to see it?”

“I’ll show it to you regardless. Because you
should
want to see it. You should be curious about everything. If you’re not curious now, you might as well shoot yourself and get it over with. You’re dead anyway.” He turned right onto Silverado Road. They drove in silence for a while.

“And then I thought we’d talk about our bargain.” He said this without looking at her.

She looked over at him, though. He was wearing a white shirt, pressed. You could see the creases in the fabric where it had been
folded. The cuffs were turned back, and his wrists and hands had light brown hairs that glinted in the sun. “There is no
bargain
,” she said.

“Well, exactly.” He smiled at her, but his eyes were sober in his pale face. “The bargain we have yet to strike. The bargain in which I don’t report your malfeasance this summer to your
mother
in exchange for something or other.”

“I don’t care if you do report it.” She believed this as she said it. She looked out the window at the live oaks, the coppery vines. It would be a relief. Eva would yell at her. She would yell at Eva. It would be over.

What? What would be over?

“Oh yes, you do,” he said. “You care very much, in fact.” And suddenly she believed this, too. That she cared, that it would be unbearable if Eva found out.

All of this confused Daisy, and fed into the confusion she felt about Duncan and what he might want with her. What she might want with him. She couldn’t have explained anything. If someone had asked her, “Why did you go with him?,” she wouldn’t have known. If someone had asked, “What did you think was going to happen?,” she couldn’t have said.

“What was your feeling?” Dr. Gerard asked.

“My feeling?”

“Yes. Your emotional state, as you drove along.”

“I was excited.”

“And the
kind
of excitement? Fearful?”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“Why not? There was everything to be fearful of, wasn’t there? Including the fact that he’d seen you stealing from your mother’s store.”

Daisy shook her head. “None of that mattered. I felt I controlled the situation. From the moment I saw him, even though I didn’t know what it was about, really, I felt in charge.”

“And that felt good?”

“Are you kidding? It felt wonderful.”

His studio was off a dirt road near Yountville. It was a huge
garage, nearly a barn, behind a small, run-down ranch house. The yard between the house and the garage was full of old vineyard machinery, green or bright orange, but pocked and streaked now with rust, and eviscerated, odd bits torn off to get at other parts, and everything left lying around. As if, Daisy thought, the machines were animals that had been attacked by jackals or wolves, savage creatures who’d been frightened off their prey.

Duncan pulled around to the side of the garage invisible to the house and parked. “Out,” he said, opening his door.

She got out and followed him to the side door. He unlocked it. He stepped back and she stepped forward, just across the threshold.

After the bright light outside, after the chaos of color and decay in the yard, the vast room seemed muted and still, it seemed to hold a kind of peace and order. It smelled of wood, and thinly, faintly, of something sharp and clean, something chemical. The light fell palely from skylights overhead. The air was cool. She stepped farther in.

In the center of the room was a tall, wooden chest, the drawers missing. It was slightly curved, maybe echoing the shape of a cello, or a woman’s body. Its wood was a reddish blonde, with hardly any grain. Tools and unfinished wood were laid out on a long worktable behind it. Along the side wall there was a desk—really just another long table—with papers and drawing instruments on it, and an ergonomic chair rolled up to it. Along the other side wall was a cot. The cement floor was swept clean. At the back of the space were several other pieces of furniture—two tables with curvy legs, an elaborate kind of desk—and behind them, along the back wall, there were partitions from floor to ceiling with pieces of wood leaning this way and that between them.