Lost in the Forest (31 page)

She had jumped when his fist made its noise. After a few seconds, she was able to yell back, “I don’t
want
to talk to you! I don’t want to talk to anyone! I have nothing to talk to you about.”

“
I
want to talk to you, though!”

Daisy got out of the truck and slammed the door behind her. She crossed the cement pad and walked the few steps to the back door in the moonlight. She opened it, and the dogs streamed out past her. Before she started into the dark house, she looked back and saw Mark struggling with his crutches, the dogs jumping around him.

She crossed the rooms around the familiar black shapes of the furniture without stumbling, went into her room—her room and Emily’s—and slammed that door too.

In a minute or two he was there, outside it. “Daisy?” he said.

She didn’t answer.

“Open up, Daisy.”

“I’m tired!” she said loudly. “I’m trying to sleep. Go away.”

The door opened. He stood there a moment, shifting his crutches around; she could see his shape in the faint light of the door’s rectangle. He came in slowly. He lowered himself laboriously onto Emily’s bed, facing Daisy. In the dark she was more aware of him physically than she’d been before—his size, the sound of his breathing as he sat there. She lay still. The moonlight
came filtered into the room from the window behind him. She couldn’t see his face at all.

“I wanted this to be positive, Daisy,” he said. He sounded almost hoarse. “I wanted it to be—that I want you with me. That I think you need a father, and I want to be your father.”

She made a noise, dismissive and rude.

“That’s fair,” he said. “I know I haven’t been there for you.”

Been there for me
, Daisy thought. How corny.

“But that’s what I’d like to change. I want a chance, I want you to give me a chance, to make a difference in your life.”

“Don’t you think it’s a little late for that?”

“It seems it might be. But maybe not. I’m hoping not. I’d like to help you.”

This all seemed familiar to Daisy, maddening. “What does that mean,
help me
?”

“Well, it seems you’ve gone about … making your own life, without me or your mother, in ways that I think—” He stopped, as if waiting for the right words to come to him. He looked away, and for a moment she saw his profile against the window. Then he turned back to her. He was almost whispering. “In ways that seem … really dangerous to me, Daze. Really … not good.”

What did he know? Had Emily mentioned the money to him? That would be just like her, to let it drop somehow. Her big
concern
about her troubled younger sister. “Whatever’s not good in my life is something I can fix myself.”

“I’m not so sure of that.”

“Well, tough. I am.”

One of the dogs—it was Henry—came into the room, his paws clicking on the tile floor, his tail swinging. Mark reached out to touch him for a moment. Then he drew his hand back. The dog sat.

“Daisy,” Mark said. “Let me say that I think Duncan. Duncan is … a bad choice for you.”

Daisy felt her heart stop. It seemed she might have made a noise.

“I know you might …” Mark cleared his throat. “I think what
you might feel is that you need someone.” He was speaking haltingly. “What I see, what I think I understand, is how much you needed someone. And you know, Eva is so sad right now, and I’ve been. The way I’ve been … you know
me
. But Duncan. To get involved with Duncan. I don’t know how far it’s gone, but—”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Daisy was trying to make her voice steady, sure, categorical, but it didn’t sound that way to her.

“Don’t you, Daisy.”

“No.”

There was a long silence between them, in which they could hear a coyote howling, far in the distance; and then, a moment or two later, in nervous response, Mark’s neighbor’s cattle lowing.

“Maybe
he
would,” Mark said. His voice had gone cold. “Maybe Duncan would know what I’m talking about.”

“I don’t know why.”

“Why what?”

“Why he’d
know
,” she said sarcastically.

“Don’t jerk me around, Daisy,” he snapped.

“Who’s jerking who around?” she said. “You start off asking me to live with you because you
want to get to know me
,” her voice mocked the idea, “and you end up accusing me … of some sort of … relationship with Gracie’s husband.”

“They’re not unconnected,” he said flatly. “And that’s some of the point, surely. That he
is
Gracie’s husband.”

Daisy didn’t answer.

“Shall I call him?” Mark said.

“Do what you want.”

“I’ll call him then,” he said.

“Fine.”

“Maybe he’s still at the party.”

“Maybe.”

When she didn’t say anything more, he got up. Her eyes had become accustomed to the dim light in the room. She could see him clearly, hunched on the crutches, making his way to the door. She heard him, the dull plunk of the crutches, sometimes not
quite in unison. A lamp went on in the living room, and then she heard the faint tonal clicking sound of the push buttons being worked on the phone. The dog yawned and put his head on the bed near her.

And suddenly her father’s voice, loud: “Eva? Eva, it’s Mark! No, we’re home. We’re fine. Yeah. No. No. I just wanted … is Duncan still there? Yeah. Well, I just wanted to talk to him for a minute. Yeah. I’ll wait.”

Daisy was up now, she crossed to her desk and picked up the phone. She could hear the noise of the party, people talking—someone close to the phone said, “But you never gave one to
me
”—and then Duncan’s voice suddenly on the line. “This is Duncan. Is it Mark?”

“Hang up, Dad,” she said in a low voice.

Duncan said, “Daisy?” He sounded startled. When the extension clicked off, Daisy hung up too, just as Duncan was speaking her name again.

She heard her father coming back to her room. He stood in the doorway, a dark silhouette against the living room light.

She turned at the desk to face him. “What were you going to do?” she asked defiantly. “Beat him up?”

“I might have,” he said. “Depending.”

“Depending on what?”

“Depending on what he said. On what I understood about where things stood between the two of you.”

“He’s very strong,” Daisy said; and this was the closest she would ever come to acknowledging the affair to her father, this knowledge of Duncan’s body, and its power.

“Well, that would only have made it more pleasurable then,” Mark said. He sat down on Emily’s bed again, again facing her. She was still standing at the desk, her arms folded. He watched her for a long time without speaking.

“So,” she said finally. “I’ll live with you.”

“If Eva says it’s all right.” He was nodding.

After a moment, she thought to say, “Will you tell Eva? About … Duncan?”

“No. No, I won’t tell her,” he said. Then his body straightened, he was taller. “Did you think I would? Unless you agreed? There’s no
deal
here, Daisy. You don’t need to come live with me to buy my silence.”

“No, Dad. That’s not what I meant. I didn’t mean that.”

He sounded exhausted when he spoke again. “I want you to come because I think we need each other. I think you need me.”

After a long moment, Daisy said in a quiet voice, “I don’t need anyone.”

He looked at her sharply. “You needed Duncan. That’s about the worst thing that anyone could say about me as a father.”

“I
didn’t
, ‘need’ him.”

“Ah, no.” There was an odd smile on his face. “You chose him, freely. Of all the people in the world, you decided, quite logically, that the warmhearted, the generous, the … expansive Duncan Lloyd was the very guy to be your … your best friend. Your pal.”

“Okay, Dad.”

He groaned, suddenly, and shook his head quickly from side to side. His face, in the light falling in from the living room, looked old to her, seamed.

“What
will
you say to Eva then?” she asked after a few moments had passed.

“
I
don’t know.” His hand lifted, ran through his hair. “Maybe the truth.”

“What do you mean, the truth?” She heard the fear in her own voice.

“The truth about
me
, Daisy.” He smiled, sadly. “The truth only about me. That I want to be your father, somehow, in a way I haven’t been. And I’ll just ask her to give me that chance.” He pulled his crutches up to his chin. After a moment he said, “Maybe it would help if you told her you wanted to.”

“Okay,” she said.

“You don’t have to.”

“No,” she said. “I will.”

“It’s just … It will raise fewer flags, fewer questions, I think, if it’s something you want too. Or
say
you want.”

Daisy looked down at her folded arms in her white blouse, at her hands, resting on her own elbows. She was wearing the bracelet her father had given her for her fifteenth birthday, the one he’d forgotten about.

She knew what this would mean, agreeing to this. She knew that part of what her father was asking for was that she give up Duncan. She had felt it would be impossible for her to give up Duncan, to give up sex, to give up the sense of power he gave her. But she couldn’t have guessed that this was the way the choice would come to her. That it would be her father. That he would be
asking
her for something. That she would be turning from Duncan to something else that would have arrived in her life, that would change it, in ways she couldn’t begin to guess at. “I want it,” she said softly.

This was so costly to Daisy, acknowledging this to herself, and to him—she had the sense of it as a gift she was making him, an expensive, precious gift—that it was a moment before she even thought about his response, about what she might be expecting him to say back to her.

But he didn’t answer, and he didn’t answer, and when she looked up at him and saw his face in the half-light falling in from the living room, it was transformed by what she could only have described—did describe, years later to Dr. Gerard—as anguish. She felt she was looking into his soul. It was as if everything superficial was stripped away, and she was seeing her father, her real father, for the first time.

Chapter Fifteen

E
-
MAIL
,
THE TELEPHONE
, this is how they stay in touch now, they live so far apart from each other. Daisy thinks of their communication as a kind of network, a spider’s web, a sociogram, laid over the entire
U.S. of A
., zinging with news that engenders more news.

Emily writes to Daisy from Phoenix about her two-year-old son, Gideon. She makes fun of her own nearly rabid devotion to him, she calls him “The Little Prince.” She says that her brain has turned to hominy, “whatever that is. I can’t remember anything.” Except that, inadvertently, she’s memorized entire children’s books, and can summon them whole if need be—“and unbelievably to me, Daze, need
does
be, from time to time.”

She worries that when she has the new baby, due in six months, she will not be able to love Gideon as well as she does now. Or love the new baby as well as she has loved Gideon.

Sometimes I think of Eva and Mark and how careless they seemed about us, how they were just happy (were they ever?) or miserable (yes!) and didn’t seem to worry very much about what impact any of that might have on us. In a funny way, that seems like a kind of gift to me, from the vantage I have now. But I suppose there’s a part of me, too, that simply doesn’t believe they loved us as much as I love Gideon.

I know I’m wrong, that every parent feels this way. That this amazing love, which I feel has happened to me, me, and only me in this miraculous way, is just utterly ordinary and predictable and the
way things go
, unless things are terribly wrong somehow.

Eva summarizes the news of the valley for them all. The weather, the traffic, the new shops and restaurants, the doings of people they know, the health of the bookstore—which has new co-owners, a young couple who’ve bought into it and will slowly buy Eva out. She threatens, in every fourth or fifth e-mail, to sell the house, but no one takes her seriously. She’s the one who loves it most.

Every now and then she becomes
pensive
, as Daisy thinks of it. She writes of John, or of her failed marriage with Mark. She’s thinking, it seems, of the course of her life; she’s wondering, perhaps, if her story makes sense, if it means anything, or amounts to anything.

Once she writes to Daisy about Daisy’s hard adolescence, her going to live with Mark and the difference that made:

I still wonder from time to time if it was the right thing to do. It seems that it was, that your life was better and easier after that. But I worry that I gave you up too easily, that there might have been something hurtful in that to you.

Daisy doesn’t know how to answer this, how to tell her mother that she did the right thing, that she was only grateful. She finally writes Eva that she thinks living with Mark was something she needed to do at that stage of her life, that it seems generous to her that Eva allowed it.

Theo writes from college, from Duke. He writes of courses he’s
taking, of concerts he’s planning to go to, of basketball games he’s seen, of peace rallies he’s participated in. Does he have an inner life? It’s hard to know. He doesn’t write anything that might reveal it, but this is how Theo is, having grown up alone with Eva, who worried too much about him, who made his life the center of hers. It seems to Daisy that he realized at some point that to have thoughts and feelings that could survive Eva’s probing concern—her wish to shape and control the lives around her—you needed to keep things buttoned up. She feels that her own moving in with Mark, battling openly with him about who controlled what, has somehow released her from that need.

But Theo, more loving, less angry perhaps than Daisy, seems to have flourished in his own way with Eva, even if he is a private soul.