Free Lost in the Forest by Sue Miller

glad to be chosen. When she talked about it years later in therapy, trying to reconstruct it from John’s point of view, Daisy wondered if it hadn’t been deliberated, his kindness to her. Maybe, she said to her doctor, he and Eva saw that she was too solitary, too shy. Maybe they discussed it together, how now that Eva was so busy with Theo, and Emily had moved off into the life of high school, Daisy needed extra attention. But what she concluded was that even if it was calculated in that sense—an act of parenting , that weird gerund—it didn’t matter. It had been done lovingly. It had changed things for her. She had a friend, an ally. Whatever Daisy asked him to do, John did. In return, she went with him—on errands, on hikes, on bicycle rides. And whatever they were doing, John would talk to Daisy. Or rather, he’d ask Daisy to talk to him.
    At one time or another over the years that he was her stepfather,John asked Daisy how she would describe herself to someone else; he asked her how she imagined music when she dreamed: as notes? or maybe just as waves of sound or feeling?; he asked her whether she thought the way a language was structured—she had just finished reciting a poem she’d memorized for French—made a difference in the way people thought; he asked her whether she thought she would be a different person if she’d grown up somewhere else geographically—New York, say, or Beirut; he asked her whether she would have preferred to be the older or the younger child in the family, instead of the one in the middle, and what difference she thought that would make.
    He never seemed to anticipate or to want a particular answer. He was just interested in what she thought.
    Once he asked her how her life was different from the way she would have liked it to be. Daisy didn’t even need to think to answer this. She told him she wished her parents hadn’t gotten divorced and that they still lived in the house up in the hills.
    John was taking her to a doctor’s appointment that time, driving. It was raining and the windshield wipers were slapping out their steady beat. John seemed concentrated on that, or on the road—in any case, you couldn’t have told from his expression that she’d said anything important. She watched his face and thought about her answer, about how hurtful it might be to him. Stupid! she thought. She said, “But then I wouldn’t have you and Theo, so I don’t know. It’s hard to know.”
    “It is, isn’t it?” He had looked over at her quickly and smiled. “Hard to know.”
    Only a few months before he died, he’d asked her a question about Emily. “What do you think of this business of having a beautiful older sister, Daisy?” he’d said. “Would it be a good idea if we bumped her off?”
    Daisy had burst into laughter at this, but then, because John had been the one to say it, she allowed herself to realize, maybe for the first time, that there was a part of her that would have liked Emily to disappear forever—though simultaneously she understood that she would have felt bereft if that happened, that shewould have felt that there was no one to instruct her in the way she should enter the world each day.
    She was riding bikes with John on Bennett Lane when he asked her this. She had to raise her voice a little to answer him—he was behind her. She told him that sometimes she did feel that way next to Emily—ugly and angry. He caught up to her and was pedaling along beside her, frowning in concentration on what she was saying. She said, “But I really love Emily too. Sometimes I even feel sorry for her.”
    “Sorry? For our Emily?” he asked. “How come?”
    Daisy looked over at her stepfather. He was wearing his yellow bike helmet and an old T-shirt that said ARS(e). He had on shorts, and his legs were white and hairy. He was a nerd. Daisy knew this. He was big and freckled and nowhere near as handsome as her real father. She thought about what she had said. She