Free Lost in the Forest by Sue Miller Page A

hadn’t known this before—that she could feel sorry for Emily.
    “Because,” she said. “Because Emily always has to do everything the right way, you know?” Was that what she felt? Or was she just making this up, to hold John’s attention? She wasn’t sure, actually. “Or maybe because she never gets to be, just, ignored.”
    John had bicycled silently next to her for a while.
    Daisy felt the wind—it lifted her hair and pushed against her skin. It was dry and smelled of dirt from the vineyards.
    “Ignored is good, then?” he finally said.
    “Well, then you can do whatever you want. Nobody cares. You can think about things for yourself.”
    He dropped back and rode behind her again.
    In the fields Daisy could see clusters of workers between the rows of vines. The harvest was just starting, and the Mexicans were suddenly everywhere—working in the fields, walking in groups down the sidewalks in town, sleeping at night in cars pulled off at the sides of quiet lanes. As you passed them on the street, as you walked by the park where they gathered in the hot afternoons, you could hear their melding voices, the different rhythm of their speech, their laughter. It was as though they brought their own world with them, she thought, and when shesaw them or heard them, she felt her ordinary world was changed for the moment, made somehow exotic and magical.
    John’s voice came from behind her now. “But you know that we care, don’t you?”
    “Yeah,” she called back. “But I mean, nobody in the world .”
    “Ah! Well.” John had laughed then. “Yes.”
    T HE FALL that John died was beautiful. Daisy couldn’t recall ever having thought such a thing before, ever having noticed a season . Years later, calling it up as an adult, talking about it with Dr. Gerard, trying to figure out what she had been thinking and doing then, she would still be able to remember it sharply—the sound of Spanish, the sense of the work of the harvest, the gondolas and trucks driving past full of grapes, the smell of fermentation you’d suddenly get walking past someone’s shed, the color of the leaves, the cooler nights. The world around her. She remembered that she had the sense of awakening to it, to the world. She was full of hope.
    She had started at the high school, and because John encouraged her to, she had applied to the literary magazine; she had signed up for chorus; she had gone to the preliminary tryouts for JV basketball, and was assured a place on the team. These were choices she knew were geeky—Emily, who was a senior now, confirmed this for her (“Can’t you choose just one kind of normal activity?”), but they were what she was good at, what she was interested in. And if the other kids who were interested in those things were also nerdy and geeky, they were kids Daisy felt she understood, kids she had a chance with. She realized that her life in high school was going to be different from Emily’s, but John made her feel all right about this. Made her feel she might be happy.
    When John died, Daisy felt it was wrong that they were sent to Mark’s house. She had wanted to stay at home, where John was being mourned by Eva; where, she felt, he might still in some sense be present . They were at Mark’s only two nights and the daybetween before Eva called and wanted them back, but Daisy felt it as a kind of exile, an exile where they were not supposed to talk about what had just happened—she supposed because of Theo. An exile where life seemed to have rolled on, right over John’s death, where it seemed they were supposed to pretend everything was unchanged.
    Who had decided this? It seemed to have been Emily, but it must have been Mark too, somehow. He was the grown-up, after all.
    The night John died, Daisy had heard Mark talking to his girlfriend on the phone, she had heard him call her “babe.” She had never heard anyone use this endearment except in rock songs. It seemed cheesy to her. It seemed, she