Free Lost in the Forest by Sue Miller Page B

recognized suddenly, sexual. Standing in Mark’s kitchen, overhearing this, Daisy had understood what her father’s relations with this woman were. He was having sex with her. He was sorry he wouldn’t be having sex with her tonight. That’s what John’s death had interrupted for him. What did he care about John?
    He didn’t. It was wrong that they had to be there, with him.
    They had made a cake that night—Emily’s idea, as Daisy remembered it—and Theo had licked the frosting bowl. Daisy sat across from him at Mark’s dining room table and watched him methodically scrape out every bit of the chocolately goop. He had a little clot of it in his hair; his face was smeared.
    His piggy eagerness, his animal forgetting, revolted her. She wanted to hit him, to take a little of the soft, pretty flesh of his arm and twist it, hard.
    How mean! How mean could you be! He was the one who had lost his father. Daisy knew that she was wrong, that her feelings were unjustifiable. She’d left the room abruptly and gone to lie on her sleeping bag in the dark, until Mark came to the door and asked her to say good night to Theo. Full of remorse, she’d pounced on Theo in Mark’s bed and given him gobbling kisses that made him laugh and yell her name.
    But afterward, lying on her own bed again, thinking about it, even that made her feel uncomfortable. To laugh! To play! WhenJohn was lying alone, dead somewhere. She got up to find Mark, to ask him a question that had occurred to her earlier too, about what had happened to John’s body, about where he was.
    But Mark didn’t know. He didn’t even care, she could tell.
    It was Daisy who answered the phone when Eva called to summon them home. Her mother’s voice sounded exhausted but peaceful, slowed. And that’s how she looked when they drove up an hour or so later and Daisy saw her, standing on the porch waiting for them—as though she’d newly recovered from a long illness. She had always been thin, but suddenly she looked very much too thin. Her eyes were so shadowed that they seemed sunken in her head and darkly bruised. It didn’t make her less pretty though. In fact, to Daisy she seemed even more beautiful than usual—small and vulnerable and suffering. Suffering so hard that everyone could see that, and love her more.
    When they got out of the truck, Eva started down the porch steps to them. She crouched on the cement walk and hungrily pulled them in around her.
    Daisy felt awkward. She was too big for this embrace. It was meant for someone the size of Theo. She stood looking down at her mother’s head, at the white waxy skin of her scalp at the part in her hair; and then, because this seemed somehow too naked, too exposed, she looked over at Mark, who was watching them. His eyes met Daisy’s. He seemed almost frightened.
    Then his gaze shifted, his hand came up, and Daisy turned. Gracie was standing above them in the open doorway on the porch.
    Eva released them and stood up, and Daisy turned and went up the stairs. She stepped into Gracie’s open arms—perfumed, bosomy Gracie. “Sweetie,” Gracie said. Daisy had the sudden notion that she wanted to stay in this embrace forever. Gracie rocked her for a few seconds. Then she stepped back and touched Daisy’s hair. And now everyone was on the porch, at the door, and Gracie was hugging Emily in just the same way.
    “Come in, Mark,” Eva said. Daisy turned. Her father was still on the walk, alone, looking up at all of them. Eva blew her nose.“Come in for a minute, why don’t you? Have something to drink.” Her voice sounded hollow.
    Daisy watched him come up the steps and approach her mother. His arms lifted and came around Eva, and she disappeared against his chest. He held her. Watching them, Daisy remembered abruptly the way they had looked when they were still married, when they held each other then—how they went with each other, somehow, in a way John and Eva hadn’t. They stood there together a long