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Lost in the Forest by Sue Miller
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(Hardcover - Bargain)
- Pub. Date: April 2005
- 256pp
- Sales Rank: 24,997
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Product Details
- Pub. Date: April 2005
- Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
- Format: Hardcover, 256pp
- Sales Rank: 24,997
- ISBN-13: 9780641966484
- ISBN: 0641966482
- Edition Description: Bargain
Synopsis
For nearly two decades, since the publication of her iconic first novel, The Good Mother, Sue Miller has distinguished herself as one of our most elegant and widely celebrated chroniclers of family life, with a singular gift for laying bare the interior lives of her characters. In each of her novels, Miller has written with exquisite precision about the experience of grace in daily life–the sudden, epiphanic recognition of the extraordinary amid the ordinary–as well as the sharp and unexpected motions of the human heart away from it, toward an unruly netherworld of upheaval and desire. But never before have Miller’s powers been keener or more transfixing than they are in Lost in the Forest, a novel set in the vineyards of Northern California that tells the story of a young girl who, in the wake of a tragic accident, seeks solace in a damaging love affair with a much older man.
Eva, a divorced and happily remarried mother of three, runs a small bookstore in a town north of San Francisco. When her second husband, John, is killed in a car accident, her family’s fragile peace is once again overtaken by loss. Emily, the eldest, must grapple with newfound independence and responsibility. Theo, the youngest, can only begin to fathom his father’s death. But for Daisy, the middle child, John’s absence opens up a world of bewilderment, exposing her at the onset of adolescence to the chaos and instability that hover just beyond the safety of parental love. In her sorrow, Daisy embarks on a harrowing sexual odyssey, a journey that will cast her even farther out onto the harsh promontory of adulthood and lost hope.
With astonishingsensuality and immediacy, Lost in the Forest moves through the most intimate realms of domestic life, from grief and sex to adolescence and marriage. It is a stunning, kaleidoscopic evocation of a family in crisis, written with delicacy and masterful care. For her lifelong fans and those just discovering Sue Miller for the first time, here is a rich and gorgeously layered tale of a family breaking apart and coming back together again: Sue Miller at her inimitable best.
The Washington Post - Richard Bausch
Sue Miller has been making it new now for a long time, and Lost in the Forest is a shining affirmation that her power only continues to grow.
More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
Sue Miller is an expert in limning the pain of endings, but if this were the extent of her talents, she probably would not be as successful as she is. In Miller's books, one broken relationship often leads to the development of another. Her stories may not offer pat answers and perfect love stories, but readers find something more rewarding in the end.
More About the AuthorCustomer Reviews
- Reader Rating:
- Ratings: 7Reviews: 5
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a career gal in correction'sby Anonymous
Reader Rating:
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June 24, 2008: Iwas very disappointed in the book. A Middle aged man having an affair w// a minor. He should have been sentenced to prison.
Disappointingby Anonymous
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August 27, 2005: I read Sue Miller years ago (While I Was Gone and The Good Mother). I must have liked her style to read multiple books, but after reading this one, I doubt I will read others. Other reviewers have gone into plot details. (I'll just note that the character who was seduced was 15, not 14, as if that makes a difference.) I thought that Miller's descriptions were 'gratuitous' if you will.
Fact File
Name:
Sue Miller
Current Home:
Boston, Massachusetts
Date of Birth:
November 29, 1943
Place of Birth:
Chicago, Illinois
Education:
B.A., Radcliffe College, 1964; M.A.T., Wesleyan U., 1965; Ed.M., Harvard U., 1975; M.A. Boston U., 1980
Awards:
Kate Chopin Literary Award; Yaddo Fellowship; Henry Miller Award: Lost in the Forest; Carl Sandburg Award: Family Pictures; Guggeheim Fellowship; Best American Short Stories: "The Lover of Women”; MacDowell Colony Fellowship
Biography
Since her iconic first novel, The Good Mother in 1986, Sue Miller has distinguished herself as one of our most elegant and widely celebrated chroniclers of family life, with a singular gift for laying bare the interior lives of her characters.
While not strictly speaking autobiographical, Miller's fiction is, nonetheless, shaped by her experiences. Born into an academic and ecclesiastical family, she grew up in Chicago's Hyde Park and went to college at Harvard. She was married at 20 and held down a series of odd jobs until her son Ben was born in 1968. She separated from her first husband in 1971, subsequently divorced, and for 13 years was a single parent in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working in day care, taking in roomers, and writing whenever she could.
In these early years, Miller's productivity was directly proportional to her ability to win grants and fellowships. An endowment in 1979 allowed her to enroll in the Creative Writing Program at Boston University. A few of her stories were accepted for publication, and she began teaching in the Boston area. Two additional grants in the 1980s enabled her to concentrate on writing fulltime. Published in 1986, her first novel became an international bestseller.
Since then, success has followed success. Two of Miller's books (The Good Mother and Inventing the Abbots) have been made into feature films; her 1990 novel Family Pictures was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; Oprah Winfrey selected While I Was Gone for her popular Book Club; and in 2004, a first foray into nonfiction -- the poignant, intensely personal memoir The Story of My Father -- was widely praised for its narrative eloquence and character dramatization.
Miller is a distinguished practitioner of "domestic fiction," a time-honored genre stretching back to Jane Austen, Henry James, and Leo Tolstoy and honed to perfection by such modern literary luminaries as John Updike, Flannery O'Connor, and Richard Ford. A careful observer of quotidian detail, she stretches her novels across the canvas of home and hearth, creating extraordinary stories out of the quiet intimacies of marriage, family, and friendship. In an article written for the New York Times "Writers on Writing" series, she explains: "For me everyday life in the hands of a fine writer seems ... charged with meaning. When I write, I want to bring a sense of that charge, that meaning, to what may fairly be called the domestic."
Good to Know
Here are some fascinating outtakes from our interview with Sue Miller:
Feature Interview
In Spring of 2008, Sue Miller took some time out to talk with us about her favorite books, authors, and interests.What was the book that most influenced your life or your career as a writer -- and why?
In terms of prose style or a particular way of telling a story or a story itself, there is no one book that I can select. At various times I've admired and been inspired by various books. But there is a book that made the notion of making a life in writing seem possible to me when I was about 22. It was called The Origin of the Brunists. I opened the newspaper on a Sunday to the Book Review, and there it was, a rave, for this first novel, written by a man named Robert Coover -- a man still writing, though he's more famous for later, more experimental works. The important thing about this to me, aside from the fact that the book turned out to be extraordinary and compelling (it's about a cult that springs up around the lone survivor of a coal mining disaster, Giovanni Bruno), was that I knew Robert Coover. He had rented a room in my family's house when I was growing up and while he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where my father taught. Bob Coover. Bob Coover, whose conversations with friends drifted up through the heating ducts from his basement room to mine. Bob Coover, a seemingly normal person, a person whose life I'd observed from my peculiar adolescent vantage for perhaps three years or so as he came and went. It was thrilling to me to understand that such a person, a person not unlike myself, a person not somehow marked as "special" as far as I could tell, could become a writer. If he could, well then, maybe I could.
What are your ten favorite books, and what makes them special to you?
What are some of your favorite films, and what makes them unforgettable to you?
What types of music do you like? Is there any particular kind you like to listen to when you're writing?
I never listen to music while I'm writing. I try not to listen to anything. Silence is best. Though birdsong is a lovely occasional interruption.
I like many kinds of music. I have played the piano a little in the past, and I love listening to classical piano in particular. There's a three-record set of Annie Fischer playing Liszt and Schumann and Chopin and Beethoven that I've nearly worn out.
I love the Four Last Songs by Strauss. I love the blues, and rhythm and blues, which I grew up listening and dancing to in Chicago. I like doo-wop, and early rock and roll. I like jazz, particularly jazz singers. Particularly female jazz singers: Jane Monheit, Diane Reeves, Billie Holiday, Alberta Hunter, Weslia Whitfield.
What are your favorite kinds of books to give -- and get -- as gifts?
I usually give fiction to people when I'm giving books, though there are special interests that some of the people in my life have, and if I read a review of a book that sounds as though it might connect with one of those interests, I will hunt it down.
I love children's books, and I have nephews and nieces, and now a goddaughter and a granddaughter, whom I've had great fun choosing books for over the years. I worked in day care for a long time, and did a lot of reading aloud, sometimes the same book over and over, so I really appreciate children's stories that are pleasurable for the adult reading them as well as for the child. Those are the ones I look for.
Do you have any special writing rituals? For example, what do you have on your desk when you're writing?
I write longhand, in notebooks, for my first draft; and also on the printed-out versions when I do revisions on typed drafts. As a result, often I'm not even working at a desk. Part of what I like about working this way is, in fact, the ability to roam the house while I work, to follow the sun from room to room, to work in bed if it's cold out. I have a particular kind of pen that I like and buy by the dozen. I keep several of the books I listed as among my favorites around to inspire me if I get stuck.
Many writers are hardly "overnight success" stories. How long did it take for you to get where you are today? Any rejection-slip horror stories or inspirational anecdotes?
In a certain sense, I suppose I am an example of an overnight success. My first published novel rushed right onto the best seller lists and stayed there for months. But I'd written two novels before then that I never even sent out, the first one in my early twenties, and the second just before writing The Good Mother -- the title of the very successful one. During the years between that first novel and The Good Mother, about 20 years in all, I was working, in one way or another -- writing, reading with a writer's eye as to how others worked, and then, in my thirties, beginning to get some short stories published.
I think the most inspirational aspect of my history may be my acquiring my literary agent through a story I published in Ploughshares. She read it, saw in the little bio at the back of the magazine that it was my first published story, and thought there was a good chance, in that case, that I didn't yet have an agent. She wrote, we met, and that was that, for more than 20 years.
There's a sense, I think, of the relative invisibility of the "little" literary magazines, but I'm evidence that interested people out there are reading them, and reading them carefully.
What tips or advice do you have for writers still looking to be discovered?
I don't think there are any tips, any shortcuts. But reading seems to me the basic first step, always -- reading and noticing how other writers you admire make you respond in one way or another; asking yourself what it is he/she is doing that makes you feel whatever it is you're feeling. It was by such writerly reading that I came to understand a little of how fiction works. It was an utterly essential step, one I spent years at. I think of those years, those years of mostly just reading, as a kind of apprenticeship.
From the Publisher
For nearly two decades, since the publication of her iconic first novel, The Good Mother, Sue Miller has distinguished herself as one of our most elegant and widely celebrated chroniclers of family life, with a singular gift for laying bare the interior lives of her characters. In each of her novels, Miller has written with exquisite precision about the experience of grace in daily life–the sudden, epiphanic recognition of the extraordinary amid the ordinary–as well as the sharp and unexpected motions of the human heart away from it, toward an unruly netherworld of upheaval and desire. But never before have Miller’s powers been keener or more transfixing than they are in Lost in the Forest, a novel set in the vineyards of Northern California that tells the story of a young girl who, in the wake of a tragic accident, seeks solace in a damaging love affair with a much older man.
Eva, a divorced and happily remarried mother of three, runs a small bookstore in a town north of San Francisco. When her second husband, John, is killed in a car accident, her family’s fragile peace is once again overtaken by loss. Emily, the eldest, must grapple with newfound independence and responsibility. Theo, the youngest, can only begin to fathom his father’s death. But for Daisy, the middle child, John’s absence opens up a world of bewilderment, exposing her at the onset of adolescence to the chaos and instability that hover just beyond the safety of parental love. In her sorrow, Daisy embarks on a harrowing sexual odyssey, a journey that will cast her even farther out onto the harsh promontory of adulthood and lost hope.
With astonishingsensuality and immediacy, Lost in the Forest moves through the most intimate realms of domestic life, from grief and sex to adolescence and marriage. It is a stunning, kaleidoscopic evocation of a family in crisis, written with delicacy and masterful care. For her lifelong fans and those just discovering Sue Miller for the first time, here is a rich and gorgeously layered tale of a family breaking apart and coming back together again: Sue Miller at her inimitable best.
The Washington Post - Richard Bausch
Sue Miller has been making it new now for a long time, and Lost in the Forest is a shining affirmation that her power only continues to grow.
The New York Times Sunday Book Review - Kathryn Harrison
You don't need to read a book with a title like Lost in the Forest to guess that Sue Miller will be using it to acquaint you with a wolf and a version of Red Riding Hood, a girl teetering on the dangerous cusp between childhood and adulthood, innocence and initiation. But if at first her new novel seems to revisit an overly familiar story, she quickly offers proof that it will be in her own distinctive style -- that it will, in fact, be one of her strongest, most satisfying books. Miller has always been adept at rendering the complexities of family life, the way even well-intentioned, decent people can't walk across a room without wounding at least one person they love. But while some of her plots (that of While I Was Gone, for example) can be cluttered and occasionally clumsy, Lost in the Forest has a seemingly effortless grace; Miller quickly captures and never loses our attention.
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
What lifts these stories out of tabloid hell is Ms. Miller's keen psychological insight, her radar for emotional nuance, her visceral understanding of familial dynamics. While the melodramatic plot of Lost in the Forest lurches into view from time to time, Ms. Miller conceals its schematic awkwardness by focusing on the day-to-day experiences of her characters, using her understanding of the rhythms and daily vicissitudes of domestic life to create a powerful and poignant family portrait.
Publishers Weekly
Bestseller Miller (The Good Mother; While I Was Gone; etc.) examines love and betrayal in idyllic wine country in another minutely observed, finely paced exploration of domestic relationships. Idealistic California converts Eva and Mark had a solid marriage until Mark's affair; "bumps in matrimony" is what one of Eva's friends, Gracie, calls such difficulties, and as Miller presents them it's not a question of whether they'll appear but how to deal with them when they do. Some years later, Mark and Eva's two adolescent daughters, Emily and Daisy, are living with Eva and her second husband, John, and their young son, Theo. After John's death in a freak accident, Mark rescues the children from their mother's anguish and, in the process, realizes he is still in love with her. John's death becomes the locus of an elegant and careful investigation of loss-loss of love, loss of innocence-and the conflicts between men and women, parents and children, friends and lovers. As Eva grieves and Mark acknowledges his feelings for her, their quiet younger daughter, 15-year-old Daisy (who "had loved [John] the best!"), enters into an affair with an older man. The backdrop of California vineyards is ideal for the growth and life-cycle themes that Miller so carefully cultivates. As Daisy tries her first glass of wine, has her first taste of sex and experiments with her sense of power and voice, she develops into the heroine of the tale-one of the next generation of women learning to navigate the complex familiar waters of love and domesticity. Agent, Maxine Groffsky. 150,000 first printing; 11-city author tour. (May) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
When her stepfather dies, Daisy spins out of control-and into sexuality dangerous territory. With an 11-city tour. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
In the latest from Miller (The World Below, 2001, etc.), a family member's death alters the established patterns and rhythms among those who survive. Eva's second husband, John, is killed by a car while on a walk with Eva and their three-year-old son, Theo. Eva, who runs a bookstore in California wine country, is understandably devastated. Temporarily unable to cope, she sends Theo and his half-sisters, popular high-school senior Emily and gawky 14-year-old Daisy, to their father, her ex-husband Mark, a winegrower. Mark and Eva's marriage, full of early passion, had ended when Mark, in a misguided attempt at intimacy, confessed an affair. Eva's marriage to the older, truly nice John had been calmer, but their love was genuine and deep. The children return to Eva's house after a few days, but as the months pass, Mark finds himself wooing Eva through the kids, including Theo, for whom he forms quite a lovely attachment. Miller tips the story's balance by flashing forward occasionally to the adult Daisy's conversations with her therapist. While her parents flirt and skirt around each other and Emily goes off to college, Daisy, who has always lived in Emily's shadow, is full of unexpressed depths of grief because John had been the one parent figure she felt really saw her for herself. When Duncan, the physically and emotionally damaged husband of Eva's best friend, catches her pilfering from the cash register at Eva's store, he insinuates himself into Daisy's life. Unaware of her own emerging beauty, Daisy is extremely needy and vulnerable-and extremely angry. A twisted sexual relationship begins. Eva is too wrapped up in her own struggles to notice, but Mark, whom Eva has rebuffed as suitor,steps in and rescues Daisy, who is one tough cookie. The family reshapes itself. Miller at her best: engrossing characters and a plot that turns unexpected corners.
Loading...Product Details
- Pub. Date: April 2005
- Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
- Format: Hardcover, 256pp
- Sales Rank: 24,997
- ISBN-13: 9780641966484
- ISBN: 0641966482
- Edition Description: Bargain
Reading Group Guide
Discussion Questions from the Publisher1. In the opening chapter, how does Miller set up the complex family relationship, as well as the ambivalent emotions that her main characters feel for one another? What do we learn about Eva, Mark, and John? What emotions does John's death bring up for Mark?
2. Readers get to know John only after his death, through the thoughts and memories of other characters. What kind of a man was he? Why, having lost John, does Eva find herself in a state of grief beyond her control, having feelings deeper than any she's ever experienced?
3. Is John a better father than Mark (215)? Why has John been able to connect with Daisy, a difficult child, so easily, and how did he earn her love (p. 51-56)? Does Daisy's interest in Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy" (pp. 121-23) indicate that she feels betrayed by Mark?
4. John dies just as Daisy is entering adolescence and becoming acutely aware of sex (p. 57). Does Miller suggest that a strong connection exists between grief and sexual desire? What are the circumstances that make Daisy vulnerable to Duncan's advances?
5. What kind of a man is Duncan, and what perspective does the narrative take on him? How does the reader experience him? Why does Gracie not seem to know about the pedophilic aspect of Duncan's character? When Gracie realizes that Duncan is having an affair, what is her response, and how does it differ from Eva's response to Mark's infidelity (pp. 208-10, pp. 41-43)?
6. In what ways is Eva--to use the title of an earlier Miller novel--a "good mother"? How strong a character is she, and how vulnerable? What ideas and values guide her approach to mothering? Is there any way for her to help Daisy more than she does?
7. Eva's elder daughter Emily seems oddly untouched by the crisis her family goes through during the novel. Is this due to her age (she is about to go off to college), her beauty and self-confidence, or some other reason? Is it mainly a matter of timing or one of temperament that leads to the two stepdaughters' very different reactions to John's death?
8. For a while, Daisy feels good about her affair with Duncan: "She felt he offered her a new version of herself, one she more and more carried with her into her real life. She felt uplifted, in a sense; she felt an elevation over the daily ugliness of high school. She was less afraid, less shy. . . . And she loved the strange sex, which asked so little of her" (p. 156). How is this relationship different from one that Daisy might have had with a boy her own age? Why is it more dangerous? Do the positive aspects of this affair offset the moral failing that it reveals in Duncan?
9. Eva was drawn to John only slowly, "by the persistence and intelligence of his interest in her" (p. 78). How does this differ from her love for Mark? Is it surprising or disappointing that Eva chooses not to become involved with Mark again? Given the reader's access to Mark's thoughts about Eva, does Eva seem to be right or wrong in her belief that Mark is "unable to be faithful" (p. 137)?
10. Comment on the narrative voice used in the novel: Does it give us equal access to the thoughts of all characters equally? Which characters do we get to know best? What adjectives best describe Miller's prose style?
11. Given the story told to Theo by the members of his family (pp. 30-33; pp. 231-32) and the way Daisy looks back on Mark's role in ending her relationship with Duncan (pp. 242-45), discuss the various implications of the novel's title. Which characters are "lost in the forest," and how do they manage to find a way out?
12. Sue Miller has said that in the most enduring fiction--like Tolstoy's War and Peace--"you realize that everything comes back to the hearth. Yes, there was war, but the main focus was domestic: Who gathered around the hearth? Why were they there? What had they experienced? What stories did they tell?"* How does this idea work in Lost in the Forest? Is nurturing the idea of the hearth Eva's most essential and valued role? What does Miller suggest about the nature of familial bonds in our changing society?
13. How do the details of the Northern California setting establish the cultural landscape of the story? Are the rapid growth of the vineyard business and the changing nature of little towns like Saint Helena important to the story? What is the function of references to historical events, like the fatwah against Salman Rushdie and Noriega's surrender in Panama (p.139, p. 206)? How does Miller handle the passage of time in the novel?
14. Sue Miller's protagonists have mainly been women, and her novels have mainly focused on women's lives. When Eva gets older, "She's wondering, perhaps, if her story makes sense, if it means anything, or amounts to anything" (p. 230). How does this novel address such questions, and what answers, if any, does it offer?
15. Discuss the conversation that Mark has with Daisy when he realizes she's been sleeping with Duncan (pp. 219-28). How does his suggestion that she come and live with him redeem his earlier failings as a father and husband? Why does he promise Daisy that he won't tell Eva about Duncan?
16. Years later, in therapy with Dr. Gerard, how does Daisy work through the aftermath and the personal meanings of her relationship with Duncan? How damaging has it been? At the end of the novel, how do Daisy's thoughts about her role as Miranda in Shakespeare's The Tempest reflect the person she has become (p. 239, p. 247)?
17. Sue Miller has pointed out, "We live outside the world of religion yet with a diminishing awareness of its great importance."* In Lost in the Forest, Eva realizes "that maybe some of her problem was that she didn't believe in anything" (p. 76). As a self-consciously modern and intellectual parent, she has raised her children without the notion of God, yet throughout the novel she questions whether this has been a good decision. Does Eva's belief in parties and celebrations constitute a sort of contemporary version of faith? Does Eva's embrace of traditional religion at the end of the novel come as a surprise, or not (p. 234)?
Read an Excerpt
Emily telephoned, his older daughter. "Can you come get us?" she said. "It's an emergency."As usual, she didn't greet him, she didn't say hello at the start of the call. And also as usual, this bothered him, he felt a familiar pull of irritation at her voice, her tone. But even as he was listening to her, he was focused on steering the truck around the sharp curves in the narrow road, around several small heaps of rock that had slid down the steep hillside: he was feeling the pleasure he always took in the way the slanted afternoon light played on the yellowed grass and reddened leaves left in the vineyards, in the way the air smelled. He kept his voice neutral as he responded. "When? Now?"
In the background, behind her, Mark could hear someone give a sudden whoop. Festivities, he thought. As ever. Eva's face rose in his mind--his ex-wife. At the least excuse, there was a gathering at her house: to celebrate a birthday--reasonable enough; but also for a project completed, a team victory, a skill accomplished. You learned to ride a bike, you got a party thrown for you.
"Duh. Yes, Dad, now," Emily said. "That's what I mean."
He was headed north on 128 to a small vineyard he thought his crew should harvest tomorrow. He needed to check the grapes. But he could probably get Angel to do it if he had to. His windows were open. The noise of the rushing air made his daughter's voice on the car phone sound distant.
"So?" she said. "Can you?"
If his younger daughter, Daisy, had ever called him because of an emergency, it would have been a child's crisis--not making thebasketball team, needing a ride somewhere that her mother or stepfather couldn't provide. But with Emily, this emergency was likely to be at least slightly serious, an emergency in near-adult terms. Terms he might even be sympathetic with.
But she would be taking charge again, and this was something he and his ex-wife had agreed that she should be discouraged--no, freed--from doing so often. He cleared his throat. "Maybe I should talk to your mom," he said. Yes. The approach to take.
"Dad!" she objected. He didn't answer for a long moment, and as if in response to this, her voice had changed when she spoke again. She sounded younger: "Mom can't talk right now. That's why we need you."
And with those words, we need you, it was settled. To be needed. Well. Mark thought of Emily's delicate oval face, her regular, pretty features, her curly dark hair, so like Eva's--all the things that were lovely about her. All the things that didn't piss him off. "Okay," he said. "Okay, as it happens, I can come. As it happens, I will."
She wouldn't be charmed. "Now?" she said impatiently.
"Now. Or, gimme ten or so." He was slowing, and as he pulled into a turnaround by the roadside, the truck bounced and his tires crunched on the dusty gravel.
"Okay." She sighed, in relief it seemed. "Just honk, though," she said. "We'll come out. Oh, and Dad?"
"Yeah?"
"It's for overnight."
It could not be for overnight. He had plans. He had a date. He was going to get laid. "Okay, sunshine," he said. "We'll work it all out."
She sighed again and hung up.
Twenty minutes or so later, when he pulled up at the curb in front of his ex-wife's large Victorian house, the door opened before he hit the horn and his younger daughter staggered out onto the wide porch, carrying her sleeping bag, her pack an oversize hump on her back. Daisy was barefoot. Her long brown legs were exposed nearly to the crotch in cutoff jeans--legs that were beginning to look less like sticks and more like a woman's, he noted. Emily came out the door after her, turned backward as if to fuss with something behind her.
Two pretty, dark, young women, one tall, one short: his daughters. He got out of the truck to go and help them. As he started up the walk, he saw Theo emerging from the house behind Emily. The little boy, not yet three, was carrying a brown paper grocery bag by its handles. Something stuck out of it--a pillow? a blanket? He spotted Mark and smiled. Now Emily took Theo's hand to help him down the wide porch stairs. He paused on each one, and the bag plopped slowly from step to step behind him as he descended.
Mark met them on the walk. "Hey," he said. He kissed each girl on her head. They smelled identical, a ladylike herbal perfume: shared shampoo. He took Daisy's sleeping bag from her. "Theo!" he said, and extended his hand down to him. "To what do we owe this pleasure?"
"I'll explain it all to you," Emily called back. She had moved ahead of them down the walk, between the orderly gray-green procession of rosemary plants. She was tossing her stuff into the open back of the truck.
"So he's supposed to spend the night too?" Mark asked Daisy. Theo was not his son. Theo was his ex-wife's son, by her second marriage. He liked Theo. He was, in fact, charmed by him--he knew him well from various extended-family events--but he had never before been asked to babysit for him. And actually, no one had even asked.
Daisy shrugged. She looked, as she often did, sullen. Or evasive. Her face was narrower than Emily's, her nose still slightly too big on it--she was fourteen--her eyebrows darker and thick. She had shot up within the last two years, and now she was only a few inches shorter than Mark. She carried it badly, trying to hide it. Mark had worried when she was younger that she would be plain, which seemed to him an almost unbearably sad thing--a plain woman. Within the last six months or so, though, her face had changed and strengthened, and he saw that that wouldn't be the case. That she might, in fact, be better-looking than Emily in the end, more striking. It had made him easier around her, he realized.
They had caught up to Emily, who said again, "I'll explain it later." She sounded irritated, as though she were the adult and he a nagging child. She took Theo's hand and led him to the door of the truck's cab.
Mark went around to the driver's side. He opened his door and stood there looking across the cab's wide seat, waiting for Emily to look back at him. She wouldn't. Or she didn't. First she was helping the little boy clamber into the truck; now she climbed up herself and was busy buckling him in. When she finally raised her eyes and met her father's, he was ready. He lifted his hands. "Hey, Em," he said. "You will admit--"
"Daddy, it's an emergency. A real emergency." Her eyes, he noted now, were red-rimmed, their lids swollen.
Theo looked over at him and nodded. "It's a mergency," he said, and inserted his thumb into his mouth with an air of finality.
Daisy squeezed in next to Emily, and Mark got in and started the truck. He pulled into the street. After nearly a full minute had passed, he asked, "So, the nature of this emergency is . . . ?"
He could feel Emily's gaze on him, and he looked at her. She was frowning--her dark eyebrows made fierce lines. She shook her head. "We can't . . . we shouldn't . . . talk about it now." She gestured at Theo, sitting between them, watching them soberly.
Mark nodded. After another long moment he said, "But at some point it will be revealed."
"Yeah," she said. She turned away, and when he looked over again, he saw that she and Daisy were holding hands. What the hell was going on? Daisy's mouth hung open stupidly, as though she'd been sucker punched.
They drove in near-total silence the whole way to his house. Everyone's eyes stayed devoutly on the road, as though the familiar scenes rolling past--the valley as it widened out and spread the fall colors of its vineyards before them, the deep green of the hills riding along above it all--were some new and fascinating nature movie. Once Daisy said in a near-whisper, "Are those pills supposed to knock her out or something?" and Emily shrugged. That was it.
Knock who out? Not Eva, he thought. He imagined her, his ex-wife--small, dark, quick moving, graceful. Her sudden sexy smile. Not Eva.
Above Calistoga, he turned in at the unmarked dirt road to his house. There were sparse, newly planted vineyards on either side of it. He had to swerve and dance the truck to avoid the ruts. He could feel Theo's weight swing against his side. After about a quarter of a mile, he pulled into his driveway and then up onto the cement pad where one day he planned to build a garage.
As soon as he cut the engine, they could hear the dogs barking in the house. The children started to unbuckle their seat belts, and he swung himself out of the truck. He began to gather their possessions from the back. They came and stood behind him--silent, oddly passive, waiting for their things to be put into their hands.
He led the way. When he opened the back door, the dogs shot out and started jumping around, abruptly quieted by their joy in being released. Their heavy tails whacked everyone.
Theo made a little noise of terror and delight and stepped between Mark's legs, gripping his thighs. Mark put his hands on the boy's narrow shoulders, and was instantly startled--and then aware of being startled.
Why? Why did it feel so strange to touch the little boy?
Perhaps because he had anticipated the way the girls felt when they were Theo's size, when he had loved to touch them, to hold them. Theo's body was wiry and tense, utterly unlike theirs at the same age. It felt hot with energy.
"It's okay, big guy," Mark said gently. "They like you. They like kids like you."
Theo looked up at Mark, wide-eyed and alarmed. "They would like to eat me?" he asked. He was lighter-haired, lighter-skinned than the girls, and this difference somehow struck Mark as sad.
"No, no, no," Mark said. "They like to lick you, and play with you. You'll see. They're nice."
He squatted by Theo and held his own hand out to Fanny to be licked. When Theo imitated him after a moment, Fanny's long, rough tongue came out and stroked the boy's hand too. He snatched his arm back and jigged a little in fear and pleasure, a prancey running in place. He wore miniature red high-top sneakers. His striped socks had slid down almost entirely into them. One of his knees was thickly scabbed.
Emily and Daisy had disappeared immediately into the house, to put their things away, Mark assumed. He stood up. Theo grabbed his hand, and walked right next to Mark, into the kitchen, through it, virtually riding his left leg and talking all the while to the dogs: "No bite me! Bad dog! Bad, bad dog! No bite!"
Mark was feeling a rising, irritated frustration, which he didn't want to focus on the little boy. He gestured across the living room, toward the back of the house. "Let's go figure out what everyone's up to, shall we?"
Theo looked up at Mark. "Yah," he answered.
Theo shadowed him to the doorway of the back room. The girls' beds nearly filled its narrow space. It was dark and underwatery in here--the one window faced out into an overgrown evergreen shrub, which Mark kept meaning to prune, and hadn't. The light that filtered through it was weak and greenish. Daisy was carefully spreading her unzipped bag out on her bed, as she always did. This was her strategy to avoid making it, a chore she hated. Emily was already lying down, one arm under her head, staring out the window at nothing. Ignoring him, Mark felt.
"A word with you, Em?" he said, his voice carefully neutral.
Both girls looked at him. They seemed startled, like sleepers he'd wakened. He turned to his younger daughter. "Daze, could you keep an eye on Theo for a minute? He's scared of the dogs."
She nodded.
"I not scared," Theo was instantly shrilling. "I a big boy. I not scared."
As Mark and Emily stepped toward the doorway, Daisy, who had flopped down onto her bed, was starting a game: "How big are you, Theo? Big as a . . . lion?"
"Yes!" the boy cried.
As soon as Mark shut the door to his room, Emily sat down heavily at the foot of his rumpled bed and said, "Oh, Daddy, it's John. John's dead." Her face twisted, and tears immediately began sliding down it, as though she'd been waiting until this moment to allow herself her full measure of grief.
"What do you mean?" John was Eva's husband, the girls' stepfather. Theo's father.
"He's dead, Daddy." Her hands came to her face now and covered her opened mouth. She inhaled sharply through her fingers, and then closed her eyes. "He got hit . . . by a car. A car hit him."
Mark pictured it. He pictured it wrong, as it turned out, but he saw John then--his large body, bloody, slumped behind the wheel of his ruined car. He saw him dead, though he didn't believe it.
Mark sat down next to his daughter and held her, and she wept quietly and thoroughly, as he couldn't remember her weeping since he had told her he was moving out--long shuddering inhalations, and then a gentle high keening as her inheld breath came out. From the other bedroom he could hear Theo shrieking, "Bad! Bad!" and Daisy's voice trying to distract him.
"Sweetheart, it's okay. Cry, cry," he said. And then he said, "Shhh."
Though he was still thinking of John, still trying to take it in, he was also aware of thinking that it felt good, holding Emily. And of wondering when he had last held her, her or Daisy. He couldn't remember.
When she had calmed down a little, he stretched away from her to grab the box of tissues from the stand by the bed. She blew loudly, using several, and wiped her face. His shirt was wet where she had leaned against him.
"How did it happen?" he asked at last, keeping his voice gentle. "When?"
She seemed stricken again at the question, her eyes swam and grew larger, but she held on and whispered back, "This afternoon. A car just . . . hit him."
Mark cleared his throat. "He was driving?"
Read a Sample Chapter
Emily telephoned, his older daughter. "Can you come get us?" she said. "It's an emergency."As usual, she didn't greet him, she didn't say hello at the start of the call. And also as usual, this bothered him, he felt a familiar pull of irritation at her voice, her tone. But even as he was listening to her, he was focused on steering the truck around the sharp curves in the narrow road, around several small heaps of rock that had slid down the steep hillside: he was feeling the pleasure he always took in the way the slanted afternoon light played on the yellowed grass and reddened leaves left in the vineyards, in the way the air smelled. He kept his voice neutral as he responded. "When? Now?"
In the background, behind her, Mark could hear someone give a sudden whoop. Festivities, he thought. As ever. Eva's face rose in his mind--his ex-wife. At the least excuse, there was a gathering at her house: to celebrate a birthday--reasonable enough; but also for a project completed, a team victory, a skill accomplished. You learned to ride a bike, you got a party thrown for you.
"Duh. Yes, Dad, now," Emily said. "That's what I mean."
He was headed north on 128 to a small vineyard he thought his crew should harvest tomorrow. He needed to check the grapes. But he could probably get Angel to do it if he had to. His windows were open. The noise of the rushing air made his daughter's voice on the car phone sound distant.
"So?" she said. "Can you?"
If his younger daughter, Daisy, had ever called him because of an emergency, it would have been a child's crisis--not making the basketball team, needing a ride somewhere that her mother or stepfather couldn'tprovide. But with Emily, this emergency was likely to be at least slightly serious, an emergency in near-adult terms. Terms he might even be sympathetic with.
But she would be taking charge again, and this was something he and his ex-wife had agreed that she should be discouraged--no, freed--from doing so often. He cleared his throat. "Maybe I should talk to your mom," he said. Yes. The approach to take.
"Dad!" she objected. He didn't answer for a long moment, and as if in response to this, her voice had changed when she spoke again. She sounded younger: "Mom can't talk right now. That's why we need you."
And with those words, we need you, it was settled. To be needed. Well. Mark thought of Emily's delicate oval face, her regular, pretty features, her curly dark hair, so like Eva's--all the things that were lovely about her. All the things that didn't piss him off. "Okay," he said. "Okay, as it happens, I can come. As it happens, I will."
She wouldn't be charmed. "Now?" she said impatiently.
"Now. Or, gimme ten or so." He was slowing, and as he pulled into a turnaround by the roadside, the truck bounced and his tires crunched on the dusty gravel.
"Okay." She sighed, in relief it seemed. "Just honk, though," she said. "We'll come out. Oh, and Dad?"
"Yeah?"
"It's for overnight."
It could not be for overnight. He had plans. He had a date. He was going to get laid. "Okay, sunshine," he said. "We'll work it all out."
She sighed again and hung up.
Twenty minutes or so later, when he pulled up at the curb in front of his ex-wife's large Victorian house, the door opened before he hit the horn and his younger daughter staggered out onto the wide porch, carrying her sleeping bag, her pack an oversize hump on her back. Daisy was barefoot. Her long brown legs were exposed nearly to the crotch in cutoff jeans--legs that were beginning to look less like sticks and more like a woman's, he noted. Emily came out the door after her, turned backward as if to fuss with something behind her.
Two pretty, dark, young women, one tall, one short: his daughters. He got out of the truck to go and help them. As he started up the walk, he saw Theo emerging from the house behind Emily. The little boy, not yet three, was carrying a brown paper grocery bag by its handles. Something stuck out of it--a pillow? a blanket? He spotted Mark and smiled. Now Emily took Theo's hand to help him down the wide porch stairs. He paused on each one, and the bag plopped slowly from step to step behind him as he descended.
Mark met them on the walk. "Hey," he said. He kissed each girl on her head. They smelled identical, a ladylike herbal perfume: shared shampoo. He took Daisy's sleeping bag from her. "Theo!" he said, and extended his hand down to him. "To what do we owe this pleasure?"
"I'll explain it all to you," Emily called back. She had moved ahead of them down the walk, between the orderly gray-green procession of rosemary plants. She was tossing her stuff into the open back of the truck.
"So he's supposed to spend the night too?" Mark asked Daisy. Theo was not his son. Theo was his ex-wife's son, by her second marriage. He liked Theo. He was, in fact, charmed by him--he knew him well from various extended-family events--but he had never before been asked to babysit for him. And actually, no one had even asked.
Daisy shrugged. She looked, as she often did, sullen. Or evasive. Her face was narrower than Emily's, her nose still slightly too big on it--she was fourteen--her eyebrows darker and thick. She had shot up within the last two years, and now she was only a few inches shorter than Mark. She carried it badly, trying to hide it. Mark had worried when she was younger that she would be plain, which seemed to him an almost unbearably sad thing--a plain woman. Within the last six months or so, though, her face had changed and strengthened, and he saw that that wouldn't be the case. That she might, in fact, be better-looking than Emily in the end, more striking. It had made him easier around her, he realized.
They had caught up to Emily, who said again, "I'll explain it later." She sounded irritated, as though she were the adult and he a nagging child. She took Theo's hand and led him to the door of the truck's cab.
Mark went around to the driver's side. He opened his door and stood there looking across the cab's wide seat, waiting for Emily to look back at him. She wouldn't. Or she didn't. First she was helping the little boy clamber into the truck; now she climbed up herself and was busy buckling him in. When she finally raised her eyes and met her father's, he was ready. He lifted his hands. "Hey, Em," he said. "You will admit--"
"Daddy, it's an emergency. A real emergency." Her eyes, he noted now, were red-rimmed, their lids swollen.
Theo looked over at him and nodded. "It's a mergency," he said, and inserted his thumb into his mouth with an air of finality.
Daisy squeezed in next to Emily, and Mark got in and started the truck. He pulled into the street. After nearly a full minute had passed, he asked, "So, the nature of this emergency is . . . ?"
He could feel Emily's gaze on him, and he looked at her. She was frowning--her dark eyebrows made fierce lines. She shook her head. "We can't . . . we shouldn't . . . talk about it now." She gestured at Theo, sitting between them, watching them soberly.
Mark nodded. After another long moment he said, "But at some point it will be revealed."
"Yeah," she said. She turned away, and when he looked over again, he saw that she and Daisy were holding hands. What the hell was going on? Daisy's mouth hung open stupidly, as though she'd been sucker punched.
They drove in near-total silence the whole way to his house. Everyone's eyes stayed devoutly on the road, as though the familiar scenes rolling past--the valley as it widened out and spread the fall colors of its vineyards before them, the deep green of the hills riding along above it all--were some new and fascinating nature movie. Once Daisy said in a near-whisper, "Are those pills supposed to knock her out or something?" and Emily shrugged. That was it.
Knock who out? Not Eva, he thought. He imagined her, his ex-wife--small, dark, quick moving, graceful. Her sudden sexy smile. Not Eva.
Above Calistoga, he turned in at the unmarked dirt road to his house. There were sparse, newly planted vineyards on either side of it. He had to swerve and dance the truck to avoid the ruts. He could feel Theo's weight swing against his side. After about a quarter of a mile, he pulled into his driveway and then up onto the cement pad where one day he planned to build a garage.
As soon as he cut the engine, they could hear the dogs barking in the house. The children started to unbuckle their seat belts, and he swung himself out of the truck. He began to gather their possessions from the back. They came and stood behind him--silent, oddly passive, waiting for their things to be put into their hands.
He led the way. When he opened the back door, the dogs shot out and started jumping around, abruptly quieted by their joy in being released. Their heavy tails whacked everyone.
Theo made a little noise of terror and delight and stepped between Mark's legs, gripping his thighs. Mark put his hands on the boy's narrow shoulders, and was instantly startled--and then aware of being startled.
Why? Why did it feel so strange to touch the little boy?
Perhaps because he had anticipated the way the girls felt when they were Theo's size, when he had loved to touch them, to hold them. Theo's body was wiry and tense, utterly unlike theirs at the same age. It felt hot with energy.
"It's okay, big guy," Mark said gently. "They like you. They like kids like you."
Theo looked up at Mark, wide-eyed and alarmed. "They would like to eat me?" he asked. He was lighter-haired, lighter-skinned than the girls, and this difference somehow struck Mark as sad.
"No, no, no," Mark said. "They like to lick you, and play with you. You'll see. They're nice."
He squatted by Theo and held his own hand out to Fanny to be licked. When Theo imitated him after a moment, Fanny's long, rough tongue came out and stroked the boy's hand too. He snatched his arm back and jigged a little in fear and pleasure, a prancey running in place. He wore miniature red high-top sneakers. His striped socks had slid down almost entirely into them. One of his knees was thickly scabbed.
Emily and Daisy had disappeared immediately into the house, to put their things away, Mark assumed. He stood up. Theo grabbed his hand, and walked right next to Mark, into the kitchen, through it, virtually riding his left leg and talking all the while to the dogs: "No bite me! Bad dog! Bad, bad dog! No bite!"
Mark was feeling a rising, irritated frustration, which he didn't want to focus on the little boy. He gestured across the living room, toward the back of the house. "Let's go figure out what everyone's up to, shall we?"
Theo looked up at Mark. "Yah," he answered.
Theo shadowed him to the doorway of the back room. The girls' beds nearly filled its narrow space. It was dark and underwatery in here--the one window faced out into an overgrown evergreen shrub, which Mark kept meaning to prune, and hadn't. The light that filtered through it was weak and greenish. Daisy was carefully spreading her unzipped bag out on her bed, as she always did. This was her strategy to avoid making it, a chore she hated. Emily was already lying down, one arm under her head, staring out the window at nothing. Ignoring him, Mark felt.
"A word with you, Em?" he said, his voice carefully neutral.
Both girls looked at him. They seemed startled, like sleepers he'd wakened. He turned to his younger daughter. "Daze, could you keep an eye on Theo for a minute? He's scared of the dogs."
She nodded.
"I not scared," Theo was instantly shrilling. "I a big boy. I not scared."
As Mark and Emily stepped toward the doorway, Daisy, who had flopped down onto her bed, was starting a game: "How big are you, Theo? Big as a . . . lion?"
"Yes!" the boy cried.
As soon as Mark shut the door to his room, Emily sat down heavily at the foot of his rumpled bed and said, "Oh, Daddy, it's John. John's dead." Her face twisted, and tears immediately began sliding down it, as though she'd been waiting until this moment to allow herself her full measure of grief.
"What do you mean?" John was Eva's husband, the girls' stepfather. Theo's father.
"He's dead, Daddy." Her hands came to her face now and covered her opened mouth. She inhaled sharply through her fingers, and then closed her eyes. "He got hit . . . by a car. A car hit him."
Mark pictured it. He pictured it wrong, as it turned out, but he saw John then--his large body, bloody, slumped behind the wheel of his ruined car. He saw him dead, though he didn't believe it.
Mark sat down next to his daughter and held her, and she wept quietly and thoroughly, as he couldn't remember her weeping since he had told her he was moving out--long shuddering inhalations, and then a gentle high keening as her inheld breath came out. From the other bedroom he could hear Theo shrieking, "Bad! Bad!" and Daisy's voice trying to distract him.
"Sweetheart, it's okay. Cry, cry," he said. And then he said, "Shhh."
Though he was still thinking of John, still trying to take it in, he was also aware of thinking that it felt good, holding Emily. And of wondering when he had last held her, her or Daisy. He couldn't remember.
When she had calmed down a little, he stretched away from her to grab the box of tissues from the stand by the bed. She blew loudly, using several, and wiped her face. His shirt was wet where she had leaned against him.
"How did it happen?" he asked at last, keeping his voice gentle. "When?"
She seemed stricken again at the question, her eyes swam and grew larger, but she held on and whispered back, "This afternoon. A car just . . . hit him."
Mark cleared his throat. "He was driving?"
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