Lost in the Forest Read Online Free PDF Page A

the three earlier, and grief stricken is what you’d expect. What you’d want, Eva thinks.
    Grief stricken is what Daisy and Theo haven’t seemed. Though Eva knows that Daisy’s withdrawal, her silences, are part of her sorrow, as she knows that in some sense Daisy was the most deeply attached to John of the children. The most in love with him. Emily and Theo relied on John, took John for granted—as, Eva recognized, she had too. Though what did that mean? That she knew he’d always be there? Maybe something as simple as that. But that was a something that meant almost everything to Eva.
    Daisy, though, limp unpretty Daisy, with her horrible posture, her unkempt hair, her droopiness —Daisy who probably mostly didn’t believe that anyone would always be there—Daisy seemed to have pinned the little hope she held on to in that department on John. The wooing of him! He and Eva had laughed about it occasionally alone in their bedroom at night. Only last year he’d shown her an elaborate card Daisy had made and left on his desk,inviting him to her piano recital. And one night when she was about ten, they found a poem from her pinned to his pillow, a poem that galumphed along to the final line, “Oh stepfather, man among men!” (Eva had used this as a sexual joke once. She had whispered the line to John as he entered her, and they had laughed; but she felt a kind of sad guilt about Daisy afterward, and she didn’t do it again.)
    It was Daisy who would go anywhere with John when he leaned in and offered his open, careless invitations: “I’m heading to the bakery”—to the grocery, to the dry cleaner, to the wine shop. “Anyone want to come along?” Daisy always put aside what she was doing and volunteered, as though she couldn’t bear to think of his being alone.
    It’s difficult to tell how hard it is for her now, she’s so private, but even when Eva is most lost in her own pain, she tries to remind herself that Daisy is suffering too. That the more you can’t tell Daisy is suffering, the more she is. Eva hasn’t known what to do about it beyond trying to get to all the recitals, the games she can manage. Beyond letting Daisy see her own grief, her tears. Beyond touching her as much as Daisy will allow, which isn’t a lot—she’s expert at shrugging away from Eva’s hand on her shoulder, at turning out from an attempted embrace by her mother.
    But Theo is even harder, because Eva simply has no idea what he feels. Not once has he truly wept. Or even in any real sense acknowledged that John is dead, though Eva has tried often to speak of it with him. Not so much the event of John’s death—that would be too terrible, too cruel to discuss. But simply the fact that he is dead, gone. And sometimes it seems Theo does understand that, without being able to talk about it. There are even moments when it seems to Eva that he accepts it, as a premise, an underlying fact of his life.
    But then no. Today, for instance, in the car on the way back from swimming in the pool at Gracie’s, he said, out of the blue, “When I get big, I’m going to show my dad how good I swim.”
    Eva, who was planning dinner, surveying her open refrigerator in her mind, wondering if she could get by without stopping forgroceries, was startled to attentiveness. She looked over at him. He was wrapped in a striped towel, his thick brown hair still dark with dampness, his eyes and nostrils pinked from the chlorine and water.
    After a minute, she said, “I wish you could show that to Daddy.” She was considering each word. “He’d be so proud.”
    “I’m gonna ,” the little boy said fiercely.
    Eva felt a heaviness forming in her midsection. She tried to keep her voice mild. “But you know Daddy is dead, Theo.” He was looking out the passenger window—though he was so low in the car, so small, that surely all he could see were the overhanging trees by the road and the cloudless sky behind them. “Right?” she said.
    Now he