The Inverted Forest (31 page)

Nothing accidental about this maneuver, nothing careless. It took time to accomplish. It required a tremendous effort to hold his hostage down and prevent him from drawing another breath.

What he was left with was sagging and loose-limbed and surprisingly difficult to move. To pull Christopher Waterhouse by the ankle was
to have his other limbs—his unattended leg and arms—fold back and scrape the ground at unnatural angles. No good to try to drag him by the collar of his T-shirt, either; the collar stretched wide and long and the shirt threatened to unpeel from his body.

What a sight it must have made. What a woeful and clumsy spectacle. Worse even, the side door of the Kindermann Forest van was hanging wide open. Evie Hicks had been granted a privileged view of the struggle and its aftermath.

Wyatt, kneeling over his work, lifted his gaze up and nodded at her. With a raised hand, he pointed into the woods. He hoped the meaning was clear enough: he intended to crawl beneath the low-hanging cedar branches and drag Christopher Waterhouse, burden that he was, into the darkest corner of the forest. Did she understand why this needed to be done? Did she comprehend?

She was listing forward in her seat, her head low but her gaze open and aware. Hard to guess what her opinion might be—though it was fair to say that she was as interested in the slumped body at Wyatt’s feet as she was in everything else: the twigs and pebbles and other earthly debris which all day long she knelt over and studied from the distance of just a few inches. She was amazed by everything she saw.

Part Two

S
ome things were just too tricky to talk about. Certain
biases,
for example. You couldn’t earn anyone’s sympathy by describing the small insults a woman suffered when she reached the age of thirty-seven and remained—through no real effort or fault of her own—quite pretty. Apparently people got tired of it. At least with Marcy Bittman Lammers they did. Often she was aware of her friends—and new acquaintances, too—surveying her lively and delicate face (at the cusp of middle age still a pixieish face), her hazel eyes, her soft brown hair, her trim little body, and after a fickle moment, a bored moment really, shifting their attention elsewhere. Who knew why? People used to be captivated or made sweetly shy by her fine looks.

None of this for an instant stopped her from welcoming into her home the many friends and associates of her husband, Dr. Dean Lammers. She was honestly glad to do it. In fact she seemed to have a knack for placing her guests into conversational groups that generated a flood of cheerful talk. Yet when it came Marcy’s turn to contribute to the conversation, she could sense people’s interest starting
to thin. If she talked on at any length—about a DVD movie she’d seen, about the family of handsome tree squirrels in her front yard—it would evaporate altogether.

It wasn’t a terrible thing. She wouldn’t call herself crushed by this lack of attention. Still, it was
interesting,
wasn’t it? With Marcy no one seemed anymore to want to include her in talk that lasted more than a minute or went beyond any of the usual topics.

All afternoon and evening people had been stomping through Marcy and Dean Lammers’s home in West St. Louis County. The idea was that this year they’d do an open house winter party. People could drop by anytime between 4:00 and 9:00
P.M.
They could pile their coats and scarves in the little area off the foyer called the welcome room. Along the front hallway was one of five bathrooms, in case anyone should need it. In the great room there was a stoked fire and three open couches and a fully loaded wet bar. From there a person was likely to head downstairs, drink in hand, to the Lammerses’ wide and lushly carpeted basement. There was a game room—pinball, Ping-Pong, foosball, shuffleboard—and a long serving counter bearing plattered holiday food. On the back wall of the basement was a flat-screen TV so large that one of Marcy’s nephews had called it
gi-norm-ous
. The label stuck. This evening a crowd of some twenty guests had gathered around the gi-norm-ous television to watch the blustery final quarter of a snow-wrecked college football game. For now these guests were happy to linger awhile in the leather chairs. But at some point during the party they’d migrate, one by one or in pairs, up the stairs to the vast open kitchen with its gorgeously marbled counters and long windows full of wintry outdoor light. In the kitchen they’d take a seat at a hand-me-down oak breakfast table—the only underwhelming piece of furniture in the whole house—and have a talk with Dr. Dean Lammers.

For at least half the guests, Marcy’s husband, Dr. Lammers, was their immediate supervisor—owner and director of a three-branch ophthalmology practice in greater St. Louis County. Eight interns—the attractive young men and women in the basement game room—called Dr. Lammers their attending ophthalmologist. To many of the other guests he was an essential client for the prescription drugs and medical equipment they peddled. By one means or another, they were beholden to him. So it was easy to assume these kitchen table chats with Dr. Lammers were a calculated obligation. But this most definitely wasn’t the case. Dr. Lammers was widely and sincerely liked. People came to the table because they wanted to. And this, Marcy knew, was a rarer accomplishment than anyone realized: to be highly competent and at the same time to be a modest, funny, personable man.

But not perfect, of course. He was older than Marcy by twenty-one years—a round-faced, balding, bespectacled gentleman of fifty-eight. Despite Marcy’s best efforts, Dr. Lammers was eighty-five pounds overweight. (One of the reasons he stationed himself at the kitchen table was to hide the full extent of his protruding belly.) It was true: they probably looked a little foolish strolling side by side: petite, pretty, younger-than-her-years Marcy Bittman Lammers and the older, overweight, stiff-jointed, and often hobbling Dr. Dean Lammers. They didn’t make a logical couple. No doubt there were people—a few of them at this party—who liked to dwell on these differences, who liked maybe to imagine the two of them together in intimate and unflattering bedroom positions.

That would be cruel, certainly, but not so far off the mark. Tonight being Saturday (the second Saturday of the month no less), they’d convene in their bedroom after the party and clamber up onto their California king and assume a few of those positions. It wasn’t an occasion Marcy looked forward to. Even so, she recognized the relative importance of this schedule: the second and fourth Saturdays of each
month. Mark your calendars! People might think this a pathetic marital arrangement. The handsome young newlywed interns downstairs in the game room; easy to imagine them scoffing. But really, what the hell did they know? Let these newlywed interns grow middle-aged and older and stay married. It would be interesting to see what kinds of schedules they ended up keeping.

Still and all, she enjoyed opening the doors of her home for a holiday party. What happiness to order food and arrange the house, room by room, exactly as she pleased. She really wasn’t a demanding hostess. It was perfectly fine with Marcy if, as they pushed toward late evening, the party atmosphere got a bit loud and lived-in. Perfectly all right if a handful of guests decided to stay until nine o’clock and beyond. In these waning minutes of the party Marcy could wander into the less trafficked corners of her home and pick up an abandoned party cup (though most people were awfully neat at parties these days). She could step out of her pumps a moment and wiggle her toes and stand before the second-floor bay windows and get a bit, well, moony. That was the term she and Dr. Lammers had arrived at after a fierce negotiation.
Getting a bit moony.
He could say, without ruffling anyone’s feathers, “All right now, sweetie pie. Let’s not get moony over any of this.” By which, generally, he meant:
Let’s not get lonesome.
Or:
Let’s not get melancholy.
Or, more specifically, though it couldn’t be spoken aloud:
Let’s not waste any more time thinking about Christopher Waterhouse.

As if she—or anyone—had such command over her emotions: to feel an unexpected ache and be able to steer it back from where it came. There was something about the waning moments of a holiday party—the house emptying of people and a charged stillness filling the rooms—that turned her into a conductor for certain feelings. Before she knew it the full weight of her longing was upon her.
She missed Christopher Waterhouse. She ached to commune. Mostly she’d gotten over the way he’d died, the particular and awful death he’d suffered. But in place of this shock she had, fifteen years after the fact, a much larger capacity to imagine the life-moments Christopher had missed out on. He would absolutely have loved this holiday party, the downstairs game room, the rowdy company of the young interns. The trick, of course, was to remember that he’d be nearly forty years old—a boyish forty, most likely, an alert, happy, physically vital man. Maybe he’d like the artichoke dip she’d made or the shuffleboard game, because these small pleasures, thousands of them over the course of life, were what you missed out on if you died when you were just twenty-two. No Sunday morning breakfasts on the patio. No Caribbean vacations. No movies, either. How awful to miss out on going to the movie theater. Sometimes she and Dr. Lammers saw such outstanding movies at the eighteen-screen cineplex, the kinds of movies in which opposite-minded people fell in love or showed unexpected kindness to homeless men or idiot savants. These were the movies that buoyed you up on a wave of good feeling and made you want to turn to the person next to you, even if it was a stranger, and say, “Oh, that was cute! That was just darling!”