The Forrests

5. Out There





There was no queue yet for the second chairlift, and Evelyn had the bench seat to herself; it rocked under her shifting weight when she yanked the gloves and hat on and rubbed her ears through the wool. The ski-hut roof was icing white and smooth with snow. Up in the mountains, crumbs of rock faced outwards through the snowfall, dark and bumpy. The last of the pine trees passed beneath her feet. The boots hung heavy with the skis. Behind the sunglasses, her eyes stung and watered.

The chair reached the top and she lifted the bar and skied away before it arced the half-circle for its slow return journey. She kept climbing the slope, cutting the skis horizontally into the gradient, heading for a ridge that snaked upwards to a peak. At the ridge she faced up-mountain and was able to walk directly forwards. Her arms and legs worked hard; inside the ski suit was effort and heat. Her vision filled with the whiteness of snow. She panted heavily, thirstily, and lactic acid seared her muscles, and the slim Vs of her steps in the skis inched closer together until she was shuffling. She pushed on with the poles.

At the top of the ridge, where the ground fell away into a valley that led to another hill, Evelyn rotated the skis like irregular hands of a clock, the ticking spread and smashed in the snow in a five-point manoeuvre until she was positioned to head downhill. She took off the hat and listened to the whistling. Her hot head quickly cooled, the air like fingers through her hair. Velvety blue shadows ran down the side of the ridge’s spine. There were the dotted pines below, gathering further down into a white and black forest. And the car park, and the roads out, and very far away the muzzy village, some farmland, a greenness that was probably trees, and a shining fingernail of silver that might have been the edge of a lake, or a stretch of highway hit by the sun, or the tubing of an industrial greenhouse. Above, nothing but the pressure of the sky. For a moment it thudded closely onto her head, onto the speck that she was. She whooped – a ringing shout bounced back off the slopes – pulled the beanie back on, took a breath and launched forwards.



In the late afternoon, Daniel and the boy from the new family stood on the elevated deck of the hut. Daniel’s wrists hung over the railing and he held a cigarette between his fingers, the acrid smell drifting on a channel of air, and he and the boy looked out across the snowfields towards the pines. The boy was talking; Daniel smoked and listened, and at something the boy said he barked a short laugh. Evelyn waved up and pushed at her ski buckle with the pole to unclick it. A blast of wind scoured her face. As she entered the hut, Daniel and the boy retreated from the deck. In the shade of the cork-floored entranceway, the drying room and the utility room to either side, their overhead footsteps echoed. A cosy smell of wet wool rose as soon as she levered off the snow boots. The outer socks were thick and tongue-shaped, with a tweed-like pattern, dark around the edges with dissolved snow.

Evelyn stepped around the crusts of ice left by her boot prints on her way into the drying room, where she unzipped the ski jacket and emerged from the waterproof overalls and hung them up next to Daniel’s giant orange ski suit, a discarded lobster shell. She ran a hand down the leg of his overalls, the polyurethane coating slightly stiff. Her fingers found something hard halfway down the leg and she slid her hand into the slit of the trouser pocket. She felt a leathery flatness and drew out the small, dried body of Daniel’s lucky frog, long dead and tanned by long-gone air. How many years had he kept this?

There was other stuff in the pocket and although Evelyn held the entire frog between her fingers, could see its squashed diamond completeness, a dread passed through her that there would be half a frog left behind. But there was just a scrunkled lift-pass sticker and two barley sugars. Daniel wore his lift pass around his neck; he was so known here that his whole face was a lift pass, and the date on this one was from last year, and the last mountain, before she had caught up with him.

Evelyn had never touched the frog before and this was the first time she’d taken a close look. It had no smell; all she could detect on her fingers was the wet-fleece scent from the inside of the ski gloves. There was the sound of boots being scraped and stamped on the grill outside. The new family came in the door and they smiled, and exchanged hellos in each other’s languages. The father pulled his dark blue beanie off and batted snow from it, his fine blond hair sticking out crazily from his head. Evelyn finished pulling the sheepskin boots on and nodded at the family once more before climbing the pine stairs to the body of the chalet. The frog was in her pocket now.

She called a greeting to Daniel and he called back from somewhere in the hut. Evelyn tightened her ponytail and washed her hands under the kitchen tap. While she waited to feel his warmth behind her, to be enveloped in his arms, Evelyn tried to focus on the food. The onions in the wicker basket were firm, golden orbs, crunchy green beneath the skin where the knife sliced in and left pungent milky droplets on the chopping board. At the industrial-sized oven she turned on the dials, stiff with trapped food crumbs, and kept chopping. The chopped onions were soft and translucent in the frying pan. The kitchen smelled of their cooking and of melted cheese. There was a tumbling sound as she tipped dried macaroni into the boiling water, which fizzed up and almost over the rim of the saucepan in a rush of white froth. The salt shaker clogged in the steam. She put the macaroni cheese in the oven and started on the birthday cake. She cut adze-shaped chunks of butter and wiped them off the knife with a finger into a large bowl with a chip out of its rim the size of a fingernail. The fine white sugar poured into a peak on top of the butter, a mountain in the bowl. She sniffed the wooden spoon, which smelled of onions, and scrubbed it under hot water then used it to beat the butter and sugar together hard. The eggs were thick-shelled, hard to crack, with a taut matt skin between each shell and the contents. In the bowl they created a separated viscous swirl with the creamed-butter mixture, the yolk trailing through the pale butter, the transparent whites floating jellyishly around the surface. The fragments of shell were tacky and sharp when Evelyn carried them in cupped palms to the rubbish bin. She sifted flour and baking powder over the wet mixture and a fine dust sprayed over the bench, down her apron and onto the floor. The vanilla essence bottle was empty; she shook it over the bowl but only that sweet, oozy smell wafted out, and she threw the bottle over to the bin, and it bounced off the rim and skittered along the floor.



Daniel was not in the bedroom. Evelyn held the banister and swung off the top stair to look down into the entranceway: his boots had gone from the neat row of pairs. In the kitchen she looked at the clustered red heart-shaped strawberries in the plastic punnet the family had brought with them. In winter! She was over the shock of it now.

The family was settled in the lounge, the father on a couch reading to the girl of about eight by his side, the mother and older girl playing a game at the table. There was the hard rattle of blocks inside a plastic shell, and the girl flipped a timer. She said, ‘OK, Mama, go.’ Yellow salt crystals slipped through the timer and the girl scribbled on her paper, an arm crooked over it so nobody could see what she wrote.

‘Dinner is ready in half an hour,’ Evelyn said, aware as she finished the sentence that she was speaking English as if it were her second language, not theirs. She poured the mother a glass of the red wine she liked and tilted the gin bottle towards the father, who shook his head. ‘Daniel and . . .’ the son, the thirteen-year-old. She gestured to the window, where there was still sun on half of the field of snow, a grey shadow from one of the rises bisecting it.

The father nodded. ‘One last run,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ said the mother, taking a gulp of wine. ‘Gut, du fängst an.’

The daughter recited the words she had found, her voice like stiff springs.

Although Evelyn had washed her hands she still felt the frog’s body on them, the desiccated skin between the pads of her fingers, the light ridge of bones beneath the skin. It sat in her pocket like a piece of gold. She washed the cooking dishes. Outside the small window, the snow was blue.

In the living room she turned on the lamp, and its warm glow made outside seem darker. ‘Thank you,’ said the father.

There was some exchange between the children and their parents, and she understood the words video and film. The girl left the room and the older sister shut her book and followed her. Eve hadn’t seen the third daughter; perhaps she was asleep in her bunk. Their mother was holding the edges of the rust-coloured raw linen curtains. She pulled them across a little bit then left them open. ‘Die Scheibe ist kalt,’ she said.

‘Close the curtains,’ said her husband.

‘Nein, not yet.’

Evelyn levered open the door of the wood burner and added another log. A splinter caught in the pad of her index finger. She pressed at the buried end, faintly visible through the layer of skin like a drawing viewed through tracing paper. In the small bathroom off her and Daniel’s bedroom, she took a pair of tweezers from the cabinet and tried to pincer it out, but her left hand didn’t have the necessary deftness and the splinter buried further beneath the skin.

In the living room she held out her finger, palm upwards, and the tweezers, to the mother, and said slowly, ‘I have a splinter. Splinter? Could you, please?’

The woman nodded and took Evelyn’s finger in her own. Her nails were short, without varnish. She pushed at the sides of the finger pad and a micrometre more of the black wood emerged, emphatic as a speck of dirt. The pointed ends of the tweezers delicately gripped the splinter and the woman drew it towards her, and out of Evelyn’s body, and held it up into the light. A dot of blood emerged from the skin where the splinter had been. The mother passed the tweezers back, the splinter still stuck to one arm. Evelyn took the finger out of her mouth and said, ‘Thanks,’ her tongue tasting a little of the blood and the resiny firewood. In the bathroom she wiped the splinter off onto a tissue and put the tissue in the rubbish bag that hung on a hook on the bathroom door, its contents – wilted tissues like flowers, flattened cardboard toilet rolls – visible innards through the transparent plastic. Far off in the mountains behind the hut there was a crack. The sound registered through the back of her head like the soft pop of a neighbour’s firework; a long second later she understood what it was.



Evelyn reached behind the gathered curtains, opened the ranch sliders as narrowly as possible and squeezed through into the limpid evening air. Light from the living room cut across the balcony. She thrust her hands into her pockets and felt the frog. The white lights on top of the chairlift pylons glistened with a small bright radius. Rope tow poles on a shallow run could have been skiers crouching in tableau. Down the slope, at the base of the first chair, the ski café lights were still on, an octagonal constellation. She thought of electric fish in the deep. Wind shook over the surface of the ski field like a sheet being thrown on a bed and there was a high, glassy ringing that might have been lift wires or the wind running over the snow.

The door behind her opened and the father said, ‘Excuse me, the alarm in the kitchen is tooting.’

In the living room the parents looked expectant. ‘Well,’ Evelyn said. ‘I think we should call the mountain patrol.’

‘OK,’ the man said, and translated for his wife.

She said, ‘Really? No. They’re OK.’

‘I don’t know,’ Evelyn said. ‘It’s getting dark. It’s Thursday. There’s no night skiing. No lights.’ Her voice was growing louder, a function of the language barrier. She tried to moderate it. ‘How good a skier is your son?’

The man nodded. ‘He’s very good. Very accomplished.’

‘Right. I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m making us all worry for no reason.’

‘You are worried.’

‘Yes. But Daniel is a good skier too and so. Would you like to eat now, or to wait?’

The man and woman consulted each other. ‘Let’s feed the children,’ he said.



Evelyn was on the phone to the ski patrol when there was a knocking sound from downstairs and Daniel and the boy were down there, in the cold entranceway, the door to the drying room open, ski jackets half off, laughing, stamping feet, the smell of snow on them. ‘Where have you been?’ Evelyn cried. ‘I’ve been freaking out.’

‘Sorry,’ Daniel said. ‘It was incredible, we had the sweetest run.’

‘F*ck that,’ Evelyn said, and the boy looked up sharply. ‘You can’t just do that.’

‘I said I was sorry!’ He said something to the boy in German and the boy ducked his head as if he wanted to laugh but knew it would be a bad idea. He kept his head low as he followed Daniel up the wooden stairs and past Evelyn, still with the phone in her hand although the patrol coordinator had said, ‘All good? My other line’s going,’ and hung up.



Eve marched to the fire and opened the door and threw the frog in. There. She shut the door, an extra lick of bright flame flaring through the soot-stained glass. The mother beamed at her son and said, ‘Wasche deine Hände.’

The boy tucked into his macaroni and cheese and Eve placed the salad lightly in front of him, the vinegary dressing buzzing in the small atmosphere above the bowl. The boy’s family watched him eat. He told a story, in German, while he was chewing, spearing creamy blond pasta onto his fork, holding it high while he swallowed. He broke a crusty roll in half and wiped it through the pale green traces of olive oil that pooled on the plate.

Evelyn sieved icing sugar over the birthday cake and poked spiralled candles, miniature barley twists, in a circle around the top and lit them, the first couple of matches snapping at the waist, the smell of phosphorous lingering until the cake was safely ablaze. Daniel turned out the living-room lights and the family breathed in as one and sang the English happy birthday song to their boy. Everyone clapped at the blazing cake. Its candles flickered while the mother and father cleared space in the middle of the table and the father found a woven tablemat in the cabinet drawer.

‘Sorry.’ Evelyn shook a strand of hair out of her eyes. ‘I should have done that.’

The boy leaned forward and blew out the candles and everyone cheered quietly, a hushed happy sound that warmed the whole chalet as though it was crammed full of well-wishers, people standing in every room, giving soft applause for this boy’s life.

As they ate, the family’s conversation became louder, the children talking over each other, the mother laughing when she had to intervene. The father followed Daniel into the kitchen, where Evelyn was washing the dinner plates.

‘Could you take him for another lesson the day after tomorrow? Tomorrow we go to the village. We will spend the day together.’

‘Sure. Kein Problem.’ Daniel stretched out the red rubber band that held the plastic wrap over the punnet of strawberries. He reached under the wrap and drew one out as though it were a large jewel. The father and Evelyn watched as he opened his mouth and put the strawberry in, twisting the green cap and stalk off with his fingers, while the rest of it was chewed and swallowed.

‘Good?’ said the father.

‘Sehr gut,’ said Daniel.

Oh f*ck up, Evelyn said, to the sink.



In bed there was the sound of wind shearing the ice, and the noises from the bathroom of Daniel brushing his teeth. He didn’t use much water; the brushing was loud and healthy-sounding, like someone eating an apple in your face. The light went out; the room was dark except for a bright line of orange beneath the door.

‘Can you turn out the hall light?’

Daniel did, and the room disappeared. The mattress shifted with his weight. He began walking his thumbs between Evelyn’s shoulders.

‘You can’t just be so late when you’ve got a child with you,’ she said.

‘He’s not a child.’

‘He’s thirteen. Don’t you think they wanted to be with him on his birthday?’

‘Sorry.’

‘You don’t sound sorry.’

He flopped over onto his side, away from her. ‘Jesus, I said sorry.’

‘You don’t sound it. You don’t mean it. You make it worse with your fake sorry, how defensive you get.’

‘What am I meant to say?’

‘You’re meant to mean it.’

‘OK, I’m sorry I worried you.’

Evelyn stuck her face into the pillow and growled.

Daniel laughed. ‘I’m not sorry we had the last run.’

She got out of bed. ‘It’s not funny.’ The air through her T-shirt was sharply cold; her feet froze; she climbed back into bed and under the blankets again.

He cupped a handful of her hair and rubbed a thumb over her hip bone. ‘Do you want to have angry sex?’

‘No.’ It was too long since they’d done it, and always weird when there were people staying. She curled up, facing away, and smoodged her body back into him, his arm slung over her ribcage.



Eve woke in the night to see him sitting on the end of the bed, something in his hand – no, flicking through a pile of something – money. He was counting money. She sat up, pulling the blankets up and her long hair down over her neck to keep warm. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Just seeing how much I’ve got left. It’s payday tomorrow from the ski school.’

‘Looks like you’ve got loads.’ She was pretty sure that wasn’t all of it.

‘I want to . . .’ He folded the bills back into an envelope and put it in his knapsack, the zip loud as he closed it. ‘I really want to go to New York. Next. I want to stay there. Get some work, bar work or whatever, go and see your folks upstate, spend some time. I mean, Canada’s fine, but.’ His gaze went through the knotted pine wall and out into the lightless snow. ‘Enough mountains, I want to go and live in a city. I just, I’m not sure how I’m going to do it, that’s all.’

‘What about –’ Later, she wasn’t sure where she had got the courage to say it. Daylight would dissolve her: after any more than a moment’s thought, Dorothy would have entered her mind, clapped a hand over her mouth, said no. Daniel’s face was barely visible. ‘I’ve got citizenship,’ Eve said. ‘A green card. We could get married.’ She felt the silence burn.

‘Eve, shh.’ He put a hand on her knee. Over the blanket. ‘Shh, it’s the middle of the night. Let’s not make things complicated. You don’t mean it.’

She did. ‘Goodnight,’ she said, and curled up again and was amazed and grateful to succumb quickly to the iron pull of sleep.



In the morning neither of them spoke of it. She got the family ready for their day and Daniel left in his ski gear straight after breakfast. He called up from the snow if she had seen his frog and she stood on the deck and said she couldn’t hear him. He turned and skied away, knees bent, legs in close, expert parallel. The family raised their arms in a faceless goodbye salute as they skied down towards the car park with packs on their backs, shouting and laughing amongst themselves, and Evelyn closed the ranch slider against the white sky. The vacuum cleaner was in the cupboard in the utility room and she dragged its dwarfish body around on the end of the snaky hose, sucking at the channels of crumbs and dust all over the cabin until the floor was clear.

In the children’s room a tubular bundle of duvet on a top bunk made her heart stop. It looked like a sleeping body. But she had seen the family ski off, all six of them. ‘Hello?’ she said, and took a quick breath and yanked the duvet aside to make sure. Nothing but a rippled sheet.

She adjusted the bunk mattresses and pulled up the bedding and shook out the pillows, which smelled of scalps. There was a dog-eared paperback on the floor, in German, its pages oxidised yellow, the cover dotted with brown like a liver-spotted hand. In the top drawer were neatly piled thermals and socks sausaged into pairs. Some cash tucked down the side, a small torch. Evelyn turned the head of the torch so it glowed, and waved the dot of white over the ceiling, the walls, the floor, light streaking past the mirror, and blew on it when she turned it off as though blowing out a candle.

Downstairs, she took the washing from the tumble dryer and folded it, picking out clotted dust and peeling away the occasional long single hair. She carried the clothes up the stairs in the latticed plastic basket and distributed T-shirts and knickers and jeans where they belonged. Outside, the snow closed in. The automated service said the chairlifts would stop running at noon. The family might have to stay at a hotel in the village, but in case they made it back Evelyn prepared lasagne. She took her diary out from the bottom drawer in the bedroom and wrote in it.

At noon the lifts creaked to a halt. Eve poured a large neat whisky, the taste abrasive and leathery. The ski-school phone number went straight to the answer service. She called Daniel’s mobile, and heard it ringing down the hall and in the bedroom. ‘Well that was stupid,’ she said.

As soon as she hung up the chalet phone it rang, and she answered expecting a dial tone or the bleeping of a fault, but it was the family’s father, his voice warm and close. ‘We’re stuck down the mountain,’ he said.

Through the whiteout the blurry shape of a chair swung high on its cable. ‘Do you have somewhere to stay?’

‘Yes, we’ve found a hotel with a hot pool, the children are happy.’

‘Good.’ Evelyn tightened the screw cap of the whisky bottle and wiped it all over with the apron for stray drops. ‘Nice treat.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

She opened the door of the wood burner onto the smell of cooled embers, the inside shardy with charcoal. Using the poker she jabbed around in the squeaking ash, but the frog had gone.

‘Sorry we won’t be back tonight,’ he said.

‘That’s fine. I hope it’s good for skiing tomorrow. The fresh fall.’ Evelyn found that she was holding her breath to try and hear his breathing. ‘Keep in touch,’ she said after a moment. ‘Let me know when you’re going to be back.’

‘OK. For sure. Are you going to be all right up there?’

‘Oh yes. Fine.’

‘Daniel is with you.’

‘. . . yes.’

In the living room she swept out the wood burner and took the ashes to the bin in the kitchen. Soot dropped on the floor; she spread it around with a foot so that some disappeared into the sole of her slipper and some dispersed into particles too small to see. She crumpled newspaper and laid kindling on top and lit the fire, crouching before it, watching the pale sticks catch along the edges. The whiteout was complete. Evelyn added a chafed, cylindrical log to the fire. In the kitchen she tore a bread roll in half and stuffed it into her mouth.

Nobody picked up at mountain patrol. She left a message about Daniel, disconnected, then pressed redial and got the answer phone again. Looking out at the wall of white she pressed redial. She opened the door onto the snowstorm and pressed redial again. She shut the door and hung up the phone and went to the bedroom to check Daniel’s phone, which registered two missed calls, one from the number here at the hut and an earlier call from a withheld number. The messages inbox stored 340 messages. The hut shook in the wind. Evelyn covered the unbaked lasagne with cling film and put it in the fridge, then washed her hands. She ate another hunk of bread. The oven fan whirred.

The phone rang; the mountain patrol. They asked what time Daniel had left that morning and where he had been going.

‘I’m not sure. I was in the kitchen, I guess about seven thirty, eight?’

‘Did he say where he was headed?’

‘No, I thought he had a class, ski school. Did he show up?’

‘We’ll check and get back to you. Have you got everything you need?’

The DVDs were kids’ cartoons, their covers yellow, orange and purple. The wind howled. Evelyn stood in front of the whisky bottle and looked at it. From the mantelpiece she took Daniel’s soft blue bag of tobacco, the slice of apple in the bottom tinged orangey brown, and rolled an amateur cigarette.



Overnight, the storm calmed. Morning came with the sound of graders, a pale blue sky over the curving dunes of snow. Cloud wisps hung below the peaks across the valley, as though the mountains were steaming. The patrol leader stood by his snowmobile and shouted up that they’d found no sign of anyone, not in the back country, not on the black runs or in the valleys.

‘A chopper’s been out since light. Nothing. But Liam at the school reckons he was headed down the mountain, into town.’

‘Yeah. Thanks . . . Daniel left his phone here, so.’

‘Maybe he was hitting the casinos, didn’t want you checking up on him.’

‘No doubt. Thanks, Bernie.’

‘We’ll send him home soon as anyone lays eyes on him. Might have been an all-nighter.’

‘Ha ha.’

There was a clunk and grind and the patroller turned to watch the chairlift swing into action. Red- and yellow-coloured figures, riding on the air, skis pointing upwards. ‘Incoming,’ he said.

Evelyn left a note for the family with heating instructions and a promise to be back after lunch. She placed it under the whisky bottle, which she turned on an angle as though that might make a difference to how much was left. In the bathroom she took a couple of painkillers, the tablets’ smooth coating momentarily sweet, and washed her face with warm water. She checked Daniel’s phone again but there was nothing new and she tossed it back on the pillowy white duvet. Evelyn went downstairs to put her overalls and parka and hat and ski boots on and finally the gloves. About two inches of new snow was piled outside the front door. She lifted her feet in a small march through the powder to the rack, and her skis. A thick length of melting snow slid through the slats in the deck.