Gone to the Forest: A Novel by Katie Kitamura Page A

her. She sits among the boxes and the bags and for the first time—through the
     cloud of rage and panic—Tom sees what his father is taking with him.
    A multitude, an ocean of things. The girl is sitting on loot, on things
     taken—she rides high on the surf of things taken. The loaded wagon material proof
     of the old man’s departure. Tom cannot understand how it has come to this. Two
     weeks and a lifetime has been undone. He watches his father. The old man circles the
     wagon. He tests the ropes. The loading is almost done. He takes out his silver watch and
     checks the dial.
    The old man is the same by most known measures. Remote, imperious,
     unknowable: the same as before. And yet the old man is entirely changed. Despite the
     disorder in his head, Tom understands something new about his father: that he is a man
     made visible by means of a backdrop. His father is a shape cut out against a landscape
     he has personally dominated and formed.
    The shape is still the same. It is the backdrop that has gone, and with it
     everything that makes the man himself. Tom can hardly recognize his father. He cannot
     see him in the same way, especially now, now that he is leaving, now that he is already
     parted, has parted himself, from the land and property. It cannot only be Tom. Others
     must see him differently. A man in bad fortune. His dreams for the future looking
     foolish. A man without money, which is also ridiculous.
    Tom does not know if his father is aware of how he
     looks. He does not think he cares. His father has been preoccupied. He has stayed to his
     study. Looking at papers, laying out maps, writing down figures. The old man making
     midnight telephone calls, the conversations muffled by the house’s thick walls so
     that Tom did not hear the matters being discussed. Although he eavesdropped carefully,
     diligently.
    There was more: the departure of the three men, the day the ash stopped
     falling. Who left with promises of their return and the strong smell of brilliantine.
     That afternoon the girl crawled out from her room. She did not look like herself. She
     was pale and even thinner but the difference was in her eyes. Which had fallen back into
     her head. She was watching things from a distance, measurably greater than before.
    There were other differences. The girl now stayed close to the old man.
     She was with him all the time. She sat inches away from him at dinner, fork clanging at
     his plate, fingers reaching for his elbow. The girl standing between the father and the
     son. Like she wasthe physical
     manifestation of the barrier Tom had often tried to deny, but that had always
     existed between them. As if she were now the guardian of that distance. Tom saw her
     sitting by the old man’s side. He saw her lift up her face to look at him.
    They might have shared blood. The girl the old man’s daughter. The
     girl the old man’s son, as he might have been, the girl the old man himself. They
     would stay together. One and one being two. One and one and one on the other
     hand—it did not add up. Tom did not fit in. In the house therewas sunlight and dust so thick it made patterns in the air. He passed the old
     man’s study, he saw the girl and the old man sitting side by side. Neither looked
     up.
    Later, he came upon the girl alone. He stopped and she stopped, too. He
     looked down at her hand, it was hard for him to look her in the face. She was still
     wearing his mother’s engagement ring. He shook his head in confusion and looked
     up. Now at her face, which had been wiped blank. She knitted her brow as she looked at
     him.
    “What has happened?”
    He intended to sound firm. As if he had some purchase on the situation. He
     was aware of how close she stood. The fetid smell of her hair.
    She shook her head. She had never liked Tom. And they had wanted her to
     marry him. They had believed this was the solution. Her eyes widened. Briefly. An
     instant later they receded and she