Tatjana Soli - The Forgetting Tree

“We can take the lump and test for margins,” the doctor said.

She both heard and didn’t hear. There was no fear. Her mind calculated what this would mean to the work schedule, if Octavio could handle the harvest alone. How much time did something like this take? “And then?”

“If the margins are clear, we won’t have to take the whole breast.”

“But it could change in the future. It would mean a constant waiting. Take it all now. I want it done with.”

For the first time, he paused to examine her face. “That’s unnecessary.”

“That’s what I want. If you won’t do it, I’ll get someone else. I don’t have time for this.”

“You don’t have time for cancer?”

* * *

What she hated most about the disease was her inability to hide it. Undergoing chemo and radiation, she would have front-and-center invalid status. The help she needed to ask for would come with a price. Her greatest fear: the family’s impatience with her refusal to sell off the remaining land. Forster had allowed her to keep the operation going, yet even he didn’t seem pleased with her stubbornness. She flirted with the idea of just ignoring the whole thing for six months till she got her projects done around the ranch. Once the news got out, she would lose her leverage. In this case, not acknowledging a thing, not talking about it, rendered it less powerful. If only Raisi were around now. Claire dismissed the statistic that her own mother had died of breast cancer ten years before. No, she would get the operation over with right away.

* * *

Within days of the diagnosis, Gwen and Lucy flew in from various compass points on the map. Their presence in the hospital room literally lifeblood. Missing them, denying that missing, had dulled Claire. Despite the circumstances, she feasted on their company while at the same time wondering if maybe she could work the guilt angle on one of them. They hovered over her after the surgery, exchanging gossip with each other. Distraught and distracted in equal parts. Cell phones buzzed, laptops flickered. Their eyes searched for reading glasses, lipstick, magazines, death.

“Thank God I got you in when I did,” Gwen said. Her glorious blond hair now butchered short, chin-length. Junior partner at her law firm, mother of two, she had taken on the mantle of the matriarch in charge of all the major and minor dramas of the family, organizing social gatherings, and being overbearing to her younger sister. “This is nothing. Early detection. Totally survivable.”

Lucy, recently moved to Santa Fe, was wearing a heavy patchouli perfume that overpowered the small room. Thin in her faded jeans and boots, her bare, tanned arms revealed tattoos. Six months before, she had finished another in a long line of rehabs, and everyone was hopeful that this latest fresh start would take permanent hold.

“Is it possible,” Gwen said, sneezing, “that you not wear that around me? It’s giving me a headache.”

Lucy looked at Claire and burst into tears. Still the baby of the family. Her emotions always on the surface. “I’m going for a cigarette. Call me when the doctor comes.”

“I thought you quit,” Claire said. The tumor had not been found early, but she wouldn’t mention that.

* * *

Gwen hid at the end of the floor in the lounge, teleconferencing with her office until the doctor appeared. She returned to watch the nurses empty drains and tubing, and she helped them coil the hoses back up, pinning them on the inside of Claire’s nightshirt, careful and steady. She had a look of resolve in her eyes, ready to take on this new challenge. She helped Claire into the bathroom, rolled her IV in after her.

“We should have caught it earlier,” Gwen whispered. Long ago, she had become the little mother of the family while her parents struggled to keep the farm solvent. Often Claire caught her washing Lucy’s face, mending her clothes, braiding her hair. Gwen would fix a snack for Josh or help him with his homework. When a girl he had a crush on turned him cruelly away, Gwen went to the girl’s house and bawled her out. Claire could gauge her failures in mothering by Gwen’s remedying the oversights.

Once Josh had come crying to Claire, a bump on his head and a half-moon-shaped gash along his cheek. The girls had been sunning in the orchard, and they had talked him into climbing an apricot tree to pick ripe fruit that was out of reach. He fell off the topmost branch. “They told me not to tell,” he cried. In a fury, Claire yelled at Gwen even as she felt the burden placed on her unfair. She was still a child herself. “You know better. It’s your job to look after them.”

* * *

In the hospital room, the light hurt Claire’s eyes. “I want out of here,” she said. The painkillers were wearing off; the nurses slow and stingy on their rounds. She begged that the blinds be lowered to a gloom, but even the blue of the television made the room appear hazy, smoke-filled, disturbing her. She longed for her own house, her own bed. What was happening with the fields in her absence?

“You just got out of surgery.”

“Recovery is the same anywhere.”

Lucy sneaked in a fifth of Knob Creek, and just as when they were teenagers, Gwen resisted, lectured, then finally gave in. “Just this once, for nerves. I’ve got it under control.” They took turns drinking shots out of the water glass on the nightstand. Lucy stroked her mother’s head. “When you’re out of here, I’ll take you for a real blowout.”

Claire chose not to lecture. “How is the new job?”

“What does it matter?” Lucy said, waving her hand at the machines surrounding them. “With all this?” She wanted to be a painter now, after wanting to be a singer, and before that a chef. Some strange role reversal had occurred between the girls. In school, Lucy had been the straight-A brilliant one, and Gwen had struggled and worked for B’s. Now Lucy was adrift, caught up in one thing after another.

“This is nothing. An inconvenience.” Claire didn’t want this to be another excuse for her daughter to fail again.

Because of the size and spread of the tumor to the lymph nodes, a radical mastectomy had been necessary even without Claire’s draconian instructions, but the surgical team was offended when she refused the simultaneous reconstructive surgery.

“Mom, that’s medieval, walking around with a gash across your chest,” Gwen said. Her wealthy divorce clients took their plastic surgery seriously, and she offered a whole Rolodex of what she called “boob men” to call.

Claire found it alien and strangely hopeful at the same time, as if packaging might be a cure-all for any calamity. “It’s okay the way it is,” she reassured Gwen. “If I decide to pose for Playboy, we’ll rethink it.”

The girls laughed and passed another round of drinks, relieved that their mother would not fall apart on them.

“I want to go home. I can’t sit around a hospital room for a week.”

“You have cancer,” Gwen said. “Forget the farm.”

“You can take care of me. What could that involve? There are things that need to be looked after.” That strange maternal twinning of love and thwarted expectation.

* * *

Forster came to the hospital, bowlegged under the weight of a gigantic arrangement of roses and lilies that sucked the air out of the room, made it smell like the dregs of an emptied perfume bottle, like the hall of a mortuary. The nurses ticked their heads in disapproval as if he’d tracked in crescents of dog shit on the bottom of his boot. Given his squeamishness in all matters of the body and heart, his visit was the more unexpected. He had come alone, without Katie, his second wife.

“Who died?” Claire asked, pointing at the flowers.