Tatjana Soli - The Forgetting Tree

“I see I came for trouble.”

“Get me out of here,” Claire said. “There’s so much going on. Octavio needs my help.”

“I already talked to him. Everything’s fine. This time of year, things are slow.”

Claire frowned.

Forster rarely visited the farmhouse, not wanting to drive through the long rows of citrus trees leading to it, rejecting the smell of his beloved blossoms in the spring, going to the length of driving the long way around the county road to avoid the loading trucks whose picking schedules he knew by heart, as they filled with fruit crates stamped with his own name. Katie confessed he went to the absurd extreme of forbidding orange juice in the house.

After forcing Claire to stay on the ranch, he had been the one to leave, a point she never let him forget.

Now he chose to live in an apartment, looking over the ocean, a desert of water, devoid of one square inch of soil. Perhaps an attempt to return to his seafaring ancestors’ roots? He ignored Raisi’s mantra of the importance of place. Such a decision smacked to Claire of a denaturing beyond even discussing. She felt pity for him. All his other poor decisions — investing in a car dealership, a fast-food restaurant, both of which went under — appeared in its long light. He was a man of the soil, trained in the rhythms of growth and harvest. Turning his back on the place he was from, he rejected a way of life. Because of the one loss, creating another.

* * *

In the hospital, the girls each bowed a submissive head for a brush of his lips across their forehead, then escaped downstairs to the hospital cafeteria. “Do I smell bourbon in here?” he asked to their giggling, retreating backs.

What they were squeamish of witnessing was not the hostility between their parents (there was none), but rather the open display of affection. No matter how long the absence, Forster and Claire reunited as tenderly as if still married. The distance between them had kindled within Claire an affection as strong as in the first days of their courtship that she was at pains to hide. The acrimony, the blame — suffocating when they were still married — had faded away.

How to explain that after twenty or more years, a marriage, if it had ever been real, could no longer be sundered by a piece of paper. In two decades — the same time it took to raise a human being — a marriage became its own entity. Life intervened, yes, a decision was made that life together was too painful, but the marriage itself lived on, a kind of radiological half-life. After the death of Josh, when Claire refused to consider trying to have another child, Forster escaped to his beach apartment and a new wife. Not so unusual to drown oneself in otherness — the ocean, when you are a man of the soil; youth, the state of having everything that will happen in front of you, when already so much has passed.

It surprised everyone when they did not immediately have children. After two years, young Katie paid Claire a visit. A sweet girl, ten years older than Gwen, she cried in Claire’s lap as she explained that Forster offered to divorce her after he made the abrupt decision to have a vasectomy. Claire believed that Forster came around to her way of thinking. Every child deserved to be wanted for itself upon coming into the world, not merely to replace what had been lost. But still, there was the problem of this girl-wife.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Claire said, “except that he is a good man. In spite of all that.”

Claire and Forster’s marital bond was welded strong by the girls, whom they had successfully raised, but was equally forged by failing the one child — the intolerable offense of not rendering the world harmless to him. They had failed, and if they were lucky, neither of them would create such scarring ties again.

“You can’t leave just yet,” Forster said, settling back into a hospital chair by the window, his eyes avoiding Claire’s face.

“I need one of the girls to come home for a while.”

She felt she had aged unbearably in his eyes, that he recoiled at the lines and fissures etching her face. Had he already resigned himself to yet another death? He looked as strong as a decade earlier, his face browned, his eyes calm. Even the sprinkling of gray in his blond hair simply made him seem more solid, more able to endure. Maybe in running away from the ranch he had made a bargain with the devil? She could ask Forster for anything and he would do it — unspoken but suspected that he would even leave Katie if it came to that — but he refused to live their old life on the farm again. They were locked together like two pieces of a puzzle that created a gaping hole when put together. Alone, they could choose to ignore the emptiness, but together they created an absence.

“You look good,” Forster said.

“Liar,” she said.

“Not bad to me.”

“Help me get out of here. Be my alibi.”

“What do you need?” he said. “Give me something to do.”

“I ask for one thing, and you refuse.”

“Christ, you have cancer. Forget about work for a time.”

“‘Highly survivable,’ according to Gweny.”

He flinched at the remark. “Don’t be so hard on her. She loves you.” His face crumpled. “I’ll see what I can do, okay?”

“I need to go home.”

He got up to make his escape, before more things he could not give would be requested. “You’re the invincible one. Don’t let us down.”

“That’s right. Tough as nails.”

“What about the farm? Gwen mentioned you’re worried about it.”

“I just need a friendly face around.”

“I can do that.” He hesitated, and she suspected the real purpose of his visit. “Maybe it’s time to let go of the place?”

“No.”

“Claire—”

“I’m lying in a hospital bed. Are you really going to talk about selling the farm now?”

The truth was that she had dug her way back like a feral animal. Scratched and clawed those around her, metaphorically ate her young by demanding what they could not give. Make no mistake — survival was not a pretty business. It was bloody and ruthless and necessary, and afterward the best most could do was to try to forget. There had been the first survival, and this was nothing in comparison.

* * *

Through the next days at the hospital, the girls circled, fluttering around Claire in their attempts to take hold of the situation, once again waiting for what would come next. As a young mother, Claire had the guilty thought that perhaps it would have been preferable to have had only one child, so that parent and child would be best friends. Siblings were always more distracted by each other, more concerned with their own constant jostling for status and position, the attending barbs and slights and hurts, to have Claire be anything more than a distant, dispensing figure.

* * *

On the day of her release from the hospital, the afternoon was like a bell, clear and hollow, with the usual white-blue haze caught in the creases of the foothills, along the long floors of the valley. A deceptively simple landscape because the haze usually hid the complication of the nearby mountain range, the capped peaks of the San Gabriels. Their existence due to the catastrophic pressure deep beneath the ground. Only on rare, Santa Ana — wind days, the humidity dropped to zero, the barometric pressure so high it caused headaches and nosebleeds and crazy longings, did the mountains appear, a presence that on most days remained invisible.

The pain drugs made her nauseated on the drive home, the traffic stop and start, gridlocked, winding out of the city. Forster drove, and Lucy sat in the backseat, distractedly biting her nails while staring out the window. A paper bag lay between them for Claire. Gwen went through paperwork in the passenger seat, reading out options of clinics around the country, rates of success, side effects of treatment.