Tatjana Soli - The Forgetting Tree

“We have to think about the treatments.” Gwen patted Claire’s arm. “This is an optimal time to sell. Before the county starts making demands for access roads.”

Claire shook her head, dizzy at this outlandish misunderstanding. “I didn’t ask for anyone’s help.”

“We’re your daughters,” Gwen said. “Of course, we’ll help. I talked to a real estate agent who said that the Owens’s land went for a record price.”

Their relentlessness made Claire feel as if she were being buried alive, hurried to the end. “It wasn’t your right,” she said, desperate to get away. “I’m going to check the garden.”

Undeterred, Gwen dogged her outside. “You said you need family near.”

The ring of Meyer lemon trees hadn’t been picked, and now the skin hung dark yellow, shrinking back on the fruit. “What I need is someone out here with a basket. I’m going to make lemon pie.”

“Mom.”

“I never told you to move away, but I didn’t stop you either.”

“No one except you wants to be here anymore.” Gwen squinted into the evening sun, as if it had placed itself just to irritate her. Away from Lucy’s scrutiny, she became petulant, childish. “I don’t see how. Even if the farm’s managed by Octavio and Dad, what about the house? Who’s going to clean? Cook? Who’s going to take you to doctors? Who is going to be responsible?”

“My head’s spinning.”

“Exactly. Your head’s spinning. I can’t leave everything behind. That leaves Lucy. Enough said.”

“It’ll get taken care of. How do you get through a day with all your worrying?”

Gwen flushed, and Claire remembered fights they’d had as she grew up. “It gets taken care of, Mom, because someone else worries about it and does it. Not you.”

“Unfair.”

Claire longed for Forster to guard her against this bullying. She was tempted to go find him but resisted. Odds were that things were going to get far worse in the future, and then she’d have no choice but to ask his help. Now she should try to hold siege alone.

“I want to spend time together. Have the children see you more,” Gwen said.

“Is that what this is about? Me being gone?”

“Don’t be melodramatic.”

“This is just a bit of unpleasantness to be got through. People survive cancer every day. If it gets worse, then we’ll rethink things.”

“If that’s the way you want it. I’ll just take the kids out of school. Take a leave of absence. Tell Kevin that I have to come—” Gwen’s voice cracked.

Nothing could not be remedied, no matter how late, by love. In this case, by giving in, and yet Claire couldn’t render it, the habit of independence too deeply established. The thought of an invasion unnerved her. She did not have it in her to deal both with cancer and Gwen’s wheedling her to sell the farm. Didn’t illness absolve one, allow one to be selfish? So she relented, backed down, cajoled, sacrificed the battle for the larger war.

“You can’t uproot yourself. What if I hired someone to take care of me? How would that be? Would that make you feel better?”

“ Hire someone?”

“Temporarily. Just to get me through. A stopgap.”

“Pay money?” Gwen said, offended by the suggestion.

Claire could not say it aloud, that money sometimes was by far the easiest price to be paid.

“You’ve always done everything yourself.”

“I know, Gweny. It’s just temporary.”

“It’s not right.” Gwen shrugged. “We’ll think about it, okay? I’ll go start dinner.”

“How come you don’t feel differently about the farm? It’s your home, too.”

Gwen shrugged. “You never understood. All we could talk about when we were kids was getting away. It was so boring and isolated. And then our family broke.” She walked inside.

Claire picked lemons. It was good to be home, even under the circumstances. When Lucy came out with a basket and helped her pluck them off the thorny branches, she was content.

“Remember when you gave us a penny a fruit?”

Claire smiled. “I even remember when it went up to a nickel.”

“We were happy.”

She looked at Lucy. “Why doesn’t Gwen remember that?”

“It hasn’t been for a long time now. Happy, I mean.”

“Things change.”

“Maybe it would be better to sell, after all?”

Lucy had always been the child most like her. Impractical, a dreamer, emotional, so this felt like a betrayal. “Did Gwen send you out?”

“Like I ever cared what Gweny thought.” Lucy snorted a laugh. “But don’t you think the place is, well, kind of haunted, or something?”

“This is where you all were born. This is where we belong, like Grandma said.”

“Maybe she was wrong.”

“Hanni was not wrong.” How had Lucy intuited Hanni’s last-minute change of heart? Not that Claire would ever admit it.

“I don’t see that either you or Dad was all that happy here.”

“We’ll set up interviews for a cleaning lady Monday. Get someone installed right away.” Claire would take up the mantle, insisting on her immortality, insisting, mostly, to remain where and how she was.

The truth was that standing in the orchard looking at a grown-up Lucy, the present did not feel real. She did not feel real to herself. The deforming fact of her missing breast, the new possibility that she would be no more, were mere fictions. Instead, it was more like taking on the role of a character in a play, forced to make the character’s circumstances one’s own. But this distance allowed her a clarity of purpose.

Lucy sighed and turned back to the house. “I should help with dinner.”

“Be on my side, baby.” Claire hugged her.

“I always was. You just didn’t see it.”

* * *

Alone, the last of the sun on her skin, the moment took Claire back to her early days, peeling an orange as she walked through the rows of trees, dropping a confetti of rind behind her, eating the sun-warmed fruit, the girls small and playful as puppies, running in their coveralls through the trees — seeing eternity down the rows the long way, seeing only the next bushy trees across — yelling, laughing, You’re it! You’re it! You’re it!

She sat on the lawn with Raisi, legs crossed Indian-style, with Josh in a bassinet under the jacaranda tree, purple blossoms floating slowly down like a benediction, landing in their hair, on the baby’s blanket. Jacaranda blossoms fell, or was it the coral tree in the front yard? Roots like a banyan tree’s, orange-red blossoms like sickles, like small crescent moons of blood.

Nothing had changed except time. Lucy was wrong because once it had been a happy place, unhaunted, and they had been happy there. She was sure of it. Time had corrupted things.

It started with Josh’s death, tainting the rhythm of their days in ways not anticipated. In the mornings, she lay in bed, unable to rise, the weight of sorrow pressing her down further and further into her bed. She stopped packing the girls’ lunches, letting them make their own. Forster, too, withdrew, spending less and less time on the farm, less time being a father, no time as her husband. Was their mutual pulling back the reason the girls clung so close to each other, the reason they left home so early and stayed so far away? Could it be that those three men first setting foot on the ranch were catalyst enough to set in motion a chain of events inexorable, not capable of being recovered from? Or was there something brittle and unsound within the family, something diseased, something they could not have known or fixed, something that might never have come to light of day except the fates unkindly exposed it?

* * *

That first night back from the hospital, Forster, Octavio, and Mrs. Girbaldi stayed for dinner, and the table was filled with food as it had been in the old days. Claire loved the feeling of the kitchen filled again with life. She pulled out her lemon cheese pie from the oven, set it on the counter to cool, the scent sharp and healing as sunlight. But she couldn’t eat — a piece of chicken brought to her mouth nauseated her, lying rubbery and repulsive on her tongue, her mind convulsed with the idea of its being dead flesh. Her entire will focused on simply not gagging. The pain drugs ruined taste — like walking around with a mouth full of pennies.