Tatjana Soli - The Forgetting Tree

Claire waved them off. “Go. Tell him to take the dog. Save a life.”

Minna gave Claire a strange smile. After she disappeared with Don, Claire went back inside and sagged down into a sofa, exhausted. The interaction had served as distraction, but now, alone, reality came down on her even more heavily than before. She didn’t like lying about her cancer, but maybe it was better than suffering those pitying looks that the soldier had endured. She wanted to escape her own life. It had been a mistake coming, she thought, and just as she was contemplating sneaking out, Mrs. Girbaldi made her way over.

“They’re all eating and drinking up a storm, but no donations or bids,” she said. “Wrong type of crowd.”

“Don’s taking another dog.”

“Good,” Mrs. Girbaldi said, eyeing a potential donor at the cheese table. “He seems to have made a new lady friend, too. Be right back.”

Claire ate and talked, drank and listened, constantly checking for Minna’s return, ready to leave. Over an hour passed before she came back.

“Where’ve you been?”

“We took the dog to his house.”

“I want to go home.” Claire grabbed her purse and said curt good-byes.

Mrs. Girbaldi looked unhappy as Claire pecked her cheek. “Leaving so soon?”

“Nerves about Monday.” In the car, alone, Claire turned to Minna. “You drove to Don’s house?”

Minna looked straight ahead, out the windshield, petulant as a teenager. “Yeah. We put the dog in the yard and then we fucked on his couch.”

Claire shook her head as if the girl’s words had blurred meaning. “What are you saying?”

“I thought that’s what you wanted. You threw me at him.”

“What I wanted? I don’t even know what that means. That you’d do something like that if I wanted ?”

“Which part?”

In that moment, Claire knew she was in over her head. As much as she liked Minna’s iconoclasm, she realized she was habituated to the opposite — people, including herself, who offered no surprises. Was Minna’s wildness the right thing for her now?

“I enjoyed it if that’s what you’re asking,” Minna said.

“How will I face him? This is a small community, everyone will know. He’ll want to see you now.” Then a new thought occurred to Claire. “Are you quitting me?”

Minna leaned over and rubbed Claire’s arm up and down, rough and comforting as if reassuring a child. “I explained to him I don’t want a romance now, okay? It was just recreational.”

“Jesus.” Claire looked at her. “You slept with him?”

Minna giggled, and then they both broke into roaring screams of laughter, a shredding, incredulous kind of hilarity that tore up the animosity between them.

“For your information,” Minna said, when they could at last breathe again, “he doesn’t know who Rochester is. Had him confused with Heathcliff. He said he could read our reactions, and he played us. He’s very small.”

Claire screeched, choking, and covered her ears. Her chest and stomach ached with the heaves of laughter; it was the first time she had laughed since her operation. “No more. No more, no more, no more, you bad girl.”

* * *

That night Minna walked into the kitchen wearing pale blue cotton pajamas, face washed smooth, hair pulled back in a bun. It felt like going back in time to when the girls were in their teenage years. Claire heated milk in a pan, and they talked about the logistics of the coming week. Already, the events of the evening were fading, and they had eased into a routine of familiarity that was out of keeping with the short time they had known each other.

“Not to hurt your feelings, but I like you much better now that your daughters are gone. You seem … more yourself.”

Claire laughed. “They’re good girls.”

“I love Lucy. She saved me.”

“You’re too young, but when you settle down and have children … you love them more than your own life. But they grow up to be your jury. All the judgment of how you raised them, the mistakes you made. It’s a lifelong sentence.”

“You’re a good mother.”

“I don’t think they see that.”

They drank from their mugs.

“Can I tell you a secret?” Claire said.

“Of course, my sister.”

“All I want, all I’ve wanted since … a long time, was to stay on this farm.”

“It’s not much of a secret.”

Claire shook her head, impatient. “My daughters don’t understand.”

“No.”

“They have no feeling for the land. Refuse to live here. They want me to leave, and sometimes I have doubts … maybe they are right.”

Minna put her hand on Claire’s. “Maybe you should offer the ranch to one daughter to take over. She runs it and gets to keep it.”

“That would create hard feelings.”

“It’s their choice. Maybe there will be only one taker. Hopefully there will be one taker.”

* * *

An hour later in her bedroom, book slumped against her chest, Claire awoke to the sound of a strangled voice. It took several minutes to shake off the impression that its source was not in her dream, which had been troubled, nor even from an overloud television, but real, and its source was Minna crying. She pictured Don come back, charged with lust, beating against the French doors. She ran into the kitchen with the only weapon in reach — her book — only to find Minna, her back to Claire, screaming into the phone.

“ Mwen renmen-w, I love you … I told you — I take care of you as soon as I can. You push and push, Jean-Alexi, and I just disappear again, you hear me?”

How to account for the momentary conviction that Minna was an intruder in her house, even though she was wearing the robe Claire loaned her? Her feet were spaced apart, her shoulders hunched, as if enduring a strong wind, or preparing for a lash. That posture created a whole new idea of Minna from the one Claire thought she knew. She was speaking English quickly, mixed with a guttural, foreign-sounding language (maybe French?) whose words Claire couldn’t pick out.

“Minna?” Claire whispered, more to hear herself aloud, wake up from an apparent dream, than to be heard. Minna turned, and the face that looked back at Claire was a stranger’s — flamed eyes, tendons and bones swelled in rage against the surface of her skin. But it was the expression of fury — or perhaps the adrenaline of terror? — that took her breath away.

No dream. Claire turned away, as if she had been shown something shameful, something not meant for her eyes, as provocative as a vision of Minna and Don writhing on his couch. She groped her way back to her bedroom and lay rigid under her cover, scared, staring at the ceiling. More excited talking on the phone, something at last concluded, and the receiver was hung up. Perhaps Claire fell asleep, but after a prolonged period Minna, her Minna, kind and smoothed over, came through the door as if the other had never been. She carried a cup of herbal tea.

“Have a nightmare, doudou ?”

“No,” Claire said, looking out the window, at the dresser, anywhere but at her.

“Drink,” she coaxed, and Claire reluctantly did. Minna leaned over her in bed, stroked her damp hair, plastered down by panic. “Don’t ever be frightened of me.”

The late spring brought a fierce bout of tule fog through the orchard every morning. Minna and Claire walked like ghosts, barely visible one to the other. Trees slid by like apparitions, the only tangible thing the scent of the leathery white blossoms that foretold future harvest. The quiet brought a sense of invisibility.

The natural world colluded with this illusion: rabbits stood in their path, not flinching till they were almost close enough to reach out and touch them. Hummingbirds hovered close by their faces as if in search of nectar. One morning, Minna lifted her arm and pointed through the fog to an orange tree, under the branches of which a coyote lay curled sleeping as if enchanted.