Tatjana Soli - The Forgetting Tree

“Maybe the Chumash?” Forster said.

“My great-uncle on my father’s side, the English side, had bought land on the far side of the island because it was cheaper. He was clearing the jungle for his coffee fields,” Minna said. “They began digging up bones. All sorts of bones. He pretended they were animal ones because otherwise it would be considered bad luck, make the land worthless. Until they dug up skulls, and the lie was up. It turned out to be a slave burial site. But this uncle kept plowing, hiding them by throwing the bones in a big pile in the jungle. After he was done, the pile was high as a man, wide as four men across with outstretched arms.”

“What’d he do with them?”

“Forgot about them.” Minna rubbed her calf with her hand. “A year later his crops failed. A year after that, the plantation house burned down. They moved to town, and his wife and daughter died in an outbreak of typhoid fever. He went back to England, broken. Became an alcoholic.”

“That’s terrible,” Claire said, gripped by the matter-of-factness in Minna’s recitation of events. People used to making a living off the land had a natural sympathy for each other, knowing the hardship involved, even at the best of times. Especially in her illness, Claire was full of the idea of unfairness in all its permutations.

“What’re you implying, Minna?” Forster chuckled. “Some kind of curse?”

“He was careless. He shouldn’t have ignored the bones,” Minna added, as if to ease the blow of her words.

Forster studied her for a moment, debating. “Who were you talking to on the phone that night, right after you first came here? When you were so upset?”

Minna’s eyes widened, then narrowed. Claire cursed herself that she had confided in him; he could never keep a secret. “My cousin. I borrowed money from him. He wants it back.”

Forster looked at Claire significantly. “How much are we talking about? Is he threatening you?”

Minna shook her head. “It’s not like that. I call him because he’s from home. A familiar voice.”

“If there’s a problem, you can tell us. We’ll help if we can.”

“None.”

Claire hadn’t told him about Minna’s recent requests for advances on her pay.

“He talks to my family. They are angry I’m not in school. I say there are other things in life.”

“Do you believe that?”

Minna smiled slyly. “It’s okay to enjoy yourself when you’re young.”

After Forster left, Minna clucked her tongue. “You betrayed me. Told him about the call.”

“It frightened me.” The truth was that during the last month, the intimacy that illness necessitated had created a bond between them so that Claire no longer questioned Minna. Such distrust was in the past.

* * *

Although it had not been discussed, Minna assumed a right to be gone every couple of nights. At bedtime, she slipped out the kitchen door, and Claire ran up to the second-story hallway and peered out the window just in time to see a faraway pair of glowing headlights like predatory eyes, waiting at the far-off foot of the driveway.

In the moonlight, the tree trunks shone smooth and heavy as bones, and even the paths between the rows resembled the ribs of an animal long succumbed. The faintly rotting smell of oranges on the air made it difficult to breathe.

Claire longed to forbid Minna these visits. All those years of living by herself, and now she could not admit the clinging panic she felt on those nights, alone, the waves of fear. Wasn’t she paying for Minna’s time? At two in the morning regularly, she woke with a pounding heart, watery bowels, a feeling that if she continued to lie there in the darkness another minute, she would simply cease. If Minna was home on those nights, she would appear magically with hot milk and sing her back to sleep, or would massage her back and legs till she drifted asleep. Claire stopped short of picking up the phone, calling either the girls or Forster to complain. Clearly she was protecting Minna even if it was against what she herself wanted. In the calm of daylight, she admitted to the irrational panic, admitted, too, that she didn’t own the girl’s soul. A companion, an assistant, but not a friend, not a lover, not a slave.

* * *

On those mornings when Minna had been at Don’s house the night before, Claire found her in the kitchen early, preparing breakfast, bruise-lipped, quiet and satisfied as a cat that has feasted enough to last for days.

“Aren’t you tired of taking care of an old, sick woman?” Claire pouted. “What can there be for you here?” Miserable at herself for being so whining. In her worst moments, not only did she resent Minna’s health, but also her youth, her beauty, even her previous night out. What she really resented was the unfairness of all those things ending in her own life.

“That’s why I need to be with Don,” Minna said, measuring coffee into a filter. “Do you never watch the mother bird fly away from the nest? The babies worry, but then she comes back with a big, fat worm for them to eat. If they all stayed in the nest, they would starve.”

* * *

Minna owned only a few dresses, rotating so regularly Claire knew which day it was by the choice. What to make of a girl not having more than three dresses and a pair of white jeans to her name? Perhaps it was some bohemianism in her, or an asceticism that rejected material things. Which begged the question of what she did with all the cash she was getting. As a favor, Claire asked her to pick among the girls’ old clothes and her own, explaining how the waste bothered her. Claire especially wanted her to try on a dress made of pale-green and pink silk. In her own opinion, she had reached the nadir of her attractiveness — hairless, unexercised, bloated, and pale — and was convinced she would never again do it justice.

Minna slipped it on. Underneath, she wore no bra, and her nipples were clearly outlined in the fabric as if the dress were designed expressly to accentuate her nakedness instead of clothe it, making her all the more alluring for both what it revealed and what it hid. She twirled on her bare feet, rising on tiptoe, and Claire clapped as the gauzy fabric fluttered out from Minna’s legs. Claire had not felt such childlike pleasure in a long time.

Minna went to her room and returned with a magenta printed scarf, which she wrapped around Claire’s head despite her protests. In the full-length mirror, Claire had to admit that it was a better solution than her alternative of patchy, sad molting-bird baldness.

“Now we are real sisters.” Minna laughed. “Exchanging skins. Why do you insist on making yourself ugly?”

The comment shocked, doubly so since it was her own complaint about Gwen. Was it true that children divided up and took the parents’ traits? Yet it was true she had lost the knack for the physical. “I can’t help it.”

“I see no men here for you. You never talk of anyone.”

“All that is in the past for me.”

“That’s ridiculous. No one is past the need for love.”

That night Claire watched as Minna in the pale-green and pink ex-dress disappeared down the driveway.

* * *

Paz was sorting laundry a few days later when she came across the dress. She brought it to Claire, chiding her that she should know better, that it required dry cleaning. What if the loca (as Paz referred to Minna) had got hold of it for washing, she continued, the ongoing feud between the two turning her bitter. Loca would ruin it. Claire took the dress and said nothing. After Paz left the room, Claire held the dress close and caught a whiff of Minna’s perfume, the patchouli Lucy had given her. She brought it closer to her nose, and there was also the unmistakable tang of sex.