Tatjana Soli - The Forgetting Tree

On those nights when she could neither control Minna’s nocturnal wanderings nor control her own mortal panic, Claire rose, turned on the lamp, and read the novel Minna had given her. Finishing the last page only to start at the beginning again so that the conclusion became beside the point; she craved only the journey. The novel did not abate her fears, but instead made her feel that she was not alone in that fear. Ever since the chemo started and her attending physical deterioration, the past had moved closer, taken up physical residence beside her. She would not admit that she was perhaps looking for meaning in her suffering — why had she been so afflicted, both before and now?

When the wind blew through the trees, Claire heard voices, as in the old days when workers slept overnight in the bunkhouses. A lone avocado falling down on the roof rang out like the crack of a gunshot, and she felt at her chest for a bullet that did not exist. Creakings of the worn boards in the house convinced her intruders had broken in; in the novel she read about creakings of bamboo outside Antoinette’s bedroom window. After a time she forgot which had actually happened and which had been imagined.

Having read it many times before, Claire now read the book as a proxy for Minna’s background, of which she was so stingy. Rhys’s earlier novels failed to interest Claire, but the last novel, set in Rhys’s native islands, spoke about the solace to be found on one’s own land. One always searched for one’s own story in a book no matter how exotic it might seem.

The imagined Minna flourished to the proportions of a romantic heroine, rushing down the crushed-shell driveway of her Coulibri into the arms of some moody island boy, or perhaps an Englishman’s son? Claire backed up, not wanting to turn it into some tawdry romance novel. From her privileged background, it was clear why Minna felt at home in the elite world of Cambridge, even girlfriend to a movie star, but at what price? Did her English suitor lust after her dusky beauty, but not love her for that same non-English blood, just as Antoinette’s Rochester failed to love her?

None of this seemed any more far-fetched than the reality of contemplating her own disease, reading the drug side effects, the survival rates, on pamphlets and disclosure forms. Reading her blood count before each treatment, to see if she was strong enough to endure more. Without the fiction of the Sargasso Sea to lose herself in, Claire would have gone mad. She prayed for metastasis, not of death, but of life, the spreading of an imagined world that would cover over the deficiencies in the real one.

* * *

One afternoon on her way to the garden, Claire found Minna sitting on a stone retaining wall, swinging her legs and humming in a voice so low, so mournful, it sounded more dirge than pleasure. Her face was swollen lumpy from crying.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s so beautiful here. But I’m still in a bad place.”

“Poor girl, you’re safe here!”

“I’m dead and drowned.”

Claire felt a catch in her throat at the possibility something treasured might be snatched away. She knew about the pernicious effects of nostalgia. Raisi had been plagued with just such longing, until Claire’s father saved up enough money to send her back for a visit, nearly twenty years after she had left. When she returned to California, she said little about the visit and never mentioned going back. Was it a great disappointment, the comparison between memory and always failing reality?

“What do you believe in?” Minna asked.

Claire, astonished at such a question, spread her arms to embrace the groves stretching out all around them. “Isn’t it obvious? This is all there is!”

Minna gave her a look she couldn’t read. “If I could just see the colors, you know? The smells. Just for a moment the sight of the ocean.”

It became clear that Minna made her brave way through life on her charm, but it was a cultivated thing, a thing put on like a piece of clothing. Here the mask dropped, and Claire realized Minna was without protection, helpless against the world.

“We can fix that,” Claire said, more desperation than plan.

Minna wiped her nose with the back of her hand like a child. “How?”

She looked around for some answer that would stop the tears. Years ago she bribed the girls when they were young with coins, trinkets, ice cream, anything to stop the crying. “I could take you to the beach? Or you could do up your room? Make it more like home? It can’t feel normal being stuck in a teenager’s room.” Was Minna’s power over her that she had turned Claire back into a mother?

At first Minna seemed unimpressed, but she sat in thought for a few minutes. “You wouldn’t mind?”

“I’m asking you to do it. Make it yours.”

“But when I leave…”

“That’s a long way off.”

Claire neglected to mention that Lucy’s lavender room had formerly been Josh’s. She hated going in there, despite the changes, always looking for what she knew she would not find. A good excuse to put yet another imprint on the room, dull its previous incarnations. The next day Minna, with new energy, dropped Claire off at the nurses’ station a full fifteen minutes early for her chemo appointment. Minna couldn’t hurry her through the door fast enough, and then she took off shopping. When she picked Claire up after the treatment, the backseat was filled with bags.

All afternoon, while Claire lay on the couch sucking on ice chips for nausea, Minna carried pails, brushes, and extension poles up the stairs to her room. Claire almost felt sorry for herself at the neglect, but at least Minna seemed to have forgotten her dirges and tears, her homesickness. The paint fumes grew so strong Claire moved to her bedroom and closed the door, but soon it wasn’t even breathable there, and by necessity she escaped to the orchard.

* * *

Octavio watched her walk listlessly up and down the rows like a child orphaned in the forest. Finally he came and suggested she rest in his stand.

For years he had remained unfazed by Claire’s mood swings, loyal to her wish to remain aloof to the outside world. Ten years before he had bought a house on Rosarito beach in Mexico with plans of an early retirement, but then Forster and Claire divorced, and the girls moved away. He felt responsible for Claire, never able to forget the sight of her in that dark grave of orchard. Years passed, Sofia had already quit her job and moved there, but he stayed on at the ranch.

“How is Sofia?”

“She has the grandchildren this week. Driving her crazy.”

“How many now?”

“Five.”

“Five! And me with two. We are getting old, my friend.”

Octavio laughed. “Not until our grandchildren’s weddings are we old.”

Although they never talked of it, Claire knew he was waiting till he could safely shepherd her into the future, but she stubbornly kept falling to pieces on him. He would have to be brutal and finally just abandon her to her fate if he was ever to be free.

He led her to the shelter he had constructed from castoffs so that there was nothing that could be ruined or stolen. The place, an unlikely refuge, served its purpose and could be abandoned in a moment, like a child’s makeshift playhouse. Claire found its transience a kind of perfection: patched outdoor umbrellas pushed together under the green gloom of a towering avocado tree; underneath, a roughly nailed table and collection of broken-down lawn chairs; a hammock stretched between two pepper trees; a dented cooler filled with ice water and sodas; a scratched-up boom box. It was the place workers could find Octavio for problems, where messages could be scrawled on scraps of paper and weighted under a rock on the table.