Tatjana Soli - The Forgetting Tree

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The Forgetting Tree: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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From
bestselling author of
, a novel of a California ranching family, its complicated matriarch and an enigmatic caretaker who may destroy them.
When Claire Nagy marries Forster Baumsarg, the only son of prominent California citrus ranchers, she knows she's consenting to a life of hard work, long days, and worry-fraught nights. But her love for Forster is so strong, she turns away from her literary education and embraces the life of the ranch, succumbing to its intoxicating rhythms and bounty until her love of the land becomes a part of her. Not even the tragic, senseless death of her son Joshua at kidnappers' hands, her alienation from her two daughters, or the dissolution of her once-devoted marriage can pull her from the ranch she's devoted her life to preserving.
But despite having survived the most terrible of tragedies, Claire is about to face her greatest struggle: An illness that threatens not only to rip her from her land but take her very life. And she's chosen a caregiver, the enigmatic Caribbean-born Minna, who may just be the darkest force of all.
Haunting, tough, triumphant, and profound,
explores the intimate ties we have to one another, the deepest fears we keep to ourselves, and the calling of the land that ties every one of us together.

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The heat grew so intense, they moved entirely outdoors, using the inside of the house only for storage. When the temperature passed one hundred, they lived on lawn chairs under the deep canopy of a large avocado tree next to the pool, mirroring Octavio’s makeshift headquarters out in the orchard.

Minna went barefoot, wore cotton overalls cut off short on the thigh. Thin, white strips of cloth were threaded through her braided hair. Bare of makeup, shiny with sweat, she looked like a wholesome teenager. Despite the heat, Claire tried to keep covered. Minna looked at her perspiring face, then reached over and yanked off her baseball cap.

“Don’t,” Claire said.

“Enjoy the air.”

After a minute, Claire had to admit it felt better, the air dry against her scalp. She tried to forget what she must look like. “I’m tired of being ugly and old.”

“It feels the same when people stare at you because you’re beautiful. Or because you’re black. Staring is staring.”

The next time Minna caught Claire despondent over her appearance in a mirror, she took all the mirrors down in the house and put posters in their place: the living room became Greece, and the den turned into Italy, and the dining room, which they never went into, languished as Finland. In the bathroom, Minna painted over the seventies-style mirrored walls with great swathes of blue-gray color so that one could only see one’s ghostly shape moving as if through fog.

As the house fell into a swoon of neglect, Claire tried to take an interest in the farm, but it was no use. For years she had overseen and shared the decisions on the daily work with Octavio, but over the last months, as she spent less and less time out in the fields, everything ran just as smoothly as it had before. Trees were sprayed and pruned, the irrigation ran, the pickers came and went, all without her lifting a finger. Now when Claire forced herself, the long walks out in the field were difficult, and she arrived exhausted, unsteady, more nuisance than help.

She suspected that her previous efforts had been in vain, that Octavio had never needed her input, had consulted her as a courtesy. With Octavio’s new coolness, Claire had to admit what she had never before considered. How could he not feel that three Mejia generations had worked their lives away on the ranch for nothing more than a decent living? Of course he wanted better for Paz. Forster’s family had bought when buying was cheap, and that piece of paper allowed them the lion’s share of the money, allowed them a home and belonging that was denied Octavio’s family. In her new state, human arrangement and history seemed a strange and arbitrary thing. When did a person really own something?

* * *

One afternoon Minna and Claire were napping under the tree, lethargic from the heat. Claire dreamed of troubling things and woke to see Minna staring at the railing, specifically at two large fruit rats as large as house cats staring back. On the railing between them lay a half-eaten avocado. Both sides were quiet for so long that Claire began to think she was still dreaming, but when she moved her arm, the rats scurried away, the avocado falling onto the deck. Minna and she blinked at each other as if they had just woken from the same dream.

“Why are you so at ease with me? More than your daughters?”

“I can’t tell them things, do you understand?”

“I do, che . You and I, we know pain.”

“I want to protect them.” Ever since the girls had left, Claire had been bursting with the desire to talk to Minna about her visitation. “I need to tell you something.”

“Yes?” Her eyes were closed.

Claire pressed her hands together, plunged on. “While you were gone … the Fourth of July … one day in the kitchen … there was a flame.”

“A flame?” Still Minna did not open her eyes, and her seeming disinterest egged Claire on.

“I saw him. My boy.”

Now Minna opened her eyes, sat up with a big smile. “Good! Why didn’t you tell me earlier? It’s starting to work.”

“What is?” Claire asked, confused by Minna’s lack of surprise.

“Come.”

She took Claire by the arm and led her through the broiling house, up the tinder-dry stairs, and into her bedroom. Each time she opened the door, Claire was again surprised by the changes. Now the figures on the wall had multiplied again until they squeezed against each other, became as dense as a forest, so thick she could hardly tell the color of the wall for the profligacy of the creatures crowding it. The paint was so thick in places that the figures were beginning a life of three-dimensionality, beginning to lift themselves off the wall, like Michelangelo’s prisoners freeing themselves out of stone. Minna directed Claire’s attention to the middle of the room, to a large link chain, coated with a thick, gluey bright green paint, hanging from the ceiling and ending in a fabric-filled pail on the floor.

“This is the poto mitan . It attracts the iwa, the spirits, to come.”

“You don’t believe in this?”

Minna grinned. “Why not? No harm done, right?”

Claire turned and studied the figures on the wall. The silence stretched between them.

“Just fun and games, right?” Minna said. “Like a psychology course taught in pictures. No black magic or zombies.”

They both laughed, thin, shallow, insincere sounds that bounced off the hot, dusty glass of the windows.

“You’ve never seen him before, your son, have you?”

“No. Never.”

“It’s not a bad thing. It’s like a dream you make for something not finished in your real life. You finish it inside, in your heart.”

Chapter 13

The intense heat continued, and that, coupled with the isolation of illness, made time become elastic. With it insufferable to be in the kitchen, much less cook over a hot stove, Minna and Claire ate bowls of cold cereal with milk, adding nuts and bananas and berries. When the milk ran out, they poured fresh orange juice over the cereal and finally succumbed to eating it dry right out of the box. When the cereal was gone, they finished the almonds, walnuts, and pecans out of the pantry by the handful, picked strawberries and blackberries from the garden, ate oranges, tomatoes, and avocados. Hungry, sometimes Claire ate fruit straight off the tree, not quite ripe, and suffered stomachaches. She pulled carrots out of the earth, held them under the hose, then ate them, warm and sweet. The absence of the debilitating effects of chemo resembled a return to health; hunger was a return of vitality. It allowed her to entertain the ironic hope that she would soon be strong enough to endure the poisoning again.

The girls called on schedule again. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. How’re you? Fine. How’re you? Great. Couldn’t be better.

Octavio was a shadowy presence, only intruding on them once a week when he would stop at the house, stand below the porch, and fill Claire in on the details of work. It was as if he wanted to emphasize that he understood that he, too, was only an employee, subject to termination at any time like his daughter. An aloofness had entered their relationship since Paz had left, but Claire planned to repair the damage later, as soon as she had energy enough.

When the time came to have her checkup with the doctor, Minna and she spent the morning showering and dressing in a combination of dread and excitement at returning to the world. Claire searched for her wig, but could not find it and had to resort to a scarf. Her hands shook with nerves, both from the upcoming verdict and at the jolt of unaccustomed activity.

“What’s wrong here is that we need to get in the car to do anything. It would be better if we could walk to the grocery, to the laundry, the doctor,” Minna said.

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