Tatjana Soli - The Forgetting Tree

“Are you listening to me?”

“Yes.” She had drifted, something she now was in the habit of doing.

“Do it, or it’ll be done for you.”

“Is that a threat?”

“If it was, I’d already have hired an attorney. Forced sale. You wouldn’t have a chance in court. I’m trying to be gentle here.”

For the first time, Claire got scared. They ate in silence.

“You have my word. A foreman by Friday. Come and see for yourself.”

“What is it about this girl? Gwen and Lucy think you’re infatuated.”

“She makes me feel needed.”

“Your daughters needed you, I needed you. We could have left. Started over.”

“Do you think I would have chosen any of this? You called it running away at the time. And then you all ran.”

“And you became the expert in not living. Turning the farm into a shrine.”

They sat in silence.

“I’m not your concern anymore. You have a wife — not me — who you should be paying attention to. We’ve been playing this little game of ours too long.”

“What game?”

“This unspoken thing. Like I’m your true love. Snap my fingers, and you’ll come running.”

Forster’s face reddened, and Claire felt shame. She had grown ruthless these last few months. She ate a few more bites of sandwich, but then pushed the rest away. She continued on because it had to be done. It was her only way to ensure the farm stayed hers. “It’s unfair to Katie. That she’s some afterthought. Don’t you owe her?”

Now it was Forster’s turn to push his plate away. He folded up his arms. “Let’s stick to business. Who’s going to work the farm?”

“Do you really think I’d let this farm — the thing I have left — go to ruin? My farm . After the price I paid to keep it?”

Forster drank his coffee, not looking at her. She could tell by the set of his jaw that he would not forgive her saying those words aloud.

During their marriage, their only respite from the stress of the ranch would be to sneak off the farm to eat at the local diner, enjoying the novelty of air-conditioning, which Hanni didn’t believe in because of the expense. They would hold hands across the table, unembarrassed, until their burgers arrived, and she’d eat his french fries, although she primly insisted on ordering cottage cheese instead. It was the loss of simple contact with him she grieved for most.

He gave her a hard stare. “It’s dangerous when you love something too much.”

This had been the rhythm of their fights — Claire’s slow working up to the hurt that was preoccupying her, hurt niggling like a toothache, not allowing her to leave it alone, although it only caused them both more pain. Forster would endure the needling until it went on too long, then he would cut her with a sentence.

She finished the iced tea and signaled the waitress for the check. “I’ll have a new foreman by the end of the week.”

Driving back to the house, Forster let her off at the side of the road by the driveway entrance. “Can you make it from here? That’s not my home anymore.”

She got out of the car. “Hasn’t been for a long time.”

“Be in touch. I’ll work with the new man. If you don’t have someone by next week, I’ll work the place myself.” He drove off the moment she shut the door.

* * *

She walked down the long driveway through the crippling afternoon heat and smelled smoke from a distant fire in the hills. Fire was the thing ranchers feared the most, and yet a devastation just as thorough had occurred. The property appeared strange even to her eyes — derelict and abandoned. No people working the orchards, no cars parked by the barn, Octavio’s lean-to dusty and blown over by the wind, as if something catastrophic had occurred to the place.

Closer to the house, Claire noticed with new eyes that the paint job had outlasted its prime — walls now faded and blistered — revealing the advanced age of the house. The annual repainting had been overdue since before Minna’s arrival. Now windows were opaque, glazed with dust and cobwebs. Most were thrown wide open, as were the gaping doors. What she saw didn’t look like home any longer, but it was like being a creature living deep in its shell — the inside known and secure, the only view possible outward. From inside, it appeared beautiful and right. How many times was one directly confronted with the surfaces of one’s life, its appearance, only to find it strangely unrecognizable? One lived buried deep inside, cozy with one’s illusions and justifications, one’s fictions, and only when confronted by large events did one have to display oneself for the outside world’s approbation. Was this where her new hunger for secrecy and privacy and concealment came from?

In the entry hallway, dizzy, Claire was confused at the sight of the pine cabinet. Didn’t it belong in the bedroom? Why was she so confused? When had she moved it? Irresolute, nonetheless she laid her purse down on it, unsure of its physical reality, but the purse sat solidly atop it. No one must suspect these lapses. She had read in the brochures about “chemo brain,” disorientation, short-term memory loss, and she was determined it would not happen to her. Walking through the emptiness of the living room, Claire felt herself falling deeper and deeper into a dreamland. The sad lunch and the promises to Forster receded like a foul tide.

* * *

Minna stood at the kitchen sink, not washing the crusted dishes that overran the counters, but peeling a peach.

Claire saw Minna, too, with new eyes. She had allowed her hair to frizz; it bunched out in an unruly dark halo circling her head, the ends orangey from sun. Claire’s dark angel. She wore cutoff shorts that barely covered her bottom, and a short camisole, which left a gaping swath of newly protruding belly. This fact, like the others of the farm and the house, noted and acknowledged more from the inside than ever openly discussed. A fait accompli that new life was stirring on the farm. Claire’s peculiar optimism in the face of so much dissolution had to be attributed to just that. Minna turned, her face brimming with joy.

“He’s coming!” she said. “Soon.”

* * *

In the orchard each year, some trees appeared to be dead, with bared branches, or branches filled with misshapen, curled leaves that bore no fruit. But they had learned to leave these trees for a season, and likely as not, the next year they would produce a luxuriant bloom. As if there were such a thing as a flora depression. Foliate trauma. Claire was not one for believing in miracles. The tree had not resurrected — rather, its life was simply hidden from the eye, beating deep in the soil, trembling within root hairs, in sap, wood, and bark.

When Minna declared he was coming, Claire had no doubt that he was her Josh at last returning. Her heart ballooned, swelled until she thought she would explode with unheard-of joy. She would gladly end in this delusion, but the next moment she realized her mistake. The idea of a foreman’s coming relieved her out of all proportion to the fact because it made her feel her faith in Minna was justified.

This was what Forster, Mrs. Girbaldi, the girls, and everyone else on the outside failed to see. Failed because Claire, the lover of fictions and now concealment, had not allowed them to see. They only focused on the peeling house, the weedy driveway, all the things that could so easily be remedied.

Rejuvenation was taking place from the inside out. The seemingly dead trees were simply resting, as her own poor, suffering body was resting. The farm was perhaps temporarily fallow, but it was only in a shallow rest. It would be fruitful again. Claire refused to be a woman dying of cancer — she was a woman who had lulled cancer to sleep. Healthy new cells were forming, subdividing, growing on and on, creating new skin, new hair, new eyes, new heart. Could one’s soul grow anew? Of course, Minna could not be left behind in all this — Minna the fecund, Minna the fertile, Minna the Caller of the Spirits.