Tatjana Soli - The Forgetting Tree

“Papi?”

“Call the police,” Octavio said under his breath to Sofia, who came out to see why he insisted on disgracing them in front of everyone they knew. He charged off with a roar like a bull, to save what had already been lost.

* * *

As Claire sat at the kitchen table with Forster, her parents, and the girls, a truck roared to a stop in front of the house. Forster looked up but did not rise, as if he had a premonition that this was something he did not want to rush to meet. Octavio walked straight in, as was his habit. Paz trailed behind in her blue satin gown and tiara, ribbons in her hair and satin shoes. She cried as Octavio pulled her by the arm.

“We must talk,” he said.

Gwen and Lucy, already in pajamas, stared at the girl, who now appeared a stranger. They had grown up together, played in the orchards and in each other’s house. Beauty that Paz was, Josh developed a wild crush on her. Now she stared back in all her adult finery, badly out of place, and she wanted to hide.

“You look pretty,” Lucy said.

Paz stared back without staying a word.

* * *

Raisi herded the girls up to bed, closing the kitchen door behind them. In their room, they worried out questions.

“Why did she come?” Gwen asked.

“She probably wanted you to see her beautiful dress,” Raisi said, guessing from the foreman’s seriousness that the real answer was far worse. “Since you missed her party.”

“She looked like a princess,” Lucy said. “Did you see she had lipstick on?”

“Why was she crying then?” Gwen persisted.

Raisi sat on the edge of the bed and covered her face in her hands for a moment. The world was a lure and a trap, a trap and tragedy. She had found this out as a young girl and never been disabused of the knowledge, although there was no acting on it, only enduring it. She got up to make coffee for the real mourning that she feared would now start. “Best to get dressed, girls. There won’t be much sleep tonight.”

* * *

The sheriffs came out and cordoned off the property, not allowing anyone on without permission. Police vans parked on the highway road. Floodlights were carried out to the remote area by the lake. Yellow tape unspooled and wrapped from trunk to trunk like a child’s game. The two sheriffs’ cars blocked the road to the orchard, careless and crooked, as if their drivers were in a great hurry.

The stark light of the searchlights gave the lemon trees and the fields around it an otherworldly feel, like a photo negative. Minus one child, the insulated Baumsarg world cracked open, the X-ray revealing a diseased inside. Octavio stood by the patrol car, his face contorted by pain. Claire sat in the back of one of the cars, her head bowed as if at a confessional. Each breath a labor. She was angry at the hurry that came too late. As if Joshua were lying under his blanket of dirt holding his breath. As if any of them could still be saved.

The officers stood knee-deep in dirt, one sheriff slope-shouldered and one potbellied with an aching back, shoveling, and then Forster let out a moan so strange it did not seem likely to come from such a large man, more like the noise of an animal trapped in the high mountains, leg caught, helpless.

He pushed them aside, parted the last inches of dirt with bare fingers. Then yelled for everyone to turn away in shame. Claire stumbled out of the car. The sheriffs, sweating, turned and with smudgy fingers stroked their felt hats. In the etched shadows, their expressions turned blank. Such outlandish grief made them dumb.

A glimpse of pant leg that turned out to be dirt-encrusted jeans. The bright red of a Keds sneaker that Josh had insisted on buying, so that he could spot his shoes easily for gym class. A pain charged through Claire’s body, and she knew with certainty that she would never recover from the sight. It grafted itself, unwanted, onto her. A cicatrice of grief.

Octavio fell on his knees in front of her. “Forgive me.”

A distaste, like bile. “What are you talking about?”

“I should have somehow protected him. I didn’t know enough.”

That was the final blow. Not even the death of Josh that destroyed, but her inability to save him from harm — a parent’s first duty — was what undid her.

The land was the first thing to understand. The Baumsarg family’s citrus ranch was one of the most valuable pieces of land in Southern California—580 acres of groves, with a ranch house and numerous outbuildings of wood with corrugated-tin roofs that flashed in the sunlight like semaphores. The majority was planted between Valencias and Washington navels. The Valencias that spring were blooming white blossoms and in fruit at the same time, the novelty of which delighted Claire. Acres and acres of perfumed white, orange, and green.

Claire felt she had arrived in paradise when she married Forster and first came to live there as a young bride. Both sides of their family were from immigrant stock, raised for hardscrabble adversity and expecting no better, but always persevering. The promise of land made the hope fresh for Claire, made her feverish with dreams and plans, even as it had grown stale for the inherent family.

She did not know the ranch was already in peril by the time Forster and she first met at UCLA. An awkward, gangly blond of German descent, Forster carefully maneuvered a cup of punch through a boisterous crowd at a university social to bring it to her without losing a single drop. She was the shy girl at school, and his attention overwhelmed her.

“You have the most delicate hands,” he said. How to explain that the moment he saw her, it was clear-cut that she was the one, but he had to pretend the knowledge away.

In the bathroom, the other girls had teased her over his attentions. “He’s a rube. He’s got dirt under his fingernails, in his ears. A farmer boy.” Claire came out of the bathroom less flattered by his attentions, more wary.

Sensing he might already be losing her interest, he blurted out, “Would you like to go outside?”

She would. Away from the curious eyes, the ironic, curled smiles. In the dark, the spring air was fragrant. They stood on the stone patio and gazed into the gloom of eucalyptus trees to avoid each other’s eyes.

“It smells so nice,” she said, thinking how to make a quick exit.

“The oranges are blooming. I’ve grown up with this smell every spring of my life. I’d be lost without it.” She looked at him more closely. His clothes — khakis and polo shirt — were old but quality. As he was oblivious to what he wore, they seemed picked out by someone else, maybe a mother?

“Tell me about your farm,” she said.

“I’ll tell you about the whole valley. My great-grandfather got the first seeds from a tree on the Agua Clara ranch. He started all the stock on our ranch, and the whole county borrowed from it. So there is a single patriarch tree that generated the whole county.” His family had owned the large farm for three generations, including other land besides; he had never considered any other life. Development was encroaching, and with record droughts over the past years and subpar crop yields, the family had had to cannibalize and sell the other pieces of land to keep the main citrus operation going. Instead of being past its prime, he saw the valley where his family’s farm lay as a place of promise still not consummated. He envisioned making the farm larger, more productive, being at the forefront of new trends in agriculture.

It seemed an old-fashioned, nostalgic way to live, one that appealed to her. She dreaded the idea of working in an office. He reminded her of a poet or maybe a preacher, not a farmer, so his endless talk of planting schedules and load counts seemed out of character, quixotic, until she realized he was simply stalling. Although the patio light was dim, she looked slyly at his ear and saw that it was pink and clean.