Tatjana Soli - The Forgetting Tree

“A crew will clear the trees next week,” Claire said.

He nodded and pulled out a notebook. “I’ll mark that down so no one bothers you again. Lots of fire danger this year. Can’t be too careful.”

“The smoke was bothering me. Me and my baby.” Marie stroked the small bulge of belly. She gave that up to keep Claire quiet.

“A baby? You’re pregnant?” Claire said.

He scratched away on his notepad, retreating even further into his officialdom. “Well, I’ve marked you down. Good luck to you both. Stay safe.”

* * *

After he was gone, Claire sat on the diving board, giggling. “He thinks we are in need of rescue.”

“It’s hot.”

“A baby! So many plans to make.”

Marie sat on the diving board and took Claire’s hand in her own, pecked the bony back of it with a kiss. “I don’t like them snooping.”

“My secretive Minna. I need my drink. Now we need to bring all the old baby stuff from the attic — cribs, bassinets.”

Marie obliged and went into the kitchen, making up the tonic that Claire was now convinced brought her health. In truth, it was no more than the spice shelf at the local supermarket — ginger, cilantro, basil, mint — steeped like tea. Then Marie added cinnamon and star anise and ground-up aspirin. Claire drank it down as if it were elixir, hungrily and with such ardor that Marie herself almost believed there might be something healing in it. The mind is an ever-hoping thing, leaning toward faith like a plant toward the sun.

* * *

“Tell me more about your family.”

Marie sighed and for a reluctant moment she considered it. “My mother used to take me to town, to Ravine Froide, every Saturday, for coconut ice.”

“I don’t know that name.”

“Sometimes we went to Massacre.”

Claire’s face lit up. “I know it! Massacre. That’s where Rochester and Antoinette stopped on their way to the honeymoon house.”

Marie shrugged. Claire spoke about imagined events taking place over a hundred years ago, things that took place only in an author’s head. A made-up love and a made-up madness. Marie could not understand Claire’s childlike preoccupation with make-believe. On the island, it was different — dread reality outstripped any kind of fantasy. One couldn’t afford to dream of anything except escape.

“I don’t remember that part of the book,” Marie said. “It must have been only a small part.”

“I pictured it so clearly.” Claire jumped up with more energy than she’d shown in weeks and rifled through the living room till she found her book, sway-backed on the chair. “Here it is.” She frowned, squinting. “Get my glasses.”

Since the chemo, she had become more forgetful and impatient when she misplaced things, so Marie solved the problem by buying multiple pairs of reading glasses at the drugstore. They were scattered all around the house, tending to migrate into a pile on Claire’s bedroom nightstand, from where Marie then redistributed them. Marie hesitated when she found a pair placed on the pine cabinet in the entry hall. Was it a sly signal from Claire? But, no, she was oblivious, and when she had the glasses on her nose, her face relaxed, and her voice grew strong and confident as she read the words: “‘ I looked at the sad leaning coconut palms, the fishing boats drawn up on the shingly beach, the uneven row of white washed huts, and asked the name of the village. ’”

Claire frowned and flipped the page. “Here’s more: ‘The rain fell more heavily, huge drops sounded like hail on the leaves of the tree, and the sea crept stealthily forwards and backwards.’”

She kept flipping pages.

“That’s not much,” Marie said. “Could be describing anywhere.”

“Here: ‘Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near.’”

Claire slapped the book shut, satisfied. “I know that place better than places I’ve actually been.”

“Yeah?”

“Like the facts you’ve told me about yourself. They don’t explain the Minna I see in front of me.”

“Those last words were Rochester’s. He hated it there. She didn’t feel that way about her island. But to her — no matter how ugly, how haunted, it is home. We find something to love in it because it is what we have. She saw kind faces — Caro’s, for instance, in the village — where he saw only ignorance and sin.”

“I thought you forgot that part?”

“You never forget. That book is in me. It’s just buried.”

Claire nodded, somber. “Don loves you.”

Marie shook her head. “He has no idea who I am. You only love what you understand.”

“Then explain yourself to us.”

“You. I know your pain. Not just the boy, or the girls, or Forster, but your own failure.” Marie, now gentle, caressed Claire’s head, put her lips against Claire’s ear. “That day I touched the tree, it told me. We understand each other, don’t we, Agatha?”

* * *

The time of the fires marked the end of the radiation treatments. Claire more exhausted now than ever before, eyes like a bed of ashes. Marie had counted on the time of the treatments to be enough, that she would be bored like a stray dog, ready for the adventure of the road again. But as the time came and went, she had grown soft, used to the deep sofas and china cups, beds with sheets the dull white of bleached bone. She resented that she would soon be expected to move on.

She felt a deep feeling for Claire, but did not recognize it was love. Comfortable, she knew she didn’t want to go back into the Uncertainty, could not imagine going back to the Troubles. She started to think she was whom she pretended to be. That was why she kept calling Jean-Alexi — to be reminded she was nothing.

While Claire slept, she called him to come. Although she knew what he was, she missed him. Couldn’t he change again? Change back into the boy in her father’s abandoned house, the one who serenaded her with crickets? They were the same, after all.

* * *

A month after the radiation, waiting for Jean-Alexi to show up any day, Claire began to have enough energy to run the farm again. Marie had to hurry and dull it. She built Claire up to drinking two “elixirs” a day. It would not do to have Claire full strength when he finally arrived. Back in Florida, Marie had discovered the uses of Valium. Claire floated through her days, lost in her own dreamworld.

“Where’s the dining-room table?” she asked, her eyes faraway.

“Remember, we discussed the rooms were too crowded?”

“Oh, yes,” Claire said, trying not to appear forgetful or suspicious.

The next day while she lay in a drugged sleep, the same people who bought the bombé chest and armoire came out with a truck and wrote Marie out a bigger check for the antique farmhouse table in the kitchen, a set of cherrywood rocking chairs, plus the big silver samovar that always needed polishing. Even while they were driving away, Marie stood in the driveway thinking there was again as much to take out of that stuffed house: barrister bookcases, sleigh beds, mahogany library tables.

* * *

With the house emptier, Marie was tempted to take up cleaning again because at last she could see what was left. Like her childhood home it was bare, but as Maman said, as clean as God’s own house.

With money sitting in a safe-deposit box, Marie felt safe for the first time since she had left the island, but how to make that last? Claire, when not asleep, stared into space and asked her relentless questions, and Marie spun out fairy tales in answer. When the girls called, Marie held up the receiver to Claire’s ear, but she lost attention quickly, and Marie made excuses, making a note to herself to lower the dosing. Claire agreed that the house felt roomier with the furniture “stored.” Time growing shorter, Marie grew more bold, went into Claire’s closet, tried on her clothes, but Claire was not like Linda in Florida; she had always been a woman without vanities, and there was nothing to Marie’s taste.