by Tatjana Soli
“That’s what I want. If you won’t do it, I’ll get someone else. I don’t have time for this.”
“You don’t have time for cancer?”
* * *
What she hated most about the disease was her inability to hide it. Undergoing chemo and radiation, she would have front-and-center invalid status. The help she needed to ask for would come with a price. Her greatest fear: the family’s impatience with her refusal to sell off the remaining land. Forster had allowed her to keep the operation going, yet even he didn’t seem pleased with her stubbornness. She flirted with the idea of just ignoring the whole thing for six months till she got her projects done around the ranch. Once the news got out, she would lose her leverage. In this case, not acknowledging a thing, not talking about it, rendered it less powerful. If only Raisi were around now. Claire dismissed the statistic that her own mother had died of breast cancer ten years before. No, she would get the operation over with right away.
* * *
Within days of the diagnosis, Gwen and Lucy flew in from various compass points on the map. Their presence in the hospital room literally lifeblood. Missing them, denying that missing, had dulled Claire. Despite the circumstances, she feasted on their company while at the same time wondering if maybe she could work the guilt angle on one of them. They hovered over her after the surgery, exchanging gossip with each other. Distraught and distracted in equal parts. Cell phones buzzed, laptops flickered. Their eyes searched for reading glasses, lipstick, magazines, death.
“Thank God I got you in when I did,” Gwen said. Her glorious blond hair now butchered short, chin-length. Junior partner at her law firm, mother of two, she had taken on the mantle of the matriarch in charge of all the major and minor dramas of the family, organizing social gatherings, and being overbearing to her younger sister. “This is nothing. Early detection. Totally survivable.”
Lucy, recently moved to Santa Fe, was wearing a heavy patchouli perfume that overpowered the small room. Thin in her faded jeans and boots, her bare, tanned arms revealed tattoos. Six months before, she had finished another in a long line of rehabs, and everyone was hopeful that this latest fresh start would take permanent hold.
“Is it possible,” Gwen said, sneezing, “that you not wear that around me? It’s giving me a headache.”
Lucy looked at Claire and burst into tears. Still the baby of the family. Her emotions always on the surface. “I’m going for a cigarette. Call me when the doctor comes.”
“I thought you quit,” Claire said. The tumor had not been found early, but she wouldn’t mention that.
* * *
Gwen hid at the end of the floor in the lounge, teleconferencing with her office until the doctor appeared. She returned to watch the nurses empty drains and tubing, and she helped them coil the hoses back up, pinning them on the inside of Claire’s nightshirt, careful and steady. She had a look of resolve in her eyes, ready to take on this new challenge. She helped Claire into the bathroom, rolled her IV in after her.
“We should have caught it earlier,” Gwen whispered. Long ago, she had become the little mother of the family while her parents struggled to keep the farm solvent. Often Claire caught her washing Lucy’s face, mending her clothes, braiding her hair. Gwen would fix a snack for Josh or help him with his homework. When a girl he had a crush on turned him cruelly away, Gwen went to the girl’s house and bawled her out. Claire could gauge her failures in mothering by Gwen’s remedying the oversights.
Once Josh had come crying to Claire, a bump on his head and a half-moon-shaped gash along his cheek. The girls had been sunning in the orchard, and they had talked him into climbing an apricot tree to pick ripe fruit that was out of reach. He fell off the topmost branch. “They told me not to tell,” he cried. In a fury, Claire yelled at Gwen even as she felt the burden placed on her unfair. She was still a child herself. “You know better. It’s your job to look after them.”
* * *
In the hospital room, the light hurt Claire’s eyes. “I want out of here,” she said. The painkillers were wearing off; the nurses slow and stingy on their rounds. She begged that the blinds be lowered to a gloom, but even the blue of the television made the room appear hazy, smoke-filled, disturbing her. She longed for her own house, her own bed. What was happening with the fields in her absence?
“You just got out of surgery.”
“Recovery is the same anywhere.”
Lucy sneaked in a fifth of Knob Creek, and just as when they were teenagers, Gwen resisted, lectured, then finally gave in. “Just this once, for nerves. I’ve got it under control.” They took turns drinking shots out of the water glass on the nightstand. Lucy stroked her mother’s head. “When you’re out of here, I’ll take you for a real blowout.”
Claire chose not to lecture. “How is the new job?”
“What does it matter?” Lucy said, waving her hand at the machines surrounding them. “With all this?” She wanted to be a painter now, after wanting to be a singer, and before that a chef. Some strange role reversal had occurred between the girls. In school, Lucy had been the straight-A brilliant one, and Gwen had struggled and worked for B’s. Now Lucy was adrift, caught up in one thing after another.
“This is nothing. An inconvenience.” Claire didn’t want this to be another excuse for her daughter to fail again.
Because of the size and spread of the tumor to the lymph nodes, a radical mastectomy had been necessary even without Claire’s draconian instructions, but the surgical team was offended when she refused the simultaneous reconstructive surgery.
“Mom, that’s medieval, walking around with a gash across your chest,” Gwen said. Her wealthy divorce clients took their plastic surgery seriously, and she offered a whole Rolodex of what she called “boob men” to call.
Claire found it alien and strangely hopeful at the same time, as if packaging might be a cure-all for any calamity. “It’s okay the way it is,” she reassured Gwen. “If I decide to pose for Playboy, we’ll rethink it.”
The girls laughed and passed another round of drinks, relieved that their mother would not fall apart on them.
“I want to go home. I can’t sit around a hospital room for a week.”
“You have cancer,” Gwen said. “Forget the farm.”
“You can take care of me. What could that involve? There are things that need to be looked after.” That strange maternal twinning of love and thwarted expectation.
* * *
Forster came to the hospital, bowlegged under the weight of a gigantic arrangement of roses and lilies that sucked the air out of the room, made it smell like the dregs of an emptied perfume bottle, like the hall of a mortuary. The nurses ticked their heads in disapproval as if he’d tracked in crescents of dog shit on the bottom of his boot. Given his squeamishness in all matters of the body and heart, his visit was the more unexpected. He had come alone, without Katie, his second wife.
“Who died?” Claire asked, pointing at the flowers.
“I see I came for trouble.”
“Get me out of here,” Claire said. “There’s so much going on. Octavio needs my help.”
“I already talked to him. Everything’s fine. This time of year, things are slow.”
Claire frowned.
Forster rarely visited the farmhouse, not wanting to drive through the long rows of citrus trees leading to it, rejecting the smell of his beloved blossoms in the spring, going to the length of driving the long way around the county road to avoid the loading trucks whose picking schedules he knew by heart, as they filled with fruit crates stamped with his own name. Katie confessed he went to the absurd extreme of forbidding orange juice in the house.
After forcing Claire to stay on the ranch, he had been the one to leave, a point she never let him forget.
Now he chose to live in an apartment, looking over the ocean, a desert of water, devoid of one square inch of soil. Perhaps an attempt to return to his seafaring ancestors’ roots? He ignored Raisi’s mantra of
the importance of place. Such a decision smacked to Claire of a denaturing beyond even discussing. She felt pity for him. All his other poor decisions—investing in a car dealership, a fast-food restaurant, both of which went under—appeared in its long light. He was a man of the soil, trained in the rhythms of growth and harvest. Turning his back on the place he was from, he rejected a way of life. Because of the one loss, creating another.
* * *
In the hospital, the girls each bowed a submissive head for a brush of his lips across their forehead, then escaped downstairs to the hospital cafeteria. “Do I smell bourbon in here?” he asked to their giggling, retreating backs.
What they were squeamish of witnessing was not the hostility between their parents (there was none), but rather the open display of affection. No matter how long the absence, Forster and Claire reunited as tenderly as if still married. The distance between them had kindled within Claire an affection as strong as in the first days of their courtship that she was at pains to hide. The acrimony, the blame—suffocating when they were still married—had faded away.
How to explain that after twenty or more years, a marriage, if it had ever been real, could no longer be sundered by a piece of paper. In two decades—the same time it took to raise a human being—a marriage became its own entity. Life intervened, yes, a decision was made that life together was too painful, but the marriage itself lived on, a kind of radiological half-life. After the death of Josh, when Claire refused to consider trying to have another child, Forster escaped to his beach apartment and a new wife. Not so unusual to drown oneself in otherness—the ocean, when you are a man of the soil; youth, the state of having everything that will happen in front of you, when already so much has passed.
It surprised everyone when they did not immediately have children. After two years, young Katie paid Claire a visit. A sweet girl, ten years older than Gwen, she cried in Claire’s lap as she explained that Forster offered to divorce her after he made the abrupt decision to have a vasectomy. Claire believed that Forster came around to her way of thinking. Every child deserved to be wanted for itself upon coming into the world, not merely to replace what had been lost. But still, there was the problem of this girl-wife.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Claire said, “except that he is a good man. In spite of all that.”
Claire and Forster’s marital bond was welded strong by the girls, whom they had successfully raised, but was equally forged by failing the one child—the intolerable offense of not rendering the world harmless to him. They had failed, and if they were lucky, neither of them would create such scarring ties again.
“You can’t leave just yet,” Forster said, settling back into a hospital chair by the window, his eyes avoiding Claire’s face.
“I need one of the girls to come home for a while.”
She felt she had aged unbearably in his eyes, that he recoiled at the lines and fissures etching her face. Had he already resigned himself to yet another death? He looked as strong as a decade earlier, his face browned, his eyes calm. Even the sprinkling of gray in his blond hair simply made him seem more solid, more able to endure. Maybe in running away from the ranch he had made a bargain with the devil? She could ask Forster for anything and he would do it—unspoken but suspected that he would even leave Katie if it came to that—but he refused to live their old life on the farm again. They were locked together like two pieces of a puzzle that created a gaping hole when put together. Alone, they could choose to ignore the emptiness, but together they created an absence.
“You look good,” Forster said.
“Liar,” she said.
“Not bad to me.”
“Help me get out of here. Be my alibi.”
“What do you need?” he said. “Give me something to do.”
“I ask for one thing, and you refuse.”
“Christ, you have cancer. Forget about work for a time.”
“‘Highly survivable,’ according to Gweny.”
He flinched at the remark. “Don’t be so hard on her. She loves you.” His face crumpled. “I’ll see what I can do, okay?”
“I need to go home.”
He got up to make his escape, before more things he could not give would be requested. “You’re the invincible one. Don’t let us down.”
“That’s right. Tough as nails.”
“What about the farm? Gwen mentioned you’re worried about it.”
“I just need a friendly face around.”
“I can do that.” He hesitated, and she suspected the real purpose of his visit. “Maybe it’s time to let go of the place?”
“No.”
“Claire—”
“I’m lying in a hospital bed. Are you really going to talk about selling the farm now?”
The truth was that she had dug her way back like a feral animal. Scratched and clawed those around her, metaphorically ate her young by demanding what they could not give. Make no mistake—survival was not a pretty business. It was bloody and ruthless and necessary, and afterward the best most could do was to try to forget. There had been the first survival, and this was nothing in comparison.
* * *
Through the next days at the hospital, the girls circled, fluttering around Claire in their attempts to take hold of the situation, once again waiting for what would come next. As a young mother, Claire had the guilty thought that perhaps it would have been preferable to have had only one child, so that parent and child would be best friends. Siblings were always more distracted by each other, more concerned with their own constant jostling for status and position, the attending barbs and slights and hurts, to have Claire be anything more than a distant, dispensing figure.
* * *
On the day of her release from the hospital, the afternoon was like a bell, clear and hollow, with the usual white-blue haze caught in the creases of the foothills, along the long floors of the valley. A deceptively simple landscape because the haze usually hid the complication of the nearby mountain range, the capped peaks of the San Gabriels. Their existence due to the catastrophic pressure deep beneath the ground. Only on rare, Santa Ana–wind days, the humidity dropped to zero, the barometric pressure so high it caused headaches and nosebleeds and crazy longings, did the mountains appear, a presence that on most days remained invisible.
The pain drugs made her nauseated on the drive home, the traffic stop and start, gridlocked, winding out of the city. Forster drove, and Lucy sat in the backseat, distractedly biting her nails while staring out the window. A paper bag lay between them for Claire. Gwen went through paperwork in the passenger seat, reading out options of clinics around the country, rates of success, side effects of treatment.
“Please stop,” Claire said.
“Choices have to be made,” Gwen said.
“Leave it for now,” Forster said.
“But you said we should decide—”
“Not now.”
“What?” Claire asked. “What are you talking about?”
“The chemo, Mom.”
She felt a weight on her chest, the first hint of panic. “Stop at the bookstore on the way home.”
“We’ll do that later,” Gwen said.
“I want some new books for tonight.”
“You don’t have enough unread books?”
“She wants to stop, we’ll stop,” Forster said.
Gwen and Lucy gave each other the Crazy Mom look over the front seat. Turning into the bookstore parking lot, a young man in a pickup tailgated them, and Forster cursed under his breath. Claire turned around to watch the man through the back window. A manic thumping of bass from his car vibrated through theirs, boom, boom, booomm, a seismic pound, like blood slamming through one’s body, as he threw them the bird, irritated at their slowness. Her face burned—how could he be so rude, so stupid, didn’t he see cars stopped right in front of them, that there was nowhere to go—didn’t he understand that she was dying?
Claire had not acknowledged the idea o
f dying even to herself, so intent was she on getting home, on appearing to Forster and the girls, pretending a strength made up in equal parts of politeness, denial, and strange, wild longing.
In a hurry, the young man, so far removed from the idea of death that it mattered to him only that their car was blocking him from where he wanted to go, slammed on the horn. Would he act any differently if she told him she had cancer? As they pulled into a space, she rolled down her window.
“I’m sick!” she yelled.
“No shit, lady. How about getting out of the way?”
The girls, mortified, shushed and gestured quiet with their hands. Be quiet, be still, Mother. They collectively panicked at any sign of confrontation, violence.
Claire let out a few choice expletives, and the man made gestures, gunning his car, leaving them in a dust of exhaust fumes and burning rubber. Mother, the girls said. How could you?
* * *
Years before, playing her part of rancher’s wife, she had hosted picnics and hayrides on the farm for seniors, disadvantaged children, people with disabilities, sent crates of oranges, avocados, and strawberries, did her part as long as she herself could keep a distance, preferring to play the part of dutiful mother and wife, the friend who made casseroles, sent candy and flowers, found gifts that were neither too much nor too little. Able to take other people’s grief and misfortune and her own charity in bite-size pieces. But she had lost the taste for social niceties, now preferring gut-swelling confrontation, with all its dangers. Mom, you should never do that. No. Dangerous.
The girls could view Claire’s heart at will, as children always see through the deception of their parents. She appeared to them as wide-open and mundane as their living-room sofa, comfortable and a bit disdained for its utility. Since Josh’s death, they carried on the conceit that Claire was as self-sufficient and contented as they wanted her to be. A necessary blindness that each new generation took on, in order to concentrate its energies on the future, its own fate, rather than the past and its mistakes, the provenance of the parents. Claire accepted the fiction, but also knew that the past required just as much attention. Would not let them out of its grip until it received its due. Her daughters were still too young to know this.
