by Tatjana Soli
“We’re just saying we want what’s best for you,” Gwen said, returning to her point as if the interlude had not happened. Patient and relentless as she was with her clients. Was that what they taught in law school?
“I’m going to the local hospital. I’m staying on the farm for treatments.”
The girls, united for once, frowned.
Chapter 2
When they pulled down the long driveway and drove through the rows of grapefruit trees, Claire felt a flutter of life for the first time since before the winnowing of the illness started. Forster waved and walked down the path to Octavio’s outpost in the groves. Gwen yelled at Forster’s retreating back that he stay for dinner. Claire bent down and ruffled the fur of the neighbor’s dogs, endured their frantic jumping, noses and tails thumping against the dressing taped tightly around her chest, swaddling emptiness. That’s the way it felt to her, not a presence, death, squeezing against her chest, but rather a vacuum to be filled. Contact, touch, connection, the dogs were oblivious to the mortality that made her daughters’ touches shy. The sharp pain that was dull at the same time, promising a long, dreary convalescence, but Claire didn’t care as long as she was back home.
“This is where I need to be. This is where I’ll recover.”
“We understand,” Lucy said. But they didn’t. Lucy had never felt homesick for the ranch once she left, and only Claire’s insistence drove her back for visits. For the daughters, the ranch had always been a place of hard work and then later sadness. Neither of them had inherited Claire’s love of the land.
* * *
The possibilities had been mulled over privately between Lucy and Gwen for days. Lucy had a new job, albeit minimum wage, working in a gallery in Santa Fe. She’d lose it if she didn’t start right away. Also, there was no clinic close to her. Gwen had her job, a husband, and two children to think about, but Sacramento might be workable. Between her Kevin and her, they could handle taking Claire to her appointments.
At the kitchen sink, Claire turned the KÄLTE handle and let the water run a minute down the side of the sink before filling her glass. The water tasted icy, different from anywhere else, especially the lukewarm chemical flavor at the hospital. It came from their own well, a deep, artesian source that was drying up: traces of eucalyptus and orange and limestone, perhaps the mineral taste of bone.
As Claire drank glass after glass, dreamy, content, the girls circled round her, wary, waiting. She smiled, gulped air. At last she could breathe. Gwen took the role of leader. Claire nodded at the rightness of this, while water dribbled down her chin, sobered by this glimpse of the future once she was gone, the rude shock of the world’s reordering afterward.
“What are we going to do about the farm?” Gwen asked. “It’s getting harder for you to manage alone. Especially now.”
“Octavio is here.” Claire filled another glass to stall them, surprised that it had been brought up so bluntly, but to Gwen’s credit that was her way. When she was a little girl, she always found one and only one solution to whatever problem came up and stolidly clung to it no matter what. Living alone, Claire savored getting lost pondering the great infinitude of fixes available to any problem, basking in the possibilities rather than employing any single one of them and getting on with solving the thing.
With her strawberry-blond hair and creamy skin, Gwen had always been striking, and her deliberate adult dowdiness of flat heels and baggy dresses irritated Claire. A throwback to Hanni? Or was it due to the night of the attack? Did Gwen blame herself for Josh’s being taken? Or was Claire responsible, putting too much responsibility on her? Whatever it was, Gwen’s adult self seemed determined to drain the pleasure out of everything around her.
“The farm is fine,” Claire repeated. “But it’s time for one of you to come back.”
“What about the cancer?” Lucy said. Gwen frowned at her sister’s clumsiness.
“Am I going somewhere?”
“We have to think about the treatments.” Gwen patted Claire’s arm. “This is an optimal time to sell. Before the county starts making demands for access roads.”
Claire shook her head, dizzy at this outlandish misunderstanding. “I didn’t ask for anyone’s help.”
“We’re your daughters,” Gwen said. “Of course, we’ll help. I talked to a real estate agent who said that the Owens’s land went for a record price.”
Their relentlessness made Claire feel as if she were being buried alive, hurried to the end. “It wasn’t your right,” she said, desperate to get away. “I’m going to check the garden.”
Undeterred, Gwen dogged her outside. “You said you need family near.”
The ring of Meyer lemon trees hadn’t been picked, and now the skin hung dark yellow, shrinking back on the fruit. “What I need is someone out here with a basket. I’m going to make lemon pie.”
“Mom.”
“I never told you to move away, but I didn’t stop you either.”
“No one except you wants to be here anymore.” Gwen squinted into the evening sun, as if it had placed itself just to irritate her. Away from Lucy’s scrutiny, she became petulant, childish. “I don’t see how. Even if the farm’s managed by Octavio and Dad, what about the house? Who’s going to clean? Cook? Who’s going to take you to doctors? Who is going to be responsible?”
“My head’s spinning.”
“Exactly. Your head’s spinning. I can’t leave everything behind. That leaves Lucy. Enough said.”
“It’ll get taken care of. How do you get through a day with all your worrying?”
Gwen flushed, and Claire remembered fights they’d had as she grew up. “It gets taken care of, Mom, because someone else worries about it and does it. Not you.”
“Unfair.”
Claire longed for Forster to guard her against this bullying. She was tempted to go find him but resisted. Odds were that things were going to get far worse in the future, and then she’d have no choice but to ask his help. Now she should try to hold siege alone.
“I want to spend time together. Have the children see you more,” Gwen said.
“Is that what this is about? Me being gone?”
“Don’t be melodramatic.”
“This is just a bit of unpleasantness to be got through. People survive cancer every day. If it gets worse, then we’ll rethink things.”
“If that’s the way you want it. I’ll just take the kids out of school. Take a leave of absence. Tell Kevin that I have to come—” Gwen’s voice cracked.
Nothing could not be remedied, no matter how late, by love. In this case, by giving in, and yet Claire couldn’t render it, the habit of independence too deeply established. The thought of an invasion unnerved her. She did not have it in her to deal both with cancer and Gwen’s wheedling her to sell the farm. Didn’t illness absolve one, allow one to be selfish? So she relented, backed down, cajoled, sacrificed the battle for the larger war.
“You can’t uproot yourself. What if I hired someone to take care of me? How would that be? Would that make you feel better?”
“Hire someone?”
“Temporarily. Just to get me through. A stopgap.”
“Pay money?” Gwen said, offended by the suggestion.
Claire could not say it aloud, that money sometimes was by far the easiest price to be paid.
“You’ve always done everything yourself.”
“I know, Gweny. It’s just temporary.”
“It’s not right.” Gwen shrugged. “We’ll think about it, okay? I’ll go start dinner.”
“How come you don’t feel differently about the farm? It’s your home, too.”
Gwen shrugged. “You never understood. All we could talk about when we were kids was getting away. It was so boring and isolated. And then our family broke.” She walked inside.
Claire picked lemons. It was good to be home, even under the circumstances. When Lucy came out with a basket and helped her pluck them off the thorny branches, she was content.
<
br /> “Remember when you gave us a penny a fruit?”
Claire smiled. “I even remember when it went up to a nickel.”
“We were happy.”
She looked at Lucy. “Why doesn’t Gwen remember that?”
“It hasn’t been for a long time now. Happy, I mean.”
“Things change.”
“Maybe it would be better to sell, after all?”
Lucy had always been the child most like her. Impractical, a dreamer, emotional, so this felt like a betrayal. “Did Gwen send you out?”
“Like I ever cared what Gweny thought.” Lucy snorted a laugh. “But don’t you think the place is, well, kind of haunted, or something?”
“This is where you all were born. This is where we belong, like Grandma said.”
“Maybe she was wrong.”
“Hanni was not wrong.” How had Lucy intuited Hanni’s last-minute change of heart? Not that Claire would ever admit it.
“I don’t see that either you or Dad was all that happy here.”
“We’ll set up interviews for a cleaning lady Monday. Get someone installed right away.” Claire would take up the mantle, insisting on her immortality, insisting, mostly, to remain where and how she was.
The truth was that standing in the orchard looking at a grown-up Lucy, the present did not feel real. She did not feel real to herself. The deforming fact of her missing breast, the new possibility that she would be no more, were mere fictions. Instead, it was more like taking on the role of a character in a play, forced to make the character’s circumstances one’s own. But this distance allowed her a clarity of purpose.
Lucy sighed and turned back to the house. “I should help with dinner.”
“Be on my side, baby.” Claire hugged her.
“I always was. You just didn’t see it.”
* * *
Alone, the last of the sun on her skin, the moment took Claire back to her early days, peeling an orange as she walked through the rows of trees, dropping a confetti of rind behind her, eating the sun-warmed fruit, the girls small and playful as puppies, running in their coveralls through the trees—seeing eternity down the rows the long way, seeing only the next bushy trees across—yelling, laughing, You’re it! You’re it! You’re it!
She sat on the lawn with Raisi, legs crossed Indian-style, with Josh in a bassinet under the jacaranda tree, purple blossoms floating slowly down like a benediction, landing in their hair, on the baby’s blanket. Jacaranda blossoms fell, or was it the coral tree in the front yard? Roots like a banyan tree’s, orange-red blossoms like sickles, like small crescent moons of blood.
Nothing had changed except time. Lucy was wrong because once it had been a happy place, unhaunted, and they had been happy there. She was sure of it. Time had corrupted things.
It started with Josh’s death, tainting the rhythm of their days in ways not anticipated. In the mornings, she lay in bed, unable to rise, the weight of sorrow pressing her down further and further into her bed. She stopped packing the girls’ lunches, letting them make their own. Forster, too, withdrew, spending less and less time on the farm, less time being a father, no time as her husband. Was their mutual pulling back the reason the girls clung so close to each other, the reason they left home so early and stayed so far away? Could it be that those three men first setting foot on the ranch were catalyst enough to set in motion a chain of events inexorable, not capable of being recovered from? Or was there something brittle and unsound within the family, something diseased, something they could not have known or fixed, something that might never have come to light of day except the fates unkindly exposed it?
* * *
That first night back from the hospital, Forster, Octavio, and Mrs. Girbaldi stayed for dinner, and the table was filled with food as it had been in the old days. Claire loved the feeling of the kitchen filled again with life. She pulled out her lemon cheese pie from the oven, set it on the counter to cool, the scent sharp and healing as sunlight. But she couldn’t eat—a piece of chicken brought to her mouth nauseated her, lying rubbery and repulsive on her tongue, her mind convulsed with the idea of its being dead flesh. Her entire will focused on simply not gagging. The pain drugs ruined taste—like walking around with a mouth full of pennies.
“Pass the salad,” Forster said. “We need to discuss some things. We are all going to have to pull together.”
“Mom’s getting a maid,” Lucy announced.
“Do you want me to talk with Sofia?” Octavio said. “She could come back from Rosarito. Or should I ask Paz?”
“Isn’t she in school?” Claire said.
“It could be arranged,” Octavio said.
“I don’t want anything to interfere with her studies.”
“Finally,” Mrs. Girbaldi said. “This place was always too much to take care of by yourself.”
“I wouldn’t call her a maid,” Claire corrected.
“What else do you call someone who washes your floors?” Lucy said.
“Not your boyfriend,” Gwen said.
The girls’ catting was like the background noise of a television, muffled yet reassuring.
“She’ll do some cleaning,” Claire said. “But also driving me, cooking meals, running errands. A nanny for adults.”
“Still, it’s a stranger.” Lucy had remained quiet while she might have been called on to stay, but now she pouted at not having been asked.
“Unless you have Paz,” Octavio said.
“Usually maids are strangers,” Claire said. “Until you get to know them.”
“Like a man,” Gwen said to Lucy, “before you’ve slept with him. Lucy doesn’t know some of them after she’s slept with them.”
“You just said she wasn’t a maid.”
Claire sighed. “Let’s call her an assistant.” But to assist in what? Illness? A handmaiden for illness.
“You’re not going to like a stranger in your house,” Gwen said.
At that moment Claire wanted so badly to please the girls, to show her gratefulness at their coming. “Here’s the deal. After I’ve finished all the treatments and am healthy again, I’ve decided to put the farm up for sale.”
Gwen’s face lit up. “You’re serious?”
“Yes.” It was as easy as that. Peace would descend for the limit of her treatment, and she would deal with the rest later. She was surprised that deception was so easy and could give such pleasure when truth almost always led to disappointment.
“That’s good,” Forster said. “Really good. I’m surprised.”
Even Lucy gave her a wary yet pleased nod, convinced her mother was finally shaking off the ghosts of the past.
* * *
For days women from an agency came in a long, supplicant line of battered cars, oversize models from a decade or more earlier that Claire recognized from when shy boys had picked up the girls for dates. The women came shuffling in, wearing scuffed shoes, most speaking halting English. A young, sweet-faced girl, Angelita, had good references, but not till half an hour passed did she reveal she was pregnant and would leave early for Mexico. Dolores, a middle-aged, heavyset woman, wanted access to a gym for three hours a day to lose weight. A Scottish nurse, Moira, with purple lipstick, was born-again and insisted on installing religious pictures in the house. A Vietnamese lady wanted to move in with her aunt and three children.
Octavio again suggested that Paz do the job, defer her admission to law school, but Claire refused.
Claire spoke a fair amount of Spanish, enough to get the basics across, but this was more complicated. Many of the women didn’t like driving. Most had to care for their own families at night even though the job description had stated live-in. The younger ones weren’t educated enough to read English, follow medication instructions. Lucy was right. Everyone did feel like a stranger. How to admit that Claire was looking for a kindred spirit in these women while they were sensibly looking at this as a dull, servile, low-wage job?
Claire did not resent the new immi
grants the way some of the old-timers did. She didn’t yearn for the old days of Midwestern farmers, polyester-suited developers, bedraggled surfers, Velveeta cocktail-party canapés, and dinner theaters that featured Hello, Dolly! But she needed a real companion for this undertaking back to health.
* * *
After a week, despairing of finding anyone, Gwen wanted to hire a full-time nurse in addition to a cleaning lady. Mrs. Girbaldi, who treated them as a surrogate family, listened to the hiring woes while the girls cooked dinner.
Claire complained that she couldn’t afford to hire two full-time new employees. “Besides, all the attention will make me feel like I’m sick.”
“Why don’t you take Paz once a week just to clean?” Mrs. Girbaldi said. “It would please Octavio.”
“Maybe. Then I could look for an assistant only. Maybe a college student?”
Gwen frowned. “Not such a great idea. They’ll be distracted—boyfriends, going out, future jobs. No way they’ll do grocery shopping.”
Lucy sighed, filing her nails. “I could come home.”
“No,” Claire said. “You’re excited about this Santa Fe job.”
“Thing is, I met a girl today. At the coffee place.” Lucy continued filing her nails, while the rest of them stood around the kitchen.
“Yes? And?” Gwen finally blurted out.
“I didn’t think you were listening.” Used to being the baby of the house, Lucy was always off guard at being taken seriously. Her brows furrowed as she pulled together the thought that she’d thrown out so casually. “I said I needed an extra shot because they always make the cappuccinos so weak, and this girl said, yes, not like in Europe. I asked her where she was from, and she said from Florida, by way of London and France. She learned to be a barista there. Born in the Caribbean. You should have seen the pattern she made in the foam—a perfect leaf. I think she said she’d studied political science at Berkeley. She wore the most beautiful canvas shoes from India, embroidered with all these sequins and—”
