The Forgetting Tree

by Tatjana Soli

  “No, please wait. If you care for me,” Minna begged.

  “I won’t let Lucy be hurt.” Claire bided her time.

  * * *

  As it grew dark, they were summoned by Minna, dressed all in white, a priestess, the house lit by hundreds of tea candles on the floor, multiplied in the mirrors’ reflections into thousands. Jean-Alexi came in dressed in his usual rags, but he had added a straw hat and a pair of sunglasses. One lens in, one out, so he could see in both worlds at once. He held out his hand to Minna. “Ma femme, Maman Brigette.”

  Solemnly he led them single file up the stairs and into Minna’s room.

  It was a mystery that now the room was empty it still felt so dense, so teeming. Candles everywhere giving movement to the figures on the wall as if they pulsed and writhed in their own anticipation. In the middle of the floor, a brazier dragged in from outside on which wood was burning. Smells of cinnamon and nutmeg, grass and flowers, the unmistakably oceany tang of salt. In a bowl on a small table lay the gold necklace Claire had given Minna.

  “Come here, Agatha,” Jean-Alexi said, and Claire started at the name but went to him and allowed him to drape her in her old yellow bathrobe. On his breath, she smelled alcohol. So clear to her that this was a bit of fakery, a B-movie set piece. Minna set a jug of the elixir between them and poured out cups for each. Lucy hesitated and Jean-Alexi reached over and tipped the bottom so that she had to gulp it and still it dribbled down her chin. Claire’s heart was beating so hard she thought it would explode in her chest, as if one could overdose on fullness.

  Jean-Alexi turned the transistor radio on and flipped channels till he stopped at some techno-disco stuff. Lucy giggled, and the two did some bump-and-grind dance while Minna poured another round of the elixir. Now she made a paste of nutmeg and lime juice and came to Claire, taking off her robe, but when she tugged at her shirt, Claire resisted.

  “I’ve had enough of this.”

  “It’s part of the rite,” Minna said.

  “Not in front of him.”

  “He’s a priest—”

  “Non, it’s okay. I step out for smoke.” He got up and held his hand out to Lucy. She rose on her feet unsteadily, and he put his long, bony arm around her waist for support.

  “I need you here,” Claire said, and Lucy looked disappointed but stayed. She swirled the contents of her glass and drank to the bottom.

  Minna took off Claire’s shirt and bra, then began to apply the paste while mumbling words. “Just go along. Pretend.” Staring at the closet door, Minna spoke under her breath. “It is complicated to be a survivor. Sometimes you have to pretend in magic. You have to find a way to bury the dead. Jean-Alexi should have remained buried in my life.”

  Claire nodded but didn’t understand, except that the danger had engulfed them—already Jean-Alexi was back in the room, distracting. She was unembarrassed now, did not turn away her brown-smeared chest, as if her disfigurement were a layer of protection. Let him look. She had never felt less naked. Minna lightly placed the robe back over her. “You must look within. Inside. You must take action. You must use the cleansing fire of the sword, sword of fire, do you understand?”

  * * *

  Another round of elixir. The percussion of the awful music timed perfectly with the throbbing in her temples. Claire could no longer sit upright but lay prostrate on the bare floor. Her body tingled, her mind spun and cawed to visions, but her stomach cramped, grew unbearable. In the corner, Lucy retched and ran out of the room. Minna handed Jean-Alexi a large glass in which she poured straight rum.

  Minna put down a small, framed picture of Joshua, the one from Claire’s bedroom, next to her. Up close: the brown eyes, sly grin, half-moon scar, crooked teeth. Next Minna put down a huge bowl of misshapen lemons that could have come from no other tree. Minna stirred the logs and a flurry of sparks went out. The air turned stifling, smoky. Lucky if they didn’t asphyxiate. Lucky if the house didn’t burn down, Claire thought lazily.

  Lucy returned as Minna talked.

  “Agatha, he visited me.”

  Claire looked at her, accusing. “What are you saying?”

  “In the kitchen last night after you went to bed. He had the darkest brown eyes, and a half-moon scar along his cheek. He held a dead parrot in his hand. He wanted me to give him a chocolate bar from the cabinet above the refrigerator. How could I know this? It was him.” She put the lemons on the fire, and their acrid, sour smell nauseated Claire.

  It was so ridiculously made up. Claire saw clearly how false this was, trumped-up, compared to what had gone on before, between her and Minna alone. This was a big fake, and Claire was letting Minna know she knew the difference. But she heard helpless sobs from Lucy.

  “Why would he visit you?” Lucy said. “I’ve missed him so long.”

  “She’s lying, Lucy. Can’t you see that?” Claire said.

  “Maman taught me to believe that death is only change. That the departed still bear weight on the living. He showed himself to me because I was open and your mother is resisting.”

  “Did he say anything?” Claire asked, against her will. She knew she was on the long, treacherous slope of gullibility but could not help herself.

  “It’s not like that. More a feeling. Possession. Of paying reparations. For being healed. For being allowed at last to rest with the dead.”

  Time passed. Lucy was asleep when Jean-Alexi stood next to Claire and lifted his boot to set it down on her skull. “Give her all the money, all the jewelry, or the spirits will take their revenge.”

  “I’ll get the money from the bank tomorrow.”

  “Or else.” Satisfied, Jean-Alexi left the room with the gold necklace in his pocket. Minna went on her knees, lifted Claire’s head, and wiped off her sweat. “I never meant to let him hurt you or Lucy!” She put a pinch of salt on her tongue. “The bitter to set things right again,” she said, and followed him out the door.

  Black stars swirled around Claire. She closed her eyes and saw the purpling orchards, felt the cool, gritty dirt under her back. Heard the labored breaths from a drugged Lucy asleep beside her. Thought of Minna’s unborn child swimming in its cocoon of sea. The child was hope, to be protected at all costs.

  * * *

  Claire lay dreaming of herself in a long, white nightgown of bast material that made the body inside it, poor battered body, both solid and ghostly, both of this world and beyond it.

  What the cancer taught her was the need for destruction before healing, the need to burn away every bit of the disease to prevent recurrence. She knew every ash that fell on the ground would enrich the soil, that with time it would become sweet and fertile beyond all imagining.

  With only the guttering light from the logs and the candles for illumination, Minna shook her awake. Terrified, Minna led her out in the hallway where Jean-Alexi lay, face twisted in a grimace. Claire looked at her for confirmation.

  “Il est mort,” Minna whispered, as if the devil were lying there.

  She was trembling, shuddering. A low moan came from deep inside her. Claire had never seen such fear and despair in a person.

  “How?” Claire asked.

  “Dead.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Minna closed her eyes in a swoon. “Valium in the rum. Rifle butt to the head.”

  The monstrousness of what had occurred. “Don’t lie to me, Minna!”

  “Him or us. I didn’t realize he was no choice. He only understood violence, pain. He would never have left without punishment.… I owed you that much … to not bring harm.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  “He was all I had in the world.”

  How did one ever come to the final truth? There was none. One flew blind, never having all the information. “You will be safe.” Even in Claire’s previous suffering, she had remained privileged from the greater world’s tragedy, but what she had learned in this last stripping away was that, unlike her, Minna had been doomed from the beginning, and for h
er there would be no justice in the world other than Claire.

  * * *

  The closet door appeared to be glowing, and she knew before opening it what she would find there. Ten large containers of paint thinner, an amount in excess of anything that would gainfully have been needed, an amount that was a clear summons.

  Chapter 2

  Especially in California, one was reminded of the fragility of one’s tenure on the land. One felt the rattle and rock of the earth’s crust, saw hairline fractures appear like visions in concrete driveways, plaster pools, rock walls. One made a pact with the devil to stay on borrowed time, while the honeycombed cliffs crumbled into the ocean, while giant, unseen excavations hollowed out sinkholes that suddenly devoured a car. Foolish to pin all one’s love on an orchard or a house.

  * * *

  Claire walked straight to the lemon tree, its branches covering the silvered moon shadow of her. She touched the black, scorched part that she’d managed to burn so many years before. It had never healed, simply became part of the new growth. This time she would be successful. The magic had returned as if Minna stood there beside her, but she would not allow company. Hungry, dried, famished leaves gobbled the fire. Her neglect forming kindling.

  The golden light warmed her although she was already warm, hot, was burning. The silver moon shadow reappeared as she walked away, back to the house, black-smudged fingerprints on white nightgown.

  Returning to the house, her body was fatigued by even this exertion, but there was still so much to be done and so little time left. As she mounted the porch steps, she looked over to the east where, a mile away, the lemon tree now glowed a sunny halo in the blue-black night sky. She tried to think of the steps required of her and knew that sleep was still a far-off reward.

  * * *

  In Minna’s room, Claire avoided the shrouded figure in the middle of the floor by the brazier. She laced the floorboards with the noxious liquid, splashed the walls, regretting that the artwork was a necessary sacrifice. She doused the contents of her own room, bloating the mattress, creaking the floorboards. Fumes stung her eyes, burned her hands, wet her nightgown to an opaque where liquid had spattered. She fought with the swollen window and banged it open, as a noxious cloud of chemical swept stinging her eyes, burning her nostrils.

  She ran through the hallway, wetted the Persian hall runners, lacquered a carved-oak finial at the head of the stairs. There was music in her head, she was humming Minna’s song, one she did not even realize she had learned, a rhythm from far away, and she danced the liquid in time to it. In the living room, she sat on the returned yellow sofa, all thick, down pillows and heavy damask cloth, and looked at the golden, floor-length silk curtains that framed the windows, the golden velvet piano scarf draped over the used stand-up Lucy had found. History turning and replaying itself over and over, and she, Claire, determined to take it off the spindle once and for all. No place for her in such a room—it was cold and beautiful and empty as a hotel. Upstairs slept the guests, some temporarily, some permanently, and she was the arthritic porter, there long past her useful tenure.

  She sat in her white nightgown on the yellow couch in the golden room and had never been so sure what needed to be done. A madness masquerading as sanity, or sanity as madness. A rescue fifteen years delayed. That moment it felt as if Minna were inside her, as close as the air in her lungs, the blood in her veins, the thoughts in her brain, so unlike how alone she had felt long ago. Minna who was already in the throes of escape.

  It took minutes that seemed to stretch into hours to empty the last of the cans, and she chided Minna in her excess zeal. Where at first she had been careful and miserly, now she grew sloppy and profligate in the abundance. The kitchen towels drooped soggy. What temperature would it take to melt the copper sink, the ceramic faucets with their antiquated lettering of HEIβE and KÄLTE? The daybed in the den reeked like a swamp; the coats in the hall closet dripped like laundry on the line; still there was splashing in the can. The wood floors grew dark and oiled, the grain magnified and lustrous; the doors, wet, groaned heavily on their frames. Claire had never loved the house so much. It was not so much a destruction, but a leave-taking, like sending off grown children, like burying one’s parents; an accomplishment necessary in its time, though painful. Its dignified accomplishment a thing greatly to be desired.

  The air in the house had become so acrid, so fume-laced, that if she had lit a match, her lungs would have ballooned into flame. She could have blown them all into a high-treeing cloud that would be seen through the whole length of the valley. She stated the obvious to herself so that it would be clear what she did not do. Did not blow Lucy or Minna or even herself up. Later, there would inevitably be the character assassinations, the I always figured and She seemed funny and the rest. But what she was determined to do at that moment was to save what had value, in the only way she thought how. What she did do, in sound mind and body, was scream to Lucy to quickly leave the house.

  Lucy stumbled out in shorts and a T-shirt, hair rumpled. “What happened?”

  “A leak—gas. Get out now!”

  Bewildered, Lucy had the milky breath of childhood as Claire led her down the stairs and outside.

  Minna was nowhere to be found.

  * * *

  Claire struck the match in Minna’s room first, to pay homage. Overturned the brazier onto the shroud. Out of the most unlikely hands sometimes salvation could be delivered. A gold blaze licked across the floor, stopped and puddled in dense places, burst into blue, then gold again, and moved on. The beautiful figures on the wall began to erase themselves. The single-breasted warrior curled and went black. Claire had to fight a terrible urge to stay inside the room. She closed the door, too enamored of it to witness its passing.

  Glancing out the window, she saw Lucy at the end of the driveway on her cell phone. Time was running out. Soon the sirens would begin. Soon the fire engines and the police cars and the great suck of public attention would come to rest on the ranch once more. Claire dumped the entire box of matches on the sofa. The whole went up in a great swell of flame like sunburst. Past due to leave, she couldn’t tear herself from the surreal beauty of the room—walls warmed by flame, curtains blazing, the soft sofa in the center now a burning coal. The down feathers swirled like black snow in the wind created by fire. A strange, alternate universe. A piece landed on her arm, crystalline like a black, skeletal snowflake. How had these objects, this building, acquired such a hold on her?

  Clearer in its destruction that all that she had held on to so tightly had been mere illusion. Did one fight for a sofa, or a house? Even the land was strangely indifferent. Later they would accuse her of being crazy, the madwoman in the orchard, but she would have been crazy only if she had forgotten the people. If they had ever accused her, she would immediately have pleaded guilty, for so many past things it didn’t matter what she was charged with in the present. But that never came. The story of the new foreman, Jean-Alexi, drunk, setting the house on fire in anger, then asphyxiating from carbon monoxide fumes from the brazier, came so easily to one as adept at untruths as Claire had become, was readily accepted by those shocked at her previous poor choices. One only had to look as far as the state of the farm to know she was unhinged. Lucy unknowingly corroborating the untruth by saying she heard Minna and him fighting.

  The piano screamed and groaned, chords possessed as if played by a madman—the room had an eerie feeling of life. The floorboards upstairs thrummed like the bleachers at a racetrack when the horses went thundering by, struts popping after the unbearable climaxing pressure. With a gentle sigh, they sagged through, an avalanche of fire and board, the convention of division, of upstairs and downstairs, rendered false. It was now inside versus outside, heat and light and creative destruction against the cold, indifferent blackness of the world.

  * * *

  She stayed as long as she could. As if the heat and flame, by eating up the house, were releasing its secrets. And she still thirs
ted to learn more. She didn’t feel the loss of one thing, simply the gain of knowledge pouring into her. A rocking chair became a fiery throne, the spokes glowing hot orange before the whole crumbled to ash. “So that’s the way it is,” she said, feeling that she knew the essence of the chair at last before it disappeared.

  She heard the sluggish wail of sirens in the distance. For a long time, the farm had become a nuisance, an eyesore, to the planned communities around it. The Baumsarg ranch was living out of its time, an anachronism, and as with all things not of their time, there would be a sigh of relief at its passing. The world broke what it could not change. But for a beautiful moment, she had returned the place to its sacrosanct emptiness.

  Behind her there was the tinkling of glass as each upstairs window burst out. She stood on the edge of the orchard, holding her arms around trembling Lucy (saved!), and beheld their former home, now lit up like some macabre jack-o’-lantern, the windows and doors like swelling eyes and mouth, the fiery shingle roof like a shock of electric hair.

  As the fire trucks pulled up the driveway, Claire saw in the beam of their headlights a figure running away through the trees. In the false dawn of the fire, the dark figure seemed to hesitate, wave an arm, to look backward in adieu. The figure grew smaller and smaller, a dark heart beating in the darker night. Then Claire lost her.

  Chapter 3

  The day had been long, first Paz’s chaotic church wedding, with so many people that the overflow ended up standing outside on the sidewalk and into the street, then the even bigger celebration at Claire’s house. All of Octavio’s married sons with their families, all of Sofia’s extended family; Gwen and her family; Lucy reunited with Javier; Forster and Katie; Mrs. Girbaldi; practically the rest of the county. The rooms hardly allowed movement, and people took their plates of food out onto the cooler veranda, the pool area, across the lawn, and some sat under the shade of the lemon trees.