The Forgetting Tree Read online

  Once a year, Claire oversaw the repainting of the farmhouse’s white clapboard walls, the glossy coating of the trim and window sashes, as neighboring, now dated, ranch houses were torn down to make room for the new rage of Tuscan villas. As out of place as seeing an elephant grazing in the desert. Like a herd of elephants, their sheer numbers destroyed the delicate balance around them. Like weeds overtaking a garden. At first, land parcels were divided in five-acre plots, then divided down to two, to one, cut in half, then halved again, until the land could barely contain the outer walls of these monstrosities. Home prices and land prices rising, the Baumsarg place became an eccentricity, a gentleman’s pastime, an anomaly. A fortune in dirt.

  Except that they had to earn a living off it. A devil’s choice: to be wealthy but lose your place, or be poor and be rooted.

  * * *

  At the yearly parties put on by the family, Mr. Relicer was an obligatory if unwanted guest. He came the earliest and stayed the longest, never declining the grudged invitation. At the beginning of each month, the statement from the bank arrived, and Claire wrote out the check for interest, which was steadily taking a bigger and bigger bite of their earnings. Debt had become unavoidable, predictable as drought or pests. Claire’s mood would be dark those days of bill-paying, and she would go out alone to walk the farm. Their small valley was still not part of the great suburbanization that was consuming the rest of the area in tract housing and minimalls. They were still a throwback to the rural roots of the area, a backwater of the past. A last holdout. But for how much longer?

  On those walks she often dreamed of the land’s returning to its sparsely filled former self, with adobe-bricked haciendas, or colonial Spanish stucco. Better than that, though, the landscape should be unshackled of human design entirely, remain empty, except for rows upon rows of avocado, orange, and lemon, or further back in time to grapes and black walnut, apricot and almond. But even human cultivation was not the beginning; in the beginning, the land was vacant of everything, the hills barren except for scrub and chaparral, the land unfilled, suffused only with air and sunlight, a state that some might call paradise.

  * * *

  With Josh now eight, Hanni realized that her role had become ornamental, that Claire had filled it and then some. Hanni decided to finally take the world tour she always dreamed of. The Saturday teas had convinced her that there was indeed a world beyond the ranch, beyond Southern California, and no matter how unlikely it was to surpass home, Hanni was determined to pass judgment before her wits left her for good.

  In Thailand, bewildered and made homesick by the unfamiliar, the chance comment of a fellow traveler sent her to visit a citrus orchard.

  The heat that day was overwhelming, the dead weight of humidity something Hanni was unused to, and after climbing a slight hill, she felt faint. The local farmer helped her sit down in the dirt, her back against a tree, shaded from the intense sun. He took out a small, sharp dagger and plucked off a deep green orange. He cut it in half. Hanni was surprised that inside it was ripe and juicy.

  The farmer had a mild, worn face. He walked barefoot through his orchard; clearly he’d spent his whole life there. Hanni felt at home for the first time since she’d left. Through a guide, he explained that the temperature never dropped enough to make the outside peel orange, although the fruit was ripe. Hanni acknowledged California’s riches—the cool evening temperatures that produced the glorious color.

  The experience determined her on a new course: visiting other citrus farms. She would go to the Middle East to see their orange groves, then to Italy, specifically Sicily, where blood oranges thrived in the volcanic soil. Maybe after that Spain.

  The idea that the same activity was going on in unknown places of the earth, places in which she had no language or custom or anything else in common, made Hanni unimaginably happy. It gave her a feeling like that of people who experience religion, an unexpected communion. But preparing to leave Thailand, she was bitten by a sand flea, and days later she was so ill she had to cancel further travel plans. The hotel manager was frightened that the old, white lady tourist might die in the room, requiring all kinds of remedy and rituals to erase the bad luck.

  By the time Hanni arrived back home, she was delirious. Forster and Claire checked her into the hospital with a 105-degree temperature. An expert of tropical diseases from the university said there was no cure, only hope.

  Hanni did not resent the foreign-borne disease. She considered it yet another land, another room, she had not yet entered in life. The ideas of illness and idleness as alien to her as the idea of death—destinations to keep open-minded about after such a long and work-filled life. It was her folly in leaving where she belonged, however temporarily. Shock like that of a transported plant. She comforted herself with the thought that maybe heaven consisted of orange groves.

  In her last hours, fluids refused to stay in her body. Her face appeared wooden, mummified; her lips shriveled as if seeking counsel within. She took Claire’s hand.

  “I didn’t believe in you at first,” Hanni said. “But you turned out to be the right person. The perfect choice.” Claire cried, but Hanni shook her head. “What I’m saying now is between women who have given their blood and sweat for the ranch. Let it go.”

  Claire thought fever had taken over the old woman’s mind.

  “Its time is past. Take Forster away.”

  “This is our life.” Claire mourned Hanni’s passing as if she were her own mother, but never told Forster her last words, reasoning they must have been said in confusion.

  * * *

  With the bequest from Hanni, Forster, Claire, and Octavio decided to make the biggest gamble for the ranch’s independence yet: branch out into organics with its higher profit margins. Rather than its being a blessing, Claire felt a sense of foreboding in using the money in a way Hanni clearly had not sanctioned. And yet, what kind of an inheritance could not be used in the best interests of the heir?

  They financed a new ten-acre parcel of lemon trees adjoining theirs from yet another farmer who had sold out and moved inland. At the auction, the farmer took their lower bid because he wanted the place to remain farmland as long as possible. If it was successful, the change to organic would be Hanni’s legacy. The turnover meant the soil would have to be amended with natural fertilizers and pesticides, no chemicals, until it tested clean under the guidelines, taking at least three or four years. If Claire had learned nothing else, it was that miracles took grueling work and utter, saintly patience.

  Chapter 5

  Kidnapping the boy had been an afterthought that went bad, they said at the trial. After Claire promised money, panicked, the men grabbed him as a kind of insurance policy. When she heard that, her guilt was complete and permanent. Josh had been unafraid, Denny Larsen said. “He yelled and called me Red Skull.” A detail that broke her heart. He died that same night, when he tried to run away. The staggering one tackled him, and the boy fell, accidentally hitting his head on a rock. Not knowing what else to do, they buried the body at the farthest corner of the ranch by the lake. Small consolation, at least he had not been long at their hands. They waited for the body to be found, and when it wasn’t, they decided to try for the ransom. It seemed beyond cruelty to Claire that her little boy was already gone while she had frantically gathered the money.

  * * *

  After Forster lifted the boy from the earth, Claire could not bear to hand him over to strangers again. She asked Octavio if they could drive him home one last time in his pickup, the boy’s favorite place in the world. All farm children learned to drive tractors and pickups early, and within the confines of the ranch Octavio allowed Josh to sit in his lap and steer the wheel, and then drive himself. Now he handed the keys to Forster to drive while Claire sat in the truck’s bed, next to the swaddled body. “Come,” she said, but Octavio shook his head and walked.

  “My heart breaks,” he said at the house, head bowed between Claire and Forster, after the body had
been driven away. Octavio felt guilt, not that he had done anything wrong, but that he had been under the tree earlier and had not known. How was it possible that he had not sensed anything?

  * * *

  Claire could not explain her deepening despair after the arrest of the men and learning the truth. The facts were flat and dry, disappointing in a way she could not describe. Denny Larsen got the idea of burglarizing the house while working the party. They had never intended to hurt anyone. The outcome random as an act of nature. They did not have the driven power of evil that the act deserved.

  It was the headline story in the local news, and the church overflowed with both known and unknown faces. A feeling of expectation was in the air that the Baumsargs appear broken, in some way show the shame of victimhood. Claire stood alone, stranded at the door of the church, until Octavio rose, gave her his arm, and escorted her to her seat. She walked with a kind of unadorned, bone strength, sat regal and remote in the front pew, until Forster arrived with the girls. When asked to say a few words, she stood in the front of the church in silence for such a time that Forster got up to rescue her.

  “‘I am going to him and he will not come back to me,’” she quoted, and allowed Forster to lead her away.

  * * *

  She refused to have the reception at the ranch after the funeral; instead it was held at the recreation room of the church. The crowd showed an undeniable fascination at the horror of the crime. Looky-loos who wanted to gawk at them in their grief.

  When Claire came back to the house, she threw off her shoes, dragging herself from room to room in her mourning dress. Sounds came from Josh’s room. Dizzy, she tiptoed to the door, opened it, and found Paz and the girls playing with his trains and cars, passing a liquor bottle. Even in laughter, they looked so forlorn and abandoned, her motherly instinct to scold evaporated. Why not mourn in this childish way?

  The girls, red-faced, froze when they saw her in the doorway. They had been giggling and, she suspected, were a little drunk.

  Claire sat down on the floor next to them. She pointed to the bottle of Baileys Cream.

  “Do you like that?”

  Lucy shook her head in a noncommittal way, as if the bottle had forced its way into her hand. “Not really.”

  “When I was your age, we drank vodka and orange juice.”

  “Really?”

  Claire nodded.

  “We shouldn’t have been drinking,” Gwen said.

  Claire shrugged. “Our parents couldn’t smell it on our breath.”

  “We pray for him,” Paz said.

  “That’s good.” She liked that the verb was in the present tense, that Josh was still alive in those terms.

  “Mr. Relicer gave me a twenty-dollar bill,” Lucy said. “Do I have to give it back?”

  “No, definitely keep it.”

  * * *

  After the attention from the outside world ebbed away, a stasis enveloped the family. Like the series of fault lines that riddled the land, the stillness was deceptive, hiding thousands of faint tremors that originated deep inside, that silently displaced the ground without shaking it. On the surface, nothing of note. Everything that went on happened within, subterranean reckonings.

  Claire emptied Josh’s room, packing all his belongings in boxes, storing them in the barn, intending to move Lucy into the room so the endless bickering over a shared room would end. Then she changed her mind and moved all his things back in, frantic when she didn’t remember the precise place of each object, consulting the girls, who fought over their conflicting memories of the placement of a pencil cup, a baseball mitt.

  * * *

  The overdue harvest was quickly picked and sent out. A curious by-product of the Baumsargs’ tragedy, the fruit stand was overrun with people, and for the first time they sold out by noon each day. In a macabre act of souvenir-collecting, people coveted the cardboard boxes stamped with their name. Because they had lost so much time, they recovered substantially less fruit than they hoped. The defeat went unnoticed by Claire.

  Not once did she go out and supervise the harvest. It was as if the trees and ground that she had loved had betrayed her. There was also a further isolation: Octavio no longer came into the house. Paz invited the girls over, but Claire told Gwen to turn down the offer. She didn’t want them out of her sight.

  “We can’t turn into prisoners here,” Forster said.

  Since the funeral he had let her do things as she saw fit, but her behavior was finally wearing on him. He allowed that her sorrow was making her act out. The unspoken accusation was that he had not been there to protect them. But still, she was turning paranoid in her grief.

  Claire looked up from the apple she was peeling. “Maybe it’s time for us to move on.”

  * * *

  She canceled the Saturday teas, no longer wanting to bring the community onto the ranch. From then on, contact with the outside world would be held to a minimum. She took over the tasks of caring for the girls from Raisi. Together as one unit, she and the girls moved from breakfast room to living room to bedroom and back. Hardly during the day did one of them separate from the others, and when they did for any length, Claire grew panicky. They were not allowed to work at the fruit stand; they were not allowed to go outside, period, unless in a group, moving together like a small, wary army.

  * * *

  After a few weeks of living under siege, Raisi packed her bags to leave. “It’s time you were on your own again.”

  “But I need you here.”

  “What you need is to heal those girls.”

  “They’re never out of my sight.”

  “Do you see? They’re becoming afraid of life.”

  Claire shifted in her seat. “The world is a bad place.”

  “Good and bad. You can’t protect them forever.”

  Without Raisi, Claire stayed up nights in her rocking chair in the girls’ room, waiting for the phantom men to come back, or others in their place. The girls slept crushed together in Gwen’s single bed, no more squabbling over space. Awake at night, Claire heard noises, thought she saw dark, purpling shapes crossing the lawn outside. Even the trees made her grow numb with dread. Her mood was unalleviated by the fact that the three men had pled guilty, were sitting in jail pending sentences. The ransom money had been found in a house, untouched, and returned to Mrs. Girbaldi.

  Sleep-deprived, Claire dragged through her days. When she finally fell into bed, she lay wide awake. She missed her mother, wanted to tell her she understood things about the past for the first time.

  She had resented the nights as a child when her role was to comfort Raisi from her nightmares. They never spoke of these things in daytime, but it had frightened Claire to see her mother so fragile and weak. How could such a mother possibly care for her? It caused Claire to build a false strength, forget about being a child herself. Now that they lived apart, did her father play that role?

  Raisi would clutch her blankets, waking from the recurrent dream of walking the frozen fields to cross the border. Despite the worsening conditions in Hungary before the revolution, Raisi’s family had refused to leave. A young woman, she decided to cross into Austria alone. The iced ground crackling under her weight, the roulette fear of running either into a border guard, meaning imprisonment or worse, or into a fellow refugee, with the attendant danger of groups. After a night in the freezing cold, lost and almost freezing to death, she saw bonfires on the Austrian border, farmers burning their harvest bales of hay, then burning old wood, sometimes resorting to burning their last wagon, to provide signal to those who were lost. To guide the way to freedom, a new life. After the revolt was crushed, she lost all contact with her family behind a wall of silence. Fear of staying, fear of leaving. That constant sense of displacement had haunted Claire’s childhood.

  In a Red Cross tent after Raisi made it successfully across, she took it as an omen when a pretty, blond girl from California served her hot cider. This first human kindness determined where
she applied for citizenship. Nothing else to do but let the past go. Every year on the Fourth of July their storefront prickled with flags, and Raisi stood rigid, hand pressed to heart, when she heard “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  Place is important, she told Claire. In a time of need, place is everything.

  But there was no signal fire to guide Claire. Place was destroying her.

  * * *

  Plans for new trees were suspended. They backed out of an escrow for additional acreage. At night in bed Claire held Forster’s hand and spoke of selling the farm and moving to the more open Central Valley to start over.

  “A fresh start.”

  “Running away,” he countered.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  Rightly he rejected the chimera of moving on. Knowing that trouble and unhappiness moved with one, only belonging was left behind. He turned away from her in bed, crooked his head in his arm. For the first time, they no longer touched. Over the next weeks and months, even the idea of intimacy became awkward, except for a chaste kiss in front of the girls. In the closet, Claire shyly turned away in her faded bra when he walked in.

  * * *

  One warm fall day when the air was like crystal and the landscape saturated with light, Forster came inside and found the girls huddled in bed, reading. “Enough of this!” he said in high spirits. “We’re going on a picnic.” He insisted that they go to a favorite spot on a hill overlooking the lake. The girls and Claire reluctantly walked with their wicker baskets through the lines of the trees, carefully, as if on patrol, squinting in the bright light that hurt their eyes. Underneath the trees’ shade, a group of workers were lounging after lunch, throwing a ball and playing music on a radio. Claire’s mouth crimped tight. When the men saw the family approach, they jumped up, shamefaced, and took off their hats—understood that the period of mourning would never end.