The Forgetting Tree Read online

  Forster went and spoke a few words to them, while Claire imagined a current of glances and nudges passing among the men. Suspicion always lurked in her mind now—which of these men might be related to the ones in jail, however distantly? Might there be recriminations against the long sentences, revenge, however undeserved? The day changed for her—the trees cast a pall, the sky cloudless yet without sun. When they came to the path that led up the hill, they had to pass the lemon tree. Forster grimaced at his oversight—he should have taken them another way. He didn’t blame a particular spot of land for their tragedy; rather, he felt the land, too, had been violated. Claire turned the girls around and marched them back home.

  * * *

  Essential to take care of Gwen and Lucy during this time, and Claire threw herself into a confusion of activity. She started by repainting their bedrooms, letting them pick their favorite colors. Gwen chose yellow, and Claire sewed matching curtains and counterpanes. Transforming Josh’s room was the hardest. At Forster’s insistence, Josh’s things were boxed up again and moved out into the barn, to be donated to charity. Lucy was given his room, and she insisted on purple walls. After much negotiation, they compromised on lavender and planned to add a canopy bed for Christmas. If Forster had let Claire, she would have ripped up the floorboards, taken the walls down to the studs. Even so, with each brushful of paint, she felt guilty of erasing the past.

  With the same fervor, she cooked breakfasts of French toast and pancakes, omelets, and scrambles, freshly squeezed orange and grapefruit juice. The breakfasts were so big and involved that the girls were frequently late for school. When it got too late, Claire allowed them to play truant. It was safer to stay at home anyway. Then she would let them watch movies while she brought them hot chocolate and caramel popcorn, treating them like invalids.

  Isolated by what they had suffered—neither teachers nor counselors were willing to reprimand—the girls, so pale and tentative, got away with more than the wildest rebels. Gwen was caught smoking in the girls’ bathroom. Lucy got caught necking with a basketball player during homeroom. While Gwen would eventually straighten out to the point of primness, Lucy plunged deeper into bad behavior. Caught with cigarettes, then alcohol, then marijuana. With the years, the power of her intoxicants grew.

  “Aren’t you spoiling them?” Forster asked. “They’re going wild.”

  “They deserve spoiling.”

  One night they sat down to a roast, creamed corn, biscuits, salad, roast chicken, and a pizza. The table was so full, the counter held the extra dishes.

  As the girls sat down at their places, Lucy looked around and saw the extra place setting. “Who’s coming to dinner?”

  Claire looked at Forster uneasily, and when he smiled, they both started to laugh. The strain wearing them thin.

  “Just us.” Claire took up the place setting, dumped it into a drawer, and went to the stove, hoping no one would see tears. Still not adjusted from the habit of thinking in fives.

  “Can we go on vacation?” Lucy said.

  No, thought Claire. She could not stop the irrational panic that they would be gone when Joshua returned. Fact helpless against maternal instinct.

  Forster smiled. “That’s the best idea I’ve heard in a long time.”

  * * *

  They couldn’t afford the money for the trip or the time spent away from the ranch, but even she saw escape was demanded. It was decided—a week down the Baja peninsula. It was perfectly acceptable that they needed “time away.” If Claire said “vacation” to the neighbors, it would have sounded crass and unfeeling. So escape was labeled retreat. It irked her that she worried what others thought when no one knew her suffering, the depth of which justified any action with the ability to ease the pain. No one could know the middle-of-the-night agonies, waking up before remembering, and then having the knowledge invade the body with the force of a hammer blow. She didn’t care for herself, but she resented a judgment of the girls. They should be affected by the tragedy, but not too much. Anything inappropriate, self-pitying, melodramatic, would be blamed on Claire, but a lack of emotion was blamed on her also.

  * * *

  The night before they were to leave, the Santa Ana winds, commonly known as devil winds, howled through the canyons, made the shingles slap down on the roof, the windows and doors moan. Claire dreamed Joshua was a baby again, and she had misplaced him somewhere. Laid him down on a bed or a couch or a pillow. Placed him in a reed basket or a wooden orange crate. She searched and searched, frantic. It was way past his feeding time, her breasts ached with milk, and he was nowhere in sight. Finally she heard him and rushed out into the orchards, following his cries until she found him beneath the lemon tree. As if he had been tending there from birth. Claire woke, her body in a sweat.

  * * *

  She left Forster in bed, worried in her rocking chair till daybreak pulled her out into the fields, the winds tugging against her nightgown, the humidity dropped so that she could hardly spit.

  It was really too easy. The gasoline can in the barn. Matches from the kitchen. The long, dizzying walk down the dirt road, rising sun blinding her. Whispers in her ear that could have been wind. She forgot the mechanics of lofting the can—watching the loop of gasoline sparkle in the air and wet the lower leaves, dousing the brush underneath, staining the trunk dark, but still leaving the container only half-emptied. Thinking the lower limbs the most promising place for the flames to gain purchase, she threw on another loop just as the wind gusted, carrying the loop backward, raining on her. Face and arms stung as if attacked by a swarm of bees. Forgotten, as well, that the first three matches were blown out, how not until the driven fourth did a brilliant flower of light ignite, kindling of tumbleweed blossoming like a shard of sun. No, in her memory, the tree simply self-immolated.

  She staggered back, too slow, heat singeing hair and eyebrows. Burning her cheeks raw as if from sunburn, as if from blood stroke. That was the moment she heard the high scream and came to herself. She could no longer separate sleep from waking or this zombie state in between. Heart stopped, her small boy ripped away from her like in birth. What had she done? She swatted at the fire, wanting to put it out, reverse time. Anything so that she could solve the conundrum of destroying what you love for the pain it has caused you. Heartsick, nightmared, she saw a rabbit wobble out from under the burning brush. His fur scorched away on one side, the other side untouched. He staggered, stopped, ran. “Survive,” Claire whispered, begged. “Please survive.”

  Black smoke fanned itself into the unforgiving blue sky. A single, wide lick of flame reached from ground to topmost branch, a reversed lightning. Leaves dried out, then curled to gold, then black ash. The rinds of lemons grew rigid and tight, then burst, releasing a thick blood of juice.

  The siren at the barn finally clanged. Pickups rattled to life. Footsteps and the calling of Forster and the girls. Claire, Mother, Mom. Where are you? Where have you gone?

  Octavio roared up in his pickup with a crew, not looking at her but unrolling the faded fireman’s hose, cranking the water. Another rescue. Forster ran to Claire.

  “Thank God you’re okay.” He held her, then pushed her away, smelling the gasoline on her. Incredulous, he stepped back, the muscles in his jaw clenching.

  “We have to leave here—” she started, but he moved quickly, slapping her across her cheek.

  She agreed to voluntarily check into a clinic. For two weeks she either sat in her monk’s cell of a room, or outside in the courtyard, watching a collection of turtles wade in and out of the fountain. The counselors gave her grief lectures, pamphlets about overcoming loss in twelve steps. In the clinic’s living area, she uneasily passed by a painting of a rainbow over hills, a smiling person in a sunbeam at its end. She took her medication and played the part of patient, allowing them to feel pleased charting her progress. When Forster visited with the girls, she acted contrite. But inside, she was unmoved. A granite and implacable stubbornness formed—she balked at t
he premise that something so monstrous and unfair should be accepted, lived through, recovered from.

  * * *

  When the clinic released her, she felt smaller, dried out. Her elbows and knees bent stiffly. The terrible thoughts still infected her, but they were weakened by medication, did not have the power to rise to action. Nothing could move her, neither Forster nor the girls. This is what it feels like to be dead, she thought.

  “It would do us all good to get away,” Forster said.

  Claire nodded, powerless.

  “Octavio said he will handle things for a week.”

  * * *

  In Mexico, they were disappointed at how desolate everything was, empty, like a moonscape. Forster explained to the girls that the origin of the word desert was from wasteland, which it turned out to be for them.

  They could not afford two rooms so shared a single one with two queen-size beds. The girls piled in one, Forster and Claire in the other. Husband and wife, they lay side by side like patients in a hospital. Sometimes Claire wondered if the girls hadn’t been there, would Forster have reached over, would they finally have been able to heal? Would she have apologized, and would he have forgiven?

  The next day they drove a winding, potholed road from the gulf side to the Pacific side of the peninsula. East to west, the eternal search for renewal. But they were already at the end of west. Tired by the heat and the bumpy ride, they stopped at a turnout for lunch. Gwen and Lucy wandered away, and Claire settled down into medicated solitude, falling asleep in the shade of the cliffs. Now she slept endlessly—ten, eleven hours each day—and woke exhausted, longing for more.

  Forster shook her awake. At first she mistook it for affection and felt a small gratitude inside her. Until he told her that Gwen came back without Lucy.

  The next two hours were spent under the pounding sun, calling. Claire’s eyes burned, she tripped over cactus, her head spinning. Chest pounding so hard she thought she would keel over. Half-crazed, drugged, she cursed at the grotesque possibility that another child could be taken. Not knowing which direction to go, they returned to the car. Forster shuffled between it and the cliffs where Gwen sat crying as he tried to soothe her.

  “What happened again?” he asked.

  “I went ahead to check out a water hole. When I turned back, she was gone.”

  “Was anyone else there? Any strangers?”

  “No. I don’t think so. I didn’t see them.”

  “Why didn’t you keep watch over her?” Claire yelled.

  “Don’t,” Forster said.

  “Then why didn’t you watch her?” Claire accused him.

  “What were you doing?” he said. “Sleeping.” Only blame and venom left between them.

  At last Lucy appeared in the distance, shimmering, unsteady, a mirage—sunburned, dusty, tearstained. Claire blinked, then blinked again, not wanting to trust anything until she was sure the girl was flesh.

  “It’s her,” she whispered.

  Together, they ran. Claire grabbed her, looked her up and down. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

  “I’m fine,” Lucy said.

  “Where were you?” Forster asked.

  “We were scared.”

  “I disappeared,” she said, smiling a sly grin. “Like Josh used to do. It was just a game. I was coming back—”

  “Don’t ever do that,” Forster said.

  “You’re ruining everything,” Gwen shouted. “Making Mom and Dad fight.” Gwen punched Lucy’s arm. “I wish you didn’t come back.”

  “No,” Claire said. “You can’t say that.”

  “We miss him, too,” Gwen said. “Not just you.”

  Each of them like a jagged piece of glass to the other, unable to do anything but inflict damage. Three grief-worn female faces on the car trip home. Four wearied souls. Forster staring through the windshield, trying to forestall more harm. The trip no escape. Claire refused to pretend healing. Instead, the land reflected them back on themselves, and they could not bear up to the revelation. When they returned home, Forster moved into the guest room, the first step of his eventual leaving.

  Other families survived tragedy. Perhaps it was a greater curse that they only appeared to remain intact, that they imploded, their collective outward gesture to become more polite, more considerate, distant as lone trees in a cleared forest, each grabbing a private circle of sun, together only in their solitude.

  * * *

  In the weeks after they returned from Mexico, an unheard-of thing happened in the orchard. Octavio was at a loss to explain: the leaves on the citrus turned a burnt yellow as if it were the changing of color during a New England fall. People drove by to take pictures of the outlandish sight. He assured the Baumsargs that he had taken the utmost care of the ranch while they were gone, personally supervising what he normally delegated to others. The leaves clung on for over a month, fresh and pliable but yellowed, then overnight every single one fell to the ground. A gold carpet upon which stood a barren stick forest. Not a sign of life on the trees, and Forster had the agriculture guys come over to take soil tests. There were guesses about mineral contaminants in the water table, a wind-borne fungus, unknown and unseen pests; the trees had gone dormant except for a strange thickening of the trunks. The bark turned hard as iron.

  The orchard’s shock deeply moved Claire, as if the land itself had turned sentient, mirroring her belief that the only true love was the one tested, put under duress, stripped, stranded, and beaten. The land reached out to her, and she accepted. No one else understood the problem—she’d survived, her son had not.

  The following spring, the trees resumed their growth.

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Fifteen years later, the Baumsarg family, too, had grown impregnable outer shells.

  With the passage of time, Josh had been her son for less time than he had not been. Untrue—he would always remain her son—yet one time had the weight of feathers and one had the weight of lead. Often, coming across her image unexpectedly in a mirror, she didn’t quite recognize herself. Who was this woman formed from sadness? Browned, wrinkled skin, weathered by the sun, and sharp, angular cheekbones. But she spent little time looking in mirrors, caught up in the management of the remaining 160 acres. Selling the larger share had been unbearable, but it was an amputee’s choice—severing one part to preserve the core. The only other choice was to lose the whole.

  The truism that time healed all was just as false as it was true, but Claire had found her way back to life through the land. When she had shunned public life all those years ago, the ranch had provided extraordinary haven. The ranching life—the deep silences of the groves, its strict schedules, its routine, the narrowness of its concerns, the necessary attention to variables of weather, cycles of fruition and decay—provided a relief that nothing else could.

  It had been a mixed lot of successes and failure. She had survived, the girls were grown up, but Forster and she had parted ways years before. Unlike her experience of healing, the land had turned against him—strange, foreign, resistant. It had driven him away.

  * * *

  So when in the doctor’s changing room, gossiping with other patients, drinking chamomile tea from paper cups, she heard her name called out for a further consultation instead of being okayed to go home (by proxy meaning she cleared), Claire was sure they couldn’t possibly mean her, and then she grew angry. She didn’t have time for this, what with replanting a section of avocado groves that had burned in the fires last fall, digging another well for the one that had gone dry. Relentless, the city was all over them, trying to raise water rates and drive them out of business. No, no time for sickness. It had been four years since she had been in for a checkup, and only Gwen’s prodding had made her go in for the mammogram.

  The quick sorority in the room disappeared, and again she was made separate from the group, this time ejected from the world of the healthy. The heat behind her eyes made her think of the wildlife shows Forster h
ad loved to watch years ago, how a herd moved as a single entity until one of the members fell behind and succumbed to whatever chased. That act of surrender—she couldn’t bear it. The one sacrificed by the group, danger averted, the weft of the fabric rendered whole again as if the disappeared had never existed. Animals didn’t have the advantages—or was it a disadvantage?—of humans with their compassion. What lesson had the girls learned from the shows? They ran from the room. Ostrichlike, they pretended what they didn’t see didn’t exist.

  The walk down the long hallway was like the stringing of beads, adding surgeon, radiologist, ultrasound doctor, nurse, counselor. She remained dry-eyed and skeptical. The tough iron shell that kept both the bad and the good at arm’s length. In the back of her humming mind was the trump card of the unfairness of it. Surely she was immune to further insult. “There’s been a mistake,” she said. Not until the surgeon, workmanlike, guided her fingers under his, along her suddenly foreign skin, rotating the soft tissue at the top of the breast, a private place she had not paid attention to since nursing her last child, did her breath escape—as she felt a hard seed of mortality, no mistaking it, lodged within her.

  “We can take the lump and test for margins,” the doctor said.

  She both heard and didn’t hear. There was no fear. Her mind calculated what this would mean to the work schedule, if Octavio could handle the harvest alone. How much time did something like this take? “And then?”

  “If the margins are clear, we won’t have to take the whole breast.”

  “But it could change in the future. It would mean a constant waiting. Take it all now. I want it done with.”

  For the first time, he paused to examine her face. “That’s unnecessary.”