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 had 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.”
“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.”