Claire chose not to lecture. “How is the new job?”
“What does it matter?” Lucy said, waving her hand at the machines surrounding them. “With all this?” She wanted to be a painter now, after wanting to be a singer, and before that a chef. Some strange role reversal had occurred between the girls. In school, Lucy had been the straight-A brilliant one, and Gwen had struggled and worked for B’s. Now Lucy was adrift, caught up in one thing after another.
“This is nothing. An inconvenience.” Claire didn’t want this to be another excuse for her daughter to fail again.
Because of the size and spread of the tumor to the lymph nodes, a radical mastectomy had been necessary even without Claire’s draconian instructions, but the surgical team was offended when she refused the simultaneous reconstructive surgery.
“Mom, that’s medieval, walking around with a gash across your chest,” Gwen said. Her wealthy divorce clients took their plastic surgery seriously, and she offered a whole Rolodex of what she called “boob men” to call.
Claire found it alien and strangely hopeful at the same time, as if packaging might be a cure-all for any calamity. “It’s okay the way it is,” she reassured Gwen. “If I decide to pose for Playboy, we’ll rethink it.”
The girls laughed and passed another round of drinks, relieved that their mother would not fall apart on them.
“I want to go home. I can’t sit around a hospital room for a week.”
“You have cancer,” Gwen said. “Forget the farm.”
“You can take care of me. What could that involve? There are things that need to be looked after.” That strange maternal twinning of love and thwarted expectation.
* * *
Forster came to the hospital, bowlegged under the weight of a gigantic arrangement of roses and lilies that sucked the air out of the room, made it smell like the dregs of an emptied perfume bottle, like the hall of a mortuary. The nurses ticked their heads in disapproval as if he’d tracked in crescents of dog shit on the bottom of his boot. Given his squeamishness in all matters of the body and heart, his visit was the more unexpected. He had come alone, without Katie, his second wife.
“Who died?” Claire asked, pointing at the flowers.
“I see I came for trouble.”
“Get me out of here,” Claire said. “There’s so much going on. Octavio needs my help.”
“I already talked to him. Everything’s fine. This time of year, things are slow.”
Claire frowned.
Forster rarely visited the farmhouse, not wanting to drive through the long rows of citrus trees leading to it, rejecting the smell of his beloved blossoms in the spring, going to the length of driving the long way around the county road to avoid the loading trucks whose picking schedules he knew by heart, as they filled with fruit crates stamped with his own name. Katie confessed he went to the absurd extreme of forbidding orange juice in the house.
After forcing Claire to stay on the ranch, he had been the one to leave, a point she never let him forget.
Now he chose to live in an apartment, looking over the ocean, a desert of water, devoid of one square inch of soil. Perhaps an attempt to return to his seafaring ancestors’ roots? He ignored Raisi’s mantra of the importance of place. Such a decision smacked to Claire of a denaturing beyond even discussing. She felt pity for him. All his other poor decisions — investing in a car dealership, a fast-food restaurant, both of which went under — appeared in its long light. He was a man of the soil, trained in the rhythms of growth and harvest. Turning his back on the place he was from, he rejected a way of life. Because of the one loss, creating another.
* * *
In the hospital, the girls each bowed a submissive head for a brush of his lips across their forehead, then escaped downstairs to the hospital cafeteria. “Do I smell bourbon in here?” he asked to their giggling, retreating backs.
What they were squeamish of witnessing was not the hostility between their parents (there was none), but rather the open display of affection. No matter how long the absence, Forster and Claire reunited as tenderly as if still married. The distance between them had kindled within Claire an affection as strong as in the first days of their courtship that she was at pains to hide. The acrimony, the blame — suffocating when they were still married — had faded away.
How to explain that after twenty or more years, a marriage, if it had ever been real, could no longer be sundered by a piece of paper. In two decades — the same time it took to raise a human being — a marriage became its own entity. Life intervened, yes, a decision was made that life together was too painful, but the marriage itself lived on, a kind of radiological half-life. After the death of Josh, when Claire refused to consider trying to have another child, Forster escaped to his beach apartment and a new wife. Not so unusual to drown oneself in otherness — the ocean, when you are a man of the soil; youth, the state of having everything that will happen in front of you, when already so much has passed.
It surprised everyone when they did not immediately have children. After two years, young Katie paid Claire a visit. A sweet girl, ten years older than Gwen, she cried in Claire’s lap as she explained that Forster offered to divorce her after he made the abrupt decision to have a vasectomy. Claire believed that Forster came around to her way of thinking. Every child deserved to be wanted for itself upon coming into the world, not merely to replace what had been lost. But still, there was the problem of this girl-wife.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Claire said, “except that he is a good man. In spite of all that.”
Claire and Forster’s marital bond was welded strong by the girls, whom they had successfully raised, but was equally forged by failing the one child — the intolerable offense of not rendering the world harmless to him. They had failed, and if they were lucky, neither of them would create such scarring ties again.
“You can’t leave just yet,” Forster said, settling back into a hospital chair by the window, his eyes avoiding Claire’s face.
“I need one of the girls to come home for a while.”
She felt she had aged unbearably in his eyes, that he recoiled at the lines and fissures etching her face. Had he already resigned himself to yet another death? He looked as strong as a decade earlier, his face browned, his eyes calm. Even the sprinkling of gray in his blond hair simply made him seem more solid, more able to endure. Maybe in running away from the ranch he had made a bargain with the devil? She could ask Forster for anything and he would do it — unspoken but suspected that he would even leave Katie if it came to that — but he refused to live their old life on the farm again. They were locked together like two pieces of a puzzle that created a gaping hole when put together. Alone, they could choose to ignore the emptiness, but together they created an absence.
“You look good,” Forster said.
“Liar,” she said.
“Not bad to me.”
“Help me get out of here. Be my alibi.”
“What do you need?” he said. “Give me something to do.”
“I ask for one thing, and you refuse.”
“Christ, you have cancer. Forget about work for a time.”
“‘Highly survivable,’ according to Gweny.”
He flinched at the remark. “Don’t be so hard on her. She loves you.” His face crumpled. “I’ll see what I can do, okay?”
“I need to go home.”
He got up to make his escape, before more things he could not give would be requested. “You’re the invincible one. Don’t let us down.”
“That’s right. Tough as nails.”
“What about the farm? Gwen mentioned you’re worried about it.”