At the kitchen sink, Claire turned the KÄLTE handle and let the water run a minute down the side of the sink before filling her glass. The water tasted icy, different from anywhere else, especially the lukewarm chemical flavor at the hospital. It came from their own well, a deep, artesian source that was drying up: traces of eucalyptus and orange and limestone, perhaps the mineral taste of bone.
As Claire drank glass after glass, dreamy, content, the girls circled round her, wary, waiting. She smiled, gulped air. At last she could breathe. Gwen took the role of leader. Claire nodded at the rightness of this, while water dribbled down her chin, sobered by this glimpse of the future once she was gone, the rude shock of the world’s reordering afterward.
“What are we going to do about the farm?” Gwen asked. “It’s getting harder for you to manage alone. Especially now.”
“Octavio is here.” Claire filled another glass to stall them, surprised that it had been brought up so bluntly, but to Gwen’s credit that was her way. When she was a little girl, she always found one and only one solution to whatever problem came up and stolidly clung to it no matter what. Living alone, Claire savored getting lost pondering the great infinitude of fixes available to any problem, basking in the possibilities rather than employing any single one of them and getting on with solving the thing.
With her strawberry-blond hair and creamy skin, Gwen had always been striking, and her deliberate adult dowdiness of flat heels and baggy dresses irritated Claire. A throwback to Hanni? Or was it due to the night of the attack? Did Gwen blame herself for Josh’s being taken? Or was Claire responsible, putting too much responsibility on her? Whatever it was, Gwen’s adult self seemed determined to drain the pleasure out of everything around her.
“The farm is fine,” Claire repeated. “But it’s time for one of you to come back.”
“What about the cancer?” Lucy said. Gwen frowned at her sister’s clumsiness.
“Am I going somewhere?”
“We have to think about the treatments.” Gwen patted Claire’s arm. “This is an optimal time to sell. Before the county starts making demands for access roads.”
Claire shook her head, dizzy at this outlandish misunderstanding. “I didn’t ask for anyone’s help.”
“We’re your daughters,” Gwen said. “Of course, we’ll help. I talked to a real estate agent who said that the Owens’s land went for a record price.”
Their relentlessness made Claire feel as if she were being buried alive, hurried to the end. “It wasn’t your right,” she said, desperate to get away. “I’m going to check the garden.”
Undeterred, Gwen dogged her outside. “You said you need family near.”
The ring of Meyer lemon trees hadn’t been picked, and now the skin hung dark yellow, shrinking back on the fruit. “What I need is someone out here with a basket. I’m going to make lemon pie.”
“Mom.”
“I never told you to move away, but I didn’t stop you either.”
“No one except you wants to be here anymore.” Gwen squinted into the evening sun, as if it had placed itself just to irritate her. Away from Lucy’s scrutiny, she became petulant, childish. “I don’t see how. Even if the farm’s managed by Octavio and Dad, what about the house? Who’s going to clean? Cook? Who’s going to take you to doctors? Who is going to be responsible?”
“My head’s spinning.”
“Exactly. Your head’s spinning. I can’t leave everything behind. That leaves Lucy. Enough said.”
“It’ll get taken care of. How do you get through a day with all your worrying?”
Gwen flushed, and Claire remembered fights they’d had as she grew up. “It gets taken care of, Mom, because someone else worries about it and does it. Not you.”
“Unfair.”
Claire longed for Forster to guard her against this bullying. She was tempted to go find him but resisted. Odds were that things were going to get far worse in the future, and then she’d have no choice but to ask his help. Now she should try to hold siege alone.
“I want to spend time together. Have the children see you more,” Gwen said.
“Is that what this is about? Me being gone?”
“Don’t be melodramatic.”
“This is just a bit of unpleasantness to be got through. People survive cancer every day. If it gets worse, then we’ll rethink things.”
“If that’s the way you want it. I’ll just take the kids out of school. Take a leave of absence. Tell Kevin that I have to come—” Gwen’s voice cracked.
Nothing could not be remedied, no matter how late, by love. In this case, by giving in, and yet Claire couldn’t render it, the habit of independence too deeply established. The thought of an invasion unnerved her. She did not have it in her to deal both with cancer and Gwen’s wheedling her to sell the farm. Didn’t illness absolve one, allow one to be selfish? So she relented, backed down, cajoled, sacrificed the battle for the larger war.
“You can’t uproot yourself. What if I hired someone to take care of me? How would that be? Would that make you feel better?”
“Hire someone?”
“Temporarily. Just to get me through. A stopgap.”
“Pay money?” Gwen said, offended by the suggestion.
Claire could not say it aloud, that money sometimes was by far the easiest price to be paid.
“You’ve always done everything yourself.”
“I know, Gweny. It’s just temporary.”
“It’s not right.” Gwen shrugged. “We’ll think about it, okay? I’ll go start dinner.”
“How come you don’t feel differently about the farm? It’s your home, too.”
Gwen shrugged. “You never understood. All we could talk about when we were kids was getting away. It was so boring and isolated. And then our family broke.” She walked inside.
Claire picked lemons. It was good to be home, even under the circumstances. When Lucy came out with a basket and helped her pluck them off the thorny branches, she was content.
“Remember when you gave us a penny a fruit?”
Claire smiled. “I even remember when it went up to a nickel.”
“We were happy.”
She looked at Lucy. “Why doesn’t Gwen remember that?”
“It hasn’t been for a long time now. Happy, I mean.”
“Things change.”
“Maybe it would be better to sell, after all?”
Lucy had always been the child most like her. Impractical, a dreamer, emotional, so this felt like a betrayal. “Did Gwen send you out?”
“Like I ever cared what Gweny thought.” Lucy snorted a laugh. “But don’t you think the place is, well, kind of haunted, or something?”
“This is where you all were born. This is where we belong, like Grandma said.”
“Maybe she was wrong.”
“Hanni was not wrong.” How had Lucy intuited Hanni’s last-minute change of heart? Not that Claire would ever admit it.
“I don’t see that either you or Dad was all that happy here.”
“We’ll set up interviews for a cleaning lady Monday. Get someone installed right away.” Claire would take up the mantle, insisting on her immortality, insisting, mostly, to remain where and how she was.
The truth was that standing in the orchard looking at a grown-up Lucy, the present did not feel real. She did not feel real to herself. The deforming fact of her missing breast, the new possibility that she would be no more, were mere fictions. Instead, it was more like taking on the role of a character in a play, forced to make the character’s circumstances one’s own. But this distance allowed her a clarity of purpose.