“You drove to South America?” Claire asked, incredulous, and Minna blinked, but before she could answer, the girls came out with their luggage. By the time the car was loaded, there was no room left for a fourth person. Lucy’s suitcases took up most of the backseat, piled high with tote bags, so that Gwen had to squeeze in.
“Aren’t you coming?” Gwen asked when she saw Claire hesitating in the driveway.
Minna sat behind the wheel, humming to herself as she checked her earrings in the overhead vanity mirror.
“Hurry, I’m tight on my flight time,” Lucy said.
“Where will I fit?” Claire asked, waving her hand at the car.
“Maybe let your mother rest?” Minna said.
It was miraculous, the speed with which the barely accepted fact of Minna’s caretaking was taken for granted and even relied upon.
The girls piled back out of the car to say their final good-byes, and for the first time Claire felt their imminent absence. The fear surprised her. She thought she had conquered it during the years of their college, the shorter and shorter visits, the growing distance of their adult lives. Had she made a terrible mistake in not selling the farm, not following Gwen’s advice? Was Lucy right, had she stripped out all the happiness to be had from this place? But if she admitted to a mistake now, then she would also have to admit her earlier mistake in staying all those years before.
Panicked, Claire stood rooted to the spot, unhappy. She came within a breath of calling the whole thing off, revealing her cowardice.
Minna watched, two sharp lines like incisions forming between her brows. “The sun is making you dizzy,” she said, and pulled Claire away from the car and into the shade, the girls following.
Perhaps Minna was right, perhaps the white noon sun was making her light-headed. Under the shade of a fig tree next to the front door, she tried to relax into the feeling of protection. Beyond, the sun still scalded, firing the fine dust in the air. It lit up Minna’s headscarf, with its garish yellows, greens, and reds, cheap and harsh in the burning light. Who was this girl and why had Claire been so impulsive, so starved and willful, as to insist on her company? Standing in the shade, doubt shook her.
Minna had left the driver’s-side door open, and the buzzing sensor made an anxious, insect whining in the background. Ignoring it, Minna folded her arms under her breasts and watched the leave-taking for a moment.
“I want you two to know that I will treat Claire as I would my own mother.”
The girls teared up. Mollified, they pulled out Kleenexes and dabbed their eyes. They embraced Claire. Minna excused herself and went into the house. The girls drifted back toward the car as they traded final good-byes, admonitions, promises, encouragements, schedules. They would take turns visiting home.
When Minna came out, she was carrying a book. “This is for you.”
Claire looked down at a first edition of Wide Sargasso Sea. She opened it to the title page and read the faded, spidery blue autograph. “This is too much.”
Minna shrugged. “It was meant for you. Maybe I am superstitious, but sometimes I think certain people come into our life for a reason.”
The taillights were at the end of the drive before Claire could thank her. Minna was right. She was where she had fought to be, having achieved her dubious goal, buried away in the middle of her groves. Claire turned her back on the car, her fleeing daughters, opened the book to the first page and hungrily began to read.
Chapter 4
They settled into a pattern of days.
Mornings were hardest. Knowledge of the cancer like a weight. Each morning Claire woke, the fact of the disease pressed down on her like a stone lid, like a tombstone, a covering of earth. She was accustomed to a cloistered solitude, had been reinforcing its walls for all the years since Joshua’s death, freely perambulating the garden in housecoat and slippers, sipping her oversize cup of coffee as her fingers trailed elegiac lavender heads and spiky, stick-leaved rosemary, cradled flesh-soft roseheads and dimpled citrus. Her garden and the ranch beyond it had always given her such consolation, but now she gazed on it as one about to go away on a long journey. Paradoxical since she had fought so hard to stay on the ranch; it had ended being her sole victory.
But the atmosphere of the farm had changed. She felt eyes watched her. In addition to Minna, there was Paz, who came once a week for cleaning. They hadn’t seen each other in a year when she came through the door. She went to Claire and buried her face on her shoulder. “How are you, mi tía?” Claire marveled at how self-assured she had become since she’d been away at college. “I wish you would have let me care for you.”
“Give me my wish — your name on the door of a law office.”
Paz blushed. “Among other things. It’s official — Steven and I are marrying at the end of the year. You’ll come?”
Of course, Claire thought, if I’m here. “Are you sure you have time for this?”
“Spending money.” Paz laughed. “School’s expensive.”
Even during the times that no one was at the ranch, the possibility of it threw a veil of self-consciousness over all Claire did and saw. My lavender, she repeated to herself. My rosemary, my roses, my farm. But despite the insistence, it now seemed a changing and remote landscape.
* * *
The doctor sent thick booklets describing the procedures of chemotherapy and radiation, and Claire signed endless papers stating than she understood the risks, would hold harmless those who would poison her with the intention of a more ultimate health. She tried to distract herself with the activities of the farm, but it seemed as if her old life had been transcribed into a language she could not understand.
“What do you think about spraying the back field?” Octavio asked.
“Yes. I think so. I don’t know. What do you think?”
“Should I ask Mr. Forster?”
“No. No need to. I’m fine.”
“I think you do too much. You need rest to get back your health.”
“I’m fine. This is what I need.”
* * *
Instead of the farm, Claire plunged into the most private of worlds, the pages of a novel, for comfort. That old luxuriousness like a warm bath that she had not realized how much she missed. The book Minna gave her was a weathered, smallish hardback. The pages yellowed and brittle and smelling, she imagined, of faded spices. Claire stared at the signature for long moments, feeling a thrill that the author had actually held this volume; it made the reading more urgent.
Rereading a book was a different experience from coming upon it for the first time. Especially if it was well-loved, like a favorite piece of music, it was capable of taking you back to a former self. In college, it was a revelation that the madwoman, Bertha, in the attic of Jane Eyre, might actually have an argument, might actually be a human being; moreover, a wronged one. That there were explanations for the crazy behavior. That the tall, dark, stoic Rochester might just be a misogynistic schemer. A newlywed when Claire next reread it, unpacking her boxes of books in her new home under Hanni’s scrutiny, this time she was much taken by the sensuality of the island, and the newlywed status of Antoinette and Rochester. That, too, had been omitted from Jane Eyre, as if Jane were jealous of Rochester’s erotic past. Now, all these years later, she identified with Antoinette’s mother, Annette, her fear, a common fear of women through time, that her better days might be behind her. How could she not try for all the things that had gone so suddenly, so without warning. Then, so close to the relief of marrying Mr. Mason, the death of a son now doubly destroyed Claire. Claire had to lay down the book and take breaks while reading the passage in which Annette’s son dies.