“Let me take it,” Raisi said, stepping out of the line.
“You have to stand by Dad,” Claire said.
“Allow me.” Relicer had appeared from nowhere and offered to take the family snapshot. A bad omen. Forster reluctantly handed over the camera. But the old man fumbled with the buttons until the dirty-haired waiter reappeared. He put his hand on the banker’s shoulder. “I’ll take over, Pops.”
Claire again noticed the dirty fingernails, and Raisi noticed, too, her eyes clouding. Octavio started toward the waiter, sensing the women’s discomfort, but Sofia called him. “Go,” Claire said. She would handle this herself. The caterer would get an earful soon. Forster escorted Relicer to the car, handed him the envelope, and watched him drive away.
* * *
The night after her birthday party, Forster was late coming home from a machinery exposition out in Pomona. Her parents had left that morning to return home. A night of hot moonlight and citrus perfuming the air. Claire had worked late in the fields with Octavio. Listless from the heat, the kids begged to eat a dinner of party leftovers out on a blanket on the lawn.
After the meal, they played cards while she went to the barn to recover a wrap she had left from dancing the night before. Late into the night, Forster and she had danced in celebration of ending the Relicer part of their life. The caterer had bawled a waiter out, demanding to look in his bag before he left. When the silver globe was found in it, she came to the barn to inform them she was calling the police. Never seeing the man in question, Claire had stopped her, telling her to escort the man off their property with a warning not to show up again. A blemish on an otherwise perfect night. They kept dancing. Now ribbon and confetti lodged in the gravel like stars, flashed through the grass like comets, turning the world topsy-turvy.
* * *
From the dark surrounding groves, three men appeared, as if they had metamorphosed from the very trees — two Hispanics and one masked by a baseball cap and a bandana from the eyes down. They mumbled about looking for work while the bandanaed one squinted through the darkness at the house, farther up the drive.
Impossible that a house brimming with hundreds of people the day before could be empty and helpless tonight.
“My foreman, Octavio, is here. He will take care of you.”
But the bandana man seemed hostile to what he sensed was a lie. One of the Hispanic men, wearing a dirty, reeking T-shirt, had a stagger that she thought was a deformity until she noticed the same heaviness in the stride of the other. Drunk. She pictured the loaded rifle safely on the top shelf of the closet in the entry hallway. How perfectly, uselessly far away it was. Even if she reached it, the child-lock would take extra precious seconds to unfasten.
Out of the corner of her eye, Claire saw Gwen walking down the drive looking for her. A cold sweat formed under her arms at the sparkle of a moonlit blade in the hand of the bandana man. She bluffed, “Octavio, where are you?” until he hushed her with a shave of metal. They must smell fear on her like dogs.
“He’s gone home,” Gwen yelled back.
The bandana one touched her arm with the cold flat of the blade as he stood partially behind her. His breath was hot and sour; she could smell his unwashed skin as Gwen came up to the group.
“Qué linda. Bonito pelo,” said the staggering one as he reached to touch Gwen’s hair. Quickly she stepped back, eyes widening as she registered that none of these were their usual workers. Far away, Lucy could be heard arguing with Joshua. Claire saw it, too, for the first time, her daughter’s new curves, now a young woman rather than an awkward teenager, and it put a vise on her heart.
“Go back to the house, Gwen.”
“No!” the bandana one said. “Keep her.” He signaled to the other, who locked his arms around Gwen’s narrow shoulders in a bear hug. When she struggled in a spasm of panic, he shook her like a rag until her body went quiet. He held her with one arm and punched her on the side of the head with his other hand. She yelped in pain.
“Let her go back.” Claire put herself between the men and her daughter, her body forming a protective shield.
Raspy laughter from the other two, and the bandana one nodded. “Let’s all go see what’s in the house.”
Her thoughts stopped, sputtered, jumped, grabbing. “Money,” she said, the suggestion of what they might otherwise do intolerable.
“Let’s go.”
“Not here. It’s at the bank. Tomorrow.”
The bandana one laughed, and she knew this was what got him off, the humiliation. He clapped his hands, an understanding between them. “We’ll need a hostage. Otherwise you’ll tell the cops.”
“Touch her and the deal’s off.”
“How do you figure you’re calling the shots?” He stopped, contemplating. “Okay, let the girl go. Keep quiet, cutie, or Mama isn’t coming back.”
A car motor broke the silence, headlights sweeping the trees just short of them as a pickup went up the drive to the house. Octavio returned or Forster come back early? The men ran, pulling Claire with them to the deepest part of the black-bitter orchard. Afraid for herself, more afraid for her children, she let out a cry. A mistake. They shoved her on the ground, a boot kicked her side. “Shut up!” They would kill her. Kill them. Mouth gagged with thick fingers and dirty cloth.
“How does the rich puta feel now? Want to order me around now?” he said, as a fist crushed bone.
Rage, hatred, welled through muscles that should have had the strength of new steel. Unacceptable to her that she could be pinned down so easily, that she could not fight back. That she had ignored Forster’s warnings of keeping a gun close by. Like a dog, she bit an ear and was punched. Kneed a groin and was cut. Would gladly have died fighting back, except the maternal kept her from sacrificing herself.
A small voice, not Forster’s, not Octavio’s, broke through. The worst pain yet — Josh had somehow found them. “Mom?”
She screamed and grabbed hair. A hard knock to her head. As she lost consciousness, she heard a scurrying and then one of the men winded, butted in the stomach. “Grab the little fuck!”
* * *
Recalling those next hours, so frightening, consciousness intermittent, all thought evaporated. She was on the same plane of existence as an animal being led to the stockyard, pure physical dread, and afterward, months later, she understood her mother’s terror escaping across the border, how for so many years she was unable to talk of it. Terror was intimate, entwined in the moment, not translatable.
Afterward, her mouth filled with salt from blood and sweet from blood. Seeded in the dirt, her fingers plowed earth she loved but was now separated from. Divorced, dismissed, expelled from. Was this the feeling of being thrown out of that first, perfect garden? Her farm, her trees, and yet she had been rendered helpless. She woke from unconsciousness to the comfort of a warm rain that turned out to be piss. All bets off because she had fought, and they had gorged on their power over her. She would never forget the spiked hatred in their laughter. Their carelessness. Their lack of fear in repercussion. She lay on the ground, unable to move. Broken arm, torn life. Later (how long? time untethered), alone, she melted into the ground, a superficial burial. Until she remembered Josh.
Chapter 2
The calling voices of the girls were like fingers poking in the darkness. Purple groves that took the dark shapes of men. Leaves in slow swoon on the trees. Her trees, her orchard, but unable to protect her. Broken Claire lay in the dirt as the irrigation came on, the drops sharp and caressing. The earth underneath her fed to mud, but still she lay there. Waiting until the pain washed away. It would never wash away. Curious cleansing of water against evil.