* * *
Gwen arrived, a combination of long rest weekend and inspection. She was pleased by the pristine quiet of the ranch house, disturbed by her mother’s waning appearance. She carried in a large box with a bow from the car.
“A present?” Claire opened it to find a Styrofoam head with a blond wig perched on top of it. “Oh, no.”
“You’re going to need it, so might as well get a nice one.”
All day long Gwen’s voice could be heard in the living room, on the phone to clients. Minna hid away, mostly in her room, presumably painting. “So she’s an artist now?” At night, Gwen drank down a whole bottle of wine while Claire sat on the sofa listening to her complaints about her underemployed husband, her long hours at the office. The bitterness in her voice left Claire exhausted.
They quieted when Minna left for a date with Don.
“Great. She’s here a couple months and has a movie-star boyfriend.”
“She’s had a more difficult life than she’s let on.”
“Those,” Gwen said, pointing her finger out the window at Minna’s disappearing back, “are the kind of women who get what they want.”
* * *
Saturday night Claire became feverish. After consulting with a nurse on the phone, Gwen helped Minna bathe her with cool washcloths, then watched as Minna brewed up an elixir that Claire eagerly drank down.
“What’s in that?” Gwen asked.
“My maman taught me folk medicine. Natural ways to bring healing.”
“Got anything for stress?”
“I can make something for you.”
Within an hour, Claire’s temperature was down, and she slept comfortably.
“I’m so glad we decided to hire you,” Gwen said.
“Do me a favor?” Minna asked.
“What?”
“Don’t trouble your mother with your problems. She talks about you and Lucy all the time. She worries. If she felt you were happy, it would ease her mind.”
Gwen weighed her options and decided not to be insulted. She had not let on her shock in the change she saw in her mother — the new frailness. It hit her full force, her mother’s mortality, so hard to reconcile with the steel-minded mother who had raised them. The idea of her failing to heal scared Gwen.
“Minna’s worth her weight in gold,” she said to Claire the next day.
“She fights with Paz. Octavio doesn’t trust her.” She tried to minimize her feelings for the girl.
Gwen wasn’t fooled. “She’s taking good care of you. I’m happy you’re in good hands.”
* * *
Living with the vicissitudes of her rebellious body, Claire lost her taste for ordinary diversions. Minna was her midwife, introducing a whole other way of existence. While Claire could no longer tolerate watching the news on television, or listening to Mrs. Girbaldi’s neighborhood gossip, she could sit outside for hours watching the trees, her thoughts swirling like a leaf riding a swift current of air. The old urgencies of the farm, which had before so preoccupied her, Paz’s complaints, Gwen’s and Lucy’s constant dramas, all began to mercifully recede.
Time, too, lost its normal sequence. Minutes became dense, rich as whole lifetimes. Claire would leave an afternoon of daydreaming filled with ephemeral wisdom as if she had been away on a long year’s journey and come back with a box filled with treasure. But she had gone nowhere, traveled no farther than a few footsteps. She hated the word detachment, but there was that — a shifting as if from a northern to a southern exposure — the whole world appearing newly draped.
* * *
Still, when Claire went out into the judging world, to the hospital or more rarely to the grocery, she clapped on the wig that Gwen had bought for her, or she wrapped her head in the colorful scarves that regularly arrived like bouquets from Lucy, or she wore Forster’s old baseball cap, brim pressed low to her bare head, but this was for the world’s sake, not her own. Patients dressed as much for others as themselves. They knew the battle being fought, grew proud of their scars, but the nonsick were visibly relieved not to be confronted with rude reminders of mortality. So the diseased attended to their illnesses discreetly in their shrunken, compromised world.
Only at home did the world open out for Claire, spread its toes to dig down into the cool infinite. She loved to sit with her head uncovered, to feel the air move against her scalp, to be attuned to the exact moment a sunbeam touched her forehead, something that in her un-stripped-down state she had been oblivious to. It occurred to her, as dispassionately as watching a cloud cross the sky, that this deep joy she felt in the ordinary might be a prelude to her death.
In her more optimistic moments, she did not believe that the cancer would kill her, but she did feel privy to a great secret that changed everything else: namely, that someday, sooner or later, something would. This was the kind of impossible knowledge that one pays lip service to, but it was like explaining the feeling of being in love, or the pangs of childbirth, or the ache of fear or loneliness. One can only know such things from the inside out.
* * *
After a difficult night during which Claire hardly slept, Minna and she walked through the orchards earlier than usual, the tule fog dense as ever. Claire, bald-headed, dressed in a clownish, marigold-colored robe given to her by Mrs. Girbaldi, thought she must appear like a supplicant Buddhist nun.
“I hate the nights,” Claire said.
“I am always happiest in mornings and afternoons, never at night,” Minna said. “Ghosts haunt one then.” Suddenly Minna veered off and headed to an area that Claire had been careful to avoid. She dragged behind, trying to think of excuses not to continue.
“We’ve never walked here,” Minna said.
“Nothing of interest.” Claire stopped at the place the asphalt road gave out, but Minna insisted on walking down the gravel path.
The asphalt road faltered, crumbled into large bits of rock and gravel, further broke down to sand, then scraped into raw dirt and rough clay. Ants colonized part of the gully, and electric-blue thistle flowers crowded an uprooted eucalyptus, out of whose roots wild willow smothered the path leading to the wash.
Claire was torn between following and returning alone to the house when she heard Minna’s cry. Reluctantly she approached. Minna stood stricken in the clearing as if she had seen a gravestone. Claire coughed, ready to come up with some fatuous story, but Minna waved her off. She waded through the bracken and undergrowth, lush from neglect.
Claire had not visited the tree in years, and Octavio avoided cultivating a large area around it until it had become enchanted in its abandonment.
“We should be getting back,” Claire said quietly and futilely. With no sign Minna had heard her, exhausted, she sat on the ground, her back to Minna and the tree. “I’m feeling bad, if you care,” she shouted.
No response. Claire turned just in time to see Minna place her hand against the trunk, as if taking its heartbeat, as if searching for clues inside for the sad state of abuse on the outside.
“Minna!” Claire yelled, but the words pushed back down her throat. She closed her eyes and must have dozed off because she woke blinded and overheated by the sun. Minna glared down at her, eyes bleared, swollen. She knelt and with an outspread hand touched Claire as she had touched the tree, and Claire shrank away as if she were being branded with a bloody imprint.
“This is the God wood,” Minna said. “The tree of good and evil. Your tree of forgetting.”
“I don’t want this.”
“Pauvre amie. This is where it happened. A son who died here.”