* * *
One afternoon Minna and Claire were napping under the tree, lethargic from the heat. Claire dreamed of troubling things and woke to see Minna staring at the railing, specifically at two large fruit rats as large as house cats staring back. On the railing between them lay a half-eaten avocado. Both sides were quiet for so long that Claire began to think she was still dreaming, but when she moved her arm, the rats scurried away, the avocado falling onto the deck. Minna and she blinked at each other as if they had just woken from the same dream.
“Why are you so at ease with me? More than your daughters?”
“I can’t tell them things, do you understand?”
“I do, che. You and I, we know pain.”
“I want to protect them.” Ever since the girls had left, Claire had been bursting with the desire to talk to Minna about her visitation. “I need to tell you something.”
“Yes?” Her eyes were closed.
Claire pressed her hands together, plunged on. “While you were gone … the Fourth of July … one day in the kitchen … there was a flame.”
“A flame?” Still Minna did not open her eyes, and her seeming disinterest egged Claire on.
“I saw him. My boy.”
Now Minna opened her eyes, sat up with a big smile. “Good! Why didn’t you tell me earlier? It’s starting to work.”
“What is?” Claire asked, confused by Minna’s lack of surprise.
“Come.”
She took Claire by the arm and led her through the broiling house, up the tinder-dry stairs, and into her bedroom. Each time she opened the door, Claire was again surprised by the changes. Now the figures on the wall had multiplied again until they squeezed against each other, became as dense as a forest, so thick she could hardly tell the color of the wall for the profligacy of the creatures crowding it. The paint was so thick in places that the figures were beginning a life of three-dimensionality, beginning to lift themselves off the wall, like Michelangelo’s prisoners freeing themselves out of stone. Minna directed Claire’s attention to the middle of the room, to a large link chain, coated with a thick, gluey bright green paint, hanging from the ceiling and ending in a fabric-filled pail on the floor.
“This is the poto mitan. It attracts the iwa, the spirits, to come.”
“You don’t believe in this?”
Minna grinned. “Why not? No harm done, right?”
Claire turned and studied the figures on the wall. The silence stretched between them.
“Just fun and games, right?” Minna said. “Like a psychology course taught in pictures. No black magic or zombies.”
They both laughed, thin, shallow, insincere sounds that bounced off the hot, dusty glass of the windows.
“You’ve never seen him before, your son, have you?”
“No. Never.”
“It’s not a bad thing. It’s like a dream you make for something not finished in your real life. You finish it inside, in your heart.”
Chapter 13
The intense heat continued, and that, coupled with the isolation of illness, made time become elastic. With it insufferable to be in the kitchen, much less cook over a hot stove, Minna and Claire ate bowls of cold cereal with milk, adding nuts and bananas and berries. When the milk ran out, they poured fresh orange juice over the cereal and finally succumbed to eating it dry right out of the box. When the cereal was gone, they finished the almonds, walnuts, and pecans out of the pantry by the handful, picked strawberries and blackberries from the garden, ate oranges, tomatoes, and avocados. Hungry, sometimes Claire ate fruit straight off the tree, not quite ripe, and suffered stomachaches. She pulled carrots out of the earth, held them under the hose, then ate them, warm and sweet. The absence of the debilitating effects of chemo resembled a return to health; hunger was a return of vitality. It allowed her to entertain the ironic hope that she would soon be strong enough to endure the poisoning again.
The girls called on schedule again. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. How’re you? Fine. How’re you? Great. Couldn’t be better.
Octavio was a shadowy presence, only intruding on them once a week when he would stop at the house, stand below the porch, and fill Claire in on the details of work. It was as if he wanted to emphasize that he understood that he, too, was only an employee, subject to termination at any time like his daughter. An aloofness had entered their relationship since Paz had left, but Claire planned to repair the damage later, as soon as she had energy enough.
When the time came to have her checkup with the doctor, Minna and she spent the morning showering and dressing in a combination of dread and excitement at returning to the world. Claire searched for her wig, but could not find it and had to resort to a scarf. Her hands shook with nerves, both from the upcoming verdict and at the jolt of unaccustomed activity.
“What’s wrong here is that we need to get in the car to do anything. It would be better if we could walk to the grocery, to the laundry, the doctor,” Minna said.
Claire shook her head. “No one walks in California.”
“Well, they should.” They giggled as if drunk.
“It makes people nervous to see pedestrians. It seems unreliable. They wonder what you’ve done wrong to not have a car.”
* * *
They stopped at the IHOP and ordered two breakfasts each: one of eggs and bacon, the other of pancakes. Waiting for her food, Claire felt overwhelmed by the number of people around them, the noise. When someone sneezed a few tables down, she jumped. Had she become such a recluse? After their food deprivation, they now gorged until they could hardly move. But Claire only managed to eat half her portion before she was full to bursting. They sat back in their booth, giddy. Minna clowned, putting a smudge of whipped cream from a pancake on the end of her nose, while Claire laughed, holding her stomach in pain.
People in the surrounding booths turned and stared, but that only increased their hilarity, until Claire feared she would be sick from laughing so hard and long. Had she forgotten how to act in public? So-called polite society?
The waitress, a big, tired-looking Swede with graying blond hair, eyed Minna with distrust. Although Minna ordered for both of them, it was as if she were invisible. The waitress talked only to Claire, handed her the bill, returned the change to her, which she pointedly handed over to Minna. Unimpressed at the correction, the waitress turned her back on them. They revenged themselves with a nickel tip.
* * *
At the hospital, the doctor came in and sat studying Claire’s charts, still holding a grudge over Mexico, refusing her any small talk since that disobedience. He stroked a thin goatee he was growing, reluctantly satisfied with Claire’s white blood cell count but unhappy with the weight loss.
“Are you eating? Too nauseous?”
“Trying…” Claire said. Forgetting was more like it, she thought.
“After this much of a break, I don’t see the efficacy in starting the chemo again. If you agree, we’ll move straight to radiation. Provided you put on weight.”