Raisi took care of the girls, cooked and cleaned for the family, but the smell of food being prepared in the kitchen was a betrayal to Claire, and an even bigger betrayal when her stomach responded. She thought it unspeakable that life would dare go on with her son not there to eat his dinner. She sat at the table picking at a plate of macaroni and cheese.
Lucy, reading a book at the table, looked up at her. “We’re just like the people in The Cherry Orchard.”
Claire stared at her. “Why do people have children?” she said, then clamped her hand over her mouth in shame. “I didn’t mean that.”
“I know Josh will come back,” Lucy said, patting Claire’s hand with her own childish one.
Claire looked at her. “Why?”
The intensity of the stare made Lucy’s face burn with guilt. “This is his favorite.” Pointing her fork to the food.
The spoonful in Claire’s mouth turned toxic. She ran to the sink and spat it out because, somewhere, her boy was hungry. Her stomach full when his was not.
* * *
The hours passed in a trance, the farm abandoned as the searchers, more desperate, skipped areas now, made looping excursions farther and farther out, past the lake, the fenced ditches, the neighbors’ land. For once, Claire stayed inside, unwilling to go out into the groves. Raisi spent her time in the kitchen or in the living room, brushing out the girls’ hair, stringing it with ribbon, teaching them parlor card games she had learned as a young girl. Dropping their usual teenage sangfroid, the girls now acted clinging and childish.
Claire and Forster fell into bed each night stunned, sleeping fully clothed, with shoes nearby. One night, there was the smallest tap on the bedroom door.
“Josh?” Claire said, bolting upright in bed.
Gwen came in, her cotton nightgown glowing in the dark. “We can’t sleep,” she said. Lucy sulked behind her.
“Bring your sleeping bags in,” Claire said, hiding her disappointment. She watched over them as they arranged themselves around the bed, the bags like cocoons with the unformed girls inside. Since the disappearance, Lucy, thirteen years old, had started to suck her thumb in her sleep. It bothered Claire how meek the girls had turned, how serious-faced. But how could it be otherwise? Her mother was right. If she wasn’t careful, she would lose them also.
A lifetime in each cycle of hours. Now Claire fought her increasing despair as one day passed into the next by forcing herself to go with Octavio to roam the grounds, both of them gloomy about the burnt edges of the thirsty leaves. If they didn’t turn the water on soon, the fruit would be destroyed. Should they pick early and risk having the wholesaler reject much of it? Impossible without bringing in a full team of laborers. The false drought depriving the trees of their lifeblood, their air and nourishment. A whole season’s worth of work, the entire crop, gone. If it went longer, the trees would die and need to be replanted. Enough to put them out of business.
Claire hid in the girls’ room, reading them story after story, and when her voice cracked too much, they took turns reading. “What would you like? Something new?” But they did not want a story they did not already know the outcome to, did not want the complexities of the adult world. They reverted to their childhood, known classics: Black Beauty, The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables, Jane Eyre.
* * *
Housebound, cloistered days, the sound of classical music, the smells of her mother’s cooking, returned Claire to her own childhood.
Their apartment was over her father’s bookstore. One had to wind one’s way through rows of shelves to find the staircase to get there. She would come home from school with friends and be embarrassed by the foreign smell of their apartment, the ever-present smells of cabbage and burning votive candles, her mother’s rosary and thick nylons that made her look ancient and severe compared to the stylish mothers in tennis skirts and sneakers. Their home even sounded different. No big-band records or Sinatra. Instead, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies played continually till the vinyl records crackled, and as a child Claire thought that was the sound of the past itself.
Another thing that marked them as foreign — the Nagys were a reading family and derived their knowledge of the world first through books. Subsequently, Claire found she only really understood a subject if she read about it in print. Close to Hollywood, all their neighbors worshipped movie stars, but they instead worshipped writers. A house of freely mingling nationalities — the Russians with the French, the South Americans with the Deep Southerners with the Irish. Dostoyevsky nestled against Borges, Zola communed with Faulkner and Joyce. As well, there was no discrimination between the living and the dead, and when school friends asked about the pictures of the grim men (Kafka and her father’s favorite, Márai) in the living room, Claire lied and said they were distant great-uncles.
The gloomy apartment was crowded, the small rooms overwhelmed, filled with a past life bigger than their present one: towering antique armoires from Austria, featuring fixed forms of birds in flight and flowers native to the Black Forest. No longer being fashionable, these were picked up cheap at estate sales. An armoire in Claire’s room was made of darkest wood and covered a whole wall, featuring a black bear with a gaping maw in which Claire used to hide a single grape. A tarnished Polish samovar with its potbellied blue flame boiled away on a sideboard each Sunday, while Raisi served Viennese pastries on china to the neighborhood ladies, scandalizing them by giving the grown-ups thimblefuls of eye-burning slivovitz, plum brandy, poured into crystal goblets stained the red, blue, and gold colors of church windows.
Almos tried to learn golf, planned days at the beach, bought a barbecue, but Raisi stubbornly clung to the old ways as if she were still in a place of scarcity, still in a place of cold, blowing winds.
Now Claire looked at the things inside her own house so painstakingly gathered, including the chest with the black bear, the samovar, the books. Had that really been her, trying to create a home so hard? A museum of family? She, after all, wasn’t an exile like Raisi, or was she? Had she inherited the damage of loss the way the children of soldiers inherit that specific heartbreak?
* * *
Guilty about falling asleep for a few hours after the first week, Claire woke to the news that a piece of paper had been left in the mailbox, no observers, with a demand for ransom. The police immediately went into action, interviewing all the workers again. “I need to talk with you,” Claire said to Forster.
“What?”
They went outside to the porch. “I offered them money.”
He paused, considering, and his slow deliberateness maddened her. “I don’t think—”
“What if I gave them the idea to take Josh?”
“Stop it.”
“We need to get the money.”
“The police said no.”
“He’s not their son.”
“Let them handle it.”
“My fault. Our son.” Claire ran into the house. Punched the numbers of the bank and demanded to speak with Mr. Relicer. She was told he was in a meeting. “This is an emergency,” she yelled. After too long, he came on.
“Mrs. Baumsarg, we heard—”
“I need money. An increase.”
“Yes, well … the line was closed at your request.”