Their world fully contracted as Claire’s radiation treatments ended, and there was no longer any reason to leave the house. The doctor had looked at the final blood work and declared her cancer-free. She would have to be monitored every three months for the first year, he lectured. He had shaved off his goatee as a failed experiment, and his manner was brisk. Clearly, she would not be his model patient.
Claire sat stunned that she had made it through.
“So it worked? I’m cured?”
“Cancer-free.”
Claire put her arm around Minna. “She got me through this. The only way I could have made it.”
“There’s a chance, of course, that we already got it in the surgery. We never know.”
“Then all of this would have been for nothing?”
“Unless we killed what was left behind. We work in probabilities, not certainties.”
“Thank you,” Claire said, and she took the doctor’s hand and held it to her lips and kissed the back of it. “Thank you.”
He pulled his hand away, embarrassed. On their way out, Claire averted her eyes to the chairs of sick people. As if they were on the island of the doomed, and she gratefully had temporary reprieve.
Claire called the girls, crying. “It’s over.” She insisted they get together, begging Lucy to come home. Things would be different, she promised. A new start.
Forster called every day about the new foreman, but he could not affect her elation. When she told him her news, he was quiet for a moment. “That’s the best news I’ve ever heard.”
* * *
The mood returning home from the doctor was strange — Claire supposed it was due to the fire and smoke, which had turned the sky yellow and bone-dry. Grit dirtied her skin after she walked outside.
The expected foreman had still not arrived.
“Are you sure…?” Claire ventured.
“He is close.”
Power lines had burned down so the electricity went out. Claire turned on a small gas generator, but they left the lights off through the house, only using what was absolutely essential. They sat on the lawn during those bright nights, under an orange, burning sky, and could hear the fire like an angry beast crunching brush in the hills.
They didn’t bother to dress, wore odds and ends of clothes like rags. Minna let her hair go wild like a napped sculpture that caught bits of lint and leaf. Claire left her head bare with its new coat of peach fuzz. In a state of waiting, during the daytime they sat in the green gloom under the avocado tree. Minna stared up into the branches for hours, lost in thought.
“Do you know the name for these on my island? Zaboka. Sa se youn pyebwa zaboka,” she said, pointing at a clutch of avocados.
“Zaboka,” Claire repeated.
In absolute pleasure, Claire read and read, pure pleasure in escape, escape as in childhood, in early wife- and motherhood. Then she was drawn to tales of adventure, lost in Melville and Conrad, the open spaces of sea and exotic lands the only ones that echoed her own cavernous inside. Now she went with Antoinette to England, to the breaking of all illusions, dreaming of swans and snow. She felt an absolute freedom of self-consciousness between Minna and herself. They shared not their histories but their states: Minna, young and with child; Claire, ravaged but recovering.
“Tell me, Minna. Tell me what you want me to know.”
* * *
They slept side by side on a mattress pulled outside, sheltered under the avocado tree. Their breaths intermingled. As much as it was possible for another person to share one’s mortality, Minna had taken on hers. It had started with the disease and gone beyond that to new health. What kind of incalculable debt did Claire owe for that?
* * *
Alone now with Minna, not only did the preoccupation with cancer fall away, but so did the decades of her life. Claire felt they were contemporaries in a way she’d never felt with her daughters, who always made her feel older than her years. Each time she looked into Minna’s unlined face, she felt it mirrored her own.
Through the world’s reaction, one was informed of no longer being part of youth, part of what is vital, desirable. While young, it seemed a birthright, and those older had always been so (despite one’s parents’ faded pictures as evidence to the contrary). Passing into middle age was no different from being barred from one’s beloved home. One’s treasured children, now grown, banging a cruel drum in one’s face. Shutting the gate and turning the lock. Not knowing to cherish youth until it was no longer. God’s prank — to give the greatest gift at the age one can least understand it.
Why shouldn’t one grow to love the time one is most accomplished, most experienced, most importantly most oneself? Why shouldn’t there be an unseemliness to the twenties and thirties, the bareness of personality, raw, like uncooked meat, pure hormonal drives that canceled individual choice?
Claire was in her own fool’s paradise with Minna, no mirrors to remember the lines on her face, no dissenting, disapproving outside. Minna telling her what she wanted to believe, filling her mind with fictions. She felt like a yogi deep in the forest, meditating on the heart of the universe, hidden and yet connected with everything.
* * *
Minna and Claire ate dinner on the living-room floor by kerosene lamp: cheese, crackers, and fruit. They ate like nomads, campers, travelers passing through a place they would not soon return to. Moths circled the room and singed their wings at the top of the lamp’s glass chimney, leaving behind a smell like burnt hair. A large one hit the lamp and fell to the floor. He was furry brown, as big as a hummingbird. Minna picked him up in her hand and lofted him out the window. The gay gentleman will be safe now. Claire smiled, but then her amusement turned to confusion — had that happened before, or had it happened in the book? In the distance, they heard the wail of sirens.
“Tell me about Joshua.” It had been so long — hours, days? — since they last spoke that Claire was startled as much by the sound of Minna’s voice as the meaning of her words.
“I’d rather not—”
“I must know for the final ceremonies. That is the reason you are healed.”
* * *
Earlier that evening, they had drawn the wooden gate across the driveway entrance in preparation for the possibility of fire reaching them, never even considering escape. They wanted to prevent invasion — even at the cost of their lives. Unspoken that they both felt in an enchanted place, untouchable. A stiff gust pressed against the walls, the windows, the doors.
“The smoke is heavier. It’s getting closer,” Claire said. “Are we safe?”
They went out on the lawn and saw that the night stars had disappeared in long, clotted valleys of smoke. Something hot landed on her arm, and she swatted it, thinking it was a mosquito. She lifted her hand to discover a piece of hot ash.
“The wind’s coming our way.”
Sirens circled closer, the wailing stoppering their ears. Through loudspeakers she heard garbled orders for an evacuation. The roof of the ranch house was thirty-year-old shingle, the sides wood, a tinderbox.
“What should we do?” Claire said.