The sagging sofas in the living room, the tarnished brass coatrack in the hall, the dusty rows of crystal in the bar, turned out to be lies because Claire never used them. Barren things whose only human contact was Marie in cleaning them, and then cleaning them once more.
When the crew Forster hired came to clear out the charred trees, Marie paid them extra to move the dining-room table and chairs, the china cabinet, the sofas, and the piano into the barn.
* * *
Claire was weak as a small bird after the radiation, and they spent the hot days after the fires outside under the zabokas, marooned on lounge chairs in the hot shadows. Don came and sat on the porch looking hangdog. Tante had been wrong about her making babies. Marie knew this thing tugging inside her was because of him, and he would start feeling he owned it and her. If she knew one thing in this world, it was that she would never be owned again. She told Claire to make him go away, that she couldn’t stand looking at him anymore.
“But what about our weekend in Santa Barbara? I don’t understand,” he said.
“What about it?”
He looked at her belly and said he wanted to marry her. That would go away if he knew the truth of what she had been. All these spoiled people in love with their lies. Or maybe he was the rescuing type, but she had no interest in being rescued. He turned angry and said he couldn’t live without her anymore, as if she were his bad drug or something. Menti, liar! Marie laughed and laughed in his face, never hearing anything so ridiculous.
* * *
Claire backed away from life as she always did when it wasn’t to her liking. She read that novel over and over with a dreamy look on her face, as if it were going to reveal some truth she wouldn’t get at by just looking around her. She would understand me, Marie thought, if I were a character in a book.
Marie wanted to shake her by the shoulders until all the illusions came rattling out. Instead she peeled an orange, feeding Claire a section at a time, the sight of the juice on her fingers making her nauseated.
“I can’t eat any more,” Claire said, and rolled away.
“You must.” But Marie gave up, threw the rest of the fruit under a bush.
“I don’t understand these women Rhys writes about. They’re so destructive. Why don’t they just ask for help?”
“Life’s a lot harder than books.”
“You’re not listening to me.”
“No, I’m not.” Marie closed her eyes.
“I understand about hiding things. People can be cruel.”
That opened Marie’s eyes. “What would you know about that, silly Claire?”
“She writes about the colonials on the island.”
Marie shrugged. “I didn’t know those people so well. Those were the old-timers. Tucked away in their pink houses. Reading Austen and Brontë. They didn’t mix.”
“Your pink house?”
Marie forgot her lie about the pink house being hers. “We were isolated.”
“You never talk of home — it’s like you’ve forgotten it.”
“I’m not a forgetting person.”
* * *
Forster kept calling, kept circling. No one cared until someone else did. Marie told Claire to go have lunch and get him away. She used the time alone to call the antiques dealer in the paper, who came with a checkbook and took away the French bombé chest in the entry hall with its paw feet and gilded corners. The man had roving eyes, and he lit on the dark armoire in the living room. Marie hated it because it was so tall and hard to clean. The carved animals on it gave her the frights, especially the bears with gaping mouths. The dust always pooled in the bottom of their maws. The man nodded, and she said why not. A fat check for five thousand dollars deposited in her checking account that afternoon. Later she found out the haul was worth more like twenty thousand.
Nothing to put in the armoire’s place, but she replaced the bombé chest with a frail pine cabinet from a bedroom. She put back the picture frames and lamp in the exact same positions they stood on the chest, but it was a poor replication. The albums and tablecloths from the drawers she crammed on the single exposed shelf. When the cabinet could not hold another thing, she put the rest in paper bags.
Most were things Claire couldn’t miss: faded ribbons that had never been used to decorate birthday presents; a shot glass with the name of a town in Mexico and an agave plant painted on its side; a salt-and-pepper set embossed with a bronc-riding cowboy on each egg-shaped cylinder; pads and pads of paper with the names of real estate companies printed along the top. Why keep a calendar a decade old with pictures of kittens and beaches and a California poppy unfurled, its petals like the skirts of a dancer? Claire hoarded for a time of need that never came.
Marie thumbed the albums that contained everything expected with the raising of two daughters. She felt a stab inside her, wishing that she had been that family. How was it that an accident of birth caused happiness, or its opposite? Why shouldn’t it be her and her maman in those pictures? No possibility that Claire would be found a victim in the iron forest, or that Gwen and Lucy would ever have been restavek. Even the loss of the boy would have had to be shrugged off to survive back home. Injustice an everyday happening. Marie closed her eyes and swallowed the bitter that would otherwise overwhelm her.
She laughed at the jauntiness of a young Claire, chin jutted out at the world. She did have spunks then. A Claire long gone before Marie arrived. Was it the losing of her boy that changed her? In a wooden box like a treasure chest was a handful of old photos. A scrappy boy stood perched in the dark sunlight of each picture, white-blond hair and tanned face, the matching mischief of his young mother’s eyes, the same jut chin. In Marie’s favorite, he wrapped a wiry arm around Claire’s neck as if consoling her for soon leaving. Joshua. Marie looked closer, but there was no sign he knew his fate.
At the bottom of the chest was a manila envelope softened by age, full of folds, with a singe name, Hanni. Inside were pamphlets to such places as Spain, Bora-Bora, Thailand, and Paris. Some of them dog-eared from having been looked at many times, but none were written on. Most of them new as if they had been buried before they were ever considered. She found a picture of white people in Martinique drinking cocktails from glasses bristling with umbrellas. The women had hairdos from the fifties, and big, rounding skirts, and pump shoes shaped like boats. She read the prices and realized it was a trip no longer possible to take because now it was more a journey in time than place.
When Claire came home from her lunch with Forster, she paused where the bombé chest used to stand. A thrill of scare went through Marie at the prospect of being caught at last, but then Claire, deep in thought — resigned? — laid down her purse on the pine cabinet and moved on to the living room.
* * *
Claire always wanted Marie to talk, but she wanted to hear what she already imagined. Marie was supposed to speak in postcard descriptions: fiery sunsets, silky white beaches, smiling black faces. Already Claire’s mind was filled up and rejected what wasn’t already there. Something in Marie wanted to break that, push out the ugly, bloody, squalling truth. Wanted to talk about the heat and the flies, the violence, the shit and the dirt. The stuff they didn’t tell on pretty travel brochures of spiky cocktail glasses and women in boat-shaped shoes. How hard the earth floor was, how loud the shanties were with hunger, how heavy a grown man laid on a young girl’s bones. Favorite food? Any, when the norm was starvation. Marie wanted to lay the mewling thing, truth, at Claire’s feet.