She kept flipping pages.
“That’s not much,” Marie said. “Could be describing anywhere.”
“Here: ‘Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near.’”
Claire slapped the book shut, satisfied. “I know that place better than places I’ve actually been.”
“Yeah?”
“Like the facts you’ve told me about yourself. They don’t explain the Minna I see in front of me.”
“Those last words were Rochester’s. He hated it there. She didn’t feel that way about her island. But to her — no matter how ugly, how haunted, it is home. We find something to love in it because it is what we have. She saw kind faces — Caro’s, for instance, in the village — where he saw only ignorance and sin.”
“I thought you forgot that part?”
“You never forget. That book is in me. It’s just buried.”
Claire nodded, somber. “Don loves you.”
Marie shook her head. “He has no idea who I am. You only love what you understand.”
“Then explain yourself to us.”
“You. I know your pain. Not just the boy, or the girls, or Forster, but your own failure.” Marie, now gentle, caressed Claire’s head, put her lips against Claire’s ear. “That day I touched the tree, it told me. We understand each other, don’t we, Agatha?”
* * *
The time of the fires marked the end of the radiation treatments. Claire more exhausted now than ever before, eyes like a bed of ashes. Marie had counted on the time of the treatments to be enough, that she would be bored like a stray dog, ready for the adventure of the road again. But as the time came and went, she had grown soft, used to the deep sofas and china cups, beds with sheets the dull white of bleached bone. She resented that she would soon be expected to move on.
She felt a deep feeling for Claire, but did not recognize it was love. Comfortable, she knew she didn’t want to go back into the Uncertainty, could not imagine going back to the Troubles. She started to think she was whom she pretended to be. That was why she kept calling Jean-Alexi — to be reminded she was nothing.
While Claire slept, she called him to come. Although she knew what he was, she missed him. Couldn’t he change again? Change back into the boy in her father’s abandoned house, the one who serenaded her with crickets? They were the same, after all.
* * *
A month after the radiation, waiting for Jean-Alexi to show up any day, Claire began to have enough energy to run the farm again. Marie had to hurry and dull it. She built Claire up to drinking two “elixirs” a day. It would not do to have Claire full strength when he finally arrived. Back in Florida, Marie had discovered the uses of Valium. Claire floated through her days, lost in her own dreamworld.
“Where’s the dining-room table?” she asked, her eyes faraway.
“Remember, we discussed the rooms were too crowded?”
“Oh, yes,” Claire said, trying not to appear forgetful or suspicious.
The next day while she lay in a drugged sleep, the same people who bought the bombé chest and armoire came out with a truck and wrote Marie out a bigger check for the antique farmhouse table in the kitchen, a set of cherrywood rocking chairs, plus the big silver samovar that always needed polishing. Even while they were driving away, Marie stood in the driveway thinking there was again as much to take out of that stuffed house: barrister bookcases, sleigh beds, mahogany library tables.
* * *
With the house emptier, Marie was tempted to take up cleaning again because at last she could see what was left. Like her childhood home it was bare, but as Maman said, as clean as God’s own house.
With money sitting in a safe-deposit box, Marie felt safe for the first time since she had left the island, but how to make that last? Claire, when not asleep, stared into space and asked her relentless questions, and Marie spun out fairy tales in answer. When the girls called, Marie held up the receiver to Claire’s ear, but she lost attention quickly, and Marie made excuses, making a note to herself to lower the dosing. Claire agreed that the house felt roomier with the furniture “stored.” Time growing shorter, Marie grew more bold, went into Claire’s closet, tried on her clothes, but Claire was not like Linda in Florida; she had always been a woman without vanities, and there was nothing to Marie’s taste.
* * *
She sat on Claire’s bed and watched her sleep. She was the first person Marie had loved since her mother. She would be sad when this time was over. Tears formed in her eyes.
Claire was lethargic, her breaths sweeping shallow like a bird’s, and she whimpered in fear that the cancer had come back. Why else feel so strange?
But Marie could only dose Claire’s mind; her body fought on with a vegetable vigor. She did not recognize these were the growing pains of health. But Marie saw the change. Undeniable as the turning of the winter solstice — even one day later, the darkness was less, and beyond the physical darkness, one felt in one’s bones that light was gaining in the world, conquering. Looking at Claire, one clearly saw that her life was returning — her color was pink instead of sheet white, her gauntness caused by hunger, not lurking death. Her skin had a fuzz of peach, the chick fluff on her scalp enough to make them both laugh. Marie had nursed her baby back to life, and she was proud as a mother and terrified as a mother — a matter of time before she was no longer needed. What came after? Why didn’t she deserve a home?
* * *
Claire got too weak, hardly wanting to leave her bed to relieve herself, and they were scheduled to visit the doctor in a few days, so Marie lessened the dose in the elixirs, and Claire walked around the house like a plucked bird, humming. Marie felt drunk with power like a tiny god. This smallest reprieve, and she had never seen Claire so happy. Joy is a thing that can be delivered in small slivers.
* * *
“Having the house empty helps me think,” Claire said. “Maybe I should redecorate. Start all over. Or travel? Maybe go see Lucy in Santa Fe? What do you think?”
“You should rest,” Marie said.
“How about some of your chicken and rice. I could eat a horse. I could eat a whale.” She giggled at her health, unsure if what she felt inside was real.
The night Jean-Alexi arrived, Marie put triple the dose in Claire’s elixir. She vomited, and her blood pressure dropped extremely low. Marie had to measure it twice to make sure she’d read it right. She was scared, frightened she had gone too far.
Claire cried Marie’s name in the night, and she went to her.
“Climb in bed and keep me warm.” Tears ran down her face, but they were healthy, glistening tears.
“Here I am, doudou.”
“I dreamed I was dying.”
“We’re all going to die someday, che.”
“You know what I mean,” Claire said, her eyes accusing, and Marie thought her secret was found out.
“Recurrence,” Claire hissed, accusing, as if the word held all the pain of the world inside it.
“Don’t talk like that.” Marie wiped Claire’s tears with her fingertip, put it inside her mouth. “It’s just a bad dream. Let me tell you what I see. I see you healthy in the future.”
“I get so scared.” Claire whimpering like a child, and Marie could not help the revulsion that lay sour in her throat. She lifted Claire off her arm and chest, and when she grabbed at Marie’s shirt, she thumped her cheek with her middle finger, a hard pluck off the thumb that shocked Claire into silence.