Torch: A Novel Part 1

TORCH.

Cheryl Strayed.

FOR BRIAN JAY LINDSTROM.

AND.

IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER,.

BOBBI ANNE LAMBRECHT,.

with love.

Acknowledgments.

I am grateful to Syracuse University, the Julia and David White Artists' Colony, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Sacatar Foundation, and the Wurlitzer Foundation for the gift of time and financial support while I wrote this book.

A heartfelt thanks to all the people at Houghton Mifflin, whose hard work and pa.s.sion helped bring this book into the world. I am especially indebted to my editor, Janet Silver, for her insight, brilliance, and kindness; to Meg Lemke, who guided me expertly along the way; and to Megan Wilson, publicist extraordinaire.

A deep bow to my agent and fairy G.o.dmother, Laurie Fox of the Linda Chester Literary Agency.

I couldn't have written this book without the encouragement and love of my friends and teachers, too many to name here. Special thanks to Paulette Bates Alden, Christopher Boucher, Arielle Greenberg Bywater, Mary Caponegro, Arthur Flowers, Lisa Glatt, Corrine Glesne, Sarah Hart, Aimee Hurt, Tom Kilbane, Gretchen Legler, EJ Levy, Emillia Noordhoek, Dorothy Novick, Salvador Plascencia, Lee and John and Astia Roper-Batker, George Saunders, Anne Vande Creek, Bridgette Walsh, and Devon Wright.

I'm grateful to Karen Patch, Leif Nyland, and Glenn (Benny) Lambrecht for all those years together, and for being modern pioneers with me.

My deepest debt is to Brian Lindstrom, for everything and then some. For love and for life. For keeping the faith and carrying the torch.

PART I.

Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it: it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.

-Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre.

1.

SHE ACHED. As if her spine were a zipper and someone had come up behind her and unzipped it and pushed his hands into her organs and squeezed, as if they were b.u.t.ter or dough, or grapes to be smashed for wine. At other times it was something sharp like diamonds or shards of gla.s.s engraving her bones. Teresa explained these sensations to the doctor-the zipper, the grapes, the diamonds, and the gla.s.s-while he sat on his little stool with wheels and wrote in a notebook. He continued to write after she'd stopped speaking, his head c.o.c.ked and still like a dog listening to a sound that was distinct, but far off. It was late afternoon, the end of a long day of tests, and he was the final doctor, the real doctor, the one who would tell her at last what was wrong.

Teresa held her earrings in the palm of one hand-dried violets pressed between tiny panes of gla.s.s-and put them on, still getting dressed after hours of going from one room to the next in a hospital gown. She examined her shirt for lint and cat hair, errant pieces of thread, and primly picked them off. She looked at Bruce, who looked out the window at a ship in the harbor, which cut elegantly, tranquilly along the surface of the lake, as if it weren't January, as if it weren't Minnesota, as if it weren't ice.

At the moment she wasn't in pain and she told the doctor this while he wrote. "There are long stretches of time that I feel perfectly fine," she said, and laughed the way she did with strangers. She confessed that she wouldn't be surprised if she were going mad or perhaps this was the beginning of menopause or maybe she had walking pneumonia. Walking pneumonia had been her latest theory, the one she liked best. The one that explained the cough, the ache. The one that could have made her spine into a zipper.

"I'd like to have one more glance," the doctor said, looking up at her as if he had risen from a trance. He was young. Younger. Was he thirty? she wondered. He instructed her to take her clothes off again and gave her a fresh gown to wear and then left the room.

She undressed slowly, tentatively at first, and then quickly, crouching, as if Bruce had never seen her naked. The sun shone into the room and made everything lilac.

"The light-it's so pretty," she said, and stepped up to sit on the examining table. A rosy slice of her abdomen peeped out from a gap in the gown, and she mended it shut with her hands. She was thirsty but not allowed a drop of water. Hungry, from having not eaten since the night before. "I'm starving."

"That's good," said Bruce. "Appet.i.te means that you're healthy." His face was red and dry and cracked-looking, as if he'd just come in from plowing the driveway, though he'd been with her all day, going from one section of the hospital to the next, reading what he could find in the waiting rooms. Reading Reader's Digest and Newsweek and Self against his will but reading hungrily, avidly, from cover to cover. Throughout the day, in the small s.p.a.ces of time in which she too had had to wait, he'd told her the stories. About an old woman who'd been bludgeoned to death by a boy she'd hired to build a doghouse. About a movie star who'd been forced by divorce to sell his boat. About a man in Kentucky who'd run a marathon in spite of the fact that he had only one foot, the other made of metal, a complicated, st.u.r.dy coil fitted into a shoe.

The doctor knocked, then burst in without waiting for an answer. He washed his hands and brought his little black instrument out, the one with the tiny light, and peered into her eyes, her ears, her mouth. She could smell the cinnamon gum he chewed and also the soap he'd used before he touched her. She kept herself from blinking while staring directly into the bullet of light, and then, when he asked, followed his pen expertly around the room using only her eyes.

"I'm not a sickly woman," she declared.

n.o.body agreed. n.o.body disagreed. But Bruce came to stand behind her and rub her back.

His hands made a sc.r.a.ping sound against the fabric of the gown, so rough and thick they were, like tree bark. At night he cut the calluses off with a jackknife.

The doctor didn't say cancer-at least she didn't hear him say it. She heard him say oranges and peas and radishes and ovaries and lungs and liver. He said tumors were growing like wildfire along her spine.

"What about my brain?" she asked, dry-eyed.

He told her he'd opted not to check her brain because her ovaries and lungs and liver made her brain irrelevant. "Your b.r.e.a.s.t.s are fine," he said, leaning against the sink.

She blushed to hear that. Your b.r.e.a.s.t.s are fine.

"Thank you," she said, and leant forward a bit in her chair. Once, she'd walked six miles through the streets of Duluth in honor of women whose b.r.e.a.s.t.s weren't fine and in return she'd received a pink T-shirt and a spaghetti dinner.

"What does this mean exactly?" Her voice was reasonable beyond reason. She became acutely aware of each muscle in her face. Some were paralyzed, others twitched. She pressed her cold hands against her cheeks.

"I don't want to alarm you," the doctor said, and then, very calmly, he stated that she could not expect to be alive in one year. He talked for a long time in simple terms, but she could not make out what he was saying. When she'd first met Bruce, she'd asked him to explain to her how, precisely, the engine of a car worked. She did this because she loved him and she wanted to demonstrate her love by taking an interest in his knowledge. He'd sketched the parts of an engine on a napkin and told her what fit together and what parts made other parts move and he also took several detours to explain what was likely to be happening when certain things went wrong and the whole while she had smiled and held her face in an expression of simulated intelligence and understanding, though by the end she'd learned absolutely nothing. This was like that.

She didn't look at Bruce, couldn't bring herself to. She heard a hiccup of a cry from his direction and then a long horrible cough.

"Thank you," she said when the doctor was done talking. "I mean, for doing everything you can do." And then she added weakly, "But. There's one thing-are you sure? Because ... actually ... I don't feel that sick." She felt she'd know it if she had oranges growing in her; she'd known immediately both times that she'd been pregnant.

"That will come. I would expect extremely soon," said the doctor. He had a dimpled chin, a baby face. "This is a rare situation-to find it so late in the game. Actually, the fact that we found it so late speaks to your overall good health. Other than this, you're in excellent shape."

He hoisted himself up to sit on the counter, his legs dangling and swinging.

"Thank you," she said again, reaching for her coat.

Carefully, wordlessly, they walked to the elevator, pushed its translucent b.u.t.ton, and waited for it to arrive. When it did, they staggered onto it and saw, gratefully, that they were alone together at last.

"Teresa," Bruce said, looking into her eyes. He smelled like the small things he'd eaten throughout the day, things she'd packed for him in her famously big straw bag. Tangerines and raisins.

She put the tips of her fingers very delicately on his face and then he grabbed her hard and held her against him. He touched her spine, one vertebra, and then another one, as if he were counting them, keeping track. She laced one hand into his belt loop at the back of his jeans and with the other hand she held a seash.e.l.l that hung on a leather string around her neck. A gift from her kids. It changed color depending on how she moved, flashing and luminescent like a tropical fish in an aquarium, so thin she could crush it in an instant. She considered crushing it. Once, in a quiet rage, she'd squeezed an entire bottle of coconut-scented lotion onto the tops of her thighs, having been denied something as a teenager: a party, a record, a pair of boots. She thought of that now. She thought, Of all the things to think of now. She tried to think of nothing, but then she thought of cancer. Cancer, she said to herself. Cancer, cancer, cancer. The word chugged inside of her like a train starting to roll. And then she closed her eyes and it became something else, swerving away, a bead of mercury or a girl on roller skates.

They went to a Chinese restaurant. They could still eat. They read the astrology on the placemats and ordered green beans in garlic sauce and cold sesame noodles and then read the placemats again, out loud to each other. They were horses, both of them, thirty-eight years old. They were in perpetual motion, moved with electric fluidity, possessed unconquered spirits. They were impulsive and stubborn and lacked discretion. They were a perfect match.

Goldfish swam in a pond near their table. Ancient goldfish. Unsettlingly large goldfish. "h.e.l.lo, goldfish," she cooed, tilting toward them in her chair. They swam to the surface, opening their big mouths in perfect circles, making small popping noises.

"Are you hungry?" she asked them. "They're hungry," she said to Bruce, then looked searchingly around the restaurant, as if to see where they kept the goldfish food.

At a table nearby there was a birthday party, and Bruce and Teresa were compelled to join in for the birthday song. The woman whose birthday it was received a flaming custard, praised it loudly, then ate it with reserve.

Bruce held her hand across the table. "Now that I'm dying we're dating again," she said for a joke, though they didn't laugh. Sorrow surged erotically through them as if they were breaking up. Her groin was a fist, then a swamp. "I want to make love with you," she said, and he blinked his blue eyes, tearing up so much that he had to take his gla.s.ses off. They'd tapered off over the years. Once or twice a month, perhaps.

Their food arrived, great bowls of it, and they ate as if nothing were different. They were so hungry they couldn't speak, so they listened to the conversation of the happy people at the birthday party table. The flaming custard lady insisted that she was a dragon, not a rabbit, despite what the placemat said. After a while they all rose and put their heavy coats on, strolling past Teresa and Bruce, admiring the goldfish in their pond.

"I had a goldfish once," said a man who held the arm of the custard lady. "His name was Charlie." And everyone laughed uproariously.

Later, after Bruce paid the bill, they crossed a footbridge over a pond where you could throw a penny.

They threw pennies.

On the drive home it hit them, and they wept. Driving was good because they didn't have to look at each other. They said the word, but as if it were two words. Can. Sir. They had to say it slowly, dissected, or not at all. They vowed they would not tell the kids. How could they tell the kids?

"How could we not?" Teresa asked bitterly, after a while. She thought of how, when the kids were babies, she would take their entire hands into her mouth and pretend that she was going to eat them until they laughed. She remembered this precisely, viscerally, the way their fingers felt pressing onto her tongue, and she fell forward, over her knees, her head wedged under the dash, to sob.

Bruce slowed and then pulled over and stopped the truck. They were out of Duluth now, off the freeway, on the road home. He hunched over her back, hugging her with his weight wherever he could.

She took several deep breaths to calm herself, wiped her face with her gloves, and looked up out the windshield at the snow packed hard on the shoulder of the road. She felt that home was impossibly far.

"Let's go," she said.

They drove in silence under the ice-clear black sky, pa.s.sing turkey farms and dairy farms every few miles, or houses with lit-up sheds. When they crossed into Coltrap County, Bruce turned the radio on, and they heard Teresa's own voice and it shocked them, although it was a Thursday night. She was interviewing a dowser from Blue River, a woman named Patty Peterson, the descendant of a long line of Petersons who'd witched wells.

Teresa heard herself say, "I've always wondered about the art-I suppose you could call it an art-or perhaps the skill of selecting a willow branch." And then she switched the radio off immediately. She held her hands in a clenched knot on her lap. It was ten degrees below zero outside. The truck made a roaring sound, in need of a new m.u.f.fler.

"Maybe it will go away as mysteriously as it came," she said, turning to Bruce. His haggard face was beautiful to her in the soft light of the dashboard.

"That's what we're going to shoot for," he said, reaching for her knee. She considered sliding over to sit close to him, straddling the clutch, but felt tied to her place near the dark window.

"Or I could die," she said calmly, as if she'd come to peace with everything already. "I could very well die."

"No, you couldn't."

"Bruce."

"We're all going to die," he said softly. "Everyone's going to die, but you're not going to die now."

She pressed her bare hand flat onto the window, making an imprint in the frost. "I didn't think I'd die this way."

"You have to stay positive, Ter. Let's get the radiation started and then we'll see. Just like the doctor said."

"He said we'll see about chemo. Whether I'll be strong enough for chemo after I'm done with radiation, not about me being cured, Bruce. You never pay attention." She felt irritated with him for the first time that day and her irritation was a relief, as if warm water were being gently poured over her feet.

"Okay, then," he said.

"Okay what?"

"Okay, we'll see. Right?"

She stared out the window.

"Right?" he asked again, but she didn't answer.

They drove past a farm where several cows stood in the bright light of the open barn, their heads turned toward the dark of the woods beyond, as if they detected something there that no human could. A thrashing.

2.

THE SOUND of his mother's voice filled Joshua with shame.

"This is Modern Pioneers!" she exclaimed from all four of the speakers in the dining room of the Midden Cafe and the one speaker back in the kitchen that was splattered with grease and soot and ketchup. Joshua listened to the one in the kitchen as he scrubbed pots with a ball of steel wool, his arms elbow-deep in scorching, soapy water. Hearing his mother's voice made his head hurt, as if a dull yet pointed object were being pressed into his eardrums. Her radio voice was exactly like she was: insistent, resolute, amused, wanting to know. Wanting to know everything from everyone she interviewed. "So, how exactly, can you tell us, do you collect the honey from the bees?" she'd ask, dusky and smooth. Other times she held forth for the entire hour herself, discussing organic gardening and how to build your own cider press, quilting and the medicinal benefits of ginseng. Once, she'd played "Turkey in the Straw" on her dulcimer for all of northern Minnesota to hear and then read from a book about American folk music. Recently, she had announced how much money she'd spent on tampons in six months and then proceeded to describe other, less costly options: natural sponges and cotton pads that she'd sewn herself out of Joshua and Claire's old shirts. She'd actually said that: Joshua and Claire's old shirts. Claire was off to college by then, leaving Joshua alone to wallow in humiliation the first week of his senior year of high school.

Marcy pushed her way back into the kitchen through the swinging door, holding a stack of dirty plates with uneaten edges of food and wadded-up napkins. She set them on the counter where Joshua had just finished cleaning up and then reached into her ap.r.o.n for a cigarette. Joshua watched her, trying to appear not to, as he sc.r.a.ped off the dishes. She was in her late twenties, married, with two kids, short and big-breasted, which made her look heavier than she was. Joshua spent a lot of his time at work trying to decide whether he thought she was pretty or not. He was seventeen, lanky and fair, quiet but not shy.

His mother was talking to a dowser named Patty Peterson. He could hear Teresa's animated voice and then Patty's quavering one. Marcy stood listening, untied her ap.r.o.n, and tied it again more tightly. "Next thing you know your mom will go down to Africa and teach us all about it. Maybe the way they go to the bathroom down there."

"She would like to go to Africa," Joshua said, dumb and steadfast and serious, refusing to acknowledge even the slightest joke about his mother. She would go to Africa, he knew. She'd go anywhere, she'd leap at the chance.

"They got an African over in Blue River now. Some adopted kid," Vern said from the back door. He had it propped open with a bucket despite the cold. Marcy was the owner's daughter; Vern, the night cook.

"Not African, Vern. Black," said Marcy. "He's from the Cities. That's not Africa." She adjusted the barrette that held her curly hair up at the back of her head. "Are you trying to freeze us all to death in here?"

Vern shut the door. "Maybe your mom will interview the African," he said. "Tell us what he has to say for himself."

"Be nice," Marcy said. She went up on her tiptoes and pulled a stack of Styrofoam containers down from the top shelf, clenching her cigarette in her mouth. "Nothing against your mom, Josh," she said. "She's a super nice lady. An interesting lady. It takes all kinds." With great care, she tapped the burning end of her cigarette on a plate, then she blew on it and put it back into her ap.r.o.n pocket and buzzed out the door.

Six years ago, when his mother had first started the show, Joshua hadn't felt ashamed. He'd been proud, as if he had been hoisted up onto a platform and was glowing red-hot and lit up from within. He believed his mother was famous, that they all were-he and Claire and Bruce. Teresa had made them part of the show; his life, their lives, were the fodder. She made them eat raw garlic to protect against colds and heart disease, rub pennyroyal on their skin to keep the mosquitoes away, drink a tea of boiled jack-in-the-pulpit when they had a cough. They could not eat meat, or when they did they had to kill it themselves, which they did one winter when they'd butchered five roosters that as chicks they'd thought were hens. They shook jars of fresh cream until it congealed into lumps of b.u.t.ter. His mother got wool straight off a neighbor's sheep and carded it and spun it on a spinning wheel that Bruce had built for her. She saved broccoli leaves and collected dandelions and the inner layers of bark from certain trees and used these things to make dye for the yarn. It came out the most unlikely colors: red and purple and yellow, when you might have expected mudlike brown or green. And then their mother would tell everyone all about what the family did on the radio. Their successes and failures, discoveries and surprises. "We are all modern pioneers!" she'd say. Listeners would call in to ask her questions on the air, or would call her at home for advice. Slowly at first, and then overnight it seemed, Joshua didn't want to be a modern pioneer anymore. He wanted to be precisely what everyone else was and nothing more. Claire had stopped wanting to be a modern pioneer well before that. She insisted on wearing makeup and got into raging fights with their mother and Bruce about why they could not have a TV, why they could not be normal. These were the same fights Joshua was having with them now.

"You're going to have to clean the fryer too," said Vern. "Don't go trying to leave it for Angie."

Joshua went back to scrubbing, turning the hot water on full blast. The steam felt good on his face, opening the pores. Pimples bloomed on the rosy part of his cheeks and the wide plain of his forehead. At night in bed he scratched them until they bled, and then he would get up and put hydrogen peroxide on them. He liked the feeling of the bubbles, eating everything away.