Torch: A Novel Part 11

"It didn't take anything away from what you had with Nancy," Claire said. "I never thought that."

"No. Definitely not. My allegiance was always with her. No offense. I think you're wonderful. You're one very pretty girl. And smart too. Kind." He clutched the edge of the counter. "And what am I when Nancy needs me most? I'm a pathetic old man."

"You aren't old."

"Not old. But to you I am. I'm too old for you. I lost my morals."

Claire stared at the floor. A spoon had fallen there, crusted with hair and what looked like bits of dried chocolate pudding.

"Plus, what was I doing gallivanting around and meanwhile she's dying?"

"She was sleeping. She didn't even know you were gone."

"Oh, she knew. She knew." He put his hand to his forehead and pressed hard.

"We weren't gallivanting anywhere. We were at your house."

He kept his hand pressed to his forehead. Claire bent to pick up the dirty spoon and set it soundlessly in the sink.

"Well," he said. "I wish you the best. I'm hoping for a miracle for your mom."

"Thank you." She touched his hand on the counter and they looked at each other, their eyes as serious as animals. He took her hand and kissed it and then pulled her into him and held her hard against him. His breathing was heavy and she thought he'd started to cry again, but when she looked at him his eyes were calm and dry.

"Claire," he said, but didn't say anything more. His fingers began to slowly graze her throat, down over the top of her chest, over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, barely touching her. He grabbed her face with both of his hands and kissed her fiercely and then stopped abruptly. "What am I doing?" he asked sadly, and then pulled her back to him and squeezed her hips, her a.s.s, her thighs.

"Stop it then," she said. She unbuckled his belt, unzipped his jeans, got down on her knees.

"This is completely wrong."

"Stop me then," she hissed. She took his c.o.c.k in her mouth. She had the sensation that he was going to hit her; that he was going to smack the side of her head or yank her away from him by the hair. She also had the sensation that she wanted him to do this, though she had never wanted this from a man. She wanted something to be clear, right, and she wanted him to be the one who made it that way.

"Jesus," he whispered, and leaned back against the wall and gripped onto it to keep him up.

She smelled his man smells, his c.o.c.k smells: a sour salt, a sharp sub-aqueous mud. He came without a word and she sat back on her heels and swallowed hard. She touched the hairs on his thighs, kissed one knee.

He reached for the sides of her face. "Oh," he moaned. "I can't stand up."

"Something about you sitting in that window reminds me of when you were little," Teresa said to Claire as the sun rose through the windows. "Sometimes I see your face and I can see just exactly what you looked like when you were a baby and other times I can see what you'll look like when you're old. Do you know what I mean? Does that same thing happen to you?"

"Yeah. I know what you mean," Claire said, turning from the window to her mother, grateful that she had spoken at such length. "Are you feeling better?" she asked. "We were scared. You hardly woke up all yesterday. You slept for like twenty hours straight. And then you were weird."

"I needed my sleep," Teresa said. "Where's Bruce?"

"Getting coffee. It's about six, Mom. In the morning."

"Where's Josh?"

"I don't know," she snapped, then caught herself and continued more gently, "He'll be here in a little bit." She got down from the windowsill and pulled a chair up next to her mother, coiling her way through the IV lines.

"Yes. Come sit with me," Teresa said, her words slurred from the morphine. "That's what I'm glad of. That you're here with me. I'll never forget you were here with me during the hardest time. And sitting the way you were in the window, it made me think of that, of all the things, of you and Joshua being little and now being grown-up."

"We're not grown-up."

"Almost. You almost are."

Claire tugged on a thread that dangled from the edge of the blanket that covered her mother; it caught, still attached.

"It was the same way when you used to sit in that window in Pennsylvania. Do you remember the window seat in the apartment in Pennsylvania?"

Claire shook her head.

Teresa smiled. "Oh, sure. You were too small then. You wouldn't remember. But that was your spot. You liked to sit in that window seat and wait for the mail to come." She paused, as if a wave of nausea were about to overtake her, but then continued. "You liked to see the mailman come and put the mail in the box and then you wanted to be the one to go and take it out. You had to be the one! You always liked to be involved with things, to be a helper, to be at the center."

"I don't remember," she said, and leaned forward to rest her head on the bed, the top of her head pressing into her mother's hip.

"Well, that's how you were," Teresa said happily. "It's how you are."

"How's that?"

"The way I taught you to be. Good."

Teresa lifted her hand from the bed. Softly, she stroked Claire's hair.

8.

BRUCE DID NOT WONDER. He knew. He had not a single doubt about what he would do after Teresa died. It played in his mind like a movie with him as the only character, its solo shining star. He knew before she died-seven weeks to the very day, it turned out, to everyone's sorrow and surprise. The knowledge of what he would do did not come to him immediately, in the moment they learned that she had cancer, but later on that night, in the wee hours of the next morning, after they'd left the hospital and gone-amazingly-to eat dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and then driven home and lain in bed thinking they would make love, but then not been able to make love because they were weeping so hard and Teresa's back hurt.

Her back did more than hurt.

Hurt was too small a word to contain what was going on in her back. It was killing her, she'd said before they'd found out about the cancer. Once she'd said it afterward too, about a week after they knew about the cancer, when the reality had hunkered down and stayed. "My back is killing me," she'd muttered, turning to him in the kitchen, holding two gla.s.ses of water, one for each of them, in the short window of time they had when a thing such as holding two gla.s.ses of water did not seem to them an utterly Herculean task. He looked at her and for a moment they both hesitated, as if taking a breath in unison. They'd been balling their brains out since noon. Her back was killing her, they realized, and then they almost fell onto the floor laughing in hysterics. The water was dropped. The gla.s.ses were shattered. Their house was a madhouse from that moment on. n.o.body gave a f.u.c.k about a gla.s.s.

It felt like a zipper, she'd explained to the doctor that day they'd found out. That her spine was a zipper and someone was coming up behind her and zipping it and unzipping it mercilessly. She'd almost cried saying this, almost seemed to grovel and beg. It pained him. He rose and went to stand behind her chair and rubbed her back uselessly. The doctor nodded his head, as if he'd known about the zipper all along, as if people marched through his door every day to complain about mechanical devices embedded in their spines.

Later, they learned her spine was a zipper, the cancer pulling it apart, st.i.tching it back together in a way that it was never meant to be. Her lungs were also a zipper, and likewise her liver, and ovaries, and parts of her body they didn't even know were there. It was like a root that went on and on, blocking the way no matter where they dug. Even the doctor used these words. The zipper. The root. Nothing was a metaphor. With Teresa's cancer the most absurd things were literal.

And so Bruce, by necessity, was literal too. He wasn't kidding when he decided that after Teresa died he would kill himself. He had not, in his life, in his before Teresa has cancer life, been the type of person to say, "I would just die" or "It made me want to die" or anything along those ridiculous lines, the way people did when they in fact had no intention or desire to actually die-when they thought they were being funny or needed to exaggerate a point.

Bruce was not a man to exaggerate. He would truly, absolutely, cross-his-heart die.

He would live through the funeral and then he would act. He reasoned this would give Joshua and Claire a moment to catch their breath, but not enough time to even begin to accept their reality. Reality for Joshua and Claire would be that, in one horrible week, they lost their mother and then their father. Not what they called their real father, a man named Karl they scarcely knew, but their stepdad, their Bruce, the guy they'd loved as their father since they were six and eight. Of course they would grieve their mother harder. Bruce did not begrudge them that, but still he knew his death would be a mighty hard blow. It did not make him happy to think of them and what they would do all by themselves; in fact, it pierced his heart. But the pain of that was not as great as the pain of having to go on living without their mother, and so his mind was made up. If this was to work, he could not afford compa.s.sion and he could also not afford pity. Not for Claire, not for Joshua, not for Teresa.

Regrettably, he had promised Teresa things on which he was simply not going to be able to follow through. At the time that he made the promises, he had not lied. The promises had been made dry-eyed and immediately, while they ate that first night in the Chinese restaurant, before he'd known what he would do. Of course he said he would raise her children, who were essentially both already raised.

"But they still need their mother," Teresa had crooned, almost losing it entirely. Years before, she had told him that her secret way of collecting herself was to think of things, things that had nothing to do with anything. Often, she kept herself from crying by thinking can of beans, can of beans, again and again. In the Chinese restaurant, while she had gazed at the goldfish, he wondered if she was thinking can of beans. She didn't seem to be. She seemed to be honestly concerned about the fish. Out loud, she wondered if they were hungry and looked around, as if for food, and then her eyes latched back onto him.

She told him she wanted to discuss this issue once and right away and then they would never speak of it again.

Yes, he would be there for Claire and Joshua, Bruce told her. Yes, he would be both mother and father. Neither of them at this point had actually absorbed the information that she was truly going to die soon. They'd been told, but they didn't believe. For that blessed hour in the Chinese restaurant his future life as a widower played before him sweetly as a benign dream. It was the movie that played in his mind before the movie of him killing himself supplanted it. He would comfort Joshua and Claire in their grief. He would hold them and weep and remind them of all the things their mother had said and done. He would tell them things they hadn't known-how their mother used to think can of beans when she didn't want to cry. The three of them would go on a camping trip-perhaps they'd canoe down the Namekagon River like they'd done several times as a family-or to Florida, to Port St. Joe, where they'd been with their mother, before they knew him. This trip would heal their grief. They would laugh, they would weep, they would return home stronger and better and basically okay. They would take this trip annually, to commemorate the anniversary of her death. When they married he would walk them down the aisle and give them a special flower that represented their mother. Their children would call him grandpa or maybe simply papa, the name he'd called his own dad's dad.

At the Chinese restaurant, Teresa had put her hands over his on the table. "I wasn't questioning you. I hope you know that," she said. "I know how much you love them. It's just that I needed it all to be spoken out loud."

She took her hands away and looked again into the pond and it was done.

There was nothing administrative to take care of. She had not written a will, but why should she? She had no life insurance policy. The land and the house would of course someday go to the kids. This, they hadn't even thought to say.

Later that night almost everything he'd promised was washed away by his new plan. He decided he would live five, maybe six days without her. They would have the funeral and he would wait a day, letting everyone get a good night's sleep, and then he would make his move.

Once the idea came to him it took about five minutes to make up his mind between rope or gun. He chose the rope. He was not a hunter. The gun in their house had been used for only three purposes: to scare away the racc.o.o.ns that came on occasion to hara.s.s the hens, to scare away the porcupines that came to gnaw the wood of their front stairs, and to teach them all how to shoot the gun so they, when necessary, could scare away the racc.o.o.ns and the porcupines. If he used the gun, there was a chance he would botch the job. He knew how to tie a knot. He knew how to tie seventeen knots, each perfect for one task or another. This, he owed to his mother, whose father had been a sailor on the Great Lakes and who had insisted that he learn all the knots that her father had taught her.

First he imagined the exact knot he would use, then he imagined the exact tree. It was a maple. It grew in the place on their land they called "the clearing"-a small meadow, the only meadow on their forty acres amid the trees-a good spot to die. The place calmed him. He and Teresa and Claire and Joshua had had many good times there. When he could honestly picture himself hanging dead from the maple tree in the clearing he was more sorry than ever about Claire and Joshua. But in this he had to be selfish. He knew what he could do and what he could not do and he could not go on living without Teresa no matter how much he loved her kids.

He hoped they wouldn't be the ones to find him. But then, who else would? He imagined them trudging through the woods calling his name-at the time he decided to kill himself he didn't know how quickly Teresa would die, so he could not know whether there would be snow in the woods or not-but for all of their sakes, he imagined there would be snow. Not this year's snow, but next year's snow. Snow that hadn't even been formed yet, snow that wasn't even remotely thinking about falling, snow that would be made in the sky and let drop to the ground in the farthest reaches of the time that the doctor predicted Teresa could be expected to live. One year. And so, in next winter's snow Claire and Joshua would be trudging through the woods calling his name. When he had first met them he had told them his name was not Bruce. They had been waiting for him in the parking lot of Len's Lookout, but when he finally pulled up, they ran, frightened as wild animals who were instantly tamed once he called their names. "Are you Bruce?" asked Claire, giggling and hopping on one foot. "No," he'd said, "I'm Bruce, Bruce-Bo-Buce-Banana-Fanna-Fo-Fuce ..." They shrieked with delight when he was done and begged him to sing it again. Then he taught them the song using their own names. They scared him a little, how fast they loved him, how they clenched his hands with theirs as they sang, how later, at dinner, they did not want to sit beside him but on him, fighting with each other over his lap.

These children whom he had met when he was twenty-seven, these children who had been born in a state where he'd never been, these children whom he had bossed and cajoled, kissed and scolded, grounded and applauded and taught how to drive a stick shift, they would be his search party of two.

He did not think they would make a big ruckus. At first they would believe that he was sad and had simply gone out to chop wood. He was a worker, they'd always known him to work, and they would a.s.sume that it was to work he turned in his grief. Slowly, dimly, they would wonder why they didn't hear the chain saw, the ax. They would stand first on the porch and call his name, and then in the driveway. Finally, before dark, they would go out to look for him. Claire would most likely be wearing the scarf her mother knitted for her, red, soft wool, with a white star near each end. Her nose would run and, along with the mist from her breath, the whole mess would freeze on her chin and on the scarf that pressed against it. She and Joshua would stop walking and listen for him, then hearing nothing, holler his name. They would look at each other and then into the trees despairingly. Possibly, Joshua, on some gut instinct, would be carrying the gun.

He attempted to keep from imagining their faces in the moment when they actually came upon his body hanging in the tree, but he could not keep the image from surfacing in his mind and the grief that shot through him as he lay in bed beside Teresa was so great that he almost decided to live.

Then it dawned on him that he could write a note.

Of course he could, and he would. The note would be left in the middle of the kitchen table and they would find it well before beginning to wonder where he was. In the note he would strongly discourage them from going into the woods themselves. He would forbid them from going into the woods. He would command them to call the sheriff. This was precisely the kind of thing the sheriff was for. He would write that he was sorry and that everything he owned belonged to them. His truck, his tools, the house and land. He a.s.sumed they would a.s.sume this, but since they were not related by blood or in any way legally bound to him, he did not want them to have any trouble. His note would serve as his will. He would tell them other things they already knew but would need to hear one last time. That he had loved their mother and he loved them like his own children since day one. He would write that they should stick together and take care of each other-they only had each other now-and that someday in many, many, many years they would all be together as a family again, reunited in heaven. He did not necessarily believe in heaven, and they knew this, but neither did he not believe in it, and he hoped they knew this too. For the sake of Joshua and Claire he would become a believer in heaven. Heaven would soften the blow.

In bed that first night beside Teresa, and then later, while he sat next to her hospital bed or lay in the cot the nurses had set up for him in her room, he wrote his note to Claire and Joshua in his mind over and over again. He scanned for other details, things he might have overlooked. He pictured himself hanging in the tree. And then the dogs came running up, right into the picture. Thank G.o.d he was planning ahead. He would have to leave Spy and Tanner inside-shut into a room-so they wouldn't dash out when Joshua or Claire entered the house and go directly to the clearing to howl frightfully up at him hanging in the tree, causing Claire or Joshua to follow them, inevitably drawn, curious and entertained, before having noticed the note.

He would see to it that they absolutely noticed the note. This was his solemn vow, his version of keeping his promise to Teresa. Her children would never have to see their "father" dangling by a rope, with a broken neck, dead in a tree.

At the very end, Bruce confessed his plan to Teresa while she lay in her bed in the hospice wing of the hospital, but she made no response. Her skin was the texture of dust, her body like that of a paper doll. He pinched her arm hard then-he had to do that sometimes, just to keep his sanity-and she opened her eyes like a drunkard and closed them and fell instantly back to sleep. They'd reached the point where her morphine dose needed to be so high that most of the time she slept or when she woke she spoke of things that made no sense-not even to her, when pressed to explain-though on occasion she was as conscious and lucid as if she'd simply arisen from a long, restorative nap.

"I'm going to kill myself," he almost shouted, and then he put his head on the bed, too exhausted to weep. Again she did nothing. It was almost midnight. He'd just gotten off the phone with Claire, who'd called to report that she'd be there in the morning and at last-they believed-she'd have Joshua with her. They would arrive in the morning and then the long wait would begin, the vigil that the three of them would keep night and day in the hospital until it was-the words were ridiculous, Bruce thought, he didn't even want to use them-over. Earlier in the evening a doctor had asked Bruce to come out into the hallway and informed him that Teresa was "actively dying."

Afterward he hadn't returned to her room. Instead he began walking, not knowing where he was going. The hallways were lit dimly, soothingly, good lights to die by, lit only by the glowing lights of vending machines, and punctured by the bright lights that spilled occasionally from patients' rooms or the nurses' station, a beacon at the center of everything. He pa.s.sed the room of an angry hippie man who didn't seem to be dying because he spent the better part of each evening dragging his IV to the third-floor patio where patients were allowed to smoke. He pa.s.sed the room of an old man who was strapped into his bed by all four limbs. He pa.s.sed the room of a frizzy-haired blond woman and noticed that she wasn't there anymore, her bed now made with a clean white sheet, the room empty. Bruce had met her husband once. Bill. He imagined that Bill's wife was dead now. He imagined it and didn't feel a thing. Nor did he feel anything for the angry hippie man or the old man strapped in four places to his bed. In the smallest, hardest part of him he didn't care if any of them suffered or died. He was sorry, but he couldn't. To pity them would be to doom his wife.

He seemed to have no control over where his feet carried him. They carried him to the stairwell and then down five flights of stairs, each flight turned back on itself, until he had followed them as far as he could go. He went to the door that led back into the hospital and pushed it open.

Now he was in the bas.e.m.e.nt, where the light was entirely different from the hospice wing. Brutal and fluorescent: a comfort to him. He walked down the long hallway. There was no one in sight. Maybe this is where the morgue is, he thought. Farther down the hall, in an industrial-sized kitchen, a black woman dressed in white stirred a giant pot of something with a paddle. He pa.s.sed several orange, windowless doors, all of them closed. His earliest s.e.xual fantasies had involved these sorts of mysterious doors that occupied public, yet seemingly forbidden, s.p.a.ces. At the age of nine he'd been told by a friend's older brother that gangs of beautiful naked women waited behind such doors, harems of s.e.x-starved beauties, locked in, yearning for a man to walk through. He hadn't thought of this for years, and a remote, perverse ache thrummed through him. He walked past a pay phone and then stopped and went back to it and dialed his home phone number. Claire didn't pick up until the answering machine had and he'd spoken into it.

"Bruce," she said, her voice sounding clogged, as if she had a cold, though he knew she didn't.

"What's happening?" he asked.

"Nothing ... Josh-he's allegedly out ice fishing with R.J. That's what Vivian said. I'm waiting for him to come back and then we'll come first thing in the morning. What's happening there?"

"Things have ..." How was he going to say it? He decided to say what the doctor had first said to him. "It seems as though this is it." He wasn't going to say what the doctor had said second. That she was dying. Actively.

"It?" howled Claire. She made a noise, like she was choking, gasping for air, but he pushed through it.

"So you should come with Josh as soon as you can."

"But Josh is out ice fishing," she said through her tears, her voice high-pitched and jagged. "And I'm afraid my Cutla.s.s will get stuck if I drive out to the ice house to get him."

"Well, then just wait until he comes back. We have some time, Claire. Come when you can."

"Okay," she said intently, as if he'd just given her a complicated list of instructions, and then hung up the phone without saying goodbye. He hung up too and then began to walk down the hall again, in the same direction he'd been heading, still not knowing where he was going or why. Maybe he would find a door that led out into the parking garage. He'd go there and look at cars.

"Excuse me," a woman's voice called from behind him.

He turned. He felt that he was being busted for something. Like trespa.s.sing.

"I could use a hand if you don't mind."

It was the woman who'd been stirring with the paddle in the kitchen. Before Bruce could move or reply, she turned and disappeared back into the doorway from which she'd emerged. He walked quickly down the long length of the hallway until he came to the kitchen again and he entered, weaving his way past enormous cooking machinery, until he got to where she stood.

"I need some muscle," she explained. The woman's hair was covered with a translucent plastic cap. She wore gold earrings shaped like turtles with little green gems for eyes. "I don't know if they told you, but the guys in maintenance usually help me out when I need it since I'm here by myself for a couple of hours."

He followed her to the gigantic pot that she had been stirring. It was full of a green liquid: Jell-O before it set.

"I've got to get this from the pot into these pans." She gestured to more than a dozen pans lined up on a long wooden counter. "It's real heavy, so it takes two."

She gave him a pair of silver insulated mitts, burnt in places along each thumb. Bruce put them on and then gripped the handle on one side of the pot and the woman took the other handle and together they poured the liquid into the pans, working their way carefully down the counter, filling each one.

"Thanks," she said, after they'd set the empty pot down. She took off her mitts and wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of one hand. "How do you like it so far?"

"Like what?"

"Maintenance," she said. "Aren't you the new guy?"

He put his hands in his pockets and shook his head. "I was just taking a walk."

"Oh!" She laughed deeply, throwing her head back. "All right, then. Well, I guess you fooled me," she said, waving him away, turning back to her Jell-O. "I guess you're just a Good Samaritan."

He stood there for a few more moments, watching her slide the pans onto a cart that held each of them in racks, one on top of the other. She began to roll the cart, pushing on it with all of her weight, and he stepped forward to help her.

"I got it," she said, pushing harder, so the cart pulled away from his hands. She opened a door that led to a walk-in cooler and then guided the cart in. "Happy St. Paddy's Day," she called to him. She came out of the cooler and slammed the door shut behind her. "It's tomorrow. That's why I made green."

But by then he was already gone.

When he returned to Teresa's room, Pepper Jones-Kachinsky was sitting next to her, holding her limp arm, two fingers pressed against Teresa's wrist.

"I'm checking her pulse," she whispered, without looking up.

Bruce watched her for several moments, the silent concentration of her face as she counted his wife's heartbeats. Teresa didn't stir or give any indication that she was aware of Pepper by her side, or of his presence in the room. She'd never met Pepper, technically speaking.