Torch: A Novel Part 25

"Lisa, hold on. Listen-" she interrupted, "I'm coming. I'll be there as soon as I can. Tell Josh, okay?" She clicked the phone off and tossed it onto the mattress.

Andre picked it up and placed it back on its receiver. "What's wrong?" he asked conciliatorily.

"I have to go," she said, almost panting with panic, leaving the room. She had the feeling he was following her, but she didn't look back as she descended the dark stairs, her legs shaking from s.e.x and fear.

Once outside, she ran to her car parked on the street. Her hands shook as she jammed the key into the lock and then into the ignition. She gripped the steering wheel firmly to still them as she drove through the streets of Minneapolis, past the apartment where she used to live with David, and then out onto the interstate. On the seat beside her there was a plant she'd forgotten to unload the day before. The edges of its withered leaves tickled her bare arm. She tried to picture Joshua in jail, for what she did not know. In her shock, she had forgotten to ask. For driving drunk, she decided, to keep herself from going mad. She wished that she could see his face this instant. The longing for it made her nose tingle and ache.

After a while, it occurred to her that she didn't know where she was going. As a child, she had taken a field trip to the jail in Blue River, but she didn't know where, precisely, she should go at this hour in order to get in to see Joshua-by the time she arrived, it would be the middle of the night. Most likely they would tell her to come back in the morning, and then what would she do? She imagined driving up her old driveway, knocking on the door and waking Bruce up-she supposed, now that it was Kathy's home, it would be only right to knock-and then she crossed the thought out of her mind as absurd, the notion of going to Bruce at all, even with the news about Joshua. She could go to Lisa, but she didn't know where Lisa lived-somewhere on the road to the dump is all she knew.

Halfway home, she pulled off the interstate, needing desperately to pee. She parked at a truck stop that was painted to look like a red barn. She had never stopped here in all the times she'd driven by. It was a tourist trap famous, she knew without having ever set foot in the place, for its frosted cinnamon rolls that were as big as your head. She got out of her car and went inside. There was a bin of self-service popcorn by the door and another with stuffed animals of varying shapes and colors and species that you could attempt, one quarter at a time, to capture with a mechanical claw. There were kiosks selling postcards that said "Gateway to the Northland" and "Minnesota Is for Lovers" and rows of shelves selling statuettes of loons and ponies and beavers. There was a counter where you could buy giant soft pretzels and caramel-covered apples and the famous monstrous cinnamon rolls.

Claire ignored these things and made her way toward the women's room. Inside, she was the only woman in sight, walking along a bright bank of sinks. Several faucets came on without her having touched them, riled by her pa.s.sing, and then, when she entered a stall, several toilets flushed of their own will. Afterward, standing at the sink washing her hands, she saw herself in the mirror, thin and bluish and exhausted-looking in the fluorescent light, still wearing the rhinestone necklace. She took it off and put it in her purse. She remembered Andre saying whatever to her when she had asked him to leave. She didn't know when she would go back to that house, didn't know what she would be dealing with once she got to Joshua. It seemed entirely possible to her that Andre was in her room that very minute, rifling through her things. She remembered a little clay gargoyle that David had given her after she'd told him about having been called a gargoyle by a mean boy in the seventh grade. She imagined Andre finding it and holding it up to the light, wondering what it was.

On the way out, she bought a cinnamon roll and carried it out to her car on a piece of wax paper and set it on her lap, reaching down to tear chunks of it off as she drove north. She'd scarcely eaten anything for days, and now she ate the entire cinnamon roll and could have eaten another. Her mind was a metronome, moving back and forth, but always between the same two things, to Joshua and Joshua. She prayed that he would be okay, that whatever he did would come to nothing, that in the morning they would laugh or argue the way they did with each other about the ridiculous events of the night before.

She took the exit to Midden and her mind emptied out and she drove without thinking, drove like the car was driving itself, racing in the night. She was far enough north now that the trees pressed up close to the sides of the road. Pine trees and birches, poplars and spruce, their silhouettes as familiar to her as people she'd known for years. She could see them in the dark, their shadows looming and kind, watching her the way they had seemed to be watching her all of her life. Their knowing branches reached out to her, knowing, but not telling, knowing but not telling who on this earth she was.

PART V.

And did you get what.

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

-Raymond Carver, Late Fragment.

15.

THE RAIN WAS STILL COMING DOWN when Bruce left Doug Reed's place, freezing to slush on the windshield before the blade could clear it away. It was the second week of December and ten inches of snow was on the ground, coated with a thick layer of ice now, shining like glazed porcelain in Bruce's headlights at five P.M.

"Whattya know about them roads?" Leonard asked when Bruce walked into the Lookout. He tossed a cardboard coaster onto the bar in front of him. "You want your regular?"

"Nah, I'll take a c.o.ke," he said, though in fact he did want a beer. He'd promised Kathy he wouldn't until after she'd ovulated and they were in the clear. They had been trying to conceive a baby for six months. Kathy had brought it up the first night they were married, how badly she wanted to have kids, asking him whether he wanted them too. He had answered that he had them already, but Kathy just looked at him with a funny expression.

"What?" he asked.

"I'm talking about your own kids," she persisted.

"They are my kids, Kath," he had said.

"You know what I mean," she replied.

And he did. An infinitesimal hairline crack of him did. Besides, who was he to stand in the way of Kathy's dream? They began immediately. Kathy had been keeping records of her cycles for months, tracking her ovulation and menstruation, monitoring her cervical mucus and her luteal surge. Initially, Bruce took this as a sign not so much of her determination as it was a reflection of her profession as a cow inseminator, though he quickly learned that he was wrong. She wept each time she got her period, bitterly remorseful for having waited until she was two weeks shy of her thirty-fifth birthday to even begin to try.

Bruce did what he could. He held her and stroked her hair and rea.s.sured her when she cried. He drank tea with her in the evenings called "Fertile Blend." He took vitamins with zinc and avoided hot baths and had s.e.x with her only missionary style and only on certain days, according to the demands of the chart she kept on the last page of her journal. And at last he even agreed to call her psychic, Gerry, and submit to a reading over the phone. "I sense a presence," Gerry declared the moment Bruce finished giving him the numbers of his credit card.

"Could it be the baby?" Bruce asked.

"No!" Gerry shouted, changing his mind already. He had a Brooklyn accent, though he lived now in upstate New York. Kathy had met him years before, improbably, at a conference for people who raised and worked with cows. They had been drawn to each other immediately, she had told Bruce, seeing that they were of the same ilk, recognizing each other by their numinous jewelry. He was a small-time guru, holding workshops on occasion in a converted barn on his farm. Kathy had gone there once and camped out in his yard for a week, learning how to read rune stones and tarot cards. She showed Bruce a picture of Gerry she had glued inside her journal. He was a chubby, graying man who looked more like a college professor to Bruce than either a farmer or a psychic, his pink face pocked with old acne scars. "It's not a presence. Not a person," he continued with Bruce on the phone. He spoke with agonizing precision, making every few words its own sentence. "It's an idea. A thought you're having. It's getting in the way. It's blocking the road. There's a logjam in the river. A mud slide on the path, so to speak."

"A thought?" asked Bruce, trying to empty his head of everything he knew and believed, not wanting Gerry to divine what was inside, just in case he actually could.

He didn't believe in psychics or crystals or any of this New Age business, but when they got off the phone, Bruce knew that, in a sense, Gerry had been right. He did have a thought. He had it each time he and Kathy made love during her fertile week, each time she got her period again. It was the thought that when he'd had the idea to marry Kathy, this was not what he expected. He realized now how ignorant and self-absorbed he had been, but Kathy's desire to have children had taken him completely by surprise, so much was their courtship focused on his grief, his life, his wife and his kids and their loss. Kathy had been his counselor and confidante, his shoulder to cry on. She had been warm and female and s.e.xually available, expert at drawing him out of his sh.e.l.l, back when the sh.e.l.l he needed to be drawn out of was composed entirely of his eternal love for Teresa Rae Wood.

When they married, all of that changed in a day. Teresa was no longer his wife, Kathy was. "Kathy Tyson-Gunther," she decided to be called. And even Claire and Joshua seemed to belong to him less than they had the day before. Kathy referred to them as his "late wife's kids," a shadowy dejection coming over her each time Claire or Joshua came up in their conversations, though she would not admit her mood had anything to do with them. All through the summer and early autumn, they had talked in an abstract way about having Joshua and Claire over for dinner, though nothing ever came of it. Finally, in November, he and Kathy extended a tentative invitation to them for Thanksgiving dinner, but then they learned that Joshua was going to be a father and their plans dissolved.

"It isn't that I'm not happy for them. I am," Kathy said to him sincerely, after having wept over the news. "It's ..." she struggled to think of what, exactly, it was. "It's that seeing Lisa's belly will bring it all to the forefront. How we've failed."

"We haven't failed," he told her.

"How about they all come over for Christmas?" she suggested.

"Josh could be in jail by then," Bruce said, and he could. His court date had been scheduled at last. Joshua had been arrested in August and charged with possession of marijuana, though Bruce had sighed a breath of relief when he heard the charge. All summer long, he had been hearing things around town, rumors that Joshua was dealing for Rich Bender and Vivian Plebo, and not just marijuana, though he had allowed himself to ignore the talk until he got the call from Claire. She had been distraught when she called, almost begging him to come to Blue River, where she was. She had driven up from Minneapolis the night before and spent half the day going from the bank to the courthouse and back to the bank again, getting money and notarized statements and filling out forms so she could bail Joshua out of jail. But Bruce hadn't gone to Blue River. He couldn't, he explained to Claire, especially since she already had it covered. He had a job to finish and then, that evening, a softball game to play. It was the regional semifinals and the Jake's Tavern team had made it all that way.

A few weeks later, he and Joshua were going in opposite directions on Big Pile Road. They stopped and talked to each other through the open windows of their trucks with their engines idling, the way they had taken to doing since Bruce had married Kathy and Joshua stopped coming home.

"What you doing with yourself these days?" asked Bruce, not wanting to mention his arrest directly.

"Pulling out docks for Jack Haines," Joshua answered.

"That's good work."

"It's just till the lakes freeze up," said Joshua, and then they looked away, out their windshields, both of them thinking that by the time the lakes froze up Joshua might not need a job anyway, because very likely he would be in jail. He had been busted with a fair amount of marijuana, Claire had told Bruce. She kept him up to date on the tug of war between Joshua's court-appointed attorney and the county prosecutor. He saw her about once a week, when he stopped in at Len's Lookout. She worked there now, picking up her mother's old shifts, living in the apartment above the bar, the way she had when Bruce had met her as a child. She had moved to Midden when Joshua got arrested, wanting to be nearby to a.s.sist in his defense. There was some debate as to whether the marijuana that Joshua had in his possession was for his personal use or for sale. On the eleventh of December, the judge would decide and sentence him accordingly.

"Bruce!" Claire called to him now on the evening of the ice storm, a moment after Leonard handed him the c.o.ke that Bruce wished were a beer, though she didn't stop to talk. Instead, she glided past him with several plates in her hands and went to a table of customers he didn't recognize. Bruce followed her with his eyes, nodding to the few people he knew and glancing briefly at the people he didn't-city people up to hunt. He took his wool hat off and set it on the bar. "You're busy, for the roads being what they are," he told Leonard.

"It's these dumb Finlanders," Leonard said, and laughed because he was a Finn himself. "They think they know how to drive. Them and the city apes. The Finlanders got the b.a.l.l.s and the apes got their big fancy trucks."

Claire approached and thumped Bruce on the shoulder. Something caught inside of him and kept him from hugging her. It caught every time he saw her. "What's new?" she asked.

"Not much." He took a sip of his c.o.ke. "How about yourself?"

To his surprise, she sat down on the stool beside him. "Did you get your hair cut?"

He shook his head truthfully. He hadn't cut it recently, though months before, he had cut his ponytail off.

"It looks like you did," she said. "Or that you're doing something different to it."

He combed his hair with his fingers, feeling self-conscious. Kathy had bought him a special conditioner and, after being repeatedly encouraged by her to try it, he'd started using it the week before. It made his hair softer, fuller than it had ever been. He wasn't going to admit this to Claire. He took his hat from the bar and put it on, remotely regretting that he had stopped by. Since he married Kathy, whenever he saw Claire he got a little nervous, like she was watching his every move, a.n.a.lyzing his every word, like nothing he could do or say would be right. He felt the same way around Joshua. They were a committee, a club, an injured gang of two. He knew without needing to be told that they reported back to each other about him. That they'd look at each other with skeptical smiles and say, So guess who I saw.

"Are you ready for tomorrow?" she asked, referring to Joshua's court date.

"I thought we couldn't go in with him."

"I told you!" she said vehemently. "We can't go in to the judge's chambers, but we can go to the courthouse and sit outside in the hall." She looked at him fervently. "Don't tell me you're not going to be there."

"I hope to," he said. "But I got to finish up at Doug Reed's place and if we can't go in anyway, I don't see why-"

"For moral support, Bruce," she interrupted, and then a bell rang back in the kitchen, Mardell signaling that an order was ready. Without another word, Claire bolted away from him, through the swinging doors.

Bruce was relieved when she left. He was almost always relieved when she left, though it was her he came into the Lookout to see. He preferred to talk to her in fits and starts, in the pleasant exchanges they could manage as she strode past him bearing food or dirty dishes or stood waiting for Leonard to make her drinks at the bar. In this manner, he talked to Claire about once a week, though seldom did they actually talk. Kathy didn't know that he saw Claire as often as he did, didn't know that when he stopped off after work, he was stopping off at the Lookout. Sometimes, without directly lying, he let her believe that he had gone to Jake's Tavern. It was their place.

"I told Lisa we'd meet her and Josh at the courthouse at noon," Claire said a few minutes later, returning to stand next to him with an empty tray, as if his presence the next day had been agreed on. "Can I get three bourbons on the rocks?" she asked Leonard. Together they watched as he lined up the gla.s.ses and poured the drinks. Bruce had the feeling that Claire was waiting for him to speak, silently daring him to dispute her or praying he would agree to go, one or the other, so she could respond.

"I'll see what I can do," he said as she placed the drinks on her tray.

"Did she tell you what came in the mail today?" Leonard asked Bruce before she left again, and then turned to Claire, "Why don't you tell your dad?"

"Oh," she waved her hand in front of her face, as if she were embarra.s.sed to even think about it. She looked tired and pretty, like her mother, only darker, now that she'd dyed her hair brown to cover the bleach blond she'd done last summer. "I finished those cla.s.ses I had to take. I did them online. So now I have my degree."

"It came in the mail today," repeated Leonard. "A fancy piece of paper with calligraphy and a big golden seal."

Claire stared at the bourbons on her tray. "It's a little behind schedule, but at least I can say I finished up." She looked at Bruce with the eyes she looked at him with lately, private and tentative, as if she were peering out at him from behind a curtain.

"That's right," he said. "Better late then never."

Her eyes flickered away. "True."

"Your mom would be proud," said Leonard, more to Bruce, it seemed, than to Claire. She took her tray and walked away from them and he was glad again, in a remorseful way. "I'm proud too," he said to n.o.body, though Leonard heard him and nodded. He went to the till and began to count the day's money, stacking the bills into neat piles and binding them in rubber bands.

"How's Mardell doing?" Bruce asked.

Leonard paused in his counting and glanced up. "Her sister's coming for Christmas. The one from b.u.t.te. How's Kathy?"

"She's good." He took the last sip of his c.o.ke and shook the ice in the gla.s.s. Since he'd married Kathy, he detected the slightest disapproval from Leonard and Mardell, the slightest lowering in their esteem. "Well, what about the kids?" Mardell had huffed back in June, when Bruce had told her the news, as if they were still in diapers. And then, before he could reply she said, "I can take them, if need be."

"Take them where?" he'd asked sharply, not caring whether he hurt her feelings, though she'd always been something of an aunt to him and Teresa.

"Take them in," she exclaimed, and then looked at him with undisguised shock and disdain. Her hair was sheer white and styled into a dense yet airy bush, like cotton candy spun around a cone. "They need a mother, you know. Or at least a mother figure."

"Well, I'm not going anywhere," he said, softening. "I got married, that's all."

"Oh, Bruce, I know," she said apologetically, and began to cry. She took her gla.s.ses off so she could wipe her eyes. He put his hand on her arm. "I didn't mean anything. It's just that ..."

"It's that you miss Teresa," he said.

"I guess that's it," she said, with a tone that told Bruce that that wasn't it at all-or rather, that was only part of it. That behind her longing for Teresa, there was judgment for what he had done so soon. He'd heard it already, all around town, without actually having to hear the words. So soon, so soon, like an inane bird swooping over his head, calling to him everywhere he went. It made him love Kathy more, or at least to feel more protective of her, like it was the two of them against the world.

Leonard hadn't been there when he'd told Mardell about marrying Kathy and he made no mention of it the next several times Bruce came into the bar, until one day he asked Bruce how Kathy was in a voice as plain as day, as if he'd asked that same question for a thousand years.

"Hey, Len," Bruce said now, standing and pulling his coat on. He opened his wallet and set two dollars on the bar. "I better get home before the roads get worse."

"You'd better," he agreed.

"Tell Claire I said bye," he called as he walked to the door.

Leonard waved him off, signaling he would. It's what he did all the time.

"There you are," said Kathy when he got home. "I hope you're not too hungry," she said and smiled, sly and flirtatious. "Or I should say, not hungry for food." She pulled him to her and kissed his ear. "I got a positive on my ovulation stick, which means we have to do it now."

"Now?" he asked, running his hands up her sides. She laughed and pulled him into their room. Despite their troubles with conceiving, they always had fun in bed.

"What do you think?" he asked, when they were finished.

"About what?" She was lying the wrong way on the bed, her feet propped up on the headboard in an attempt to a.s.sist his sperm in their mad journey to her egg.

"About being pregnant. Do you think this was the one?"

She inhaled deeply and closed her eyes, pondering the question. A few months before, Gerry had told her that she would know when it happened. That she would feel a bolt of energy or a shot of light: the spirit of their future child, taking root.

"I feel something," she said, and opened her eyes. "A kind of intensity in my womb, but I don't know if I can say for sure." She turned her head to face him, keeping the rest of her body perfectly still. "What about you? What do you feel?"

He felt sleepy and hungry and he yearned for a cigarette, but he thought it unwise to mention any of those things.

"I feel like maybe this was it," he said, and she smiled and big tears blossomed in her eyes. He hovered close but didn't touch her, afraid that to jostle her would ruin their chances of conception, but then she began to cry harder and he placed his hand on her arm ever so delicately, as if her flesh were wet paint, waiting to dry.

"I'm sorry," she said, wiping her face with her hands. "It's that sometimes I just ... I mean, how ironic can it be that I inseminate cows for a living and I can't even get myself knocked up?" She looked suddenly at him, her eyes bright with offense, as if he'd contradicted what she said. "It's my job, Bruce. And I can't manage to get it right when it comes to myself."

"It'll happen," he soothed.

"It will," she said emphatically, her mood shifting suddenly. "It's that I've gotten all off-kilter. That's why it's not happening." She sat up even though thirty minutes hadn't pa.s.sed since they had finished making love. "I need to find my center. I need to do a reading. Would you mind, honey, if I went over and spent the night at my cabin?"

"Your cabin?"

"Just for the night." She stood and began to dress. "Kind of like a retreat, so I can get centered."

"You could do it here," he offered. "I could sleep out on the couch." He went to her and tried to hug her so as to prevent her from putting her pants on, but she only patted his arms and continued on with what she was doing.

"I need to get centered, Bruce. This baby stuff has put me off balance. It's taken over my entire psyche with negativity." She pulled a sweatshirt over her head.

"But it's cold there. It'll be freezing, Kath." He had the feeling that someone was pressing a boot against his chest.

"I can start a fire. I did it for years." She came and put her arms around him. "This will be good for both of us. It will give us perspective on this whole journey."