Torch: A Novel Part 27

He and Lisa had delivered the news that they were going to have a baby at the last possible moment, in the middle of November, when Lisa could no longer conceal the fact. Upon hearing the news, Claire had raged and wept. She'd warned Joshua that the baby would ruin his life and spouted out statistics to prove it. It astonished him, the things she carried around in her head. She knew what percentage of teen parents spent their entire lives living below the poverty line, how few of their children earned college degrees, the outrageously large unlikelihood that he and Lisa would still be together in two years.

"Our mom was a teen mom," he'd said to Claire when she was done with her statistics, believing he had an una.s.sailable defense.

But she just shook her head, smiled at him incisively, and whispered, "Precisely my point."

Despite everything, Claire had quickly warmed to the idea of being an aunt, and not only an aunt but also something of a standin for Joshua while he was in jail. She was the one who accompanied Lisa to her prenatal appointments, who gave her books to read about pregnancy and what to do when the baby arrived. She'd even volunteered to be a replacement for Joshua at Lisa's labor and birth cla.s.s and, as a gift to them, paid the tuition in full. Joshua would be released on March 5-two weeks before the baby was due-and Claire would tell him all the things she'd learned at the cla.s.s that he'd need to know, so during the birth he could be of use.

"It's over at the hospital-the birth cla.s.s," Claire said to him now. They both glanced toward the windows near the ceiling, from which they could see the sidewalk above them and the shoes of a rare pa.s.serby, and beyond that, but only if they got a chair and climbed on top of it to look out, the Blue River Hospital directly across the street, where Joshua and Lisa's baby would be born. They'd not learned the gender, wanting it to be a surprise.

"We'll wave at you," she said. "It gets over at four o'clock."

"How will I see you?" he asked, sharp irritation in his voice. It angered him when she pretended that things were not as they were.

"I meant, if you're in here and you look out the window." She pressed her hands against the edge of the table as if she were attempting to slide her chair back, but it stayed anch.o.r.ed in its place, drilled into the floor.

"Well, I won't be."

"I meant if you were, Josh."

"But the point is I won't."

"Okay. You won't." She crossed her legs, her knees b.u.mping against the bottom of the table. When she was settled she asked, "What's your problem today?"

"Nothing."

"Okay," she said tentatively. "Then don't wave at us. I was just trying to be nice. I was trying to include you, for your information."

Their eyes locked for a moment, then they each looked away, disgusted with each other. The room was large and open, the carpet like a field across its center. Despite the long table at which they sat with its bolts and metal loops for handcuffs, it had the feel of a kindergarten cla.s.sroom. There was a sink and a cupboard, a terrarium filled with stones and small desert plants, and off in the corner a big chair with a floral-patterned fabric and a couch covered in dark green plaid that surrounded a coffee table scattered with magazines and plants and a box of Kleenex. It was called the "community room," the room where most things in Joshua's new jail life happened. It was where on Tuesday afternoons he, along with his fellow inmates, met with Pat McCredy for what she called "group," and where, every Thursday afternoon, he met with Pat McCredy for what she called "individual." And also where twice a week he took his exercise cla.s.s, which was, to Joshua's great relief, not conducted by Pat McCredy, but by a shifting series of people who volunteered for a program whose sole concern was the physical fitness of inmates. Sometimes it was yoga, other times step aerobics or a thing that all of the inmates dreaded called "NIA," a new aerobics crossbreed that required of its partic.i.p.ants periodic interludes of free-form dance improvisation. Joshua refused to improvise and instead kept his eyes on the instructor during these parts, attempting reluctantly to mimic her frenzy and pa.s.s it off as his own. On occasion no instructor showed up and whatever guard was on duty would wheel out the TV and VCR and put the exercise tape in-they had only one, Hips, Abs, and Buns-and then stand by to make sure everyone partic.i.p.ated. By state law, they had to exercise two hours each week.

"I always feel like I should bring something," Claire said, breaking their silence, making the kind of unspoken truce they made over and over and over again all of their lives, to have their arguments and then to move on. "A cake or something." A mischievous smile came over her face. "Somewhere to hide the file or the razor blades or whatever." She spoke louder than necessary, so as to include Tommy Johnson, who stood guard just inside the locked door, listening to every word they said, and also to indicate that she was only joking. Tommy didn't move, didn't smile, didn't appear to have even heard Claire, though they knew he had. She turned back to Joshua and more quietly asked, "So, have you seen Bruce?"

"Not since he came that one time."

"He came into Len's on Wednesday. He said he'd visit you soon." In her voice he detected a slight tilt, a microscopic embarra.s.sment over the facts of her life now: not only that she worked as a waitress, but also that she lived in Midden, working at the very bar that their mother had. Claire Wood-teachers, the people at the bank, the people he used to sell drugs to, everyone in the town, they all said to him in that same voice, the voice that contained their pride and contempt, their scorn and unmasked joy, they said it like a chant-Your sister is Claire Wood? Now there's a girl who will go far. When people asked what she was doing these days, she told them she was in transition, waiting to see what she really wanted to do, saving her money in the meanwhile.

"How's he doing?"

"Fine, I guess." She looked up at him, the veil he had come to recognize whenever they spoke of Bruce falling over her eyes. "He's starting to look ... weird."

"How so?"

"I don't know. Just different. Hipper maybe. Not actually hip, but more updated. Like suddenly he cares what he looks like."

Joshua put his fingers into the metal loop on the table through which the chain of the handcuffs had been strung while he'd been handcuffed. He ached for a cigarette. "I think it's very funny," he said.

"What?" Her eyes cut sharply to him.

"Everything." Then added, "Bruce." They sat in silence together for several minutes, neither of them wanting to get into what they'd come to refer to as "the whole Bruce thing," but also not able to think of anything else to talk about at the moment.

"You'll never guess what," Claire said at last.

"What?"

"I saw a moose. Driving here. On the road. I took the shortcut across and there it was right in the middle of the road." She shrugged and looked away, as if she realized that seeing a moose was something that in fact he could have guessed.

"That's good luck," he said.

"It is?"

"Yeah."

She pushed her hair back behind her ears. It was shorter than it had ever been, cut into a bob above her chin and colored with a remotely maroon henna dye that would allegedly fade out naturally over time.

"I always thought it was a white horse. If you saw a white horse it's good luck."

"A moose too," he blurted. "Any wild animal. And also white horses." He realized that he could not be sure if indeed it was good luck to see a moose, but he wasn't going to admit that now.

"Well, good. We could use some luck." She reached out again and squeezed his hand. Her hands were cold, all of her life she'd had cold hands and cold feet. Her sock had started to burn once, smoke coiling out of a black hole while it was still on her foot after she'd held it too long and too close to the wood stove.

"Did you make a wish when you saw it?" he asked, immediately regretting he had. His mouth had grown dry. She'd been there for twenty-five minutes. In five more minutes Tommy would tell her it was time to leave. At this point in the visit he found himself almost always wishing that whoever had come to visit him was already gone so he wouldn't have to spend five minutes with the knowledge that soon they would be.

"Of course I didn't," she said. "How was I supposed to know to make a wish if I didn't know it was good luck to begin with?"

"You should have known. Now it isn't good luck," he said, without sympathy.

"f.u.c.k you," she whispered somewhat sweetly, somewhat honestly angry. She drew an invisible spiral on the surface of the table with her index finger. "You always do that, Josh," she said, her face going serious, her hand going still.

"Do what?"

She looked away, toward one of the windows, where a dry yellow leaf that had somehow managed to survive the winter scuttled against its surface, trapped between the gla.s.s and the bars, then she turned her eyes back onto him, so bright, so large.

"Ruin everything."

Nine was the number of inmates at the jail during the months of Joshua's imprisonment, though only eight actually lived there. The ninth was a woman named Tiffany-the lone woman among them-who was housed, like all the rare female inmates, in a locked room in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the hospital. For meals and visitors and for all the mandatory activities except exercise the guards brought her from the hospital to the jail in handcuffs, following an underground pa.s.sageway that ran below the street. A different section of this same pa.s.sageway was the one that Claire had walked down to visit Joshua, and it continued on to connect a series of buildings: the courthouse to the jail, the jail to the hospital, the hospital to the nursing home, and the nursing home back to the courthouse. At lunchtime on days when the weather was too hot or too cold, too rainy or icy or windy, the women who worked in the buildings through which the underground hallway pa.s.sed did loops, walking fast together or alone, wearing sneakers and leggings with giant T-shirts that covered their behinds. If Joshua was in his cell, he could not see them pa.s.s by, but he could hear their footsteps and voices, echoing in the tunnel.

His cell was not as bad as he had expected. It was not dank and chilly and dark; sludge-filled cracks did not line the floors. Instead the floor was seamless and shiny, painted periwinkle. The periwinkle extended from the floor to midway up the wall and ended in an undulating border meant to suggest the ocean. From the edge of this sea, the wall was painted sky blue, as was the ceiling, which featured, in the far corner, a bright yellow sun with eyes and a mouth that smiled endlessly down upon him. The feel was not so much of a jail cell but of a neatly arranged cabin on a ship. Two cots sat on opposite walls, with a toilet behind a small panel in between them at the far end. At the head of the cots, both Joshua and his cellmate had a two-by-three-foot table that was bolted to the wall and a bench bolted to the floor before it. Above the table there was a small cabinet where they could store their belongings-they were each allowed a few small things. Joshua had his sketchbook and a sweater that his mother had knit that itched him, and a photo of Lisa holding her cat, Jasmine, in a vinyl frame that folded up and snapped closed.

His cellmate, to Joshua's great surprise, turned out to be Vern Milkkinen-the Chicken Man-his old coworker at the Midden Cafe. It hadn't occurred to Joshua that he'd been absent from his regular post in the Midden Dairy Queen parking lot the entire summer before. The Vern whom Joshua knew in jail was not the Vern he'd known at the cafe. At sixty-six, he had found religion. He was a new man, a reformed man, Pat McCredy's model inmate. Vern had been busted for driving drunk so many times, he'd been sentenced to a year. He'd be released a couple of months after Joshua. In the time that Vern had served before Joshua's arrival he had found G.o.d, vowed to never drink a drop of alcohol again, and written long letters addressed to everyone he loved, trying to make amends. To his son, Andrew, to his sister, Geraldine, and to his wife, even though by now she was dead.

In jail Joshua's mornings had a rhythm: at seven he would be awakened and escorted along with his fellow inmates to the shower; after showering and dressing they were led to the small dining room off the kitchen to eat. Tiffany would be there already, her wet hair falling forward, making a shield across her face as she bent over her bowl of oatmeal. After breakfast his job was to clean his half of the cell from top to bottom, including the walls and floor and ceiling on his side. Vern cleaned the other half. It kept them both occupied for a good thirty minutes each day and gave their cell-the hallway of four cells in a row-the persistent aroma of ammonia, a scent that Joshua a.s.sociated always with his mother during the years when she had worked at the Rest-A-While Villa and come home smelling of it. When the cleaning was done, they had two hours in their cells for what was called "self-reflection." In the schedule that was taped to the wall in the community room there was a note of explanation written in this time slot, most likely, Joshua believed, composed by Pat McCredy: "Two hours in which you may reflect upon what it is that brought you here and where it is you may go after you leave."

Seldom did Joshua reflect upon what brought him here, though often he thought about where he would go after he left and that was straight to Lisa's bed, though he could not think of this too long or in too detailed a manner since Vern lay self-reflecting in his cot only a few feet away. What brought him to the jail was hardly worth a thought. Greg Price had found the bag of marijuana he kept in a tackle box in his truck. It could have been worse; he didn't have to be told. Greg Price could have found the Baggie full of the crystal meth that he had in an empty thermal mug in his glove compartment when he was stopped-a discovery that would have made it impossible for anyone to deny intent to sell, which would have put him in a different, more serious, criminal category and would have landed him not in the Coltrap County jail, but a state or federal prison most likely in St. Paul. He'd held his breath as Greg lifted the Thermos and shook it, listening to hear if anything moved inside, and then he tossed it back where it had been. Later, after he'd been arrested and Claire had come and paid his bail, he'd thrown the crystal meth into the Mississippi River, out behind Len's Lookout, wanting to make Vivian and Bender pay in at least this small way.

In the end he had not been charged with dealing marijuana because his attorney had convinced everyone involved of what, in fact, was true: that bag of marijuana in the tackle box had been only for Joshua's personal use. It had helped that the judge was a regular customer at Len's Lookout and had known his mother; it had helped that Bruce had built the cabinets that sat in the judge's kitchen. At his hearing it was agreed that Joshua would go to jail for eighty-five days and be on probation for a year afterward, waiving a trial or a right to appeal. He signed the papers in the judge's chambers of the Coltrap County Courthouse with his attorney standing next to him-Lisa and Claire were waiting out in the hall. Immediately afterward, he was led away in handcuffs, past Lisa and Claire, who both gasped and wept upon seeing him, down a staircase to the bas.e.m.e.nt, to the underground hallway that took him to the processing room where the little paper man dressed in black marker held vigil, and then past him, to the locked world beyond, to jail.

The afternoons in the jail were great fields of time, punctuated by group or individual, exercise or visitors, or nothing at all, in which case Joshua would convince one of the guards to give him a pen or pencil so he could sit at the tiny table in his cell and draw. Vern would be next to him, reading his Bible, which he read so often that it was no longer a book but a stack of pages that he had to keep in a s...o...b..x that Pat McCredy had brought in for him, which had once contained a pair of her many Birkenstocks.

Joshua now knew a great deal about Vern from the two hours they spent together each week in group. Hour one was called "sharing," hour two was "moving beyond." Often moving beyond got cut short because sharing ran so long. Sharing did not run long because the inmates sat down with much desire to share, but because Pat McCredy was so insistent about-and, Joshua had to admit, good at-forcing things out of each of them. With Vern, at least by the time Joshua came along, she didn't have to work too hard. He told them about how he used to hit his wife and son, about his own childhood growing up on a dairy farm that his family no longer owned, about the death of his father by tractor, about his mother who drank herself into a stupor all through his childhood and then killed herself accidentally by lighting her bed on fire with a fallen cigarette when he was sixteen. He told them about his twin brother who was mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded, and who still lived, as it turned out, in the very nursing home across the street-he'd lived there for almost fifty years, ever since their mother died. Joshua listened to this without looking at Vern, seeing him only peripherally in his a.s.signed seat immediately to the left, though sometimes he had to turn and face him whenever Pat McCredy demanded that it be so, when she had an exercise for them to do, as she often did, between sharing and moving beyond.

"I want you to go back," she said to them one day, "to what you dreamed for yourself when you were a kid." She inhaled a big breath and closed her eyes and slowly exhaled her breath as if she were meditating all alone in a room.

In the silence, Joshua gazed at Tiffany, who sat directly across the circle from him, studying the ends of her hair in one section and then another, delicately tugging strands of it from time to time to snap off a split end. She was somewhat b.i.t.c.hy and just okay-looking, but she moved him anyway, the pure sight of her: the feast of her face, her mannish hands and flat chest, her plush hips and b.u.t.t that seemed to have absorbed all the fat that refused to settle anywhere else. She was older than him, twenty-eight, and he felt more sorry for her than he did all the men combined-not only did she have to reveal her innermost feelings, but she also had to reveal them to a bunch of men in jail. All she'd done was write bad checks.

"Let's do this together, folks," Pat McCredy said without opening her eyes. "Let us all remember together when we were kids. Let's go back there. What did we want for ourselves?" She opened her eyes and stood and made her way slowly around their circle of nine chairs. She was at least six feet tall, her brown hair dim with gray and pulled back in a thin braid. Her shoulders were wide and hard-looking; her hips squarish and flabby, hoisted a few inches too high, it seemed, by her impossibly long legs. The overall effect was that she was part woman, part something else, part horse or buffalo. She wore a green turtleneck and green tights beneath an enormous beige smock that went down past her knees, her feet in purple Birkenstocks. From the loose pocket at the front of the smock she took a stack of tiny squares of construction paper and made her way around the circle, handing them each one piece, instructing them to write one of their childhood dreams. They had pens already, and journals she'd given them and forced them to decorate with finger paint and glitter, colored markers and crayons. Pat McCredy was big on writing things down. The journals, they could keep to themselves; with the pieces of paper anything could happen, but most often what happened is that they were collected by Pat McCredy, who used them as what she called "starting points" in individual.

Joshua balanced his journal on his knee and placed the square of paper on top of that. He'd painted the entire cover of his journal midnight blue and then, with glitter and glue, added tiny white stars.

"Your childhood dreams-or dream-one is fine," said Pat McCredy, prompting them, as if they were on a TV quiz show and needed to have the question rephrased.

He wrote: To move to California. It was true enough. It was personal enough. In individual he could work up the energy to discuss this dream with Pat McCredy, if called upon to do so.

"Is everyone done?" she asked, looking around.

"Hold on," said Tiffany. Her hazel eyes flashed onto Joshua for an instant and in that instant he ached for her, felt that she ached for him, as if she'd placed her hand on his bare stomach or crossed the room and whispered something secret in his ear, but then he tamped it down. He was going to be good now, from here on out, nothing but strictly Lisa's fiance.

"Okay," Pat McCredy said when Tiffany was done. "Now I want you to pa.s.s your paper to the left." A mumble of protest rippled across the room, but there was nothing to be done, they were powerless to her, and so they made their way around the circle, reading from the nine paper squares. To be a singer, said Tiffany's. To work as a clown at Disneyland, said Frank Unger's. To be rich, said Dan Bell's. And so it went until they reached Vern. "To move to California," he said while Joshua sat blank-faced and still as a doll listening to his own inane words.

He talked about it with R.J. the next time he came to visit-how they would move to California and be mechanics together someday-though they spoke of it differently now, as if it had been a joke all along.

"We should go just to prove my old lady wrong. She always said we wouldn't go," R.J. said, a flash of anger moving across his face, and then he laughed, like he always did when he spoke of his mother.

"How is she, anyway?" asked Joshua.

"The same." He stared at Joshua for several moments with his dark eyes, as if he wanted to say more, though they both knew they couldn't say much about Vivian and Bender with Tommy Johnson standing by, listening to every word. "Still f.u.c.ked up," he said at last, and cleared his throat. He'd slimmed down since he'd moved to Flame Lake. Without his baby fat he looked taller and older, and, even Joshua would admit it, more handsome. "Oh, and you know my dad went back to drinking."

Joshua nodded, expecting as much.

"He's an old drunk." R.J. laughed, and reached up to adjust the pendant he wore, an oval cracked in half along a jagged line. His new girlfriend, who lived in South Dakota, wore the other half. "I knew it for a while, but I kept thinking he'd go back to not doing it. He started out with just kind of sneaking around. Having a beer now and then and acting like he didn't, but now he don't even deny it." R.J. turned and looked at Tommy, then back to Joshua. "That's the thing I learned, eh. People don't change."

"Every once in a while they do," said Joshua, feeling, without wanting to feel, affronted.

"Like who?" asked R.J., and then Joshua told him all about Vern, going on, with a kind of glee, about the details he thought R.J. would be interested to know-about Vern's r.e.t.a.r.ded twin brother who lived in the nursing home, about how he beat his wife. It felt good to be talking about someone else's problems, though when he was in group listening to it firsthand it made him want to throw up. At times Joshua became almost dizzy, witnessing the mastery with which Pat McCredy would get the inmates to divulge. Her voice was like the softest stroke on a piano key, so strong and sure and hushed. She had an entire orchestra of sounds and modulations. A single word from her mouth could be pitched in a manner to mean hundreds of things, to elicit the most revealing and incriminating responses. When she was done with one person, she would move on seamlessly to the next, fixing her gaze so intently it was impossible not to gaze back. "So," she began each time, knowing, as she did with most of her questions, precisely what the answer was, "whose turn?"

There were things that n.o.body knew, that he would never tell anyone, no matter how hard Pat McCredy pushed. The deep jelly core of him that only he knew. It could not be spoken of. He had no words for it, what made him, what pained him, what rocked him and f.u.c.ked him. This thing for which he had no words was his life, and his job in jail was to protect it from Pat McCredy. And so he did, speaking to her of arguments he'd had with Lisa or Claire, of career paths he might take, or what had kept him from once and for all getting his GED. For Pat McCredy he created the story of his mother and the story of his father-sad, heartbreaking really, but he'd survived, he was forging on (he left the story of Bruce out of it entirely, by maintaining that all was well on that front)-and Pat McCredy gave him the words. She gave him closure and forgiveness, adult child and the five stages of grief. She was good, she pried, she challenged him and applied her techniques, made him pour what she thought was his soul out onto paper, but he was better, fiercer, more who he was than she believed he had the strength to be, and so he held on, safe against her.

On one front she had made progress, he would grant her that. He'd made the mistake, in his first week in group, of writing the words drugs and alcohol on one of Pat McCredy's squares of construction paper in response to her question, "What techniques do you use to ease your pain or sorrow?" He'd meant it as something of a joke, though in fact it was true. Over the past year he had become one stop short of what his mother would call a "big drinker"-not exactly an alcoholic, but someone who probably drank too much, too often. When he wasn't drinking, pot kept him on balance throughout the day as he drove from place to place, delivering drugs. Meth he did not touch, a point that he, in his own defense, returned to over and over again in his individuals with Pat McCredy, though she was unmoved by this.

"It's not what others do, Joshua. It's what you do. Marijuana can be an addiction as serious as any other. As can beer."

"But don't tell me it's like meth," he insisted. "Are you aware of what's happening with meth? It's everywhere around here. It's a serious, serious thing."

"I am aware," she said sternly. She loved to talk drugs and alcohol; they were her professional forte. "We're not talking about this as a societal problem, however. We're talking about you."

"What about me?"

"Well, why don't you tell me?" She smiled at him, waiting, and then she couldn't help but say more, "I'm not the one who wrote that I use drugs and alcohol to ease my sorrow, am I?" She waited again. "Who was it that wrote that down, Joshua?"

"Me," he almost yelled.

"Okay," Pat McCredy said, more calmly than ever. "Then let us begin from there."

In the end, much to Joshua's relief, she did not pull out a yellow "permission to depart" sheet to request that he be allowed to attend the AA meetings in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the hospital, as Vern and five of the other inmates, including Tiffany, had to do three times a week, all of them sitting there shackled in chains, one to the other, among the free-roaming alcoholics of Blue River. She warned him that this decision could change, as they "continued on this journey of self-discovery together." For now, he was not an alcoholic or a drug addict and for that he was thankful. Instead he had what Pat McCredy called "issues with chemical dependency." His use was situational, in her a.s.sessment, perhaps tied directly to his grief.

And it was, he realized one afternoon after his session with Pat McCredy, having not realized it before. She was right-he had been right when he wrote those words on the square of paper in the first place. In jail, he missed his nightly drinks, his daily joints more dearly than perhaps he missed any person. Drink did not open him up, it did not allow him to think and weep freely. Instead it bolstered him against his thoughts, against her, his mother. It was the thing that had helped him, all those nights in his apartment, or lying next to Lisa, go into his torpor. Three beers or shots were all he needed, though often he had more, each one a seal, a lid, a cure.

The nights in jail were the worst, as he lay on his cot stone-cold sober next to Vern, staring at the dark ceiling, the yellow of the painted sun the only thing he could see. Early on, he'd had to strike a deal with himself: each night he would allow himself to cry, but only for thirty seconds. If he could not keep himself from crying, at least he could contain it with the voice in his head counting one, two, three as the tears streamed silently down his face, into his ears and hair. It wasn't that he willed himself to cry, or that he was thinking particularly of his mother, or remembering things she'd said or done. It wasn't even precisely his mother, though what he felt was directly tied to her-her life and her death. It was that he felt all of his sorrow, lodged in a furrow in his chest, palpable and real as an apple. It was there and it could not be avoided, would not be denied, and each night, for thirty seconds, he bowed to it. He was aware, as he wept, that his tears would gratify Pat McCredy, but he would never tell her about them. She would name them, define them, turn them into something other than what they were, something other than his own.

When he finished crying, he got up and went to the little bathroom cubby and wiped his face and blew his nose into a wad of toilet paper. Vern sometimes turned then, though his breath never broke its long, deep sleeping rhythm. Joshua would lie back down on his cot and stare at the ceiling for a while longer. The jail always seemed, at this moment, quieter than it had been before, and also more open, as if there weren't a series of barricades and bars and locked doors between him and the rest of the world, as if he could have stepped outside to take a look at the cold night sky if he'd cared to. From his cot he felt that he could feel the gentle presence of the entire town of Blue River that surrounded him: its every dim streetlight, its old brick school, its Burger King lit up like a circus on the town's one low hill, and, more than anything, he could feel the river, the Mississippi. He could feel Midden, far off, to the north, and Flame Lake a paler star north farther still.

Often, as he lay there after crying and before sleep, he had the sensation that his mother was in his cell with him. In the weeks immediately after she'd died he had invented various tests for her to see if she was watching him. He had commanded her to turn on or off a light or make a chair move or the wind come through the curtain at a certain time. She had failed every one, but now he didn't need her to pa.s.s any tests. Sometimes he simply allowed himself to believe that she was there, above him in the painted sun, watching him. Other times he closed his eyes and let the breathing, sleeping person in the cot beside him be his mother, not Vern Milkkinen. To his surprise this was not so hard to do. The moment he allowed himself to hear the rhythm of his mother's breath in that of Vern's, she was there, in his every sigh and twitch. Twice he'd gone so far as to extend his arm midair into the center of the room. He imagined his mother reaching out from the opposite cot and taking his hand. He imagined all the things she would do and did, the things he hadn't been grateful for when she was alive, the things he would say sorry for if he had one last chance and he could. But then Vern would move and an unmistakably masculine grunt would issue forth from his dry mouth, and as fast as she had appeared, Joshua's mother would be gone.

"They did a marathon on the radio of your mom's old shows," Bruce told him the next time he came to visit-it was only the second time he'd come.

"They did?" asked Joshua, his voicing squeaking embarra.s.singly.

He nodded. "I caught some of it. They did a segment at the end where they interviewed various people at the station who knew your mom. Who she was, what she did, what she was like, and so forth." He reached up and twirled the diamond stud in his ear. "A tribute, I suppose."

A heat, a pressure, a vapor, rose like a hot hand behind Joshua's face, making his eyes water, his cheeks grow warm, as if he'd had a gla.s.s of whiskey in one straight shot. "What did they say?"

Bruce sat thinking about it for a moment, the expression on his face quizzical, as if he were pondering something philosophical, utterly unrelated to him. "That she was a nice lady," he said, scratching his arm. "That everyone enjoyed listening to her show."

Joshua forced himself to cough, feeling the hand, the vapor that felt like whiskey but wasn't rise again and press behind his face, wanting, with the cough, to force it down, for fear that he would burst into tears. f.u.c.k, he thought over and over again, motherf.u.c.k, to get himself back in line. He shifted in his chair, wanting to be two people: to be the person who demanded, Tell me what my mother was like-he knew, of course, but still he wanted to know, to hear, and in particular to hear it from Bruce-and also to be the person who sat still and hard and calm as a statue in his chair, as if no part of him could be moved or reached or known.

He opted, on instinct, to be the latter. It was the easier person to be. He willed himself to think of whatever he could that was not his mother, which, instantly, was Tiffany, and the way in group that afternoon she'd picked indifferently through the ends of her hair and then, suddenly, erotically, it seemed, looked up at him.

"I wonder how much time we got left," asked Bruce after a while, patting his hands on the metal table.

"Twelve minutes," Joshua said, staring at the clock behind Bruce's head, in a voice as leaden as he could muster.

"Feel this," said Lisa the following week, pulling Joshua's hand toward her, pressing his palm onto the side of her round belly. He had to lean forward hard, trying not to actually rise from his chair. Anything that could be construed as standing during the visit-other than the h.e.l.lo and the goodbye-was strictly against the rules. She pressed her palm more firmly on top of his and together they waited until he felt a tap and then another one in quick succession.

"Cool," said Joshua. It surprised him every time. Even with less than a month to go before the baby was due, he found it hard to honestly believe that inside of Lisa there was a baby.

"It's been like that night and day lately," she said, letting go of his hand. "I can hardly sleep anymore."

"No?"

"Oh, I try. I lay there. When you're home I'll sleep better."

"I don't sleep well neither. But we only have a week to go." He squeezed her hands. They were slightly puffy, like the rest of her except for her legs, which were as long and bony as they'd always been.

"So, Claire and I are making progress. This cla.s.s is really good, Josh. I wish you could go. Today they taught us how to breathe." She took a deep breath in and then exhaled it.

"To breathe deep?"

"Yeah-but it's a special deep breath. Like this." She demonstrated it again. "In through the nose, out through the mouth. You'll have to remind me to do that when I'm in labor."

"Okay."