Torch: A Novel Part 3

"Claire."

"Mom."

The snowflakes landed on the windshield and then melted instantly. Teresa turned the wipers up to the highest speed. "I suppose the roads'll get bad now," she said. "They say it's going to snow six inches and then get cold."

"What about going to college? What happened to that?" Claire asked.

"Oh, for goodness' sake." She looked at Joshua in the rearview mirror, though he could not hear her. "You're both being silly. We'll talk when we get home. Until then, you're going to have to relax."

"I am relaxed," Claire said, trying to make her voice sound relaxed. She sat quietly for a while, staring at the road ahead of them, and then took off her mittens and got a tissue from her purse. "It's just that I think I have the right to know," she said, dabbing at her nose with the tissue. "I think driving two hundred miles like a maniac to get here gives me the right."

"I didn't tell you to drive like a maniac."

They pa.s.sed the Simpson farm. Becka stood with a shovel in front of the house and waved.

"Honk the horn, Mom. There's Becka."

They were silent then, riding home. Trees streamed past, their trunks encrusted with snow, and behind them, not visible from the road, flowed the river, the Mississippi. Claire could feel everything they pa.s.sed without having to see it, every weed and rock, every patch of bog and tree; even if it were dark she would feel them, so familiar they were to her. She watched herself in the cracked side mirror, remembering how she used to make faces at herself when she drove for long days with her mother, when she was in junior high school and her mother had worked for a short time as a Mary Kay lady. They'd driven all over Coltrap County, holding parties and trying to convince people to buy Mary Kay makeup. Teresa had a folding table that she'd cover with a pink cloth and a cardboard Mary Kay stand-up display. When the women at the party were ready, Teresa would have Claire sit in a chair in the center of the group and make her up, explaining what she was doing while she worked with gentle, emphatic strokes. Claire felt glamorous and important, though she pretended just the opposite, carrying herself as if she were submitting to something not quite distasteful, but approaching that. "Beauty is a few simple steps away," her mother would say when she'd finished applying the makeup, the roomful of women all beaming at Claire. Her mother didn't believe, though, that it was beautifying. Afterward, when they'd left the party and were back in the car, she would push herself up on the seat to look at herself in the rearview mirror and wipe away what she could with a tissue and the cold cream that she kept in her purse. Then she'd hold a clean tissue up to Claire and say, "Here. Get that junk off your face."

"So how've you been?" Teresa asked. "How's David?"

"Okay."

"How's school?"

"Fine."

They saw a deer standing at the edge of the woods in the ditch. Teresa let her foot off the gas and they coasted past him.

"How are things with you?" asked Claire. She turned to her mother, who looked tired but pretty, her hair pulled into a braid the color of toast. "Have you lost weight?"

"I don't know. I don't think so," Teresa said, and touched her face with one of her gloved hands. "Do I look like I have?"

"A little. It looks nice, Mom."

Claire turned on the radio. Only one station came in, KAXE, out of Grand Rapids, where her mother had her show. Now it was the cla.s.sical music hour, an explosion of flutes and violas and violins.

"Bruce is making dinner," Teresa said loudly. "He's making his mac and cheese."

Claire switched the radio off. "Just tell me one thing. Is there even a reason that you had me come home?" She stared at Teresa, who concentrated on the road. "Because if there isn't, I am going to be p.i.s.sed." She sat quietly, waiting for her mother to say something, but when she didn't she added, "For your information, I have a life and I can't be told to come home whenever you feel like I should."

"I know you have a life," Teresa said.

"I'm not a child anymore, you know."

"You're not a child, but you're my child. You always will be. Both you and Josh."

"That has nothing to do with what we're talking about," Claire said. She turned to Joshua behind her. "Did she tell you what was wrong?"

He stared at her for several moments and then clicked his CD player off.

"Did she tell you?" she asked him again.

"Are you pregnant, Mom?" Joshua asked, astonished.

"Claire! Stop, okay?" Teresa looked in the rearview mirror. "I'm not pregnant." And then she said, her voice quiet, "I have some news. That's all."

"News?"

"What kind of news?" Joshua asked, but Teresa didn't answer.

"Why are you torturing us like this?" Claire asked.

Their mother slowed the car and pulled to the side of the road and then put it in park but left the windshield wipers going.

Joshua asked, "Did something happen to Bruce?" He pushed his headphones off and let them hang around his neck.

"Bruce is fine." She turned the ignition off and removed her gloves. "Everyone's fine. It's just ..." She hesitated for several moments, then continued, as if talking not to them, but to herself. "It's okay."

"What's okay?" Joshua asked savagely.

"Tell us!" demanded Claire, the tears rising in her eyes, more angry than sad, more frightened than angry. She believed that when her mother spoke again it would be like the moment in a fairy tale when a spell is broken and whatever had been horrible moments before was suddenly lifted and everyone was released from d.a.m.nation.

But her mother didn't speak. She put her hands on the steering wheel, as if she were going to start the car and drive away. The three of them gazed silently out the windshield for several moments, at the carca.s.s of a dead racc.o.o.n, flattened on the road, fine tufts of its fur blowing in the wind.

"What is it, Mom?" Claire whispered gently, as if trying to persuade a child.

The engine began to tick-for several moments there was no other sound-and then it stopped ticking and, aside from the wind, it was silent altogether.

Teresa turned in her seat so she could see both of them and smiled. "My babies," she crooned suddenly, and reached out to touch them.

Claire didn't have time to think about it, what she did the moment she felt the weight of her mother's hand. How she shifted, delicately, away.

4.

THE SUN BEAT WARMLY against the sheets of plastic that covered the porch screens, and the flies, which had appeared to be dead that morning in the sills of the screens, stirred. They spun in mad circles on the backs of their wings, their legs black wires spindling frantically in the air, until some of them, by will or by luck, wrenched themselves at last upright. They beat themselves against the thick plastic until the dim January heat died behind the clouds and with it, them.

Bruce sat in the cold rocking chair on the porch and listened to the flies buzzing. It was all he could hear, that buzz, interrupted occasionally by the dogs, who scratched the door, wanting to be let in or out, from the house to the porch, from the porch to the yard, and then back again. But mostly they sat with him and snapped at the flies.

Bruce rolled a cigarette and then smoked it. He rolled another one and held it without lighting it. He wore a navy blue hat with earflaps that could be b.u.t.toned under his chin or on top of his head, but he'd not b.u.t.toned them at all, so they hung loosely over the sides of his face. He was a bony man, but strong, his limbs long and hard and pale as the bleached poles of a dock. His hair was blond and wispy and tied back always in a low ponytail that snaked thinly past his shoulders. He was freezing, but he didn't want to go inside, so he stayed sitting in the wooden rocking chair and stared at his truck in the driveway.

He considered getting into it and driving back to the job, back to the cabin on Lake Nakota where he was renovating a bathroom for a couple from Minneapolis. He'd spent the morning there, tearing the room apart with his hammer and crowbar and his own hands, ripping the sink out and the tub and shower stall and linoleum from the floor. None of it wanted to come out, all of it almost brand-new. And now tomorrow he would begin to install the bathroom the couple wanted, composed of the old things they'd found in antique shops and specialty hardware stores: an enormous iron bathtub with silver clawed feet, a porcelain sink shaped like a tulip, and tiles for the floor that looked precisely like packed mud.

He could be laying those tiles now. He'd driven home after lunch, thinking he'd find Claire and Joshua there, thinking he'd spare Teresa the grief and go ahead and tell them the bad news, despite what he and Teresa had decided-to tell the kids together that evening after dinner-but when he'd arrived the house was empty and Joshua's truck gone.

He stood and the dogs stood and they all went outside, where it had begun to snow. He turned his face up to the sky like a boy. All the times he'd gazed there, looking for things, finding things, knowing things and pointing them out to girls, or at other times to his father. The Milky Way and Pleiades, the Aurora Borealis and Orion. And all those times he'd felt he'd known the sky, yet now he felt that he knew nothing, or rather that he knew nothing except for what he felt, which was his body cold inside and out and the snowflakes tumbling softly onto his face. Wet fingerprints they were, no two the same, miracles that arrived and then melted.

It was too early to feed the horses, but he did it anyway. Then he fed the hens, huddled already into their beds of hay and shredded wool in the dark of the coop, their feathers brown against their beautiful bodies. He cooed to the first of them, cooed her name, though he could not be sure which name exactly was hers, never able to tell them apart. Teresa knew their names. She'd named them herself-Miss Pretty and Prudence Pinchpenny and Flowers McGillicutty and Mister Bojangles-though of course there was not a mister among them, her idea of a joke. He slid his hand under their rumps and found two warm eggs and put one in each pocket. He had to duck to keep from hitting his head on the ceiling of the coop. It was an A-frame hut that had once stood at the end of their long driveway so that Claire and Joshua had shelter while they waited for the school bus. Now that the kids had no use for it, he'd made it into a chicken coop-a thing that he did often and well, changing one thing to another, according to need. Changing station wagons into pickups, stumps into birdbaths, metal barrels into wood stoves.

He walked out the door of the coop, where the dogs waited for him. The snow, falling in earnest now, gathered on their shiny black backs and then wafted off when they moved. He trudged to the porch and lit the cigarette he hadn't lit before, having carried it all this time pinched between his lips. He'd already prepared dinner and laid it all out in a baking pan and set it aside to go in the oven when it was time. He looked at his watch. It was three o'clock and moving toward dark already. His insides felt heavy, weighted with guilt about not being where he should be at this hour on a Friday afternoon. He closed his eyes and a list formed there of all the work he had to do. He and Teresa had agreed that despite everything they would continue to work. He would work. She would work.

"There's nothing else we can do," she'd said to him the night before as they lay together in bed, having gone there early, exhausted from their day in Duluth. She didn't say it and neither did he, but they both knew why it was so very important that they had to work: money. She said, "We'll work every minute of every day that we can."

"Not you," he said. "Me. Your job is to get better."

She didn't reply, but he could feel her mind ticking. On Monday she would start radiation treatments, but she could keep working. She'd been able to schedule her appointments late enough that she had time to work lunch and then drive the hour and a half to Duluth. Joshua would take her after school. He'd have to take a leave from his own job. These are the things they'd decided already, things they'd gone over, lying in bed after trying to make love but then not being able to go through with it because they were too sad. He had felt her going over it all as he held her hand beneath the covers and rubbed the soft side of her hip with the back of his hand. Even her hip had seemed to be thinking.

"Everything's going to be okay."

"I know," she said, and rolled onto her side, facing away from him. He shifted onto his side too, and cupped her body into his. "Be careful," she whispered sharply.

"I am." He gently clutched the small mound of her stomach. She wore a bra and nothing else. She had to wear the bra to protect the bandage that was taped to her breast to cover the st.i.tches she'd gotten that day, when she'd had a biopsy of a lump that the doctor had found. It turned out to be benign, unlike everything else. He kissed her shoulder, leaving saliva on her skin, and then he kissed it again where it was wet, where it had already gotten cold.

They were one person, he thought, not two.

"Don't," she said. She sat up on the edge of the bed, her back very pale in the light of the moon, accentuated by the black straps of her bra.

"I don't want to go anywhere," she said, after a long while, as if he'd asked. "I mean, Paris or Tahiti or anywhere. I thought you were supposed to want to go where you'd always dreamed of going when you found out you're going to die."

"You're not going to die." His words barely came out, as if he were saying them from the bottom of a canoe, a f.u.c.king liar. Her body shifted infinitesimally, icily, and he remembered the words that had been spoken to them earlier in the day. Ordinary, happy words that had become suddenly daggers of fire. A month, a year, perhaps by summer. He imagined her dying next month, in February, and then he pushed the idea immediately from his mind, scorched by it. He imagined her dying a year from now-a whole year, an entire blessed year-and it seemed so very far and it seemed that if he knew it were true, that she would live for one more year, he could bear it. More than that, he would do anything for it, give up everything he had. He thought, September. September at least. Another spring, another summer. He could live with September. September suddenly made his chest open with joy. And then he thought, there's always a chance. What was the chance? Ten thousand to one? A hundred thousand to one? Whatever it was, it was there-the chance that she would live, go on living, and the cancer would languish and disappear and they would grow old and laugh about it or shudder when they remembered this awful winter of cancer, but they would also be thankful for it. How much it had taught them. How close it had brought them-Claire and Joshua and Bruce and Teresa. And they would understand how deeply they loved one another, how intricately bound they were to each other, how every conflict or division or thought in any such direction was nothing-petty folly-in the face of love, and not just their love for each other, but love in the world. Love for every man, woman, and beast, and even G.o.d, not just one G.o.d, but all G.o.ds, because now they knew the meaning of life because it-life!-had come so close to being taken from them.

Or the other option was that he would die before she did, no matter when she died. The knowledge that he could die tomorrow, that anyone could suddenly die at any moment of anything, seemed to him consoling, almost a complete relief. And then it came to him, what he would do when she died: die too. The thought was like a hand cool on his forehead.

"It's funny, but I thought of Karl," Teresa said, still sitting on the edge of the bed. "Whether he'll try to get in touch with the kids. You know, afterwards."

"How would he know?" asked Bruce.

"I don't know. If somehow word got to him."

Bruce didn't like to think about Karl, Teresa's ex-husband, Joshua and Claire's so-called father-a man they'd seen only once since their parents had divorced. When Bruce first met Teresa he said he was going to drive to Texas and find Karl and kill him on her behalf, because when they'd been married he'd broken her nose. He'd broken other bones too, at other times over the course of their marriage, but the nose Karl had tried to make up to her by buying her a new one, which was the nose she had now, the only nose that Bruce could imagine on her. Her nose had a name: Princess Anne. She'd picked it out herself from a stand-up display with several rows of noses that had names printed beneath them like paint samples. She'd almost chosen one named Audrey or another called Surfer Girl. She told Bruce about her nose and the other noses when they were first falling in love, and he'd said she possessed the most beautiful nose on the earth, and she'd burst into tears. She'd been working at the Rest-A-While Villa then, making sure that the residents took their pills, cleaning out bedpans, changing and washing sheets, whatever needed to be done. Bruce's Aunt Jenny had lived there. He'd visit her every couple of weeks, bringing her bottles of Orange Crush and the black licorice she liked, sitting with her in the community room to watch TV or play cards.

The first time he saw Teresa she was mopping up a pool of tomato juice that had spilled from a rolling cart in the hallway. "h.e.l.lo," she said, and laughed lightly. The second time he saw her she was standing in the front door of the Rest-A-While Villa in the heat of summer holding a screwdriver, its handle, pale yellow, barely transparent, like honey gone hard. Later, he learned that she carried it with her wherever she went so she could open and close her car door by jamming it into the s.p.a.ce where the handle had once been. "h.e.l.lo," she said for the second time. Her earrings were real feathers that fluttered up into her hair as she walked past. The third time he saw her they spent an unexpected hour in the Rest-A-While Villa parking lot together while he fixed the handle on her car door.

They fell in love then. Languidly, secretly, during the hours that Claire and Joshua were in school. She hadn't allowed him to meet them for months, and once they'd decided to live together-neither of them believed in marriage-they'd had a ceremony, a nonlegal wedding, which bound Bruce not only to Teresa but also to Claire and Joshua. The ceremony involved vows they'd written together and then the four of them each chose a lilac frond from the same bough and took turns letting it go in the Mississippi River to symbolize their bond as a family. Bruce Gunther to Teresa and Joshua and Claire Wood. That night Teresa had given Bruce a painting that she'd painted herself-The Woods of Coltrap County-three trees in the snow, one big, two smaller ones. It hung now on the wall at the foot of the bed, and he'd slept and woken to it every morning and night for the twelve years they'd been together.

He asked, "Do you want Karl to know? Should I call him when the time comes?"

"No," she said, turning slightly toward him, but not enough to face him. "Not unless Josh and Claire want that. I don't even know exactly where he lives anymore."

He stroked her back with the tips of his fingers and then he remembered that she didn't want to be touched and stopped, but left his hands near her on the bed. He felt a burning tightness in his center, down low, in rut and ache, wanting her, wanting to do everything to her, to push and pull and lick and hump and enter and suck and pinch and rub. He felt other ways at other times and he knew that she did too. Sometimes they'd had to almost will themselves to f.u.c.k, their bodies clacking together good-naturedly, as familiar and expected as water to the mouth. During those times, they got each other off expertly, lovingly, and kindly, but without urgency and without l.u.s.t. Sometimes when she walked through the room naked he was no more moved by the sight of her than if the cat had sidled in, but now he felt the opposite: that he could make love to her again and again for days without stop.

"Josh is late," she said.

"He'll be along. Why don't you get some sleep?"

"I will," she said hoa.r.s.ely, without moving.

He heard the rumble of a pickup making its way down their road, ice-glazed gravel and packed snow, with more snow coming on. He knew as it neared that it was neither Teresa nor Joshua, knew in fact that it was Kathy Tyson. He was mildly surprised when he heard her engine slow and then saw her truck turn into the driveway. The dogs barked and he tried to quiet them to no avail, and he walked off the porch and into the yard to greet her. He'd known her all his life, without actually ever truly coming to know her in anything but a neighborly way. She'd graduated high school a few years behind him and joined her dad in his business, inseminating cows. She lived on their road, another mile and a half on, in a cabin midway down a long driveway that continued up a hill to her parents' house, where she'd grown up.

"Afternoon," she called happily, rolling her window down, but not getting out. He walked up to her door. "I didn't expect to find anyone home this time of day."

"I'm headed back out now. I just stopped home to get some tools."

"The roads are icing up." Her eyes were brown, the same color as her hair. "I wanted to bring some things by." She handed Bruce an empty mason jar. "Thank Teresa again for the apple b.u.t.ter. And this came to me somehow." She handed him an envelope.

"Thanks." He looked at the envelope: nothing but junk mail, addressed to him in computer-generated cursive handwriting, a trick disguised as something real.

"You got any big weekend plans?" she asked.

"Not too much."

She shifted her truck into reverse. "Tell Teresa hi for me."

"You do the same with your folks," he called out to her as she rolled backward into the turnaround. He opened the envelope and read the letter that tried to persuade him that he needed to replace all the windows of his house. He ripped it in half and put it into his pocket, where he found one of the eggs he'd placed there earlier, cooler now. The snow had already laid down a fresh two inches. He ran his glove over the trunk of Claire's Cutla.s.s, swishing the snow off of it, clearing it away for no actual reason, and then he stood staring at its maroon rump, the only color in sight.

He opened the back door of the car and got in and lay down on the seat, his knees bent, his feet crammed onto the floor. Snow covered the windows all around him, making the inside like a coc.o.o.n. The car had belonged to his parents, who'd died a few years ago, his father first, then his mother a couple months later. Bruce had given the car to Claire when she moved to Minneapolis to go to college. By the time his parents owned the car, Bruce had been living on his own, so he hadn't ridden in it all that much, but being inside of it made him feel as if he were in the presence of his mother and father again. His parents had died old, nearly eighty. Bruce was their only child, conceived late, after they'd given up hope. The car smelled good, the way all cars did to him, like his whole life pressed together in a room. A combination of metal and gas and bits of food and velour and vinyl and fake pine needles and plastic where people had been, where their hands had touched and touched again. There was a long rip in the fabric that covered the ceiling of the car, causing the whole thing to sag. He closed his eyes, and soon the dogs started up their ecstatic barking, hearing Teresa's car approach. Bruce stayed in the back seat as she turned into the driveway and made her way up the hill. He kept his eyes closed and a list formed again, not of the work he had to do, or the money he had to make, but of what he and Teresa were going to do now, what they'd decided to say, and how.

The engine stopped and he heard them get out; none of them said a word, not even to the dogs. He was going to sit up and get out in a minute, but something held him there. He heard them walking through the snow, up onto the porch. It occurred to him that he could stay in the car. They would think he was in the barn. How long could he stay there before they went looking for him? His hands were numb from the cold. He sat up, slowly, and one of the eggs in his pocket rolled out onto the seat. He put it back into his pocket and got out of the car. When he shut the door all the snow that had clung to the windows fell off like a large curtain.

The outside light went on, and Teresa stepped out onto the porch without her coat on. "There you are," she called to him, and stood waiting for him to come to her.

They hugged without looking at each other, and she held him for a very long time, then stepped back and said, "They know. I told them on the way home. I couldn't wait." He could see that she'd been crying. She looked down and then turned and went inside, and he followed her, straight into the living room without taking his boots off, where Joshua and Claire sat on opposite ends of the couch. Shadow was on Claire's lap. She stroked her as if she were concentrating very hard on following precisely the same line each time, tears falling quietly down her face.

"Cancer means a lot of things these days," said Teresa encouragingly, and sat down between them. "It can do different things. We don't know what mine will do."

Simultaneously Claire and Joshua began to weep, each of them scrambling to sit on the floor at Teresa's feet, their heads pressed into her corduroy-covered knees. Bruce pursed his lips, to keep his mouth from quivering, but then his jaw began to tremble and he coughed into his hands. He gazed at the gold-colored towels that sat always on the arms of his stuffed chair, to cover the places where the fabric had worn away. He smoothed the towels down with his rough hands, straightening them back into place, and tried to make his mind go blank as Teresa continued to speak, her voice like a band playing a march, reciting the numbers, the dates, the seasons, the estimations and the speculations and the calculations, the Septembers, the Marches, and the maybe-not Mays.

At last she stopped talking and Bruce watched her stroke Claire and Joshua's hair while they wept, stroking it in all the different ways that he had seen her stroke their hair over the years. Rubbing it like it was cloth, raking through it like it was leaves, then taking it in tiny tendrils and pulling delicately on it, as if she were playing the strings of a harp. His insides leapt and were still and then they leapt again as he thought of what to say but he said nothing. Pain washed through him in waves at seeing the sorrow of his children, and solace washed through him as well, for precisely the same reason.

"We're going to get through this," he said at last, his voice ghoulish and tinny, an echo from afar. Teresa looked at him gratefully, her eyes aflame and at the same time calm, as if she'd arrived at the scene of an accident and had come prepared to help. With their eyes they said things to one another, domestic and romantic, grandiose and mundane, but mostly they said, without any surprise, Cancer. Cancer. It's truly cancer now. The realization crackled starkly between them across the room. Bruce felt as if he were seeing it-the word itself-and understanding it for the first time. Fraught with horror. And beauty now too, because it lived in her, like a fish that swam or a sapphire of coal that burned. "We're going to get through this," he repeated, suddenly giddy, believing it, that if cancer could be beautiful, she would live. "We are."

"We are," Teresa agreed quietly, stilling her hands.

And then she turned away from him, as if all alone in a room, and rested her head back against the ruined velvet of the couch.

PART II.

The face of this love was quiet and feral. It was a ruthless act, but not a guilty one. A waterfall, a flood, is neither guilty nor not guilty. It simply drowns the people in its way.