Torch: A Novel Part 5

She woke with the wet washcloth draped over her face. The bathroom was as warm as a sauna from the s.p.a.ce heater humming on high. She realized that there had been a knock, and that's why she'd woken. She sat up and looked at the closed door.

"Ter?" Bruce said from the other side.

She opened the door, reaching awkwardly for it, still sitting on the rug with her socks and bra on, her robe laid out beneath her. "I fell asleep," she said when he came into the room, squinting at the light. "What time is it?"

"Four something."

"Why aren't you sleeping?" she asked, standing up.

"I am. I just had to pee."

She examined her face in the mirror while he urinated. "I think I'll take a bath," she said. She took her bra off and felt a tight pulling sensation where the st.i.tches strained against the weight of her breast. Slowly, she tugged the tape that held the gauze bandage in place, covering the st.i.tches from her biopsy. "I can take this off now."

"Here," Bruce said. "Let me." He stood in front of her and pulled the tape off more gently than she had, peeling it away bit by bit and then removing the gauze. There were pink lines on her skin from the elastic of the bra, and other, meaner-looking marks where the tape had been. The air felt cool and damp on her newly uncovered skin. There was a small bruise at the center, where the st.i.tches were, and the skin yellowed as it circled out away from them. She got into the tub and ran the water without putting the stopper in the drain. She wetted the washcloth and patted the st.i.tches with it, then turned the water off and leaned against the back of the empty tub. Bruce sat on the floor beside her and stroked her arm, kneading the muscles.

"Would you please stop?" she asked, sharply. "I can't stand all this rubbing. I don't want to be rubbed, okay? It's like you're my f.u.c.king ma.s.sage therapist all of a sudden."

He let go of her. He wore boxers and nothing else. The slit in the front was gaping open, his soft p.e.n.i.s in a nest of hair just inside. She looked away from him to the end of the tub, at her feet braced on either side of the faucet. "I want it to be the way it's always been. That's how I need you to treat me."

She turned to Bruce. He'd been looking at her all the time, hadn't taken his eyes off of her, and now she gazed back at him with the same intention. She would not look away. He would not look away. They were children playing a game of wills and then they were hostile enemies. She felt enraged by him and then mad with love. Their eyes did this, said this, shifting from one thing to the next like a baton being pa.s.sed off.

He crouched over her, leaning into the tub and then bent to press his tongue against the st.i.tches on her breast. Pain shot all the way back to her collarbone and then down through the channels of her body, going everywhere, growing enormous, filling her entirely, and also staying small, as if her whole being were centered on Bruce's mouth. His tongue was a knife or a flame that opened her up.

She pulled him into the tub on top of her and wrapped her legs around him, moaning low and soft into his chest, and then she shifted and he was inside of her and she rocked against him. Her head knocked rhythmically against the rim of the tub and then she pushed herself up onto her elbows and they f.u.c.ked that way until Bruce's knees couldn't take it anymore and they laughed and climbed out of the tub and tumbled onto the rug, where they f.u.c.ked some more. Hard and soft and slow and fast. Not like she had cancer. Not in any way differently than they had f.u.c.ked each other for the past twelve years. Joy filled them, then ecstacy. Out in the living room the dogs lifted their heads. Upstairs Claire and Joshua woke momentarily to roll and shift before falling back to sleep in their beds. Shadow jumped up onto the back of the couch and gazed out the window at the deer who came to the salt lick each night, and then she turned abruptly and listened intently as the cuckoo clock sounded five times.

Teresa and Bruce were asleep by then, their bodies intertwined on the bathroom rug, their eyes closed against the light overhead that they'd both been too tired to reach up and switch off. So bright it was, and yet they hardly seemed to notice it, the way it beat down on them without mercy.

6.

WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD for me? What are my career interests? What do I look for in a spouse? Will I have children? How will I balance the demands of career and family? Joshua sat staring at the questions on the blackboard and let Lisa Boudreaux-his so-called wife-do the work. She wrote the questions in her notebook and then took Joshua's notebook and wrote them in his. Now they were supposed to discuss these questions, desk-to-desk, like all the other "married" couples around the room, making compromises like real couples did.

"What if one wants to be a farmer and the other a Broadway star?" Mr. Bradley had asked them, smiling, pretending to be confounded. "What if one hates snow and the other is a dog musher? What if Cindy likes to party and Jimmy wants to bake bread?" He paced, then stopped suddenly and looked at them with the expectant air of a TV talk show host. His own wife-his actual wife-was a teacher at the school too, in math. He set his stick of chalk down dramatically on the metal rim that ran the length of the board and then turned back to face them. "Welcome, ladies and gents, to 'Life and Love and Work.' "

Joshua stared at his forearm. It was covered with an intricate blue pen drawing he'd made of a spider web. They'd just completed the unit called "Life and Personal Values." When they were done with "Life and Love and Work," they'd move on to "Life and Money," a sort of light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel project, in which they'd each be given an imaginary five thousand dollars to invest in the stock market. The cla.s.s itself was simply called "Life." Everyone had to take it in the last semester of their senior year in order to graduate from Midden High School, even the kids in special ed.

"What do you want to be?" asked Lisa, once they'd arranged their desks. Her pen had a pink feathery furry thing at the end of it, and she swished it contemplatively along her pale cheek.

"An astronaut," he said, after thinking for a while.

Lisa wrote this down in her notebook. "I'll be an astronaut too. We'll make, like, a ton of money." She took Joshua's notebook and wrote We are both astronauts!

"We could get on the same flights together or whatever," she said. "We'll be like this total couple in s.p.a.ce." She put her fluffy pen down and took a cherry Ricola from her purse and sucked on it while still holding it in her fingers. Together they glanced around the room. Joshua knew he'd gotten lucky. At least they were at the same level, socially. Not extremely popular, but not unpopular either. Many of the couples had not been so fortunate. People in drama and band and Knowledge Bowl had been paired up with heavyweights like Jordan Parker or Jessica Miller, who sat looking mortified. And Tom Halverson and Jason Kooda had had to agree to be married to each other, thanks to a shortage of girls.

"How many kids should we have?"

"Six."

"No," said Lisa, bobbing in her chair. "Like ten." And then she wrote ten and underlined it twice.

He smiled at her. She was basically a cool, sweet, hot girl. Not perfect, but hot. Her body was one long noodle, tall and thin and flat, and all the clothes she wore accentuated that. It was not so unlikely that she was his wife. In seventh grade she'd been his girlfriend for two weeks, his longest relationship until he went out with Tammy Horner for six months last year. He and Lisa broke up because she thought they were getting too serious too fast during their afterschool, before track practice make-out sessions in the back of the dark band room where everyone went to make out, where Tammy Horner and Brian Hill had allegedly gone all the way a few months ago. Brian Hill was a p.u.s.s.y as far as Joshua was concerned, and nothing made him happier than the fact that Brian had been the biggest victim of "Life and Love and Work," having been forced to draw a straw along with Tom Halverson and Jason Kooda and not only be married to someone who was not a girl, but in fact to someone who was Mr. Bradley.

"Okay, so seriously, we have to kick a.s.s on this, Josh. I totally have to get an A." Lisa opened the cla.s.sified section of the Star-Tribune that they'd been given. They had to find a place to live that was financially feasible in relation to their professions and number of children. Then they'd cut the ad out and paste it to a page and write all about why they chose that house and where it was located-they could say it was anywhere they wanted-and how much they paid in rent or mortgage and what percentage of their income that was, and how it met the needs of their family.

"I think we have to live in Florida, don't we?" Lisa asked. "That's where they take off."

"Take off?"

"The astronauts-you know-the launching pad for the rockets is there."

Joshua began to draw a spider with his pen onto his arm, onto the web. Without looking up he said, "We could live in Port St. Joe."

"Where's that?" asked Lisa, carefully ripping a jagged square out of the newspaper.

"Florida. I went on vacation there one time."

Port St. Joe, he wrote in his notebook and then took hers and wrote Mr. and Mrs. Wood live happily ever after in Port St. Joe.

"Hey, who said I was going to change my name?" Lisa asked, punching him in the arm. He grabbed her scrawny wrist and held on to it just hard enough that she couldn't pull away. "Mr. Bradley! My husband's abusing me," she yelled. Her wrist was so soft, almost unreal. "Mr. Bradley!" she shrieked again, though he ignored her, engrossed in a conversation with Brian Hill. "I want a divorce," she said, hitting Joshua with her free hand until he let her go.

Tammy Horner turned and rested her eyes on them for a moment and then turned away. Joshua's heart lurched and then slowed and he cackled loud enough so she could hear, knowing that she would know the cackle was meant only for her. He had loved her once, but he hated her now. Sometimes he drew a pen tattoo of her name on his hand and then washed it off.

"So we live in Florida?" Lisa asked.

He nodded. In real life Lisa was engaged to Trent Fisher. He was older, twenty-six, a logger. Technically, since she wasn't yet eighteen, every time they did it, it was statutory rape, but n.o.body cared. They'd been dating since she was in eighth grade. She wore his cla.s.s ring wrapped with yarn so it would fit.

"Are you going to change your name to Fisher?" he asked.

"Probably," she said hesitantly, readjusting the clip in her hair. "Why?"

"Just curious."

He took the fluffy pen from her desk and examined it to see how the feather thing stayed attached. It smelled like a combination of perfume and bubble gum, which is what Lisa Boudreaux smelled like too.

During seventh period he walked through town, not caring who saw him or that he was supposed to be in study hall. It was Monday, the first day of the last week that he would have to drive his mother to Duluth for her radiation treatments. He'd driven her for the past two weeks, Monday through Friday, going home immediately after school instead of to the Midden Cafe to wash dishes. He walked past the cafe now and saw Marcy through the front windows, but she didn't see him. He thought about going inside to say hi-it was Vern's day off and Angie would be there too-but he didn't, afraid of how they would act when they saw him. At school he was still fairly safe. Only a few people knew about his mom having cancer. The streets were empty, all the kids still in school. He wished he were going to work, though he usually went there with a mild dread, bracing himself for Vern's bullying and blathering, and a monotonous night scrubbing pots. When he'd told Marcy and Angie about needing to take three weeks off, they cried and told him he could take four. He wouldn't, though. He'd go back as soon as his mother's radiation was done with and her cancer eradicated. He would work and save money. Money for June, when he graduated and could move to California and escape Midden, which he considered barely a town. The library was not a library, but a milk truck painted green and parked two days a week in the Universe Roller Rink lot. The mayor wasn't a mayor, but Lars Finn, whose real job was at the feed store. The firefighters weren't firefighters, but anyone who volunteered, guys with big guts and a lone woman named Margie. Even the clinic was a sham; no actual doctor worked there, though whoever did was referred to as a doctor anyway. Dr. Minnow, Dr. Glenn, Dr. Johansson, Dr. Wu-a string of ever-changing people who came to fulfill a requirement to become a nurse pract.i.tioner and in exchange got a break on their student loans. They were mostly women. One came to school and talked to them about birth. She told them about how, before the baby came out, a woman's cervix dilated to ten centimeters, and then she took a large protractor with a piece of chalk fitted into it and drew a perfect ten-centimeter circle on the board. It stayed for weeks, the circle itself, and then the ghost of the circle, still visible though it had been erased from the board.

Joshua recognized that his mother was not so unlike these women, so open about various things. She had told him all about s.e.x already, about women's bodies and men's. She felt that it was important to know what she called "the facts of life." She told him that she had lost her virginity at seventeen, and advised him against it until he was twenty-one. He did not tell her it was too late, that he'd been sixteen, with Tammy Horner. During this discussion he sat silently, looking anywhere but at his mother, and she told him to always use a condom no matter what urges he felt, because of AIDS, and then she gave him a box of condoms-handing it to him in its little paper bag with the receipt inside. He buried it in a drawer beneath his T-shirts.

On their drives to Duluth and back she'd asked him questions about Tammy Horner, whether he loved her still, whether he was interested in someone else. He hadn't been alone with his mother for such extended amounts of time since he was little-before he'd started school, when Claire was away at school all day-but mostly they didn't talk at all because his mother was too sick. On the drive home the first time they went, his mother had asked him to pull over so she could get out and vomit, holding on to the side of the car. He shut the engine off and got out, walked to the back of the car to see what he could do. "Leave me alone," she'd said. "I don't want you to see this." And then when he stayed, watching her, she hollered, "Go!"

Within a few days she didn't mind vomiting in front of him. She took a plastic milk jug in the car with her, with the top cut off but the handle still intact, to vomit into while he drove. They had dozens of these jugs around the place to use as scoops for the dog food, the corn for the chickens, oats for the horses. By then his mother had had to stop working at Len's. He didn't know what was next for her, and neither did she. "What we're going to do is wait and see," she'd say, wiping her mouth, forcing herself to drink another sip of Gatorade.

Despite the fact that the radiation made her sick, it would shrink the tumors that grew along her spine and ease her pain. The nurse named Benji had explained this on the first day they went. Before Benji radiated Teresa, he had shown them both around the radiation room.

"This is where it all happens," he said, waving his hand. There was a silver table and, hovering over it, a metal contraption that culminated in an arm that reached out with a dumb round eye, wide and conical like what Joshua imagined an elephant gun would look like. On one side of the room there was a wall that was not actually a wall, but rather a special kind of gla.s.s through which they could see the people in the waiting room, without being seen by them.

"That way Mom can keep an eye on you," Benji said, swatting Joshua's shoulder. "To make sure you're not flirting with the girls."

He looked out into the waiting room and didn't see any girls. He saw a number of gray-haired people who wore brightly colored coats and ratty boots made of rubber and fake fur, and a woman with a cast on one foot, rocking a baby in a plastic carrier with the other.

His mother came up beside him and tapped on the gla.s.s. "Yoo-hoo," she called, testing it out, to see if she could get anyone's attention, but n.o.body moved or looked.

"I guess I'm safe," she said, and laughed.

"Very," Benji said, handing her a gown.

In the waiting room, Joshua sat near a tank of fish, then stood to gaze into it, feeling that his mother was watching his every move. From this side, the wall of gla.s.s was pure black. He pressed his face in close, making a tunnel around his eyes with his hands to block out the light of the waiting room.

"Did you see me looking in?" he asked her when they were driving home.

"Oh-did you? No. I wasn't turned in that direction most of the time. What could you see?"

"Nothing."

They drove in silence for a while. This was day one, several minutes before his mother would have to tell him to stop the car so she could vomit into the ditch. He could sense that she was waning as she rested her head back against the seat.

"So, did it hurt-the radiation?"

"No. Radiation doesn't hurt, honey, it's just ... I don't know ... like powerful rays of light."

"What did it feel like when it was shooting in?" he asked.

She thought about it for a few moments, fanning her face with her gloves.

"Nothing."

When he saw all the buses driving through town to line up at the school, he blended in with the kids streaming into the parking lot, to avoid being noticed, and got into his truck. Before he started the engine, he saw R.J. walking toward him. He waved, and R.J. got in.

"You're so f.u.c.king busted," he said. "s.p.a.cey saw you leave. She was standing right by the window when you took off."

"I don't care," Joshua said. "What are you doing now?"

"Nothing."

When they pulled up to R.J.'s house, Joshua got out too.

"Don't you have to go to Duluth?" R.J. asked, and blushed. He couldn't even allude to Joshua's mother being sick without blushing.

"Pretty soon."

Inside, R.J.'s mother, Vivian, was sitting on the floor with her elbows propped on the coffee table, rolling joints. A pile of them was stacked neatly like logs inside a tin container. "My boys! How are my boys?" she asked.

"Fine," Joshua said, sitting down in a chair near the stereo. R.J. went into the kitchen and came back holding a tube of cookie dough he'd sliced open, gouging out chunks to eat with the blade of a knife.

"You want some?" he asked, holding a slab of dough out to Joshua, who took it and ate it in one big bite.

"You want some, Mom?" R.J. asked, turning to Vivian.

"That's why you're so f.u.c.king fat," she said. Her hair was parted in the middle, shoulder-length, feathered into brown sheets on each side of her head.

She finished rolling a joint, then lit it up, inhaled, and handed it to Joshua. He was high already-he and R.J. had smoked on the drive from school-but he took a couple hits anyway and pa.s.sed the joint to R.J., who pa.s.sed it back to his mother without smoking.

"This is good stuff," she said, smoke coming out of her mouth. "Bender's special batch." She gave it back to Joshua. "I'm all done."

"Me too," he said.

"You can keep it," Vivian said, sprawled back on the couch. Her fingernails were freshly painted red, so long they curved in toward her palms at the ends. "My little gift to you."

Joshua gently tamped the burning end out in an ashtray that sat on the arm of his chair. He tucked the rest of the joint in his coat pocket.

"So did R.J. tell you about our little plan?" she asked Joshua.

"It's not our plan," R.J. said. "I told you I'd think about it." He held the tube of dough in his lap, sitting in a chair that was the twin to Joshua's, an itchy brown plaid.

"Bender and I thought we'd let you sell to your friends and whatnot. Dime bags and loose joints. Whatever they want." She lit a cigarette and sat back, smoking and gazing intently, but dreamily, at Joshua. "We figured you two could use the money, with graduating and all, and our place wouldn't be like Grand Central Station. It's making me f.u.c.king paranoid, you know? All the people coming in and out. And half of them are your friends anyway."

"They're not our friends," R.J. said, holding up the remote, trying to turn the TV on. He banged it on his chair and then it worked.

"Well, they're your peers. They're people you know." She flicked the ash from her cigarette. "What do you think, Josh?"

"I think it sounds cool," he said, looking tentatively at R.J. "If we keep it low-key."

"Completely," said Vivian. "No way would we be anything but low-key. Everything is totally mellow. It's not on the level of dealing. It's on the level of just having mellow connections with people and you guys making some extra cash."

"I don't need any cash," R.J. said.

Vivian looked at him for a while, then crushed her cigarette out. "What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about how I don't need cash," he said quietly. He turned the TV off.

"You don't need cash, my a.s.s. Who you think's gonna buy the food you stuff into your big fat face? Huh? You think it's gonna be me for the rest of your life? Well I got news for you, porky pie. I got news the day you turn eighteen."

R.J. stood up. "I got news for you the day I turn eighteen too," he yelled as he went back into the kitchen.

"What's that?" she asked tauntingly, smiling at Joshua. "I'm just dying to hear your news," she yelled, then fell onto her side on the couch laughing.

Joshua stood up and stared at a newspaper flyer that sat on the floor, advertising the things on sale at Red Owl-Granny Smith apples, an economy pack of paper towels.

"I gotta go," he said. Then hollered, "I gotta take off, R.J."

"I'll go with you," he said, walking back into the living room.