Torch: A Novel Part 8

"You can go and see Randy later," Claire said. She looked at her brother steadily while he continued to eat. "Please," she said. "Pretty please." And then when he kept eating without saying he would go, she said viciously, "Some things are more important than trucks. Mom is more important than a truck."

"I need a truck. I told you yesterday. I'll go to be with Mom tomorrow." He looked at her for several moments, trying to out-stare her. Her earrings were silver hands that turned, caught in her hair.

"Your mom would want to see you," Bruce said lightly.

"Which is why I'm going tomorrow."

Claire put a bite of eggs into her mouth, but had to force herself to swallow them, like a handful of soft pills. She was aware of the fact that though she was eating, she seemed like a person who was pretending to eat. She stood and sc.r.a.ped her plate into the dogs' dishes. Spy and Tanner rumbled into the room and the eggs were gone in an instant.

"I'm going," she called, putting her coat on.

"I'll see you around eight tonight," Bruce said.

"Yep."

"I told you I couldn't go today, so don't be acting like this," Joshua said.

"I'm not acting like anything," said Claire. Sometimes she hated Joshua's guts. She considered telling him this: I hate your guts. They had said it to each other before, when they were kids. She'd put her coat on in a huff, but now she pulled her boots on in a calmer fashion, as if to demonstrate that she wasn't going to let him get to her.

"Your car been running okay?" asked Bruce.

"Yeah." She walked to the door and opened it. "Bye," she hollered back.

"The roads'll be slick," Bruce said.

"Tell Mom hi," said Joshua as she shut the door.

It took ninety-five minutes to drive to Duluth in March. Claire had it timed. Seven minutes to the blacktop, thirteen to Midden, then an hour and fifteen minutes straight east to Duluth. Mostly she was the only one on the road. When a car drove by she waved to whoever it was and they waved back, and as she got closer to Duluth more and more cars pa.s.sed her and fewer and fewer people waved until she was in the light morning traffic of downtown and she didn't wave at anyone at all.

She parked her car near St. Benedict's Hospital. When she approached the doors, they whooshed open with a hot gust of air. She pa.s.sed the information kiosk, the flower shop, the coffee cart, and the gift store, and went straight to the elevators that took her four floors up to her mother's room.

"You look pretty," Teresa said when Claire walked into the room. "You look like Little Red Riding Hood." Her eyes were open and clear. Now that her mother was on morphine, Claire never knew what to expect. Teresa could be in a near stupor and then shift back to her old self within an hour.

"I wore your coat." Claire stood at the end of the bed and rubbed the tops of her mother's feet. It was the only place she could get at freely, without the tangle of tubes and plastic bags of fluid and tall carts holding the machines that sat near her head.

"That was always my favorite," Teresa said. "I wore it ice-skating when I was a teenager."

Claire pushed her hands into the pockets of her mother's old coat, red wool. The room was packed with flowers in vases and it smelled like them, black-eyed and exuberant, angular and bright.

"You wore it other times too. I remember you wearing it all the time."

"I wear it to feed the chickens. And the horses. It's my barn coat."

"I know," Claire said, afraid now, thinking that her mother was becoming delirious again, despite the fact that everything she said was true. Yesterday she'd sworn that someone named Peter had attempted to shave her legs. Claire sat down and took the coat off and picked up a book she'd been reading and removed a pressed leaf from the page where she'd left it to mark her place. She twirled the dry leaf by its stem and held it up. "What's this?" she asked, to test her mother's mind.

"A leaf."

"Yeah, but what kind of leaf?"

Teresa took a deep breath and held it, as if she were doing yoga, and then she let it out slowly. "Aspen," she said, looking at Claire and not the leaf. Her arms were utterly unmoving on the bed, her wrists swaddled in gauze to keep the IV lines secured. "Otherwise known as poplar."

"Correct," Claire said, although she did not know whether it was an aspen leaf or not, having never bothered to learn such things.

"Populus tremulus," Teresa said in Latin, dragging the syllables out. On Modern Pioneers, she'd done a whole show about the botanical names of common northland trees and gra.s.ses. She'd quizzed Claire and Joshua and Bruce on several of them the week before the show. Claire tried to remember one now, to demonstrate to her mother that she'd been paying attention, but she couldn't.

"Where's Bruce?"

"He left a couple of hours ago, Mom. He has to go to work. Don't you remember?"

"Oh," she said. "Now I remember. I thought I dreamed it. Where's Josh?"

"He said hi. He'll be coming tomorrow."

She began to straighten the objects that sat on the little table so she wouldn't have to look at her mother. A tube of lip balm, a box of Kleenex, a cup of warm Gatorade. It had been two weeks since her mother had been admitted to the hospital and Joshua had not come to visit even once.

"I brought something for you," she said after a while, searching through her backpack. She pulled out a lollipop made of honey and ginger that she'd bought at the health food store, and handed it to her mother.

Teresa hadn't eaten for three days. The radiation treatments had started decomposing her stomach and she vomited pieces of it up into a yellow pan that was clipped to the side of her bed.

"Thank you," Teresa said. She held the lollipop, shaking, and brought it slowly to her mouth. Large blisters had formed on her lips, burnt by the acid of her stomach. "Maybe this will make me feel better. Ginger is what you should have when you're pregnant, by the way. It's a natural cure for nausea."

"I know." And she did know-that, too, had been on Modern Pioneers. "So is peppermint," she said and Teresa smiled in recognition. Claire pushed an IV stand back toward the wall so she could stand near her mother and stroke the top of her head. Her hair was sharp and dry like the weeds that grow flat along the cracks in rocks.

"Oh," Teresa moaned. "Don't touch me. It hurts. Everything hurts. You wouldn't believe the pain." She closed her eyes; held the lollipop. "Let's sit and not say anything. That's what I want more than anything. To be together and rest."

Claire took the lollipop from her mother's swollen fingers. She held it for a while and then began to eat it herself.

Teresa lay with her eyes closed. Her face was flushed, feverish-looking. At other times it was as pale as snow. Claire considered singing a lullaby, but she didn't know more than a few words of one or two. Her mother hadn't sung lullabies to her and Joshua that she could remember. She'd sung other songs, funny songs, songs with lyrics she made up as she went along. Or sad songs by Joan Baez or Emmylou Harris. Claire didn't think her mother wanted to hear these songs now, so she stood at the foot of her bed and sucked the lollipop and listened to her breathe, waiting to hear the breath that meant that she was sleeping. When this breath finally came, Claire watched her mother's face for signs of relief, which did not come. Her face had an expression of permanent tension. Claire could not discern whether this was a new thing, because of the cancer, or if that expression had been there all along, masked by the ordinary light of day. Teresa's chin hung slack, making the flesh beneath it baggy, but her mouth was strangely alert, puckered, and faintly streaked with vomit. Claire thought of the TV commercials of starving children, how the flies gathered at the corners of their eyes, but the kids were too weak to swat them away. How unbearable it was to see that, more so than anything else, more so than all the other things, lack of food, lack of water, lack of love, which were so much worse.

She got a washcloth and wetted it and delicately wiped her mother's face.

"Thank you, honey," Teresa said, without opening her eyes, without moving or giving any other indication that she was awake. And then she said, "I was thinking about a lot of different things last night. Like that time that I locked myself in the bathroom."

"What time?"

"You remember the time." Teresa opened her eyes and looked at Claire.

"I don't remember any time."

"I was furious with you and Josh. You were about five. I don't know what the two of you did. Probably a combination of things."

She smiled at Claire. Her beauty, even then, was like a Chinese lantern hanging in an oak tree.

"It was just before I finally left your father. Anyway. n.o.body tells you how it will be. I was so furious that I wanted to hurt you. I mean, do you physical harm. Well, I didn't really, and I wouldn't have, but right then and there I felt capable of it. They don't tell you that when you become a mother-and n.o.body wants to talk about it-but everyone has a breaking point, even with children. Especially with children." She laughed softly. "So. I went and shut myself into the bathroom to calm down."

"That was probably good," Claire said pa.s.sively. She was sitting on the vinyl couch, the damp washcloth next to her.

"Oh, were you ever mad! Just seething. You couldn't bear that I wouldn't let you in. You hurled your body against the door with all your might. I thought you would hurt yourself. I thought you were going to break a bone. I had to come out so you wouldn't."

She kept a smile on her face, gazing at Claire for a long time. After a while she said, "Sometimes I would think crazy thoughts when you and Josh were babies. Things I wouldn't do, things that would come into my head from out of nowhere."

"Like what?"

"Like awful things. Like I would be chopping vegetables and I would think I could chop your heads off."

"Mom!"

"I wasn't going to do it, but the thought came into my mind. I think it's natural. Nature's way of helping me adjust to the responsibility."

Claire laid the washcloth to dry on the wooden arm of the chair. She said, "When Shadow was a kitten and I would carry her around, I would get this feeling that I would drop her and it would freak me out until I set her down."

"Yeah. It's sort of like that. Not what you want to do, but what you could do."

Claire picked up an envelope. "The people from the radio station sent you a card."

"That's nice."

"Do you want me to read it to you?" she asked, tearing the envelope open.

"Maybe later."

Claire stared at her mother as she slept or tried to sleep. The longer she watched her, the more foreign Teresa seemed to her, as if she hadn't known her all her life. She'd felt the same peculiar dislocation years before, when it had been explained to her how babies were made. It wasn't the facts that had confused her, not the mystery of s.e.x or birth or creation, but the question of why. Why should there be people at all? Or fish or lions or rats? Now she felt a new wonder washing over her. If there were to be people and fish and lions and rats, then why should they die? And why, most of all, should her mother die? She stood up in order to shake the feeling off and walked softly across the room to the window and gazed out at the street below. She stood perfectly still and erect and was acutely aware of her stillness, her erectness. Grief had suddenly, inexplicably, improved her posture. It had also, more understandably, made her thin. She felt as though her body had become something brittle, like the branch of a tree or a broomstick.

She turned away from the window and picked up the card from her mother's friends at the radio station. On the front there was a sepia-toned photo of a woman sitting on the seat of a Conestoga wagon, pulled by a pair of oxen. Inside there was a constellation of messages, each saying practically the same thing: Get well soon. She propped the card on the sill of the window and walked out of the room past her mother asleep in the bed.

Claire had become familiar with the hospital's hallways and rooms, the small places she could go for privacy or entertainment. The nurses smiled politely as she pa.s.sed. Each day she went to the gift shop and lingered over shot gla.s.ses and key chains, smiling clocks and teddy bears. There was a bin of small toys and she became obsessed with one in particular, but wouldn't buy it-a little plastic tray of letters on cubes that shifted to form words. Every word had to be four letters long. She stood in the gift store and played the game, spelling wand, toss, pond, burn, bask, p.i.s.s, fish, and so it went, until the woman who worked there seemed annoyed and she set the game down and left. She would take the long corridors to the maternity ward, through several sets of doors, up an elevator, past cardiology and radiology and neurology, and over an indoor bridge that spanned the street below. The babies were tiny and not beautiful, but inspiring nonetheless. She watched them through a wide gla.s.s pane, not wanting them, but wanting desperately to hold them. They smelled good to her, even through the gla.s.s, like raw vegetables when they were still dirty.

"Are you an aunt?" everyone would ask her.

"No. Just visiting!" she'd say too jovially.

And then she would leave, taking a roundabout way through the day clinic, back through oncology, and into the hospice. There were only a few patients here besides her mother, another woman about her mother's age and several old people. She caught glimpses of these people as she walked past their rooms and came to know them the way one knows the houses along a familiar street. The lady with the hole in her throat, the endlessly sleeping bald woman, the thrashing man who eventually had to be tied by all four limbs to his bed, the other man who beckoned and yelled, "Jeanie!" to everyone who pa.s.sed, until finally one day Claire stopped.

"Jeanie?" he asked. His voice sounded young, but he was old. Old old, like most of the others-people who were so old n.o.body knew them anymore, or if they did, they came to visit only on Sundays.

"Yes," Claire said. She stayed in the hallway, peering at him through his open door.

"Jeanie," he said, relieved.

"Yes."

"Jeanie?"

"Yes." She twisted her hands into the wrists of her sweater.

"You ain't Jeanie," he said at last, gently, as if he were sorry to hurt Claire's feelings. "I know my Jeanie and you ain't her."

A nurse appeared then, carrying a lunch tray, pushing into the door past Claire. "Is he ha.s.sling you?"

"No," Claire said.

"Just ignore him," the nurse said.

"Ah, Christ," the man said and sat up in his bed, his feet dangling off, oddly bruised-looking, his toenails in need of a trim.

"You just gotta let it go in one ear and out the other," the nurse said, and laughed uproariously.

There was a room at the end of the hall reserved for the relatives of the people who were patients in the hospice wing. On the door there was a painted wooden sign that said FAMILY room in puffy letters. Inside, the same artist had painted a giant rainbow on the wall, and at the end of it, a pot of gold and a fat elf doing a jig. There was also an orange couch, a refrigerator, a microwave oven, a coffee pot, and a water dispenser with one spout that was hot, the other cold.

Claire went there to drink herbal tea from a pointed paper cup and to read the bulletin board. There were signs advertising groups for people with AIDS, with chronic fatigue, for parents of premature babies or twins, for drug addicts and anorexics. She read these things each day, as if she'd never read them before. There was a television in the room, but she didn't have the heart to turn it on. Usually she had the room all to herself. One day a man had walked in.

"h.e.l.lo," he said. "I'm Bill Ristow."

"I'm Claire. Claire Wood." She shook his hand with one hand and with the other held on to her empty paper cup. It was as pliant and soft and wet as the petal of a lily.

"My wife's down in four-ninety. She's got cancer." He scratched his head with a pinkie finger. "You must be new here."

"Kind of. We've been here-my mom's been here-for two weeks. We didn't know anything. I mean, about the cancer. She had this bad cold that wouldn't go away. And then all of a sudden she had cancer everywhere." She paused and glanced up at him. His eyes were hazel, sunken. She smiled, stopped smiling, went on. "Anyway. It's just been a little more than a month that we knew she had cancer and now there's nothing they can do." She stared at the absurdly rugged leather reinforcements on the toes of her shoes. She didn't know what she would say or not say. She didn't feel like she would cry. She had no control over either.

"Christ," Bill said, and jingled the coins in his pocket. He was making coffee. The water fell one drop at a time into the pot. "Well, kiddo, I hate to say it, but in a way you're lucky. It's no vacation to drag it on. Nance and I-we've been doing the cancer dance for six years."

He was older, but not old, her mother's age. She thought he might have been a wrestler in high school, his body wide and dense, like a certain kind of boulder; his face too-primitive. He wasn't good-looking. He wasn't bad-looking. He took a mug that said WYOMING! from the cupboard and another one with a chain of vegetables holding hands and filled them both with coffee. He handed Claire WYOMING! without asking if she wanted it.

"You and me have a lot in common," he said.

She didn't say anything. She didn't drink coffee. She didn't like coffee, but she held it anyway, the mug cradled in her hands. With pleasure.

In the afternoon she called David from the pay phone near the nurse's station. She dialed his number-their number, though in the short time since she'd been gone, she'd suddenly felt as if she didn't live there anymore. As she waited for him to pick up, she became aware of the fact that a woman was standing behind her. When she turned to look, the woman smiled and waved animatedly, as if she were standing far off instead of uncomfortably close.

"Hi," Claire whispered, still holding the telephone receiver to her ear, the line ringing and ringing.

"I'd hoped to catch you," the woman said, putting her hand out. "I'm Pepper Jones-Kachinsky. I'm the grief counselor here. I met your father ... your stepdad ... Bruce."

"Oh," Claire said, and hung up the phone. "h.e.l.lo."

Pepper stepped closer and took her hand, shook it, and didn't let it go.

"How are you?" she asked. Her eyes were sad, glimmering. "You know, Claire, I want you to know-oh, it's terrible about your mother-and I want you to know that my door is always open if you ever want to talk about all that you're experiencing. Twenty-four seven, as they say!"

"Thank you," Claire said politely. She didn't want to be consoled. She wanted one thing and one thing only-for her mother to live. "It's just that I don't know what good it will do." Pepper kept her eyes locked on Claire's face, still holding her hand. "I mean," Claire stammered, "not that I couldn't talk to you."

"Oh, I would like that. I would like that very much," Pepper said. She had two gray braids rolled into buns and pinned to the sides of her head.

"But I can't. That's the thing. I'm busy all day. Being with my mom." Claire's hand felt hot and damp. Infinitesimally, she tried to extricate it from Pepper's grip.

"I don't have a schedule. I'm at your beck and call. There's no nine to five for me." She put a finger to her lips, her crow's feet crinkled in thought. "Let's see. What about now? Why don't we pop into my office this very minute?"

"Um," Claire said, pointing to the phone. "Actually I was about to call someone ..."