Torch

  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 passed. Each day she went to the gift shop and lingered over shot glasses 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, piss, 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 glass pane, not wanting them, but wanting desperately to hold them. They smelled good to her, even through the glass, 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 passed, 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 nobody 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 hassling 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.

  “Hello,” 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. “Hello.”

  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 minu
te?”

  “Um,” Claire said, pointing to the phone. “Actually I was about to call someone …”

  “Oh,” Pepper said, disappointed, as if she hadn’t noticed that Claire had been on the phone in the first place.

  “But maybe,” Claire said. She didn’t want to hurt Pepper’s feelings. Perhaps, if no one went to talk to her, she would lose her job. “Briefly.”

  “Fair enough!” Pepper exclaimed, and led the way to her office.

  First they talked about Joshua. How he was never around. How he wouldn’t come to see Teresa at the hospital. How whenever Claire saw him he was high on marijuana. Pepper said this was called disassociation, Joshua’s version of coping. They sat on twin rocking chairs, wooden, with multicolored afghan blankets slung over the backs. Claire rocked steadily in her chair and then stopped.

  “So what about you?” Claire asked shyly, when there seemed to be nothing more to talk about.

  “Me?”

  “Well … I mean how long have you worked here?”

  Pepper said that she was an ex-nun, married now to a man named Keith, a nurse, whom she’d met on an Indian reservation in New Mexico. She told Claire how Keith had become addicted to gambling after his first wife left him. “Everyone has their own way of grieving,” she explained. “And that was Keith’s way. Joshua has his way. You have your way. There is no right way. There is no wrong way. All ways lead to the mountaintop.”

  “What mountaintop?”

  Pepper didn’t answer. She leaned back and folded her hands on her lap and looked magnificently amazed, which is how, Claire had noticed, Pepper always looked. As if she held a giant ruby. As if cool rain were falling softly on her hot, grateful head.

  Without warning, Claire began to cry. She simply inhaled and when she exhaled she was weeping—gulping and choking and bawling loudly. Embarrassed, she reached for a tissue from the table between them and blew her nose and then took another one. To gather herself, she concentrated on the row of cornhusk dolls that stood along the edge of Pepper’s desk and went up onto the sill of the window that looked out into the nurse’s station.

  Finally Pepper said, “God is with you, and God is with your brother. God is with your stepfather, and God is with your mother. He is standing right next to each one of you and holding your hands whether you know it or not.”

  “I don’t think so,” Claire squeaked. She was taking small puffing breaths, trying to get ahold of herself. “Maybe for you, but not for everyone.”

  Pepper stayed looking like she did. Happy and holy and amazed and gazing directly into the eyes of whoever was looking at her, which made it impossible for Claire to look back at Pepper for any length of time. She took the afghan from the back of her chair and wrapped it around her shoulders even though she wasn’t cold.

  “You don’t choose God. God chooses you,” Pepper said, and Claire began to cry again, but softly now, gushing silent tears. “You are chosen by God. You, Claire. I know in my heart that you are and that your mother is too.”

  “Well, I don’t know it,” Claire said sharply from behind the tissue she held pressed to her nose. “I mean, I don’t feel his presence. I don’t even feel whether it’s actually a him. It could be a woman, you know. Did you ever think of that? Or it could not even be a person. And isn’t God supposed to help you or protect you or something? I don’t feel at all protected. And what use is God if you don’t feel that?” She cried in a few small gasps and then collected herself again and blew her nose. “It all just seems so indirect. And I need more than that.”

  Pepper smiled kindly. “God is not a hotline,” she said. “You don’t get to just dial Him up. No. The problem is that you—oh, me as well, all of us, every last one of us—we expect happiness. God has a plan for each and every one of us and perhaps for you, perhaps right now for you, muffin, happiness is not in the plan. We are at the mercy of the Divine. Every last one of us!” She sat looking sadly at Claire and then crossed her legs and smoothed the fabric of her pants on the tops of her thighs. “Now look at that,” she said, “my shoe’s come untied,” and leaned forward to tie it.

  Claire didn’t say a word. Her tears fell thicker and came down her face in hot streams and dripped off of her chin while Pepper sat quietly watching and then she sprang up out of her chair and bent to hold Claire.

  “Oh, angel. Oh, sweet child. I know it’s hard. I know it is.” She held the sides of Claire’s face and then kissed her forehead and sat down on the floor and rubbed her ankles, then leaned back on her hands and told Claire about her life as a nun. Being called, knowing, knowing since she was ten that she wanted to be a nun, despite the disapproval of her parents. Her family owned a paper products manufacturing giant. They’d been the wealthiest family in Duluth for a century. Roads were named after them, ships, parks, and a museum that Claire had visited on a field trip in sixth grade. Pepper had given this all up and had been a nun for thirty-two years, from the ages of twenty-two until fifty-four. She lived in Chicago and then Green Bay. But most of the years she lived in El Salvador running a goat farm with three other American nuns and three Salvadoran nuns until one day a gang of men raided their house and kidnapped all of the nuns except for Pepper, who happened to be out back feeding the goats when the commotion started. She jumped into an oat bin and stayed there for two days, trying not to make a sound or think about water. Meanwhile, the other nuns had been taken away and gang-raped, tortured with a pair of scissors, several cigarettes, and an electric cattle prod, shot in the head, doused with gasoline, and set on fire.

  Claire wiped her face with the balled-up tissue. She got the hiccups and listened hard. It was immensely helpful.

  “So now you’re friends with the Bible thumper,” her mother said the next morning. And then, before Claire could answer, “To think it was me who raised you.”

  “Pepper isn’t a Bible thumper. Anyway—who said we’re friends? I talked to her once. I wouldn’t call that friends.”

  “I’m not going to say a word about it,” Teresa said. She tapped her feet together. “Far be it from me to tell you what to do. I always raised you to think for yourself. You want God, go take a walk in the woods. Read a book. Read Emily Dickinson! What are you reading these days? Don’t tell me it’s some religious blather.”

  “Mom.”

  Claire told Teresa about Pepper almost being murdered by a rightwing death squad, about the Navajo reservation, and about her new husband, Keith.

  Teresa scratched her arm, softening. “It isn’t that I am against faith,” she said warily. “I’m against the thinking that says that humans are shameful and bad. I know all about that, thank you very much. Had it shoved down my throat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for eighteen years, but I kept you and Joshua from all that.”

  “Why’d you have us baptized then?”

  Teresa turned to Claire, alarmed, like an eagle with its feathers ruffed up.

  “I was weakened by childbirth, for your information. I was in a maternal daze. It was what you did with babies then, smarty-pants. Plus, in case all that mumbo-jumbo about going to hell turns out to be true, you’ll have me to thank later. I was safeguarding you against eternal damnation.”

  “Well, you can’t have it both ways, Mom.”

  “Fine. I’m a terrible mother. I did everything wrong. Forgive me.”

  “I’m not saying that. I’m saying that Pepper is not a Bible thumper.”

  “Apparently not,” Teresa said grimly.

  “What?”

  “I said okay!”

  Claire sat in the wide bay of the windowsill.

  “What’s it doing out there?” asked Teresa.

  “Snowing.”

  They sat in silence for several minutes and then Claire said, “It’s nothing, Mom. I just talked to Pepper. I’m not going to be a Jesus freak now.”

  “I know, honey.” Her voice lilted from the morphine in a way that Claire had come to recognize. “I don’t mean to argue. I understand you perfectly. You’re just
exactly like me. A seeker.”

  In slow increments, she turned her head toward Claire sitting in the window.

  Once her mother had fallen asleep, Claire walked down the hallway, but differently now, self-consciously trolling, looking for Bill without allowing herself to believe that. She passed his wife’s room, keeping her gaze straight ahead and then after a while she heard her name being called.

  “You want to grab some lunch?” Bill asked, coming toward her. His face was marked with creases on one side, as if he’d been lying down.

  They walked to a place a couple of blocks from the hospital called the Lakeshore Lounge. The bar was dark, windowless, lit with dim yellow light bulbs and Leinenkugel beer signs. They ordered vodka and grapefruit juice and sat down in a booth. The only other person in the place was the bartender, an old lady with painted-on eyebrows who sat on a stool and watched television.

  Bill told Claire that he’d grown up in Fargo and had joined the Navy and spent most of two years on a ship in the Middle East. He’d married his high school sweetheart, a woman named Janet, before he went into the Navy and by the time he’d returned Janet had a tattoo of a fire-breathing dragon on her ass and was running around with a man called Turner, who was the leader of a Manitoba motorcycle gang.