Torch

  “Why is she here?” Teresa demanded, banging on the rails of her bed so hard the yellow pan that was clipped onto it fell off.

  Bruce reached out and stroked Teresa’s shoulder. “It’s Claire, Ter.”

  “It’s me, Mom. What’s wrong?”

  Teresa sat quietly for a while and then closed her eyes.

  “Mom. It’s me, okay? Do you understand that?”

  She opened her eyes, soft now, back to normal. “I understand that. It’s you. I’m glad.”

  “Stay awake with me, Mom.”

  “Okay,” Teresa said, then closed her eyes and slept. She slept all morning and into the afternoon, and Claire sat next to her bed, not reading or watching TV, not doing anything but watching her mother. She said the beginnings of prayers silently to herself but then petered out, not remembering how they went. “Our Lord, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name …” and “Now I lay me down to sleep …” When the afternoon sky began to darken Claire could not keep herself from it anymore. She shook her mother hard until she opened her eyes and kept them open.

  “Hello,” she whispered.

  “Hello,” her mother said back to her, as if she were hypnotized.

  “I miss you.”

  Teresa said nothing.

  Claire held out her fingers; on one there was a mood ring that belonged to her mother. “What does it mean when it’s red?”

  “That your hands are cold,” Teresa answered, then closed her eyes.

  Claire shifted the ring. When she pressed on its little oval surface, it became a purplish green. “I’ve been going through things. Remember the macramé feather earrings you made?”

  Teresa didn’t answer or open her eyes, but turned her head toward Claire.

  “I found them. And also that skirt you made out of your jeans.”

  “You can have them. Take whatever you want.”

  “Okay,” she said, though she had already—taken what she wanted—a lion figurine, a shawl made of string. She’d felt compelled to search through her mother’s things since she’d been admitted to the hospital, like a child left home alone for the afternoon, not knowing what she’d find, but then knowing everything she did find, being shocked over and over again by the excavation of her mother’s life. The things she’d remembered and forgotten: garish beads that had fallen from necklaces, a square of lace, a photo of an old boyfriend of her mother’s named Killer. All these things she’d found and more, none of it mysterious, all of it astonishing in its familiarity, as if they had been embroidered onto her skin all along.

  “Also, I found this.” She touched the pewter belt buckle she now wore. It was perfectly round, etched with an image of a woman with flowing hair who held a feather, a relic from her childhood. The buckle was attached to a braided leather belt that her mother had made herself.

  “You can have it,” Teresa said, and then appeared to instantly fall asleep.

  Claire stood, watching her mother, running her fingertips over the engraving on the buckle. Since her mother got cancer she’d become superstitious. She believed that everything she did was in direct relation to the survival of her mother, that wearing the belt would save her. As a child she’d believed that the pewter woman with the flowing hair who held a feather on the buckle was her mother. This made some sense on a practical level. Teresa’s hair had been flowing for a time. She’d worn necklaces, earrings, halter-tops made of feathers. But this isn’t why Claire believed it. She’d believed it because her mother was that omnipotent and omnipresent, her power over Claire absolute. She believed it again now, or perhaps she had believed it all along.

  Her mother: Teresa Rae Wood. Anything she said would be true.

  After several minutes Claire rose and silently walked to the Family Room to make a cup of tea. Bruce would return in an hour or two, perhaps Joshua would be with him. She let her fingers graze against the wall as she walked, as if to help her keep her balance. Her body felt weightless, like she was not walking but floating down the hall, a pretty ghost. She didn’t see Bill as she passed by Nancy’s room, its door closed, but she imagined Nancy behind that door, lying on her side, her thin hip a triangle, her blond frizzy hair matted into a flat nest at the back of her head. Claire thought of that plum. Imagined it warm inside Nancy, as if it were still there: a thing she would not release. Purple, red, and black. Sweet and soft and bruised.

  The door to the Family Room was also closed, but she went inside. Bill was there, emptying his part of the refrigerator, clutching a paper bag.

  “Hey,” he said dreamily.

  “Hi,” she said, wiping her face with her hands. It was only six, but it felt like the middle of the night. Her life always was the middle of the night now.

  “It happened,” Bill said, turning to her. “She died.”

  Claire shut the door behind her and locked it. She felt shocked beyond words, as if death were an enormous surprise. She hugged Bill and the paper bag. “Oh my God. I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  “It isn’t what I expected,” he said.

  “What did you expect?”

  He set the bag on the floor. “I’m not taking these. They’re those frozen dinners. You can have them if you want.”

  “Okay,” Claire said gravely. Bill’s face was pale and puffy. He smelled like worn-out peppermint gum and French fries. She hugged him and cupped her hand around the back of his neck, and he pressed into it the way a baby who can’t hold his head up does.

  “Look,” he said, almost inaudibly. “I feel that I should apologize.”

  “For what?” She let go of him, took a step back.

  “For what’s gone on with you and me.”

  “There isn’t anything to be sorry about.”

  “I feel that I behaved badly.”

  “No.” She peered at him. “Nobody behaved badly.”

  He took several deep breaths, panting almost, his hand on the counter. “I didn’t want to leave the room. They took her—her body—out after a couple of hours. People came to see her, to say goodbye. Her folks, her brothers, and a couple of her best friends. And then they took her away and I didn’t want to leave, you know. The room.”

  “That’s understandable,” Claire said gently. She was holding herself, her arms crisscrossed around her waist. “I can see wanting that.”

  He sobbed. He made small whimpering noises, and then he found a rhythm and his cries softened. Claire rubbed his shoulders. He let her do this for a while, and then he went to the sink and leaned deeply into it and rinsed his face and dried it with a hard paper towel from the dispenser.

  “Anyway, you know something? I never cheated on Nancy up until now. That’s the God’s honest truth. Maybe you don’t know that, but thirteen years plus and I never cheated. I almost did once or twice, but I never followed through. That’s normal human temptation. That can happen in any marriage. But I didn’t do it. I honored the vows.” His voice quavered and he tried to breathe deeply again. “The vows meant something to me once upon a time.” He paused. “And don’t get me wrong. None of this is your fault. I hold you responsible not one iota. You are a beautiful girl. A top-notch young lady. I was the one married. It has nothing to do with you.”

  The bag of frozen dinners shifted without either of them touching it.

  “It didn’t take anything away from what you had with Nancy,” Claire said. “I never thought that.”

  “No. Definitely not. My allegiance was always with her. No offense. I think you’re wonderful. You’re one very pretty girl. And smart too. Kind.” He clutched the edge of the counter. “And what am I when Nancy needs me most? I’m a pathetic old man.”

  “You aren’t old.”

  “Not old. But to you I am. I’m too old for you. I lost my morals.”

  Claire stared at the floor. A spoon had fallen there, crusted with hair and what looked like bits of dried chocolate pudding.

  “Plus, what was I doing gallivanting around and meanwhile she’s dying?”
r />   “She was sleeping. She didn’t even know you were gone.”

  “Oh, she knew. She knew.” He put his hand to his forehead and pressed hard.

  “We weren’t gallivanting anywhere. We were at your house.”

  He kept his hand pressed to his forehead. Claire bent to pick up the dirty spoon and set it soundlessly in the sink.

  “Well,” he said. “I wish you the best. I’m hoping for a miracle for your mom.”

  “Thank you.” She touched his hand on the counter and they looked at each other, their eyes as serious as animals. He took her hand and kissed it and then pulled her into him and held her hard against him. His breathing was heavy and she thought he’d started to cry again, but when she looked at him his eyes were calm and dry.

  “Claire,” he said, but didn’t say anything more. His fingers began to slowly graze her throat, down over the top of her chest, over her breasts, barely touching her. He grabbed her face with both of his hands and kissed her fiercely and then stopped abruptly. “What am I doing?” he asked sadly, and then pulled her back to him and squeezed her hips, her ass, her thighs.

  “Stop it then,” she said. She unbuckled his belt, unzipped his jeans, got down on her knees.

  “This is completely wrong.”

  “Stop me then,” she hissed. She took his cock in her mouth. She had the sensation that he was going to hit her; that he was going to smack the side of her head or yank her away from him by the hair. She also had the sensation that she wanted him to do this, though she had never wanted this from a man. She wanted something to be clear, right, and she wanted him to be the one who made it that way.

  “Jesus,” he whispered, and leaned back against the wall and gripped onto it to keep him up.

  She smelled his man smells, his cock smells: a sour salt, a sharp sub-aqueous mud. He came without a word and she sat back on her heels and swallowed hard. She touched the hairs on his thighs, kissed one knee.

  He reached for the sides of her face. “Oh,” he moaned. “I can’t stand up.”

  “Something about you sitting in that window reminds me of when you were little,” Teresa said to Claire as the sun rose through the windows. “Sometimes I see your face and I can see just exactly what you looked like when you were a baby and other times I can see what you’ll look like when you’re old. Do you know what I mean? Does that same thing happen to you?”

  “Yeah. I know what you mean,” Claire said, turning from the window to her mother, grateful that she had spoken at such length. “Are you feeling better?” she asked. “We were scared. You hardly woke up all yesterday. You slept for like twenty hours straight. And then you were weird.”

  “I needed my sleep,” Teresa said. “Where’s Bruce?”

  “Getting coffee. It’s about six, Mom. In the morning.”

  “Where’s Josh?”

  “I don’t know,” she snapped, then caught herself and continued more gently, “He’ll be here in a little bit.” She got down from the windowsill and pulled a chair up next to her mother, coiling her way through the IV lines.

  “Yes. Come sit with me,” Teresa said, her words slurred from the morphine. “That’s what I’m glad of. That you’re here with me. I’ll never forget you were here with me during the hardest time. And sitting the way you were in the window, it made me think of that, of all the things, of you and Joshua being little and now being grown-up.”

  “We’re not grown-up.”

  “Almost. You almost are.”

  Claire tugged on a thread that dangled from the edge of the blanket that covered her mother; it caught, still attached.

  “It was the same way when you used to sit in that window in Pennsylvania. Do you remember the window seat in the apartment in Pennsylvania?”

  Claire shook her head.

  Teresa smiled. “Oh, sure. You were too small then. You wouldn’t remember. But that was your spot. You liked to sit in that window seat and wait for the mail to come.” She paused, as if a wave of nausea were about to overtake her, but then continued. “You liked to see the mailman come and put the mail in the box and then you wanted to be the one to go and take it out. You had to be the one! You always liked to be involved with things, to be a helper, to be at the center.”

  “I don’t remember,” she said, and leaned forward to rest her head on the bed, the top of her head pressing into her mother’s hip.

  “Well, that’s how you were,” Teresa said happily. “It’s how you are.”

  “How’s that?”

  “The way I taught you to be. Good.”

  Teresa lifted her hand from the bed. Softly, she stroked Claire’s hair.

  8

  BRUCE DID NOT WONDER. He knew. He had not a single doubt about what he would do after Teresa died. It played in his mind like a movie with him as the only character, its solo shining star. He knew before she died—seven weeks to the very day, it turned out, to everyone’s sorrow and surprise. The knowledge of what he would do did not come to him immediately, in the moment they learned that she had cancer, but later on that night, in the wee hours of the next morning, after they’d left the hospital and gone—amazingly—to eat dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and then driven home and lain in bed thinking they would make love, but then not been able to make love because they were weeping so hard and Teresa’s back hurt.

  Her back did more than hurt.

  Hurt was too small a word to contain what was going on in her back. It was killing her, she’d said before they’d found out about the cancer. Once she’d said it afterward too, about a week after they knew about the cancer, when the reality had hunkered down and stayed. “My back is killing me,” she’d muttered, turning to him in the kitchen, holding two glasses of water, one for each of them, in the short window of time they had when a thing such as holding two glasses of water did not seem to them an utterly Herculean task. He looked at her and for a moment they both hesitated, as if taking a breath in unison. They’d been balling their brains out since noon. Her back was killing her, they realized, and then they almost fell onto the floor laughing in hysterics. The water was dropped. The glasses were shattered. Their house was a madhouse from that moment on. Nobody gave a fuck about a glass.

  It felt like a zipper, she’d explained to the doctor that day they’d found out. That her spine was a zipper and someone was coming up behind her and zipping it and unzipping it mercilessly. She’d almost cried saying this, almost seemed to grovel and beg. It pained him. He rose and went to stand behind her chair and rubbed her back uselessly. The doctor nodded his head, as if he’d known about the zipper all along, as if people marched through his door every day to complain about mechanical devices embedded in their spines.

  Later, they learned her spine was a zipper, the cancer pulling it apart, stitching it back together in a way that it was never meant to be. Her lungs were also a zipper, and likewise her liver, and ovaries, and parts of her body they didn’t even know were there. It was like a root that went on and on, blocking the way no matter where they dug. Even the doctor used these words. The zipper. The root. Nothing was a metaphor. With Teresa’s cancer the most absurd things were literal.

  And so Bruce, by necessity, was literal too. He wasn’t kidding when he decided that after Teresa died he would kill himself. He had not, in his life, in his before Teresa has cancer life, been the type of person to say, “I would just die” or “It made me want to die” or anything along those ridiculous lines, the way people did when they in fact had no intention or desire to actually die—when they thought they were being funny or needed to exaggerate a point.

  Bruce was not a man to exaggerate. He would truly, absolutely, cross-his-heart die.

  He would live through the funeral and then he would act. He reasoned this would give Joshua and Claire a moment to catch their breath, but not enough time to even begin to accept their reality. Reality for Joshua and Claire would be that, in one horrible week, they lost their mother and then their father. Not what they called their real father,
a man named Karl they scarcely knew, but their stepdad, their Bruce, the guy they’d loved as their father since they were six and eight. Of course they would grieve their mother harder. Bruce did not begrudge them that, but still he knew his death would be a mighty hard blow. It did not make him happy to think of them and what they would do all by themselves; in fact, it pierced his heart. But the pain of that was not as great as the pain of having to go on living without their mother, and so his mind was made up. If this was to work, he could not afford compassion and he could also not afford pity. Not for Claire, not for Joshua, not for Teresa.

  Regrettably, he had promised Teresa things on which he was simply not going to be able to follow through. At the time that he made the promises, he had not lied. The promises had been made dry-eyed and immediately, while they ate that first night in the Chinese restaurant, before he’d known what he would do. Of course he said he would raise her children, who were essentially both already raised.

  “But they still need their mother,” Teresa had crooned, almost losing it entirely. Years before, she had told him that her secret way of collecting herself was to think of things, things that had nothing to do with anything. Often, she kept herself from crying by thinking can of beans, can of beans, again and again. In the Chinese restaurant, while she had gazed at the goldfish, he wondered if she was thinking can of beans. She didn’t seem to be. She seemed to be honestly concerned about the fish. Out loud, she wondered if they were hungry and looked around, as if for food, and then her eyes latched back onto him.

  She told him she wanted to discuss this issue once and right away and then they would never speak of it again.

  Yes, he would be there for Claire and Joshua, Bruce told her. Yes, he would be both mother and father. Neither of them at this point had actually absorbed the information that she was truly going to die soon. They’d been told, but they didn’t believe. For that blessed hour in the Chinese restaurant his future life as a widower played before him sweetly as a benign dream. It was the movie that played in his mind before the movie of him killing himself supplanted it. He would comfort Joshua and Claire in their grief. He would hold them and weep and remind them of all the things their mother had said and done. He would tell them things they hadn’t known—how their mother used to think can of beans when she didn’t want to cry. The three of them would go on a camping trip—perhaps they’d canoe down the Namekagon River like they’d done several times as a family—or to Florida, to Port St. Joe, where they’d been with their mother, before they knew him. This trip would heal their grief. They would laugh, they would weep, they would return home stronger and better and basically okay. They would take this trip annually, to commemorate the anniversary of her death. When they married he would walk them down the aisle and give them a special flower that represented their mother. Their children would call him grandpa or maybe simply papa, the name he’d called his own dad’s dad.