Torch

  “Amen,” he said and she whispered amen too, saying it fiercely, almost savagely, without taking her hand from his knee.

  When a decent enough time had passed, he said, “I appreciate it—you coming in. But you don’t have to. Actually … I thought I should tell you that my own beliefs,” he glanced at Teresa, “our beliefs—I mean, in God—are not that firm. We were both raised Catholic, but we didn’t stick with it. We aren’t in any way religious. So prayer …” He didn’t know how to continue without offending. Out on the street far below, he could hear a car horn blare for several seconds and then stop. “Prayer,” he continued, “is not going to be of much use to us.”

  Pepper didn’t say anything. She went to the small table in the room, where they’d propped all the get-well cards, and picked one up and read it. It had a sepia-toned photo of a Conestoga wagon on the front. He wanted to rip it from her wrinkled hands.

  She looked at him abruptly and put the card down, careful to prop it precisely as it had been. “Would you like a doughnut?” she asked, glancing toward a long box that sat near her coat and purse. She walked over to it and carried it to him, hoisting it up so he could choose.

  He wasn’t hungry, but he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so he took one—the first one his hand landed on, a glazed twist—and chewed it dispassionately as a beast in a field. When he was done he reached for his coffee, cold now, and took a swig. The coffee was strong and he intended to drink it all night. He didn’t want to sleep. Ever again.

  “Thank you,” he said, setting his mug down. It said WYOMING! across the side; he’d taken it from the Family Room down the hall.

  “They’re left over from my group that meets Monday nights.” She sat on the couch again and gestured for him to join her, and he did. “Speaking of which, that’s something you should know, Bruce. For afterwards. We have a group, ‘The Loss of a Loved One and Other Life Changes.’ It’s a family group. It meets once a week. You can all come together. We find that it—” she interrupted herself, a look of realization overtaking her face. “You know, we just did something that you may be interested in. In fact, it’s something I’d very much like to share with you.”

  She stood and went to her purse, knelt to rummage through it, smiling at its contents, searching in the dim light of the room in each of its pockets and sections. She had an incredibly fit body for a seventy-year-old. She wore jeans with an elastic waistband and a sports bra that gathered her breasts into one firm bundle. She seemed constantly on the verge of turning a cartwheel.

  “Here it is,” she exclaimed. “Heavens, this purse. All the doggone things I cart around!” She stood and came toward him, holding what he could now see was a purple marker, and took the cap off. “It’s a little exercise we did. Bow your head,” she said, as if she was about to perform a party trick. She parted his hair with her free hand and before he could agree or disagree, she pressed the tip of the marker to his scalp.

  “Now,” she said, stepping back, replacing the cap on the marker. “I want you to remember that dot when you’re feeling sad or lonely. You can’t wash it off. Once it’s there, it’s there for life. It’s a reminder that you’re a special person. That you’re a child of God, which means that you’re never alone, Bruce. Not for a minute. It means that you are a beloved man who lives in the light of God’s love, as we all do.”

  “How are the animals?” Teresa asked suddenly, her voice clear as a spoon against a jar.

  They turned to her, startled. Bruce rushed to the bed.

  “The animals? Fine.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “Did you just wake up? They miss you—everyone does. The dogs are staying at Kathy Tyson’s now, until we can all be home.”

  “Kathy Tyson?” She lifted her eyes to him. They appeared younger, bluer now because the rest of her had become so old.

  “So they won’t be lonely. With us gone all the time they don’t have company.”

  She smiled at him and her smile was like her eyes. The only two parts of her that were still that way.

  “Would you like to pray?” Pepper asked from the foot of the bed, still holding the marker.

  “Actually,” he said irritably, “we’d prefer if you’d—”

  “Yes,” said Teresa, keeping her eyes on Bruce.

  That night, despite the coffee, Bruce slept. Then woke. Then he flickered back to sleep and woke again, and again and again, as if a dumb but persistent hand attached to a stick was prodding him. At last he woke entirely, instantly, and sat up in his cot as if the hand had slapped him. He knew exactly where he was. Never in all of this did he forget where he was. The room was quiet, but recently so. The silence had a luxurious quality, as if in the wake of the terrible sound that had preceded it. Teresa was asleep, bathed in the gentle lights of the machines that were stationed around her head. He watched her face and then the noise came again—the noise he presumed had woken him in the first place—and he went toward it, a horrible high pitch from one of the machines. He pressed the flat buttons on the panel covered with numbers and indecipherable commands until the noise stopped. He stood staring at the display. Whatever he had done to silence the noise had caused the screen to rhythmically flash a series of zeros.

  “You’re awake,” the nurse said as he glided into the room. His name was Eric. He carried a tray with a plate on it, covered by a dome-shaped lid. Teresa ate no matter what the time of day—or rather they tried to get her to eat, a thing that had become next to impossible. The evening before she’d allowed Bruce to spoon a sliver of a canned peach into her mouth and then chewed it obediently without seeming to taste it at all. The nurse set the tray down on the table beside Teresa’s bed and edged in next to Bruce and pressed several buttons on the panel and the zeros disappeared. “You were snoring like a baby when I came by here last.”

  Bruce gazed at him dreamily, as if unable to comprehend what he was saying. His waking life had taken on the quality of dreams, his dream life, the quality of reality. “How’s your car running?” he asked after several moments.

  “Fine,” Eric said. He was a chubby kid barely out of nursing school. Bruce had come to know and like him over the weeks of nights he’d spent at the hospital. Eric’s presence was undemanding and, most importantly, unconcerned. He hadn’t tried to talk Bruce into counseling, hadn’t told him how sorry he was, or how there were people “there for him,” or that his wife dying so quickly was actually for the best because now she wouldn’t suffer. Eric scarcely acknowledged that Bruce was having any trouble at all. In fact, he’d burdened Bruce with his own problem—a car that wouldn’t start on occasion or made a knocking sound upon acceleration when it did. Twice Bruce had gone down to the parking lot with Eric on his breaks to investigate the trouble with the car.

  “Has she woken up?”

  “No.” Then, “Once. About ten thirty, but just briefly. Maybe five minutes.”

  Eric took Teresa’s wrist to check her pulse, watching the clock.

  Bruce sensed that it was snowing. He felt that he could hear it falling outside or maybe he could smell it. He went to the window, drew back the curtains, and looked out.

  “How’s her pulse?” he asked, turning back to Eric.

  “Good.”

  “There are these doctors. They base everything on the pulse. How to cure diseases and so on.”

  Eric nodded pleasantly and wrote on the clipboard that was kept in a bin bolted to the wall by the door.

  “They’re Chinese. That’s the kind of thing my wife’s into. Alternative things. I was thinking maybe I’d look into it, to see if they could help.”

  Eric began to change Teresa’s catheter bag. Bruce turned back to the window and stared out the opening in the curtains. He’d been right. It was snowing, though spring was only a few days away. The wee hours of March 17, perhaps an hour before sunrise. Teresa’s parents and brother would be arriving that afternoon—they’d planned the visit weeks before, not knowing how sick Teresa would become, how quickly.

  “I m
ean, you never know. I figure it’s worth a shot.” He pushed his hands into his pockets. He was fully dressed, in jeans, shirt, boots. He’d slept that way for the past sixteen nights. He became aware once more of the purple dot on his head that Pepper had made. It felt wet, as if it would smear if he touched it. And also slightly weighted, as if he were balancing a book on his head. After Pepper had left that evening he’d gone into the bathroom and attempted, uselessly, to get a look at it in the mirror. Of course he couldn’t see it. But it was there. It would stay. He felt it bore into him, a bullet from a soft gun.

  He smoothed a hand over his hair and turned to Eric. “I’m not going to work anymore. I’m staying right here until all of this gets resolved. The kids are coming too.” He thought about Claire and Joshua, driving to Duluth now, he hoped. He ached for them.

  “So you’ll need two more cots?” Eric asked.

  Bruce nodded.

  “I’ll submit a request form before I leave.” He placed the clipboard back in its bin and then removed his gloves, peeling them off from the inside out so that no part that had touched Teresa would touch him, and then walked out the door.

  Bruce opened the curtains, wanting the light to wake Teresa when it came, feeling already how fierce it would be, the morning sun cutting against the new snow. He sat down in the chair beside her and opened the drawer of her nightstand and took the phone book from it. He had no idea where to begin, so he turned first to Chinese, though he knew that was ridiculous. Then he turned to Physicians and flipped through the pages, overwhelmed by the long list. He sat thinking for several moments and then paged through the list of doctors, scanning each name for anyone that sounded Asian and found a Dr. Yu. It was five o’clock in the morning, but such things didn’t deter him anymore. He dialed the number. “I need a healer,” he was going to say. Just like that. Maybe the Chinese doctor would know. Maybe he had a friend who would come and check Teresa’s pulse. The phone rang and rang, so long that the ringing finally stopped and there was an almost-silence that contained almost-sounds—faint crackling, glimmers of voices and conversations on other lines. He put the phone down and sat gazing at Teresa, who, though silent, had opened her eyes.

  He said her name, shaking her a little. She remained perfectly still.

  “Wake up, baby,” he said, shaking her harder. He put his hand to her face and at the very last moment she blinked. Though her eyes were open, she was neither looking at him nor not looking at him. She reminded him of one of those old-fashioned dolls with movable eyelids that close when you tilt them back and open when you put them upright. His mother had had one named Holly that he was forbidden as a child to touch without supervision, though he’d rarely cared to touch her, so deeply she’d creeped him out. He took the pillows from his cot and shoved them behind Teresa’s back, propping her up, so now she was staring in the direction of her feet instead of the ceiling. Her lower jaw hung slack, leaving her mouth slightly ajar. He pushed it closed, but when he let go it fell open again.

  “The kids are coming,” he said. “Josh too—he was out ice fishing. And your parents and Tim, they’ll be here by three.”

  If she would just make the smallest sound, the slightest motion, the most remote indication. Then he would be happy. All these days he’d been waiting for her to open her eyes and for her to keep them open, and yet now that she was doing that he wished she would close them. He placed his hand over her eyes, but they stayed open beneath it.

  “You ready for breakfast?” He lifted the lid from the tray that Eric had brought in. A square of green Jell-O sat alone in a small bowl on a plate. He scooped some onto a spoon and held it to her mouth. “I made this for you, Ter. Open up. Honestly, it was so funny. I went for a walk and I ended up downstairs and then there was this kitchen and—”

  She blinked.

  “Here,” he said, and pushed the spoon into her mouth. “You’ve got to eat. If you don’t eat, how’re you going to get better?” Streaks of green liquid began to ooze from her mouth, dripping down her chin, but he wouldn’t look at her. He filled the spoon again and pushed another bite into her mouth, then turned to refill it again, but stopped himself and instead threw the spoon against the wall behind Teresa’s head with all of his strength. It ricocheted onto the wall at their side, then clanged to the hard floor beneath the bed.

  After several minutes he took the cloth they kept nearby and wetted it in the sink and returned to clean her face with it, wiping the green stains from her chin and throat. He opened the tube of lip balm that sat on the table beside her bed and applied it to her slack lips.

  “What do you want?” he asked, smoothing her eyebrows with his thumbs the way she liked.

  She coughed once and her eyes fluttered shut, then opened again.

  “Do you want me to say it’s okay if you die?” Pepper had told him this, that Teresa might need permission. That dying people will often wait until the people who love them encourage them to let go. “Because it isn’t, Ter. It’s not okay. You have a life to live, and we have our lives to live, and everyone needs you, so you can’t just give up now. Do you hear me?”

  She made no move or acknowledgment of him. He sat silently watching her until light began to filter into the room from the window, soft and pale, first purple, then blue.

  He bent and took his boots off and then pulled off his jeans and unbuttoned his flannel shirt and tossed them both onto his cot and crawled into the bed beside her and arranged the blankets over them. She wore only her hospital gown, and he pushed it out of the way so he could feel her skin against him.

  “Let’s watch the sun rise,” he whispered into her ear and then closed his eyes. He stroked her arm, tracing his fingers down to her wrist until he found her pulse. It was strong, like he knew it would be. And fierce and small and fast. Like a force that could not be stopped or changed or helped or harmed. Like a woman who would live forever.

  PART III

  … there is really no such thing as youth, there is only luck, and the enormity of something which can happen, whence a person, any person, is brought deeper and more profoundly into sorrow, and once they have gone there, they can’t come back, they have to live in it, live in that dark, and find some glimmer in it.

  —Edna O’Brien, Down by the River

  9

  EIGHT DAYS AFTER TERESA DIED, Bruce woke in a field.

  He was still alive. It took him several moments to understand this, as he lay numb from the cold under the blue morning sky. The horses hovered over him, making chuffing sounds with their warm brown noses, and he listened to them without opening his eyes. For those moments he had no past, no life, no dead wife. He was no man in a no man’s land, and reality was a glimmering series of pictures in a dream that went back no farther than the night before. How he’d stood on the front porch drinking the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. How it had felt as the flesh of his cheek opened against the rock in the field where he fell. How Teresa was. How she had come to him. Silent, but there. Her eyes were the stars, her hair the black sky, her body the trees at the edge of the field, her arms the whiplike saplings that surrounded him.

  He grabbed one of the saplings now with both hands and pulled on its wire stem with all his might, making a growling sound that spooked the horses, so they ran, stopping to watch him from a distance. He pulled so hard that he rolled over onto his belly with the effort, as if he were not pulling on the sapling, but it was pulling him. He let it go and it sprang back to its upright position, rooted in the frozen ground.

  When he opened his eyes, a shard of glass seemed to cleave through his head. It was his life coming back to him. Beside him was a patch of vomit, congealed and almost frozen solid. Very slowly, he pushed himself up. When he made it to his knees he had to lean forward onto his hands and vomit again. Afterward, he sat back on his heels and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. He touched his face with his numb fingers, tracing the scab that had formed there.

  At last he stood and staggered a few steps. The horses had be
gun to graze, but now they lifted their heads from the grass and stared at him expectantly until he called their names, and immediately they came to him and pressed their noses into his hands, as if he were holding apples.

  The three of them began to walk home, following the path that the horses had made; the path Bruce had no doubt followed the night before, though he could not remember it. When the barn came into view, Lady Mae and Beau trotted ahead and stood in their stalls, waiting to be fed. He gave them oats and then went to the hens to get the eggs, but found none.

  When he walked in the house he saw that Joshua had not come home the night before. All the lights that Bruce had turned on were still on, and the radio played fiddle music so loudly he thought he would have to vomit again before he reached the stereo and turned it off. Now that he was inside he realized how cold he was. He began to build a fire in the wood stove. Joshua had slept over at his new girlfriend’s house, he assumed. Claire had gone back to Minneapolis the afternoon before—she had to go back to her job and, Bruce hoped, eventually school. Both she and Joshua were meant to graduate in June, Claire from college, Joshua from high school. In the course of their mother’s dying, both of them had stopped attending school. Teresa had not been aware of this, and Bruce, though dimly aware, hadn’t been able to muster up enough energy to be concerned. He’d needed Claire. What would he have done with her away at school? They would go back soon, he figured, and left it at that. They needed time to get over things, another reason for him to act soon on his plan to kill himself—he hadn’t forgotten his plan—so they could grieve and get on with it.

  The kindling began to burn and the heat of the flames felt good on his face as he stooped near the open door of the stove. The gash in his cheek began to pulse. It was two days after the day he’d hoped to be dead. Last night he’d been willing to die, but now he realized that drinking and then half freezing himself to death was not how he wanted to do it. It lacked dignity, but more, it could be misconstrued as unintentional. He would do what he intended to do and nothing less. He had the rope all ready to go, tied into its knot and coiled in the trunk in the barn where they kept the tack.