Torch

  “So I was thinking, I wanted to tell you, if you ever want to take a walk or talk on the phone or whatnot, I wanted you to know that I’m here. I mean, if you ever need an ear, I’m just right down the road.”

  She got up to stoke the stove.

  “I should go,” he said, standing. “But thank you again.”

  “I enjoyed it, being of assistance.” She walked him to the door and then stood on the porch as he drove away with the dogs beside him in the cab.

  He drove past his house and out to the highway, to Len’s Lookout, where he parked and shut the ignition off. He sat waiting, as if for Teresa to come out, as she’d done when he came to pick her up after her shift. It was just after one: several people were inside eating lunch, their cars and trucks were in the parking lot. He recognized almost all of them. He started the engine again and drove to Norway and back, a sixty-mile roundtrip that took him a couple of hours because he avoided the highway and took the long way, on mostly dirt roads, for no reason at all.

  When he got home Joshua was there, and together they cooked up a pound of hamburger, pressing it into four patties. They covered the patties with ketchup and ate them without buns. When Teresa had died they had all abruptly, inexplicably, without having mentioned it, stopped being vegetarians. It was one of the first things that changed. As Bruce did the dishes, Lisa Boudreaux pulled up into the driveway and Joshua went out to greet her. Fifteen minutes later they walked into the house and Lisa handed Bruce a card.

  “This is from my mom,” she explained almost inaudibly, without looking at him.

  “Thank you,” he said. He could not think of who her mother was. Lisa he recognized from school functions over the years, and also Teresa’s funeral, though she had not spoken to him then, which meant she had not said she was sorry, a fact he now found himself strangely resenting.

  “Would you like a burger?” he asked, though they’d eaten all the beef.

  “We’re going upstairs,” Joshua said curtly. Teresa had not been a strict mother, but neither had she allowed her high school–age children to sleep with their romantic partners in her house. Bruce watched them walk up the stairs and didn’t see them for the rest of the day.

  On the morning of the tenth day he woke from a dream in which he was murdering Teresa by beating her to death with his fists. He lay on his side, staring at the line of small yellow circular stains that a leak in the roof had made last year where the ceiling met the wall. He heard Joshua and Lisa in the kitchen. Almost immediately Lisa began to laugh, rather loudly, he thought, given the fact that she was in someone else’s house at nine o’clock in the morning and it was obvious that he was not up. Usually by nine Bruce would have been up for three and a half hours, but he’d been sleeping late since Teresa died. He was on a vacation from work—which would actually become permanent since he would soon be dead.

  “Josh,” he hollered out from his bed three times before receiving a sullen, almost vicious, “What?” in return.

  “Will you feed?”

  Joshua said he would and then, without another word, the front door slammed shut. Bruce listened until he heard them drive away. Once the sounds of their engines faded, the house took on the quality of quiet he’d felt the morning before—that he was not in a house, but a field. He lay there in it, his eyes not shut but merely lowered as if to shield against the sun.

  It came to him then: he was not going to be brave enough to kill himself.

  It came whole and solid, like a fish that swam up to him, the same way it had when he’d decided the opposite. He wailed, and then wailed and wailed, so loudly that all the animals came and jumped up to be near him on the bed—Spy and Tanner and Shadow. The dogs licked his face and throat and arms and hands, as though he were a plate, and then a new sound emerged from him, one he’d never made before or witnessed anyone else making: a kind of whimpering and peeping and coughing and hooting all at once.

  When he quieted he became aware of the fact that he was encased by animals, the dogs lying against him on either side, Shadow above him, pressed up against the top of his head. He was surprised that Shadow in particular had stayed so near, in the midst of such horrible noise. He reached up and stroked her with both hands, the tears dripping silently at last, off his face and into his ears and neck and hair.

  He knew something else then. That in some way he already was dead, that his life was killing him, and worse, that he would not ever be able to kill his life.

  Once he had heard a terrible story about a man in New York City who had slipped and fallen into the path of a train, but only half of this man’s body had been run over, the other half, his top half—either blessedly or not blessedly, depending on how you looked at it—had remained above, on the platform, conscious and fully alive. He could talk, he could listen, he could recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He could do everything but move from precisely where the train pinned him to the platform from the waist down. The rescue people came and soon it was determined that the man would die the moment they moved the train, but in the meanwhile he was kept alive by the train in its stillness, holding his organs together, his blood inside.

  Bruce, in bed on the morning of day ten, remembered that man. He was that man.

  An hour passed while he stared at the ceiling and did not move. When he sat up it was only to reach over to rummage around in the drawer of Teresa’s nightstand, looking for tissue to blow his nose, but he found a cassette tape instead. He lay back down with it in his hand and stared at it for several moments before he could make out that it was by Kenny G. He had never listened to Kenny G. He had never known Teresa to listen to Kenny G. He had no idea how the tape had found its way into the drawer on the side of their bed or why a grown man would call himself “G” instead of simply using his full last name. He leaned over and popped the tape into the player that sat on the shelf behind his head. When one side ended he switched it to the other side, and he did it again and again. He played it and played it, and it told him his whole life story, and hers. It pinned him beautifully, all day, to the bed, and though it made him weep, it also managed to shout down the other sounds that had pinned him to the bed before—the voice that hissed the questions that all began with why.

  At four the phone rang. He assumed it would be Claire, who had called him three times that day already, leaving messages for him in her new sad voice. He picked it up, ready now to possibly drag himself out of bed.

  “Bruce. It’s Kathy,” the voice said, then added, “Tyson.”

  “Hi.” He reached over to click off Kenny G.

  “How are you?”

  “Fine,” he said, clearing his throat.

  “I was wondering if you wanted dinner. I made chili. I could bring it over or you’re more than welcome to come here.”

  “I can’t. But thank you. Claire’s coming home,” he lied. She wouldn’t be there in time for dinner. She wouldn’t be there until past ten.

  “Oh,” she spoke quickly. “I meant that you could bring the kids too. If they would want to come.” She paused. “But it sounds like you’re all set.”

  “I think Claire has something planned. She already bought the food.”

  “Well, anyway, before dinner … I was thinking of taking a walk.”

  He agreed to meet her at the stream, the midway point between his house and hers. He wasn’t so much interested in seeing Kathy as he was in getting out of his bed, and miraculously, the house. He walked the three quarters of a mile slowly, feeling strangely feverish and out of breath. He passed one cabin and then the other one—both stood empty most of the time, belonging to city people. No one lived between his house and Kathy’s, which he’d known all along, but hadn’t thought of specifically until today. When he saw her in the distance he waved, and Spy and Tanner lowered their tails, thinking Bruce was leaving them again.

  “Greetings,” she called in response to his wave. She did not walk toward him, but instead gathered her poncho in more closely around herself, and stood waiting i
n the part of the road that covered the culvert through which the stream flowed, the official spot where they’d agreed to meet. When he was near enough to her, they shook hands awkwardly and walked to the edge of the road and looked at the water.

  “So,” she asked, solemnly, as if out of respect. “How was your day?”

  “My day?” he asked, surprised at what he would tell her. “Hard.”

  When Bruce returned home Claire was sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee.

  “There you are,” she said.

  “You’re home early. Since when do you drink coffee?” he asked, pouring himself a cup.

  “Since the hospital, I suppose. Where were you? I worried—your truck was here and I didn’t hear your chain saw. And I called you today. Did you get my messages?”

  “I thought coffee made you sick.”

  “It doesn’t anymore,” said Claire. “I lost my sensitivity and now I’m addicted.” Her hands gripped the cup, bony and hard-looking and pale. She seemed suddenly older to him than she was, and he realized that this had probably, recently, become true. In the course of Teresa’s dying and death, Claire had been less his daughter and more his comrade in arms. Together they had tended to Teresa, together they had searched for Joshua, together they had sat businesslike with Kurt Moyle and told him what they wanted—which casket, which flowers, which program, which songs. Alone, she wrote the thank-you cards, in one long day, signing all of their names.

  “Did you ever meet that guy named Bill?” he asked.

  “Bill?”

  “At the hospital. He lost his wife.”

  She stared at him for a few beats and then stood up. “No. Why?”

  She got the coffee pot and refilled both their cups. He noticed her hand trembled as she poured.

  “You’re still sensitive,” he said.

  “What?” She set the pot down too hard.

  “To the caffeine. It’s making you shake.”

  “Oh,” she said, sitting down. She pushed her hands between her legs as though she were trying to warm them up.

  “So, this Bill. I thought of him the other day. I only talked to him once or twice, but he seemed like a good guy. We had a lot in common. His wife was about your mom’s age and she died a couple of days before her—her room was a few rooms down from your mom’s. Anyway, I wondered how he was.”

  Claire nodded coolly. “I’m sure it’s difficult for him just like it is for us.” She took a sip of her coffee and swallowed hard, like she was taking a pill. “Where were you?”

  “I took a walk.”

  She combed her hair with her fingers. It was longer than it had been for years and tinted a faint, unnatural red. She wore lipstick that was the same color as her new hair, the rest of her face bare.

  “What happened to your braid?” he asked, noticing for the first time that it was gone. He’d teased her about it, but he’d always liked how the little bells tinkled when she moved. It had reminded him of a cat entering the room.

  “I cut it off.” Her hand went to where the braid had once rested on her neck. “Did you work today?”

  He shook his head. “But I will Monday. I figured it’s time. What else am I going to do? I’m broke.”

  “I could loan you money.”

  “No.”

  “Well, if you need it, just ask. ’Cause I have it. My tips have been good.” She was now waiting tables full-time at the restaurant where she’d worked part-time before she dropped out of school, before her mother got sick.

  “So, how are you doing?” Bruce asked.

  “I’m hanging on,” she said, giving him a twisted little smile. “I can’t sleep much. I keep waking up with nightmares. And I still can’t eat anything yet.”

  “What do you dream?”

  She propped her chin on her hand, thinking of what to tell him, which dream. “I dream that I have to murder her,” she said. “That she forces me to do the most horrible things like beat her to death with a bat or tie her to a tree, pour gasoline on her, and light her on fire.”

  “That’s probably normal. It’s your way of saying goodbye.”

  “No, it’s not,” she snapped, and looked angrily at him. “I’m not saying goodbye, Bruce. I’m never going to say goodbye, so don’t say that, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said gently. He put his hand on top of hers, but she pulled it away.

  He looked at her for a long time, so long that he could see the effect of his gaze. How it opened her, softened her, broke her. Tears came into her eyes and dripped silently down her face. He reached out and with his thumbs he dabbed them away. He remembered how she used to gallop around with her arms swinging in front of her and whinnying, pretending she was a horse.

  “How about you?” she asked. “What do you dream?”

  Teresa’s face flashed into his mind, the dream face that had come to him that morning, in the moment before he punched her. How she cackled at him with her bloody mouth and demanded that he do it again, and how, helplessly, he did it. Again and again and again.

  “So far,” he said to Claire, “nothing I can recall.”

  On Monday morning he got into his truck and started it up and sat in it, letting it run for several minutes. He had a kitchen to remodel. The people who had contracted him to do it—a couple from the Cities—had been patient, waiting months past when he said he’d have the job done, knowing what he’d been through. He drove the twenty miles to their cabin without turning the radio on. When he shut his truck off in their driveway he sat staring at the cabin, a log A-frame. Finally he got out and took his tool belt with him. He made it as far as the porch and sat down. He took out a cigarette and smoked it. The day was gray, rainy, and there was a chill in the wind, a good day to be working inside. It was day thirteen without Teresa, and he realized that enough days had passed by now that he could document the time without her in weeks. He would say, My wife died two weeks ago to anyone who asked, though no one yet had. And then eventually he would have to say three, or possibly he would skip past three and jump ahead to months and then years, though years he could not imagine, not even one.

  When he’d smoked his second cigarette he stood up and got into his truck and drove home and spent the afternoon in bed listening to Kenny G, which he also did the entire next day, not even attempting to work, managing only the briefest conversation with Joshua when he appeared. On the third day that Bruce stayed in bed and listened to Kenny G and cried until it got dark, Kathy Tyson called to see if he wanted to come over for dinner.

  He said he did.

  She served him what she called “Mexican quiche” with a salad that had tortilla chips poking decoratively out of its edges. She thought he was still a vegetarian.

  “It looks delicious,” he said, standing near the table.

  Kathy wore pants that had so much fabric he first thought they were a skirt. Her hair was held back by an enormous beaded barrette like the kind he’d seen for sale at the annual powwow on the reservation in Flame Lake. Every year Teresa broadcast a live edition of Modern Pioneers from there.

  “Some wine?” she offered, struggling to get the cork out of the bottle. He took it from her and opened it, and then poured the wine into the glasses she held, feeling vaguely awkward. Usually he drank milk with his dinner, and when he drank alcohol he drank beer or the occasional rum and Coke.

  “Here’s to you,” he said, raising his glass, and a surge of joy seized his heart. It had the same effect sorrow had had on him when it was sorrow he had not been used to—as if it had the power to stop him from breathing. It felt like it could, though it never did.

  “No,” she said, “here’s to you.”

  “Here’s to both of us,” Bruce said.

  “To us,” she agreed, and they clinked their glasses. They each took a sip, and then Kathy looked at him gravely, expectantly, and set her glass down. “So. How was the weekend?”

  They had bonded on Friday’s walk after he’d confided in her about crying in bed all day and lying to
her about Claire being home in time to make dinner. Kathy had been kind to him, had listened and said things that made sense and then had given him a big hug when she said goodbye.

  “The weekend was okay, but sad, of course,” Bruce said.

  “Of course,” said Kathy. She was going around the room lighting candles, and then she went to the stereo and put a CD on. It wasn’t music so much as it was sound. Falling rain, chirping birds, pounding thunder, and the whoosh of what Bruce presumed was the ocean. The radio station played this kind of music each Sunday evening at ten, on a show called Audioscape. He and Teresa had mocked it whenever it came on.

  “We were all together all weekend—even Josh stuck around. We made a plot for Teresa—for where we’re going to put the ashes, her grave, I suppose you can call it. We’re going to make this flower bed, where we’ll bury her ashes and then plant flowers and put her gravestone when we get it—it won’t come for a while, but we ordered it.” Kathy nodded, listening; she’d already consumed a third of her wine. Bruce noticed this and took a sip of his. “It’s nice to have the kids around, but then it’s also tough. They remind me of everything.”

  “Of course they do! They’re your whole history with Teresa.” She squeezed his arm and then stroked it, the way Pepper Jones-Kachinsky used to do in an attempt to console him. It felt different when Kathy did it, though. It consoled him. “Claire and Joshua are a huge part of your past, Bruce. With them, there’s no escaping the reality of what’s happened. The three of you are going to have to find a new path in order to move forward.”

  “I’m not saying it’s bad. I mean, I like having them around.”

  “I know,” she said. “Of course you do.”

  That night he drove home with a spot on his neck that felt like a burn. It was the place where Kathy had pressed her lips. It had not been an actual kiss. He had not, in return, kissed her on the neck. In fact, even his hug had kept her at bay. She had kissed him when they said goodbye, after she reached to give him a hug the way she had a few days before. Women had given him kisses such as this before, kissing hello, kissing goodbye, kissing him in this way hundreds of times right before Teresa’s eyes, but now, driving home from Kathy’s he felt that he had done something terribly wrong. He wiped the place where her kiss had landed, rubbing it until he felt he had rubbed it entirely away.