Torch

  “So, he’s a professor,” said Leonard.

  “Yes,” she answered joyously, though it wasn’t entirely true.

  “Well, I’m glad he’s coming up,” said Mardell. “It seems like he never comes anymore.”

  Claire took another sip of her drink. Earlier in the day, she and David had fought over that very issue. Why she never wanted him to come to Midden with her—she hadn’t brought him home since her mother’s funeral. Why she never wanted to have sex with him—they hadn’t made love since her mother got sick. He’d pulled her to him when she came out of the shower that afternoon, after she’d gotten off work from Giselle’s, running his hands along her bare hips. She’d moved away, attempting to seem as though she’d only done so in order to more thoroughly dry her hair with a towel, but he hadn’t been fooled.

  “Fuck it,” he’d hissed, and left the room.

  “What?” she called after him, trying to conceal the guilt from her voice. She didn’t know what was wrong with her, what kept her from him lately. She only knew that something had changed when her mother got cancer. She couldn’t see David anymore in the light that she’d seen him before, and she didn’t know whether this new way of seeing him had been distorted by her grief or unveiled by it. Whether her life with him was fraudulent or the best thing she had. She loved him and, in equal measure, felt sickened and swaddled by his love. At times, it rose in her throat, filling it like strep.

  “Are you having an affair?” he’d asked that afternoon, coming back into the room.

  “An affair?” She wore a robe tied with a sash around her waist, her wet hair bundled in a towel on top of her head.

  “An affair, Claire. Are you cheating on me?”

  Of Bill Ristow, David knew nothing. The thought of him finding out filled her with a dizzy panic and yet also a terrible hilarity. “Yes,” she could say and, in that single word, her life would change.

  “No,” she said, and then made a crumpled, helpless gesture with her hands that she hoped would represent her innocence. In some ways, she truly did believe herself innocent. She hadn’t spoken to Bill since a couple of days before her mother died, in another lifetime, really. It was as if Bill had never existed, though in fact he often came into her mind. Not him entirely, but instead a flash of him. The hair that grew on his wrists, the way he would say “put that in your pipe and smoke it,” the shape of his two jagged front teeth. He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he’d become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale.

  “I would never cheat on you,” she said earnestly.

  “Never?” David asked morosely. He placed his hands over his face, as if he didn’t really want to see or know, despite the fact that he’d asked, and then he removed them and looked at her. “Okay, so maybe you haven’t acted on it, but are you interested in someone else?”

  “No!” she exclaimed. “No,” she repeated, more insistently now. She pushed her hands into the pockets of the robe. It had been her mother’s—terry cloth, coming apart at the hem. Her mother had called its color “French pink,” though Claire could not discern what was French about it. “No, no, no,” she chanted softly to David. Even in the dim light of the room, she could see how deep and tender and open his eyes were to her, and she tried to make her eyes convey those same qualities to him. She was the first to admit that she’d been a terrible girlfriend in recent months. She’d taken to spending hours staring at the ceiling or sitting on the grubby cushion of the bay window that faced out onto the street, going too long without saying a word. She’d previously thought herself a romantic, believed that David was her future husband—they’d even gone so far, in a playful and yet serious way, to propose to one another the summer before.

  “Do you promise?” he asked.

  “I promise.”

  “I love you.” He came to wrap his arms around her waist from behind.

  “I love you,” echoed Claire. Together they gazed out at the hedge that grew in front of their apartment, its jagged top in need of a trim so badly they could see it even at night.

  It was then that David suggested he drive up to Midden on Saturday to spend the night with her and Bruce and Joshua. When she resisted, he’d become enraged. He reached for the ficus tree that she’d nurtured for five years and picked it up by the rim of its pot.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, and then watched as he dumped it upside down onto the rug they’d purchased together at a garage sale. The dirt and tiny bulbs that had hung from the tree’s little branches since Christmas fell into a pile, first showering down, then coming all at once in a heavy clump. His anger was like that. Silent, and yet also grandiose. Sudden, and then gone.

  “There,” he said with his back turned to her, looking at the mess with grim satisfaction. After several moments, he raked his hands through his hair, a gesture that signaled to her that his anger had passed and he felt like a fool.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, turning to her. He tried to wipe a tear from her cheek, but she pushed him away and dabbed at her face with the sleeve of the robe. “I didn’t mean …”

  “No,” said Claire and hugged him and held on. “It’s my fault. I …”

  “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  “I’m the one who’s sorry,” she replied, clutching onto him. He was her first true love. The day she met him they swam in a lake together and she went under and opened her eyes, the way she always had as a kid in the river, and he thought this was crazy and beautiful and wild and she convinced him to do it too, and they did—holding hands, though they were virtually strangers—which made them love each other. Until their recent troubles they’d had an easy, happy time of it, drinking herbal tea in the mornings, a bottle of wine at night. Going on hikes and bicycle rides and having long talks and a decent amount of fun in bed.

  “We need to stop doing this—tearing each other apart,” he said. He lifted the upturned ficus tree and set it upright in its pot, empty of dirt.

  “We need to start over,” she suggested, really wanting to.

  “So how about this. How about we do that thing that Rachel suggested?”

  “What thing?” she asked, suspicious already. Rachel was a therapist they’d seen once together—Claire had gone to her a couple of times alone before that.

  “Write a contract. A sort of list of rules or guidelines for our relationship.”

  “Okay,” she said tentatively, and David went immediately to get a piece of paper and returned with it, propped on top of a book on his knee. With a blue pen he wrote Our Contract across the top of the page.

  “You first,” she said, turning on the lamp. “What do you want me to do?” She waited expectantly, willing to do anything, and then she said yes to everything he said. She would allow him to accompany her to Midden that weekend to celebrate Joshua’s birthday, she would be more emotionally available to him, which meant, oddly, that she would attempt to cry less over her mother—she’d been crying every day, alone in the bathroom or lying on their bed—and she would have sex with him again, and soon. She watched him as he wrote, her heart aching from the things she would do, wanted to do but couldn’t, hadn’t done but would, would do but didn’t want to.

  “Okay, so what about me?” he asked.

  “You?”

  “What do you want me to work on?”

  “I wish you’d be better at cleaning the bathroom,” she said.

  “I clean the kitchen,” he said, addled. “And I do the yard.”

  “I know. I’m just saying you don’t seem to notice when the bathroom needs cleaning.”

  “You don’t seem to notice about the kitchen,” he countered.

  “Look. You asked me what I wanted. Do you want to know or not?” She stood and stepped carefully around the mess of dirt and bulbs and ficus leaves on the floor.

  “Okay,” he said, softening. He wrote, David will be more aware of the bathroom.

  “Of keeping it clean,” she pressed.

  He looked u
p at her. Around his neck he wore a macramé necklace with a single brown bead that she had made for him the year before.

  “I think we should be clear,” she insisted. “Saying that you’ll be aware isn’t enough.”

  To the end of the sentence he added, being kept clean.

  “What else?” he asked.

  She thought again, studying him as if his face would contain the answer. He was handsome in a classic Scandinavian way, his skin bronze already, in May. Each day he walked the mile and a half to the university and back, carrying his laptop computer and a backpack of books, to sit in a corner of the library and work on his dissertation. He’d been working on it for nearly the entire time Claire had known him—two years.

  “I want you to be honest,” she said, more darkly than intended.

  “Honest,” he said, writing it down instantly. “That’s no problem at all.” He took a swig from his water bottle. “Rachel would be proud.”

  A small huff of air escaped from Claire. Whenever she thought of Rachel, she went into a silent, private fury.

  “What?” David asked defensively.

  “Fuck Rachel,” said Claire, though she knew he was right: Rachel would be pleased and also curious with a kind of craven and vulturous therapist’s glee. She didn’t know why she was angry, though she sensed it had something to do with the fact that David had horned in on her therapy. She hadn’t originally planned to see Rachel with him. She’d gone on her own shortly after her mother died, not because she had much faith that seeing a therapist would actually alleviate her grief, but because so many people had pressed the idea upon her that it seemed like something she had to do. Plus, a small, hopeful part of her believed that therapy would do something to make it okay that her mother was dead. Her meetings with Pepper Jones-Kachinsky in the hospital had, to her surprise, been somewhat consoling. And it was Pepper who had given her Rachel’s number and, when Claire had been reluctant, actually called to arrange the first appointment herself. When Claire wrote the time and date of her first appointment in her pocket calendar, a small glimmer of solace washed through her, a sweet tendril of optimism not unlike the feeling that she had in the hours immediately after her mother’s funeral. For those hours she’d felt oddly pacified, remotely less sad, briefly convinced of what everyone had told her: that it would be okay. That her mother was in a better place. That her sorrow was a road that she would travel down, or a river or a sea. And that to her grief, like each of these things, there was another side, an end, a place to which she’d be delivered and there she could be happy again, content without her mother.

  This did not prove to be true.

  Instead, as the weeks passed and then turned to months, Claire’s sorrow thickened, deepened. She came to see that her grief did not have an end, or if it did, she would not be delivered there. Grief was not a road or a river or a sea but a world, and she would have to live there now. The world was different for each person, for her and for Joshua and for Bruce. She couldn’t say what Joshua’s or Bruce’s was, but hers was a place vast and wide. It was everywhere, went on forever. The sky at night in a place famous for its night sky: Montana or the Sahara Desert. And her face eternally tipped up to that sky.

  Stars and stars and stars.

  • • •

  After finishing her drink at the Lookout, Claire drove the last miles home with a plate of baked chicken covered with foil on the seat beside her. Mardell had insisted she take it, despite Claire’s protests. As she drove, she ate tiny bites of it, tearing pieces of it off the bone with one hand, while she steered her car with the other. It wasn’t that she was trying to lose weight; it was that she seldom registered hunger anymore. Her sorrow had taken its place, filling her to the gills.

  Bruce’s truck wasn’t in the driveway when she arrived, the house entirely dark. She went inside and walked from room to room turning lights on, with the dogs trailing behind her, pushing their noses into her palms. In the kitchen, she opened a cupboard door and gazed at the neatly organized dishes. The previous weekend she had taken each dish out and washed it and lined the cupboards with new paper. She reached inside and rearranged the glasses so they stood in a straight row. Since her mother died she’d made a project of the house, taking everything apart, putting it back together. Each Sunday she drove back to Minneapolis exhausted by the weekend’s tasks, though they were things her mother had done on a regular basis without comment. Claire did these things in order to approximate some continuation of life as she and Joshua and Bruce had known it, and she did it willfully, almost gratefully, though often she felt resentful and underappreciated by Bruce and Joshua, who seemed not to care whether she cleaned or cooked, or in Joshua’s case, that she bothered to come home at all.

  She heard Bruce’s truck pull in and she let the dogs out so they could run to greet him.

  “Have you been here long?” he asked when he came inside, hugging her.

  “No. Where were you?”

  “At the Lookout.”

  “At the Lookout.” She smiled at him quizzically. “But I was just there. I—”

  “I meant Jake’s,” he corrected himself quickly. “Jake’s Tavern.”

  “Jake’s?” She blushed, feeling disoriented, as if she’d never heard of Jake’s before, though, of course, she had. It was a bar in town. She’d been there a few times herself, though it struck her as odd that Bruce would go there instead of to the Lookout and even odder that he would get them confused, even momentarily. It occurred to her that he was lying to her, but that seemed impossible, so she shook the thought from her mind.

  “So, I got a call today,” he said, and sat down at the table. “From the hospital—the morgue at the hospital. Your mom’s ashes are ready.”

  “Ready?” she repeated, alarmed by the word. It made it sound as if her mother had been prepared like bread or tea or roast for supper.

  “That’s what the lady who called said.”

  “Wow,” she whispered. She sat down and stared at the newspaper called The Nickel Shopper in the center of the table. It didn’t contain any news—only ads for used cars and trucks and old furniture and wedding dresses that had never been worn. It came every Tuesday and was Bruce’s favorite thing to read. “Mom’s ready to be picked up,” she said contemplatively, like it didn’t hurt at all. It occurred to her that in a way her mother had been prepared. Dressed and boxed and burned. She wondered what kind of container the ashes would be in. A Hollywood version of a genie bottle came into her mind—the kind you rub and get three wishes.

  “It isn’t your mom. It’s her ashes.”

  “Don’t say it’s not my mom,” said Claire. “It is my mom.”

  “I’m just being factual,” he said gently.

  “It’s a piece of her, Bruce. It’s all we have, so just let it be what it is.”

  He nodded. “We all grieve differently. I understand that.”

  “I’m not grieving differently,” she said, exasperated. “You know who you sound like?” She paused. “Pepper Jones-Kachinsky.” She said Pepper’s name like she hated her guts.

  He smiled, though she hadn’t meant it as a compliment. It hurt her that he seemed to be healing. More so than it had hurt her to see him unable to rise from his bed in those first weeks after her mother had died. Tears came to her eyes from the realization now: how wretched she was, how cruel she was to want Bruce to be in pain, and yet she did, more than anything. If he wasn’t, she would be alone.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” Bruce asked.

  “For saying you were like Pepper.” She got up to make tea.

  “So, we could go tomorrow. David won’t be here till about five.”

  Bruce nodded, though Claire sensed a hesitation in him. “I was going to run errands tomorrow,” he said, finally. “I’ve got to pick up some lumber for a job.”

  “We could run your errands and then go afterwards.”

  “Or we could wait and I’ll go Monday,” Bruce countered.


  “Monday is Memorial Day,” she said. “I’m sure they’ll be closed.”

  “Or Tuesday.”

  “I’ll go,” Claire snapped.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind going alone?”

  “I’m fine.” She hadn’t been to Duluth since the day her mother died, and she didn’t think Bruce had either.

  “Watch yourself on our road. I’ve been stuck in the mud twice already.”

  “I’m fine,” she said again, and then looked at him accusingly. “I’m not going to just leave her there, you know.”

  “I wasn’t saying we’d leave her there. I was saying Tuesday—”

  She nodded but didn’t look at him. If she looked at him she would burst into tears. There was something odd in his voice—sorrow edged with guilt—something odd about his entire being since he’d walked in the door and misspoke about where he’d been. It made her wary. Perhaps he would leave her mother’s ashes at the morgue for days and days that turned to weeks and months. “Have you seen Josh?” she asked, wanting to change the subject.

  “He was home a couple of nights ago. He’s all hot and heavy with Lisa now, so he stays at her house most of the time.”

  “And that’s cool with Lisa’s mom?” She took a dishrag and began vigorously wiping the wall behind the faucet.

  His expression told her that it hadn’t occurred to him to care. “I suppose so.”

  “Huh.”

  “We should turn in.” He came to her and gave her shoulder a squeeze.

  “I’m not tired,” she said. She rinsed the rag out and then twisted it and wiped the same spot again, though it was already clean.

  “Good night,” she called, several minutes after Bruce had gone.

  Her mother came to her not in a genie bottle but in an ordinary cardboard box. It was light brown and taller than it was wide, as though it might contain an overly large football, though it was far heavier than that.

  “Thank you,” she said to the man who handed it to her. A couple of months earlier, Pepper Jones-Kachinsky had taken Claire and Bruce down to this very office, where the remains of those who died at the hospital were processed, so that when the time came they would know where to go. It was hidden at the back of the building, behind the elevators on the hospital’s first floor.