Torch

  “No,” she shrieked, laughing.

  He kissed her collarbone and she kissed his throat and then they both recoiled and spat, tasting the bug spray they’d recently applied, which burned their lips like poison.

  “I wonder where they are,” she said, looking toward the road. “It’s not Joshua I worry about. It’s Bruce. It’s typical for Josh to not show up, but not Bruce.”

  “It’s Saturday night. I’m sure he’s just out having fun.”

  “I hardly think that’s what he’s doing.” She felt heavy with dread over the idea that Bruce was out having fun. Maybe he was at Jake’s Tavern, she thought.

  David tugged on her arm. “Come here.”

  She laughed, unable to think of another way to say no, and followed him to the tent. It was dark inside, though the light hadn’t faded entirely from the sky. David came in behind her and tied a small flashlight to a loop on the ceiling.

  “It’s glaring right into my eyes,” she said, shielding them. She lay on top of the sleeping bags, wishing she’d had a shower. In the close air of the tent she could smell Bill on her.

  David adjusted the light so it beamed onto her feet. “Better?” he asked, hovering over her.

  “Better,” she whispered. She felt almost shy, almost virginal. She reached up and pushed a lock of hair behind his ear and then pulled his face down to her. A lump rose in her throat as she kissed him, but she continued on. She had to do this or he wouldn’t love her anymore, or she wouldn’t love him anymore, she couldn’t decide which was the truth, whether she would be his lover in order to go on living with him, or so she could go on living with herself. She pulled his T-shirt off and then reached for the button of his shorts.

  “Do you want to do this?” he asked, taking both of her hands.

  “Yes.”

  They were silent for several seconds, listening to the engine of a truck out on the road to see if it was Bruce or Joshua. It was neither, going on past.

  “Do you?” she asked accusingly, as if it had been David who had been the problem all along.

  “Yeah, but only if you do, Claire.”

  “I do,” she said furiously. She pulled her jacket off and then her shirt, as if to prove it. Sometimes she wished he were less kind. They were sitting up, facing each other in the dark, the flashlight, a dagger of yellow in the corner.

  He kissed her gently and then more firmly.

  She pulled away from him and put her hand on his chest. “But, there’s one thing,” she said soberly. “The thing is, there’s something you should know. I slept with someone. A couple of months ago at the hospital when my mom was sick. This guy named Bill. His wife was dying too.” She said it calmly, matter-of-factly, as if she’d rehearsed it in her mind, though she hadn’t. The notion to tell David had just occurred to her that moment. She gripped the fabric of his shorts fiercely. “I slept with him a few times. We had …,” she hesitated, searching for the right way to phrase it, “… an affair. I know I should have told you when—”

  “Should have?” David boomed, incredulous.

  “I’m sorry.” She leaned forward, wanting to push herself into his embrace, but he wouldn’t have it.

  “Should have told me?”

  “Yes. I … I couldn’t. But I’m telling you now.” She couldn’t see his face clearly in the dark. He unzipped the tent and got out. Claire lay down in the jumble of the sleeping bags feeling miserable and relieved and free. Free to do what? she wondered, and then sat up.

  “David?”

  “What?”

  By his voice she knew he was ready to talk to her again.

  “I love you,” she yelled, and then waited for him to reply. When he didn’t, she pulled her shirt and jacket on and got out of the tent. He was sitting on the picnic table, smoking a cigarette, his second of the day.

  “I would never do that to you,” he said, jabbing his cigarette in her direction. “I would never hurt you like that.”

  “It wasn’t about hurting you.”

  “Fuck you,” he snapped.

  They both petted the dogs, who’d settled in beneath the table.

  “Do you love him? I mean, was it a big deal or is it still going on, or what?”

  “I didn’t love him,” she said. She tried to touch him, but he pulled away. “I haven’t even talked to him for months,” she lied.

  “You didn’t or you don’t?”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Love him!” David screamed.

  “Neither,” she said. “I didn’t and I don’t love him. I love you.”

  “Bullshit!”

  She didn’t say anything for fear of making things worse.

  “Did he make you …” He waved his hands in a rolling motion.

  “What?” she asked, pulling her jean jacket more tightly around herself.

  “Did you … was it fun?”

  “Fun?” She thought of Bruce then, wondering if David was right, that he was out having fun.

  “Yes, fun,” he said. “Nice?”

  “It was … It wasn’t like it is with us.”

  “Huh,” he spat.

  “It wasn’t!”

  “There is nothing with us.”

  She couldn’t dispute this, at least when it came to sex.

  “Did you come?” he hissed.

  They heard the approach of another car on the road. They both turned toward it and back to each other, grateful that it wasn’t Bruce or Joshua. Maybe they’re dead, Claire thought. She thought that often these days, that if her mother could die, anyone could, and would.

  “Did you?” he demanded.

  It took her several moments to answer. She had. That very afternoon.

  “Sometimes, but …”

  “Fuck you,” he shouted, standing. “I would never fucking do this to you. Never!” He began to walk away from her and then he bent over with his hands on his knees and sobbed. He’d left his cigarette behind, burning in the little dish, and she picked it up and took a drag, then crushed it out and stood up.

  “I …”

  “Never!” he screamed again.

  She thought of his ex-girlfriend, Elizabeth. He’d cheated on her for nearly a year with a string of women, though she’d never found out about it. In the end, he’d been the one to break up with her, telling her he needed to focus on his dissertation, though, within a month, he was dating Claire. She almost reminded him of Elizabeth now but decided against it. She tried to think of what to say to make it all better again, or at least the way it was before she’d made her confession, though she didn’t regret having confessed. Perhaps that was what had been wrong with her all along. Now that the lie wasn’t between them anymore, maybe she could love him again. She placed her hand on his back, hoping this was true. He allowed her to inch one hand up under his shirt and then she kissed his neck and his lips and he allowed that too. He remained distant, not kissing her back or even seeming to notice that she was kissing him for several moments and then he relented and held her to him. He removed her jacket and shirt and they got down on the ground and took everything else off, making a bed of their clothes.

  As they fucked, she could feel the copper button she’d recently sewn into her jacket digging into her, imprinting its mysterious Chinese symbol into her flesh.

  “I want us to go away together,” she said afterward, a fantasy playing in her mind. They would go live somewhere entirely different from here: New Mexico, Washington, Connecticut. The names of faraway places made her ache with an excruciating longing. Here was where she could never forget her mother. She wanted to forget her mother. The sudden clarity of it was like ice on her tongue.

  “I think we need some time,” said David, shifting off of her. He pulled his shirt from beneath her rump.

  “Time?” She sat up and wrapped her arms around her legs to stay warm.

  “To think about us. Whether there is such a thing as us.” He was nearly dressed now, finding his clothes in the dark, pulling them away from hers.
br />   “There’s an us,” she said.

  “Not really, Claire,” he said bitterly.

  A hush came over her, inside of her. It hadn’t occurred to her that David would break up with her. All this time that she’d been silent and sad and distant, without joy or lust, she’d expected him to stay, or perhaps, it occurred to her now, she’d been daring him to leave all along, taunting him to go. The truth took shape and turned solid inside of her: he would stop loving her. Of course he would. How easy it was not to love her.

  “It doesn’t have to end,” she said. She began to get dressed, tugging numbly at her clothes. David’s semen gushed out of her when she stood.

  “Don’t put this on me,” he said, anger edging his voice again. “It isn’t what I want. It’s what you brought on, Claire. I want you to remember that. This is your own doing.”

  She nodded, not caring whether he could see her nod in the dark or not. Tears stung her nose, but she wasn’t about to start crying now.

  “I can go to Blake’s,” he said, as if he’d planned this out already, his escape. “His housemate is moving out and he needs someone.” He reached into his pocket and took out another cigarette and lit it. “Don’t worry about rent. I can still pay my half until our lease is up in August. I got that fellowship and—”

  “I don’t need your fucking money,” she said savagely, though she did. It pained her that he could so quickly allow himself to think about the logistics, but then her mind went in that direction too—what he would take with him, what she would keep. Until her mother got sick, she and David had spent most of their weekends shopping at garage sales and thrift stores, buying things together: old coats they both wore and sets of dishes, magazine racks, and rickety tables that they had no actual use for. They purchased a set of glass jars, in which they’d planned to store foods that they were too busy or lazy to purchase, let alone make into anything that would actually become edible: dried beans and seeds, flour and sugar. They’d even bought a rocking chair with a wide comfortable seat. Claire had been fool enough to imagine herself in it, rocking their future babies to sleep.

  “There’s your dad,” David said, turning toward the lights coming up the driveway. She reached for his cigarette and took a drag and handed it back. With that, they made a silent pact to pretend at least for this moment that they were still a couple.

  “Bruuuce,” she called when he got out of his truck, crooning his name like a song.

  “I was hoping David would stay for the day. It’s been a while,” Bruce said the next morning. He seemed to be looking closely at Claire, suspecting more than she wanted him to.

  “He had to get back to work on his dissertation. It’s a lot, you know. The equivalent of writing a book.” She stood near the counter with a spatula in her hand, frosting Joshua’s birthday cake. She’d been up since five, when David woke her, enraged about Bill all over again. They’d fought again and broken up again, more certainly this time, whispering fiercely in the tent. They decided he should leave immediately for Minneapolis, to pack up his things so he wouldn’t be in their apartment when she returned late that night. After he drove away, she’d come into the house and quietly baked the cake and then sat watching it cool until Bruce woke up.

  “Well, I better get out and feed the animals,” said Bruce, without moving from his place at the table. He gestured toward the ceiling, upstairs where Joshua was still sleeping. He’d come home last night after everyone had gone to bed. “I can probably get the stalls cleaned before Prince Charming wakes up.”

  “And then we’ll have our little celebration,” Claire said, without looking at him. She didn’t want him to notice that her face was puffy from having wept a few hours before. While the cake baked, she’d pressed a cool washcloth against the lids of her eyes.

  “So, how was Duluth?” Bruce asked.

  “Fine.” She set the spatula down and turned the cake from side to side to make sure she’d covered all the bare spots. It was their tradition to eat cake for breakfast on their birthdays. “Actually, it’s there.” She pointed to the box of her mother’s ashes, which sat inside the curio cabinet. After David left, she had placed it there, among her mother’s best things, among the breakables and fragiles that she had purchased at flea markets over the years and a few worthless family heirlooms. There was a collection of dinner bells and half a dozen porcelain birds and a single open fan, made of white feathers tipped in black, that had once belonged to a relative that Claire couldn’t name. As a child Claire used to beg to be allowed to play with this fan and would sometimes be granted permission. She would twirl it before her face, then peep coquettishly over it, pretending to be a beautiful debutante at a ball, vigorously fanning herself with it until her bangs lifted from her forehead.

  Bruce went to the cabinet and looked in, but he didn’t open the door to touch the box.

  “I was thinking we could spread the ashes next weekend,” she said.

  Bruce nodded and pulled his boots on and went outside.

  Claire walked through the house, picking things up, wiping the surfaces of tabletops and shelves whether they needed it or not, arranging the pillows neatly on the couch. She stopped at the doorway of her mother and Bruce’s bedroom—it was only Bruce’s now, but still she thought of it as theirs—and looked in at the unmade bed. Dust had settled on all of the surfaces; this room and Joshua’s were the only two that Claire left untouched each weekend. She stepped inside and lay down on the bed, remembering the nights she had slept there when her mother and Bruce were at the hospital and Joshua was God knows where. She had thought those were the worst nights of her life. But now she knew how wrong she’d been. How sweet they were, those nights when her mother was still alive, when in the mornings Claire could drive to the hospital and see her and say hello, to ask how did you sleep or did you have breakfast, or to be asked these things and to answer in return. She lay staring at the objects on the table on her mother’s side of the bed—a green lamp shaped like a tulip, an alarm clock, and a tune box that Bruce had put there after Teresa died. Claire sat up and opened the little drawer beneath the table.

  “What are you looking for?” Joshua asked, standing in the door.

  “Nothing,” she said. She shut the drawer. His face was still sleepy, his feet bare. He wore a T-shirt that had MIDDEN MONARCHS printed on the front, a relic from their childhood, back when the Midden school team was still the Monarchs, before the school in Two Falls closed down and all the students had to transfer to Midden and together they became the Pioneers.

  “You’re snooping around again.”

  “Not snooping. Looking.”

  “For what?” he said.

  “For things,” she said nonchalantly, though the question rattled her. What was she looking for? It hadn’t occurred to her until this very moment that looking was what she’d been doing every weekend since her mother died. Searching for something she would never find.

  “Mom had this vibrator thing that was like the size of a lipstick,” said Joshua. He paused, waiting for Claire to react. When she didn’t, he continued on. “I found it in a shoebox in the closet.”

  She turned to the closed doors of her mother’s closet, stunned that Joshua had gotten there before her.

  “I wasn’t snooping like you, though. I just needed the box,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “It’s all still there for you to explore.”

  She felt a strange gratitude. She had to keep herself from pulling the doors open this very instant, continuing the search.

  “I thought David was coming up with you.”

  “He was. I mean, he did, and …” A temptation to tell him the truth pulsed through her, but then she waved her hand as if the story was too complicated to explain. “He had to get back to the Cities.”

  He nodded.

  Claire looked at the painting at the end of the bed, the one their mother had done, The Woods of Coltrap County, and then Joshua turned to it as well. She didn’t know if he remembered that the th
ree trees represented the three of them—she and her mother and Joshua. She didn’t know what he remembered or knew or what his life was like now. Until recently she’d always believed she’d known—what he did, what he thought, who he liked and didn’t like. She hadn’t had to work at knowing these things. They’d been, all her life, on full display, and in more recent years, when she hadn’t looked closely, hadn’t even really wanted to know who her brother was, it had been telegraphed to her through her mother and Bruce.

  “Aren’t you going to say happy birthday?” he asked.

  “I did.” She stood. “When you first came in. But happy birthday again,” she said, thumping him on the shoulder as she walked past.

  He followed her into the kitchen. It had begun to rain, and the house had grown dark though it was only ten in the morning, a storm moving in. Claire reached to close the window over the kitchen sink. Outside the tree branches were waving violently in the wind. “So what does it feel like?” she asked Joshua. “Being eighteen.”

  “Like normal,” he said.

  She wanted to say something meaningful about him being grownup now, but she couldn’t think of what exactly to say, so she said nothing.

  Bruce came running in the door, wet from the rain and the dogs wet too, running in behind him. A loud clap of thunder sounded and then the rain began in earnest, beating hard against the roof. “Your tent’s getting soaked,” he said to Claire.

  “What tent?” asked Joshua.

  Together they went to the window and looked out. She’d neglected to zip the tent door entirely shut, she saw now. A pool of water was forming on its nylon roof. She thought of David in Minneapolis, packing his things. Maybe he was watching this same rain, thinking about her, she thought. Maybe he would be waiting for her when she arrived at their apartment tonight and they’d take back all the things they’d said. They’d pull their contract out and read it over, vowing to obey it this time.

  “I’m ready for cake,” said Joshua.

  “Me too,” said Bruce. “Happy birthday, by the way.”

  Claire got a tube of icing from the refrigerator to put the final touches on the cake.