Torch

  He went to the refrigerator and poured himself a glass of juice, without bothering to explain why he was late. He practically lived here with her now, in Pam’s trailer, ever since Kathy had moved in with Bruce and Lisa had graduated and Pam had said her “work was done” and had moved in almost entirely with her boyfriend, John. Occasionally, he slept in the apartment over Len’s Lookout, when Lisa thought he was up in Flame Lake visiting R.J. or down visiting Bruce. He’d done neither, though he and R.J. kept meaning to get together. Bruce, he saw only around town, at Jake’s Tavern, or at the Tap, and once at Len’s Lookout. When they met, they’d sit and talk for a few awkward minutes about what jobs Bruce was working on and what the weather was doing or if Joshua had heard from Claire and what she was up to. Last week he’d seen him at the Coltrap County Fair, walking arm and arm with Kathy. Joshua had ducked back into the crowd before they’d seen him.

  He had spent the night before in the apartment, so Lisa and her mother could have a rare night alone. It was different than it had been all through the spring, when he’d thought of the apartment as his own secret world. Now it was packed with boxes full of his mother’s things and small pieces of furniture she’d refinished and paintings she’d made over the years. He and Claire had hauled it all there on one long Sunday back in June, before Kathy moved in. Most of the boxes weren’t even taped shut, as they’d had none on hand and were too frantic to drive to town to get some. Claire did most of the packing, jamming together unlikely combinations of things into boxes: a pair of scissors, a camera, a half-used bottle of Vick’s Vapor Rub, and a collection of Johnny Cash CDs might be in one box; a salad spinner, their mother’s ancient reading glasses, an unopened jumbo packet of sugar-free gum, and a lampshade in another. Claire refused to throw anything out. If he questioned why they needed to take a half-used bottle of Vick’s Vapor Rub, she explained that it was because their mother’s fingers had jabbed into it; the gum was possibly the last pack of gum their mother had purchased. Sometimes, in the mornings when it was light enough to see, he’d open one of these boxes and peer inside. The sight of his mother’s things alternately comforted and slaughtered him, depending on the day, depending on what his eyes landed on, and what image then leapt into his mind. Once, he came across her moccasins and immediately held one up to his nose and the familiar stink of his mother’s feet—a smell he had not until that instant known he knew—shot into him like a bullet that left him gasping and stunned.

  “Did you have fun with your mom last night?” he asked Lisa, after he finished his juice.

  She nodded and took his empty glass from the table and went to the sink and emphatically washed it.

  “I was going to do that,” he said.

  “We should get going,” she said, turning to him.

  Today was Lisa’s first appointment about the baby. He’d told Vivian and Bender that he needed the day off but hadn’t told them why. For now, Lisa’s pregnancy was a secret, and they had decided to keep it that way as long as they could. They were driving all the way to Brainerd instead of going to the clinic in Midden or Blue River to avoid seeing anyone they knew.

  “Did you have breakfast? I can make you some toast,” he offered, but she shook her head. Sometimes it made her sick just when he mentioned certain foods, but until he named them, he never knew which ones they would be.

  “I’ll bring my stuff so I can study,” he said, reaching for one of the GED books that sat in the middle of the table. He’d been neglecting them for months. “I figure then I got something to do in the waiting room.”

  She made a disgusted sound.

  “What?”

  “You can go in with me, you know.”

  “To the doctor?”

  She nodded like he was an idiot.

  “Okay,” he said. “I didn’t know. How would I know?”

  He stood and put his arms around her. He could smell the lemon drop she was sucking on to keep from throwing up and the gel she put in her hair.

  “Let’s go,” she said, and took her purse from the table, walking to his truck without turning to see if he was following her.

  By the time they got to Brainerd, Lisa was in a better mood.

  “Do you think it’s a boy or a girl?” she asked, sitting next to him in the waiting room of the clinic, a magazine called Baby in her hands.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s already been decided,” she said, her voice mystical. “That’s what I just read. That everything having to do with its genetics is already set in stone the minute the sperm met the egg.”

  They were fairly sure when that minute was, when the sperm met the egg, about six weeks before, in the little lake behind Lisa’s house that didn’t have a name as far as they knew. It had been a hot summer, and dry, so most days after Lisa came home from her job at the Red Owl—she’d gone up to full-time after graduation—and Joshua was done delivering drugs for Vivian and Bender, they followed a trail that wound its way behind the dump and over the railroad tracks to the lake. They never saw anyone else there, despite the trail and the occasional signs that other people had been there—aluminum cans in the fire ring, a candy wrapper that blew and caught in the grass—so they thought of it as their secret, private lake. They’d peel off their clothes and dive in and splash each other and then lie peacefully floating on their backs in silence together, staring at the sky. Once, a bear crashed out of the woods and approached the shore. Lisa screamed and Joshua smacked the surface of the water and the bear looked up at them and ran, most likely on his way to the dump. Sometimes Lisa wrapped her legs and arms around him while he stood on the slimy bottom, bobbing to keep both of them up, and they made love, though they tried to keep themselves from it because they didn’t have any condoms out there with them. Usually he pulled out. Except for the one afternoon when he didn’t. Afterward, they’d returned to the hot trailer and ate the salami and cheese and crackers and cold pasta salad that Lisa had brought home from work, and talked about the fact that there was no way she could have gotten pregnant from one mistake.

  “Plus,” said Joshua, “wouldn’t the fact that we were in a lake make it less likely? I mean, wouldn’t the water in the lake … dilute it?”

  “Maybe,” Lisa said dubiously. Her eyes were red from having cried.

  And then they waited, forgetting about the whole thing, forgetting it for one week and then two and three and almost four before Lisa took a test in their bathroom and they couldn’t forget it anymore.

  “Mrs. Boudreaux,” a woman called from a doorway.

  Lisa closed her magazine and looked at Joshua, fear flashing across her face, and together they rose and walked toward the woman, following her down a hallway into a room that was so narrow it was like another hallway.

  “Please take a seat.” She gestured toward two plastic chairs that faced each other and then when they sat, she pulled up a chair next to them. “I’m Karen. I’m a nurse here. I need to get some basic information from you first.” She opened the folder and began to read the long questionnaire that Lisa had filled out in the waiting room. “So, you’re pregnant,” she said, still looking at the papers in the folder, and then she looked up at them and smiled tentatively. “And is this good news?”

  “Yeah,” blurted Lisa. “I mean, it wasn’t planned, but now that I am pregnant we’re happy.”

  “Good,” said Karen.

  Lisa looked at Joshua, her eyes flaring wide for a moment.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Well then, congratulations are in order,” Karen said, taking out a pen.

  They had discussed abortion, but Lisa decided she shouldn’t because she was Catholic. If you’re so Catholic, you weren’t supposed to be having sex in the first place, Joshua had said, much to his later regret. They’d ended the argument by agreeing they’d get married after the baby was born, so they could have a real wedding to which Lisa could wear a real wedding dress. Now they were technically engaged, though they’d told no one and he hadn’t gi
ven her a ring.

  “So today you’re seeing …” She turned to the folder again.

  “Dr. Evans.”

  “Yes,” Karen said. “Sarah Evans. She’s not a doctor, actually. She’s a certified nurse-midwife. She works with the doctors in the practice here and does everything the doctors do pretty much. You’ll like her a lot. She has a very hands-on approach.”

  Karen spun a little cardboard wheel and told them that the baby was due to be born in mid-March. The week his mother had died, Joshua thought instantly. He cleared his throat and shifted in his chair. The moment they walked into the clinic, he’d begun to feel her, his mother—and in particular the day he’d gone to the hospital where he’d never seen her alive and instead saw her dead—but now that they were back in this room, full of its smells of cotton balls and rubbing alcohol and whatever they used to clean the floors, he felt her even more. He sat trying to let his mind go blank, trying to focus only on the long list of questions that Karen was asking Lisa, about her health and the health of her parents; most, it seemed, she’d already answered on the questionnaire.

  “How many sexual partners have you had?”

  “Three,” Lisa said, without looking at him. A little dagger of heat jabbed his heart and he forgot all about the smells in the room. As far as he knew, she’d only had two: him and Trent Fisher. He could see her pale face growing pink as she stared at Karen, intentionally not looking his way.

  “Ever had any sexually transmitted diseases?”

  “No,” she said, as if the question were absurd.

  “What?” she asked when they were at last alone together in the examination room, left there by Karen to wait for Sarah Evans.

  “Three?”

  “Josh. It’s not like you haven’t slept with anyone else.”

  “Who?” he whispered angrily so no one in the hall would hear.

  “It was this guy from Duluth,” she whispered back. “It was before we were even together. Like, back in eleventh grade I went up there for that trip with ornithology for the science fair and we spent four days. I met this guy—Jeff—and I slept with him once, Josh. Once.” She was sitting on the edge of the exam table, wearing nothing but her socks and the gown they’d given her that tied in a few places down the front. He could see intimate slices of her body through the gaps in the gown as she spoke.

  “So you cheated on Trent?”

  “Duh. I cheated on Trent with you.”

  “But you cheated on Trent with someone else too.” It enraged him, though in some faraway place inside himself, he knew he was being irrational. For him, aside from Lisa, there had only been Tammy Horner.

  “Yes,” she said at last, miserably. “Once.”

  “I can see your …” He gestured at her.

  “What?”

  “Your … thing.”

  “It’s just my pubic hair, Josh,” she said too loudly, covering it up.

  They sat in a tense silence for several moments. On the wall behind her hung a diagram of the female reproductive system, and then a smaller diagram of the male. There was a tap on the door, and before they answered, Sarah Evans came into the room and introduced herself, shaking first Lisa’s hand, then his. She sat down on a little stool with wheels and smiled at them.

  “Congratulations!” she boomed.

  “Thank you,” they both said in unison.

  She told them they should call her Sarah and talked to them about what Lisa could do to help with her nausea; what vitamins she needed to take and which foods she should eat and not eat, about not drinking alcohol or smoking or being around others who smoked, then she scavenged through a drawer and found several brochures, which she handed to Joshua, about cystic fibrosis and exercise, miscarriage and nutrition, and then another one entitled “Special Circumstances: Teen Pregnancy” that featured a worried-looking Latino couple on the cover. Sarah’s hair was cut short like a boy’s, like Joshua’s, like she didn’t do a thing with it aside from keeping it clean; she wore no makeup or jewelry. She reminded him remotely of the women who used to come to the school to teach their special sexual education courses or women who volunteered at the radio station with his mother, particularly the women who hosted a show called A Woman’s Place, though she did not remind him, actually, of his mother. She was too athletic-looking and self-assured, too possibly a lesbian, like half the women who worked on A Woman’s Place. When she was done talking to them about everything they needed to do now that Lisa was pregnant, Sarah asked if Lisa minded if a student came in to observe the exam. When Lisa said no, a man named Michael materialized immediately, as if he’d been standing outside the door listening in, or Sarah Evans had pressed a secret button indicating that it was okay for him to enter. They each shook his hand and he retreated to the corner of the room to stand near Lisa’s feet.

  Lisa lay back on the table and Sarah untied the gown at the top, exposing her body from the waist up. Sarah pressed the flesh around one breast and then the other, working her way in toward her nipples in concentric circles, not looking down at Lisa, but past her as if trying to rely only on what she felt rather than saw. Joshua couldn’t help but blush. Why he had to be here for this, he did not know. A dizzy, almost sick, feeling rose inside of him, like he could burst into hysterical laughter at any moment, though he urgently knew he must not do so. He looked at Michael, who was looking in the direction of Sarah and Lisa, but seemed to be thinking of something else entirely, something grim or incredibly boring, going by the expression on his face.

  “Think we’re going to get rain anytime soon?” he asked him.

  Michael shifted his eyes to Joshua, uncomprehending for a moment. “Oh—yeah—I don’t know. It’s been awfully dry, hasn’t it?”

  “It sure has,” he nodded, and stared at the floor, trying to think of what else to say, hoping that Michael would pick it up from here.

  “Do you see these veins?” Sarah asked when she had finished prodding Lisa’s breasts.

  “Yeah,” Lisa said hesitantly, looking down at herself.

  “Here.” Sarah pulled on a mirror that was attached to the wall on the end of an expandable accordion arm that could reach halfway across the room. “You can really see them from this angle,” she said, and positioned the mirror beneath Lisa’s breasts. “All these blue veins.”

  “Check this out, Josh,” Lisa said.

  He stood by her head and gazed impassively at her swollen breasts. A network of blue veins crisscrossed over them like the lines on a road map. “Is that a good thing?” he asked.

  “Totally normal. It’s the breasts preparing for lactation,” said Sarah, and pushed the mirror away. “Can I get you to slide down here?”

  Lisa pulled the gown over her chest and scooted down to the end of the table and put her feet up in the stirrups. The gown over her knees formed a tent behind which Sarah worked by the light of a very bright beam that pointed directly between Lisa’s legs. Joshua stood near Lisa’s head, not sure where he should be, as Sarah reached for a tube of lubricant and then for a metal device. Again he had the mad urge to laugh. He had to cough in order to stop himself.

  “Now I’m going in,” Sarah said. “You’ll just feel a little pressure.” He could hear the metal device click and then it made a horrible cranking sound like a miniature car jack. He stroked Lisa’s hair, trying to comfort her, but her hands fluttered up to stop him and their eyes met and he knew that their argument about how many lovers she’d had was over. He squeezed her hand, feeling protective of her, like it was the two of them against Sarah Evans and Michael.

  “It all looks good,” Sarah said after a few minutes, peeking over the gown. Joshua glanced at Michael, who was staring directly at Lisa’s exposed parts in the beam of light. He felt like going over and smacking him in the head.

  “Have you ever seen your cervix?” asked Sarah.

  “No,” said Lisa. In that single word Joshua could hear all of her uncertainty—over whether she ever wanted to see her cervix and also over what, e
xactly, a cervix was in the first place—but Sarah pressed on.

  “Everyone should see their cervix at least once.” She pulled the mirror toward her again, flipping it over to the side that was magnified, and positioned it a few inches away from Lisa’s vagina. Lisa pushed herself up onto her elbows and then leaned awkwardly forward, her feet still in the stirrups. “Wow,” she said after several moments. She lay back down and looked up at him. “You want to see it, Josh?”

  He didn’t, but he knew it would cause trouble if he said so. Wordlessly, he stepped forward to look into the mirror. The metal contraption held Lisa’s vagina open like a tunnel and at the end of it there was a round, wet-looking bulb, slightly blue, slightly pink, covered with a glaze of whitish goop. It reminded him of the faces of a litter of mice he’d seen once; they’d been born in the barn moments before he’d come across them, blind and translucent and wet and gaping and repulsive as creatures from a science-fiction film.

  “Cool,” he said, and returned to his station near Lisa’s head.

  “Just think, Josh, that’s where our baby is.”

  “Well, almost,” corrected Sarah, removing the metal device, and switching the lamp off. “Your baby is actually in your uterus.” She tapped on Lisa’s knee. “You can put your legs down. We’re all done.”

  She flicked off her gloves and came to stand in front of the diagram on the wall, tracing over its laminated surface as she walked them through the reproductive system, first female, then male, like they were two kids.

  By four they were back in Midden, in the parking lot of the Red Owl. Lisa had exchanged her day shift for a night shift so she could go to her appointment. Her mother worked at Red Owl too, so she’d had to concoct an excuse: that she and Joshua were driving to Brainerd to go out to lunch to celebrate their six-month anniversary, which was not completely a lie, since indeed today was that day.