Torch

  “Well, it’s not.” She gave him a threatening look. “My God, Josh. It’s almost a hundred degrees outside. Do you expect me to wear a turtleneck?”

  “Are you on crack?” he asked suddenly, humorlessly. “Or meth or coke or something?”

  “What’s your problem today?” she asked, wounded. Their eyes met for the first time and she saw his expression shift as he realized he was wrong. She looked away. “I thought you’d be happy to see me.”

  “I am,” he said, softening. “It’s that you seem different. Kind of city.”

  Claire smiled and stretched her arms wide. “Here we are in the city, Josh. This is what people dress like here.” She turned abruptly toward the house and tugged on his arm, guiding him inside. “Can we please stop talking about what I look like?”

  She led him past the boxes she’d packed and stacked up in the living room and into the kitchen, where she gave him a cold Mountain Dew.

  “So what do you think?” she asked, looking around at the bare counters and cupboards. “I mean, I wish you’d have seen it before I had it all packed up, but—”

  “It’s nice,” said Joshua. He cracked his can of pop open and stood holding it uncertainly.

  Before he arrived, Claire had walked through each room, attempting to see it all through Joshua’s eyes, hoping he would think it was cool. She gestured toward his Mountain Dew. “I’d give you ice and a glass, but I already packed them up.”

  “That’s okay.” He took a long sip as she watched him and then he held it out to her. “You want some?”

  “No thanks,” she replied politely. In all of their lives they’d never met up intentionally or made plans with only each other. It felt strange and formal and grownup.

  “So I suppose you’re wondering what happened.” Her voice echoed against the emptiness of the kitchen.

  “With what?” he asked, and burped.

  “With David.” She leaned against the counter and then hoisted herself up to sit on it. “I never told you why we broke up.”

  “I thought you were just taking time apart,” he said, without sympathy.

  “No. It’s over.”

  He nodded.

  “But I’m coping.” She took a deep breath. “Of course, I miss him sometimes, but I think it’s probably for the best.”

  He nodded again.

  “I was unfaithful,” she blurted. She hadn’t planned to tell him this, but now she offered it up, wanting to force him to respond. “I had this—” she folded her hands on her lap and then released them “—thing with a guy in Duluth.”

  Joshua kept his expression still and unreadable, as if he already knew everything she could possibly say, but then she saw his face flush pink. She wondered if he’d ever cheated on anyone and immediately decided he hadn’t.

  “He’s older. He’s, like, almost forty.” She paused, to give Joshua time to react, but he didn’t. He only took another swig of his Mountain Dew. “And—I mean—it’s completely over now,” she said, though in truth she’d gone up to see Bill in Duluth three times over the summer, sailing past the exit to Midden on her way. “He’s not the reason that David and I broke up. Well, I suppose he’s part of the reason ultimately. Let’s put it this way: he didn’t help the cause. But I don’t know. It’s a lot of things. It’s complicated.” She was talking fast, wired from having consumed so much coffee in the past few days as she’d packed her apartment, leaving too much to the last minute. “Anyway, I haven’t seen him for a month—this guy, the old guy, Bill. It’s not like we’re in a relationship or anything.”

  She stopped talking and looked at Joshua, regretting having asked him to come, regretting having involved him in her Minneapolis life—the life she considered her real, private life. It wasn’t until this instant, as he stood silently in her kitchen, that she realized she had concocted a fantasy of what it would be like to have her brother here. In it, he would talk and want to know everything; he would tell her things and make sounds of approval or curiosity as he listened. Instead, he was like always, secret and unattainable. Just as a part of her was to him, she thought now. Without their mother and Bruce to hold them together, they were not a family anymore, but siblings—a leaner, sparser thing. Just Claire and Joshua: two people wandering in the wilderness, each of them holding one end of a string.

  “So how are you and Lisa doing?” she asked, pushing off of the counter, stumbling off of one of her shoes as she landed.

  He shrugged.

  “You’re getting rather serious, it seems.”

  “Why do you say that?” He set his empty can on the counter, and Claire picked it up and put it in the recycling bin by the back door.

  “Because you’ve been together for a while.”

  “Not even six months.”

  “Okay, Josh. No reason to get defensive. I was only saying—”

  “It’ll be six months tomorrow,” he said, as if he felt guilty about having downplayed it a moment ago.

  “Are you going to celebrate?” Claire asked.

  “We’re going to Brainerd,” he said, and opened the refrigerator. Inside there were two more cans of Mountain Dew and the box of caramels she was going to give him. He closed it and turned to her. “But I’m too young to settle down.”

  “No one said you were settling down,” said Claire. She looked at him quizzically, as if just now she was seeing him. His arms were manlier than she’d remembered them, and tan; the hair that grew on them thicker, and golden.

  “Lisa’s great, but she’s not the only woman in the world.”

  “Woman?” Claire said in a teasing, ecstatic voice. The possibility that her brother could be dating anyone that could be described as a woman seemed absurd to her.

  “Shut up.”

  “Wo-man!” she warbled.

  “Don’t we have work to do?” he asked, and she followed him out of the kitchen and into the living room, where they stood looking at all of her things.

  “I’m thinking we should load the bed first and then pack all the smaller stuff around it,” he said.

  She looked out the window at his truck. It was dustier, more worn than all the others parked on the street. She recognized the dust as Midden dust, the mud that rimmed the wheel wells, Midden mud. It wasn’t just dust and mud, it was Bruce and it was her mother, it was Joshua and home. Seeing it made her feel happy and sad at once.

  “You forgot something,” Joshua hollered. He had wandered away into her old bedroom.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “A candle.”

  “Oh that,” Claire said, going to him. “That stays.”

  Joshua left as soon as his truck was unloaded, though Claire tried to convince him to spend the night. Once she was alone she paced the room, thinking about how she should arrange the few pieces of furniture she had. From the windows she could see both the front and back of the house, east and west, from street to alley, from hulking ship to garbage bin. She stopped pacing and stared out the window to the street, as if she were waiting for Joshua to return, watching for his truck, though she wasn’t waiting. She only seemed to be.

  “Boo,” Andre whispered, standing in the doorway.

  She turned to him, startled. He had a smile on his face that made her feel that he’d been watching her for some time.

  “Hey.”

  “So now that you’re in, do you want the grand tour?”

  She followed him down the stairs and through the kitchen and living room and up the curving stairway at the front of the house that led to most of the housemates’ rooms. Some were cavelike, cloaked with dark curtains; some were scattered with clothes and books and bits of uneaten food and a garble of things that couldn’t be instantly identified; some were bright with sunlight or painted in wild colors; and all of them were scented with the smoke of cigarettes or marijuana or heroin or incense, depending on the habits of their occupants. None of the housemates were home, but Andre named each one as they passed. There was Ruthie and Jason and Victor—a
ll members of Andre’s band, Binge—and Sean, who preferred to go by the name Elk, and Patrick, who was almost always at his girlfriend’s place, and a woman named Melody who technically still lived in the house but wouldn’t be home until December, after she was done traveling in Southeast Asia.

  When they returned to the kitchen Claire wandered around it appraisingly, as if pondering whether it was going to be sufficient for her cooking needs, though she’d seen it a couple of weeks before when she’d come to see the room. “Is that a breadmaker?” she asked, pointing to a bright yellow piece of equipment shaped like a giant marshmallow that sat on the counter.

  “A microwave.” Andre went to it and pressed a button so the door popped open. “Everyone thinks it’s a breadmaker. I suppose ’cause it looks like one.”

  “I know how to bake bread,” she blurted, feeling instantly like an idiot, but then she went on, hoping to seem valuable as a housemate. “I mean, from scratch. Not with a breadmaker.”

  “Awesome,” he said. He wore a cowboy shirt that he’d cut the sleeves off of and a pair of jeans that were ripped at the knees. On the inside of his forearm, from wrist to elbow, there was a tattoo of a cucumber on fire. The cucumber was actually a person with dots for eyes and a chef’s hat on his head and little green arms that extended out from his sides. In one hand the cucumber held a spatula, in the other a butcher knife. The cucumber man also had a mouth, which smiled, though flames were bursting up from the bottom of his cucumber body and would soon, it seemed, overtake him. Claire thought this tattoo was preposterous. Not that she was against tattoos. Rather, she thought that they should not be comical.

  “I like your tattoo,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s got a sense of humor.”

  “Yeah.” He smiled at her appreciatively, nodding his head slowly, as if she’d said something profound. “That’s so true. You know, you’re one of the only people who have gotten that.”

  Pride and inane joy surged through her, and in her mind she cast about for more brilliant observations about the tattoo but came up with none.

  “You want some toast?” he asked, beginning to make some for himself.

  “No thanks.” She leaned against a counter, trying to seem comfortable, trying to seem like a housemate, though she didn’t feel like one at all, as she watched Andre smear first peanut butter, then maple syrup onto his toast and then press it together, sandwich style. She turned away and stared numbly into the living room, where there was a glass terrarium against the wall.

  “Oh. I forgot to show you. Ruthie’s pet,” said Andre, gesturing in the direction of the terrarium.

  She walked toward it and saw, as she got closer, that there was a tarantula half the size of her hand inside. When she stooped near the glass, it rose up on its hairy tiptoes, as if about to lunge at her. She stepped back.

  “It’ll bite,” Andre yelled from behind her, and then laughed with exaggerated wickedness, so she didn’t know whether to believe him or not. He was a few years older than her, though he seemed younger. He had a boyish quality about him that she’d picked up on immediately. It wasn’t innocent, the way an actual boy would be, but a grownup version of a boy: menacing and pranksterish, like any moment he would do anything he wanted. “Sometimes, when Ruthie feeds it, it tries to bite.”

  “What does it eat?” Claire asked, and the bears came into her mind then, the bears that ate from the canoe in the summertime behind Len’s Lookout.

  He sat down on the couch without answering her and set his plate on the coffee table. His forehead was rimmed neon green along his scalp, the remnants of a recent dye job. He wore a necklace of silver beads that looked like it came from somewhere far off—India or Guatemala. The hair and the necklace and the extravagant tattoo didn’t seem to belong to him, Claire thought, as if the moment they were detached from him, he would look entirely like someone else, like the person who he actually was.

  “So did you say you work at Giselle’s?”

  “Yeah. Have you been there?”

  He nodded and took a bite of his sandwich.

  “I’m a waitress—or I guess I should say ‘server.’ ”

  He nodded again and continued to look at her, which made her wary that he would press harder, ask more, ask the question that so many of her customers asked every day—what it was she “really did.” This, despite the fact that they’d been watching her doing what she did all the time they were there—racing around with trays of food and drinks in her hands, clearing and scrubbing the surfaces of tables and chairs. Still, she knew they meant no harm. Giselle’s was the kind of restaurant where all the employees except for Giselle herself at least claimed to be something else—artists of one sort or another mostly—and some in fact were. Claire had gone to gallery openings, dance performances, and concerts that featured her coworkers. “I’m a student,” she’d murmur to the customers who asked, pushing a strand of hair from her damp forehead, even though that was no longer technically true. She hadn’t gone back to school since her mother died, though she intended to. To graduate she needed only two more classes, but the customers didn’t need to hear the details. They would smile sweetly at the news of her student status, and she would walk away with their dirty plates in her hands and escape to the humid privacy of the kitchen.

  “So, the spider can’t escape or anything,” Andre said, speaking more gently than he had before. “There’s no reason to be afraid.”

  “I’m not,” Claire said, and then to prove it she almost told him about how she’d grown up, how there were bears and moose and wolves. How she hadn’t been afraid of them, even when her family lived in the apartment above Len’s Lookout and she’d had to trek out to the bathhouse—though in fact she’d been terrified. But something kept her from telling him this, something quiet and protective that she could feel rise up like a veil inside of her from time to time. “So what do you do?” she asked. “I mean, for a job.” The room was large, but void of furniture other than the coffee table and the couch and a giant poster of Kurt Cobain on the wall. She considered going to sit next to Andre but remained where she was, her arms wrapped around herself.

  “The law,” he said after having seemed to carefully consider her question, and then he snorted and laughed again in the way that made it impossible for her to tell whether he was serious or not. She gave him a kind of bemused smile so as to communicate that she neither believed him nor disbelieved him, that she was the kind of person who was wise enough to know that anything could be true or not true, but he didn’t explain himself any further and so she went to the window, pretending that something had caught her interest.

  There was a cat sleeping on a splintered wicker chair on the front porch. Earlier in the day, while she and Joshua were unloading the truck, this same cat had skittered away from her in the backyard.

  “Kitty,” she called, and tapped gently on the glass.

  He opened his eyes and turned majestically to meet her gaze, fearless now that she couldn’t touch him.

  Her heart shrank when she got to her room, seeing everything she owned in a pile, her bare mattress on the floor. She ripped a plastic trash bag open, too impatient to untie the knot she’d made of the handle, and extracted a blanket, which she spread over the mattress to cover the stains. A painting of her mother’s she’d taken from home leaned against the wall and she picked it up and went from wall to wall with it, deciding where it should go. It had hung in her mother and Bruce’s bedroom up until a couple of months before, when Claire had packed it up with everything else before Kathy Tyson moved in. She’d put most of her mother’s possessions in the apartment above Len’s Lookout, but the painting she kept with her, believing that Bruce would call and protest, demand that she bring it back since it belonged to him, a gift from her mother. But he hadn’t called—hadn’t, Claire assumed, even missed it—which made her insides go bitter and hard, made her feel that their entire life with Bruce had been nothing but a sham. There was a nail in the
wall between the two windows that looked out onto the street and she hung the painting on it temporarily, though it was off-center and too high.

  She went back to her things, not really unpacking but searching and taking out whatever moved her. She extracted a rhinestone necklace from a tangled lump of jewelry and went into the bathroom and put it on and stood in front of the mirror. The necklace looked ridiculous with the T-shirt and jean shorts she wore, but she left it on, like a little girl playing dress up. She got a lipstick from her purse and applied it and then blotted it on the back of her hand and stood staring at herself in the mirror. A dark stripe ran the length of her part on the top of her head, the blond growing out. She pushed her hair away from her face and then secured it with a clip and then took it out and did it again, better this time. She turned away and went back to her work in a more orderly fashion now, emptying a box of books and then a bag of clothes, which she hung in the closet. She found her phone and plugged it in and dialed Bill’s number.

  “It’s me,” she said when his machine picked up. “Just wanted to call and say hi.” She hung up the phone and stared at it, waiting for it to ring. Often, Bill screened his calls and then called her right back. She hadn’t seen him for a month, but they talked about once a week. They had settled into an easy friendship on the phone, sharing the banal details of their days. In these conversations, Bill felt to her like one of the regular customers who came into Giselle’s, familiar and yet vague, intimate yet harmless, giving her advice about her car, listening to her stories about what she did on Friday night, about what movies she saw and whether they were any good or not. In person—on the occasions that she’d gone to visit him over the summer—Claire felt differently about him entirely, as if he wasn’t the Bill she’d been talking to on the phone all these weeks but a sexier, more robust brother. In his presence she became provocative and petty, falsely jealous and insecure. She believed it wasn’t so much Bill that brought this out in her but his house. While there, she often had the feeling that she was being watched—and in some ways she was. Since Nancy’s death, Bill had displayed framed photographs of her all around, on every shelf and nook, on every counter and table. Nancy as a baby, Nancy as a bride, Nancy with her students on the last day of school, Nancy standing in the front yard, a rake in her hands. She was everywhere, in every room, her same sardonic smile watching them and all they did together in her house. Watching them have sex and shower and grill dinner on the back deck and listen to music and read books on the couch. Books—some of them—that Nancy herself had bought, had read or had hoped to read, had loved or hated or been bored or riveted by.