Torch

  “Josh,” his mother called to him.

  He could hear her getting out of bed. “I’m home,” he said, irritated, not wanting her to. He considered bolting immediately upstairs. He loved his room.

  “You’re late,” she said, appearing in the kitchen, wearing her long fleece nightgown and fake fur slippers. The dogs went to her, forced their noses into her hands so she had to pet them.

  “We closed late. Three tables came in right at the end.” He tossed the apple at the garbage bin and could tell by the sound it made that he’d missed, but he didn’t go to pick it up. “We don’t have school tomorrow anyway. It’s teacher workshop day.”

  “You’re supposed to call when you’re later than ten. That’s the deal we made when you took the job.”

  “It’s only eleven.”

  He poured himself a glass of water and drank the whole thing in one long chug, aware that his mother was watching him. “What?” he asked, filling the glass again, running the water hard.

  “I’m not tired anyway,” she said, as if he’d apologized for waking her. “You want some tea?” she asked, already putting the kettle on.

  “Did you see the moon driving home?” she asked.

  “Yep.”

  She took two mugs from their hooks above the sink and placed the tea bags into them without turning any lights on.

  “The chamomile will help us sleep.”

  The kettle began to whistle. She picked it up and poured the water into the mugs and sat down at the table.

  He sat too, sliding his hot mug toward him.

  “It’s that I worry when you’re late. With the roads being icy,” she said, gazing at him by the dim light of the moon that came in through the windows. “But you’re home safe now and that’s what matters.”

  She blew on the surface of her tea but didn’t take a sip, and he did the same. He wore his headphones around his neck. He ached to put them on, to blast a CD. Instead, he imagined the music, playing a song in his head, its very thought a beacon to him.

  “So, you were busy tonight?”

  “Not really,” he said, and then remembered his earlier lie. “Until just before closing and then the place filled up.”

  “That always happens.” She laughed softly. “Every time I’m about to get out of Len’s a busload of people shows up.”

  She’d tried to quit her job there once. She started up her own business selling her paintings at flea markets and consignment shops. Scenes of northern Minnesota. Ducks and daisies and streams and trees and fields of grass and goldenrod. Most of them were now hanging in their house, much to Joshua’s chagrin. His mother had taken R.J. on an unsolicited tour of them once, telling him her inspiration for each painting and their titles. The titles embarrassed Joshua more than the paintings themselves. They were indicative of all the things that irked him about his mother: fancy and grandiose, girlish and overstated—Wild Gooseberry Bush in Summer Marsh, The Simple Sway of the Maple Tree, Birthland of Father Mississippi—as if each one were making a direct appeal to its own greatness.

  Joshua took a tentative sip of his tea and remembered a game he and Claire used to play with their mother called “What are you drinking?” She’d make them drinks out of water with sugar and food coloring when she didn’t have enough money for Kool-Aid and then she would ask them to tell her what they were drinking, smiling expectantly, and they would say whatever they wanted to say, whatever they could think up. They would say martinis, even though they didn’t know what martinis were, and their mother would elaborately pretend to put an olive in. They would say chocolate milkshakes or sarsaparilla or the names of drinks they’d invented themselves and their mother would add on to it, making it better than it was, making the water taste different to them too. This was before they met Bruce, after they’d just moved to Midden, when they lived in the apartment above Len’s Lookout. The apartment wasn’t really an apartment and the town didn’t yet feel to them like a town, so outside of it they were that first year, not knowing a soul in a place where everyone else knew each other. Their apartment was one big room, with a kitchen that Len had devised for them along one wall, and a shower and sauna and toilet out back. There was a couch that they pulled out into a bed, and they all slept on it together and usually didn’t fold it back up, so that the apartment was really a giant bed, an island in the middle of their new, Minnesota life.

  In the afternoons when Claire and Joshua had returned from school and their mother was home from work they would lie on the bed and talk and play games they’d made up. They would say that they could not get off the bed because the floor was actually a sea infested with sharks. Or their mother would close her eyes and ask, in a snooty voice that she used for only this occasion, “Who am I now?” and Joshua and Claire would shriek, “Miss Bettina Von So and So!” and then they would transform her. Softly, they touched her eyelids and her lips, her cheeks and her face, all the while saying which colors they were applying where, and from time to time their mother would open her eyes and say, “I think Miss Bettina Von So and So would wear more rouge, don’t you?” They would rub her face for a while longer and then she would ask, “What on earth are we to do about Miss Bettina Von So and So’s hair?” and they would rake their fingers through her hair and pretend to spray it into place or tie it into actual knots. When they were done, their mother would sit up and say, in her best, most luxuriously snooty voice, “Darlings! Miss Bettina Von So and So is so very pleased to make your acquaintance,” and he and Claire would fall onto the floor in hysterics.

  Joshua remembered these things now with embarrassment and something close to rage. As a child he’d been a fool. He wasn’t going to be one now.

  “What are you thinking?” his mother asked suddenly, suspiciously, as if she knew what he was thinking.

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  He could hear that she was smiling and—he couldn’t help it, he didn’t know exactly why—he wanted to obliterate her smile.

  “Why?” he asked bitterly.

  “I wondered if that’s what made you late.”

  “I told you. We got tables that came in.”

  The dogs sat between them and laid their paws on their laps every once in a while and then withdrew them when they got petted.

  “Plus, if I had a girlfriend, I would be more than an hour late.”

  “I suppose you would,” she said, thinking about it for a moment and then breaking into a long deep laugh. Despite himself, he began to laugh too, but less heartily.

  She took off her wedding ring and set it on the table and went to the sink to pump lotion onto her hands and stood rubbing it in. He could see her silhouette in the dark. She looked like a friendly witch, her hair pressed up scarily on one side of her head, from how she’d been lying on her pillow.

  “Here,” she said, reaching out to him and sitting back down. “I took too much.” She scraped the excess lotion from her hands onto his and then massaged it into his skin, onto his wrists and forearms too. He remembered when he had had colds as a child she would rub eucalyptus oil onto his chest and chant comically, “The illness in you is draining into my hands. All of Joshua’s illness is leaving his body and will now and forevermore reside in the hands of his poor old mother.” He had the feeling that she was remembering this too. He felt close to her all of a sudden, as if they’d driven far together and talked across the country all night.

  “Does that feel good?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I love having my hands rubbed more than anything,” she said.

  He took her hands and squeezed once, then let go.

  “How was your day?” he asked.

  “Fine. I went to Duluth actually. Bruce and I went. We ate at the Happy Garden.” She took a sip of her tea. “There’s something I want you to do for me, hon. It’s a favor I want. Claire’s coming home tomorrow and I want you to have dinner with us so we can all have dinner together as a family.”

  “
I work.”

  “I know you work. That’s why I’m asking now. You’ll have to take the night off.”

  “I can’t. Who’s Angie going to find to cover for me?” He held his mug. It was empty, but still warm.

  “It’s a favor that I’m asking you to do,” she said. “How often do I ask you for something?”

  “Often.”

  “Josh.”

  He petted the top of Tanner’s head. He tried to keep his voice calm, though he felt enraged. “What’s the big fricking deal about Claire coming home anyway? I see Claire all the time. She was here two weeks ago.”

  “Don’t say fricking.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m your mother and I told you not to say it.” She looked at him for a while and then said quietly, “It’s a stupid word. Say fucking, not frigging. And don’t say that either.”

  “I didn’t say frigging. I said fricking. There’s no such thing as frigging.”

  “Look it up in the dictionary,” his mother said gravely. “There is such a thing as frigging. It’s just not the best choice, comparatively speaking.”

  He tilted himself back in his chair as far as he could, so far he had to anchor himself underneath the table with his knee, but his mother didn’t tell him to stop, didn’t even appear to notice. He let it fall back onto all four legs and said, “Ever since Claire went to college it’s like she’s the queen bee.”

  “This isn’t about Claire.” Her voice shook, he noticed. “It’s about doing something that I asked you to do. It’s about doing me a fucking favor.”

  They sat in silence for several moments.

  “Okay,” he said, at last. It was like someone walking up and cutting a rope.

  “Thank you.” She picked up both of their mugs and went to the sink and washed them, then turned toward him, drying her hands. “We’d better get some sleep.”

  “I’m wide awake.”

  “Me too,” she said in a hushed voice. “It’s the moon.”

  He stood and stretched and raised his arms up, as if he were about to shoot a basketball; then he jumped and swatted at the ceiling, landing in front of his mother. He patted the top of her head. He was taller than her by more than a foot and now he stood up straighter so he would be more so. The cuckoo clock that Bruce built poked its head out and cooed twelve times.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked when the clock was done.

  “Yeah,” he said, a wave of self-consciousness rushing through him, remembering the meth. His mother had a way of detecting things.

  “Good,” she said, pulling her robe more tightly around herself. “And everything’s going to be okay.”

  “I know.”

  “Because I have given you and Claire everything. All the tools you’ll need throughout life.”

  “I know,” he said again, uncomprehendingly, feeling mildly paranoid about seeming high, especially that now in fact he suddenly felt high.

  “You do know, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said insistently, not remembering what he knew. He felt simultaneously disoriented and yet also in full command of himself. The way he felt when he’d gone to a movie in the bright light of day and emerged from it and found the day had shifted astonishingly, yet predictably, to night.

  “And I’ve given you so much love,” his mother pressed on. “You and Claire.”

  He nodded. Out the window behind her he could see the silhouettes of three deer in the pasture, their heads bent to Lady Mae and Beau’s salt lick.

  “You know that too, don’t you?”

  “Mom,” he said, pointing to the deer.

  She turned and they both looked for several moments without saying anything.

  And then the deer lifted their heads and disappeared back into the woods, which made the world right again.

  3

  THE AFTERNOON WAS SUNNY. Ice hung from the trees, shining, and then fell from their branches suddenly in great heaps. Claire sat near the window in the back of Len’s Lookout, gazing at the balsam fir and blue spruce, the Norwegian pines and the poplars, with her coat still on, her scarf still wound around her neck, not knowing that she was looking at balsam fir and blue spruce, Norwegian pines and poplars. Not knowing anything. Not even that she didn’t know.

  She was twenty, tall, with blue eyes and dark blond hair that went to her shoulders and another, longer rope of hair that was streaked electric blue and was woven into a thin braid with dull silver bells embroidered into it. Despite this, she looked like a farm girl—a big farm girl, her boyfriend, David, had said once, grabbing onto her naked hips, meaning it nicely—though she did not want to look like this and didn’t believe herself to look like this. Her fingernails were painted black, her toes a glimmering, morose green. The flesh on the right side of her nose was pierced and bejeweled with a fake sapphire stud. She twirled it in its tender hole and sipped her drink. Her brother sat across from her and sipped his drink too, looking out at the trees. Neither of them spoke for long stretches of time, feeling alone and yet together, enclosed in the crowd of the bar as they had been when they were children and waited here for the same reason they did now: for their mother to get off of work.

  Claire sucked the last of her drink through her red straw until it made a hollow rasping sound and then she set her glass down. “Any more booze in your little stash?” she asked, stabbing her ice with the straw. Joshua had discreetly added tequila to the orange juice their mother brought them from a tiny bottle he had in his coat pocket.

  He shook his head and took the plastic monkey that clung to the edge of her glass and put its tail in his mouth, letting the rest of it dangle. So delicate it was, Claire noticed, a sculpture more lovely than glass. For years they’d collected these monkeys in every color, and also the mermaids and the sharp miniature swords and the paper parasols that stretched open, taut and graceful, at the end of toothpicks. Now Claire wondered what had happened to them, this collection—their collections, his and hers—that they’d begged and bribed and battled to build.

  “I should get up and help Mom,” she said, without moving. She knew what to do. As a teenager, she’d worked here.

  The place was packed, a Friday during ice season. People they didn’t know occupied most of the tables, their glossy snowmobile helmets tucked beneath their chairs, their SUVs crammed every which way in the parking lot. People from Minneapolis and St. Paul—“the Cities”—and the suburbs. City apes, the locals called them, not necessarily meaning harm.

  “Mom seems perfectly fine to me,” Claire said, unwinding her scarf.

  They both looked at her charging smoothly across the room, clutching the necks of three beer bottles in one hand and two plates of food in the other.

  “Who said she wasn’t?” Joshua asked.

  “She did. The tone of her voice did. I told you. She sounded like someone died.”

  “And she said we need to talk?”

  Claire nodded, sucking on an ice cube. She had to wait for it to melt before she could speak, her eyes watering from trying to keep the ice from touching her teeth.

  “I already told you what I think,” Joshua said, with the monkey still in his mouth. “It could totally still happen, you know.”

  Now Teresa stood near the small opening at the bar where the cherries and limes and lemons and olives were kept in a compartmentalized bin. She carefully set drinks on her tray one at a time, the strings of her green apron in a sturdy knot at the back of her waist. When she turned she saw them watching her and smiled and held up one hand to signal that she was almost done and then disappeared into the throngs of people, away from them.

  “Trust me,” Claire said. “It’s not that. Her tubes are tied.” She looked out the window again. There was a canoe there that Len and Mardell used as a trough to feed bears in the summertime, buried now, a hump of snow. “As in fallopian tubes,” she continued, switching her eyes back to Joshua.

  “I think I know what fucking tubes are.”

  “I’m ju
st telling you.”

  “How stupid do you think I am?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer. She’d convinced him to eat dog food once, assuring him that the hard pellets were a new kind of snack mix. She took the book of matches that sat in the empty ashtray between them and lit one and watched it burn and then blew it out the moment before the flame scorched her fingers.

  “Don’t fight with me, Josh. Not now,” she said, gravely, though she didn’t feel that things were grave. She felt mildly elated, as if something exciting were about to happen. Driving up from Minneapolis she’d felt just the opposite. Filled with dread for four hours, imagining what could possibly be wrong, playing over and over in her head the words that her mother had spoken to her on the phone the night before when she’d called and commanded her to come home first thing in the morning, parsing them to bits in an effort to determine where exactly the danger lay. Bruce had cut off the end of his thumb with his table saw once. Another time, he’d fallen from a roof and crushed three vertebrae and banged his head so hard that he’d forgotten who Claire and Joshua were for almost a month, remembering Teresa only dimly. Claire knew that these things happened. She’d felt gripped by the enormity of it as she drove north, the vents of her Cutlass Supreme blasting hot air onto her face with the force of a desert wind. The fan had broken to the extent that it was either off entirely or on full blast and so she went from hot to cold and back and forth again, freezing and then roasting, never getting it right. She imagined Bruce unconscious in a bed with his limbs suspended from a ceiling contraption like the time when he’d broken his back. He wasn’t her father, or anybody’s father, but she loved him as one, and as she drove she imagined the things that she would say about him at his funeral, and she had cried so hard thinking about it that she thought she would have to pull over to the side of the road. But she gathered herself and blew her nose into a gob of napkins from Taco Bell that she’d found crammed into the crease of the seat. She turned on the radio and felt calmed and refreshed for having wept. She remembered, from this new, more reasonable vantage point, how the phone call that told her of Bruce’s accident had been much like the one from her mother yesterday: bossy and eerie and horrifically vague, but immediately identifiable as life-changing, although Bruce’s accident had not ultimately changed his life, once he was able to identify them as his family. Now he just had a bad back. And from the accident with the table saw, a shortened thumb with a new pink tip that was as shiny and smooth as the skin of a bell pepper.