Torch

  “Andre,” she whispered. “Andre,” she said more loudly, so he stirred, but made no reply. “You have to go.” She went to a desk lamp that sat on the floor in the corner and switched it on.

  “Huh?” He sat up, disoriented by the light, as if he’d only now realized they were together in her room.

  “I can’t sleep if you’re here,” she explained, though she didn’t know what she was talking about. Aside from her dalliance with Bill, she’d never done this before either, gone to bed with someone she’d only just met. For all she knew, she could sleep next to him as well as if she were alone.

  He laughed and looked at her like she would take back what she said just because he wanted her to.

  “But—that was fun,” she said, so his feelings wouldn’t be hurt.

  “Whatever,” he said, and sat up.

  The phone rang. She went toward it, to turn down the volume on her machine so whoever it was could leave a message without Andre hearing it, but he picked it up before she could get there.

  “Hello?” he trilled in a falsely high female voice. He paused, listening. “Claire? Claire who?”

  “Don’t,” she whispered fiercely, trying to wrest the phone from him.

  “Oh. Claire. Well, okay then. Here’s Claire.” He held the phone out to her, a smirk on his face.

  “Hello,” she said, turning away from Andre. “What?” she asked. It took her some time to comprehend that it was Lisa, Joshua’s Lisa. She was crying and speaking in nonsensical fragments about Greg Price and Joshua. “Greg!” Claire cried out in her confusion, and then Lisa gathered herself and got it out: Joshua had been arrested and was being held at the jail in Blue River. As she listened, she grabbed her purse and her coat and shoved her feet into her clogs.

  “Lisa, hold on. Listen—” she interrupted, “I’m coming. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Tell Josh, okay?” She clicked the phone off and tossed it onto the mattress.

  Andre picked it up and placed it back on its receiver. “What’s wrong?” he asked conciliatorily.

  “I have to go,” she said, almost panting with panic, leaving the room. She had the feeling he was following her, but she didn’t look back as she descended the dark stairs, her legs shaking from sex and fear.

  Once outside, she ran to her car parked on the street. Her hands shook as she jammed the key into the lock and then into the ignition. She gripped the steering wheel firmly to still them as she drove through the streets of Minneapolis, past the apartment where she used to live with David, and then out onto the interstate. On the seat beside her there was a plant she’d forgotten to unload the day before. The edges of its withered leaves tickled her bare arm. She tried to picture Joshua in jail, for what she did not know. In her shock, she had forgotten to ask. For driving drunk, she decided, to keep herself from going mad. She wished that she could see his face this instant. The longing for it made her nose tingle and ache.

  After a while, it occurred to her that she didn’t know where she was going. As a child, she had taken a field trip to the jail in Blue River, but she didn’t know where, precisely, she should go at this hour in order to get in to see Joshua—by the time she arrived, it would be the middle of the night. Most likely they would tell her to come back in the morning, and then what would she do? She imagined driving up her old driveway, knocking on the door and waking Bruce up—she supposed, now that it was Kathy’s home, it would be only right to knock—and then she crossed the thought out of her mind as absurd, the notion of going to Bruce at all, even with the news about Joshua. She could go to Lisa, but she didn’t know where Lisa lived—somewhere on the road to the dump is all she knew.

  Halfway home, she pulled off the interstate, needing desperately to pee. She parked at a truck stop that was painted to look like a red barn. She had never stopped here in all the times she’d driven by. It was a tourist trap famous, she knew without having ever set foot in the place, for its frosted cinnamon rolls that were as big as your head. She got out of her car and went inside. There was a bin of self-service popcorn by the door and another with stuffed animals of varying shapes and colors and species that you could attempt, one quarter at a time, to capture with a mechanical claw. There were kiosks selling postcards that said “Gateway to the Northland” and “Minnesota Is for Lovers” and rows of shelves selling statuettes of loons and ponies and beavers. There was a counter where you could buy giant soft pretzels and caramel-covered apples and the famous monstrous cinnamon rolls.

  Claire ignored these things and made her way toward the women’s room. Inside, she was the only woman in sight, walking along a bright bank of sinks. Several faucets came on without her having touched them, riled by her passing, and then, when she entered a stall, several toilets flushed of their own will. Afterward, standing at the sink washing her hands, she saw herself in the mirror, thin and bluish and exhausted-looking in the fluorescent light, still wearing the rhinestone necklace. She took it off and put it in her purse. She remembered Andre saying whatever to her when she had asked him to leave. She didn’t know when she would go back to that house, didn’t know what she would be dealing with once she got to Joshua. It seemed entirely possible to her that Andre was in her room that very minute, rifling through her things. She remembered a little clay gargoyle that David had given her after she’d told him about having been called a gargoyle by a mean boy in the seventh grade. She imagined Andre finding it and holding it up to the light, wondering what it was.

  On the way out, she bought a cinnamon roll and carried it out to her car on a piece of wax paper and set it on her lap, reaching down to tear chunks of it off as she drove north. She’d scarcely eaten anything for days, and now she ate the entire cinnamon roll and could have eaten another. Her mind was a metronome, moving back and forth, but always between the same two things, to Joshua and Joshua. She prayed that he would be okay, that whatever he did would come to nothing, that in the morning they would laugh or argue the way they did with each other about the ridiculous events of the night before.

  She took the exit to Midden and her mind emptied out and she drove without thinking, drove like the car was driving itself, racing in the night. She was far enough north now that the trees pressed up close to the sides of the road. Pine trees and birches, poplars and spruce, their silhouettes as familiar to her as people she’d known for years. She could see them in the dark, their shadows looming and kind, watching her the way they had seemed to be watching her all of her life. Their knowing branches reached out to her, knowing, but not telling, knowing but not telling who on this earth she was.

  PART V

  And did you get what

  you wanted from this life, even so?

  I did.

  And what did you want?

  To call myself beloved, to feel myself

  beloved on the earth.

  —Raymond Carver, Late Fragment

  15

  THE RAIN WAS STILL COMING DOWN when Bruce left Doug Reed’s place, freezing to slush on the windshield before the blade could clear it away. It was the second week of December and ten inches of snow was on the ground, coated with a thick layer of ice now, shining like glazed porcelain in Bruce’s headlights at five P.M.

  “Whattya know about them roads?” Leonard asked when Bruce walked into the Lookout. He tossed a cardboard coaster onto the bar in front of him. “You want your regular?”

  “Nah, I’ll take a Coke,” he said, though in fact he did want a beer. He’d promised Kathy he wouldn’t until after she’d ovulated and they were in the clear. They had been trying to conceive a baby for six months. Kathy had brought it up the first night they were married, how badly she wanted to have kids, asking him whether he wanted them too. He had answered that he had them already, but Kathy just looked at him with a funny expression.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I’m talking about your own kids,” she persisted.

  “They are my kids, Kath,” he had said.

  “You know what I mean,” she
replied.

  And he did. An infinitesimal hairline crack of him did. Besides, who was he to stand in the way of Kathy’s dream? They began immediately. Kathy had been keeping records of her cycles for months, tracking her ovulation and menstruation, monitoring her cervical mucus and her luteal surge. Initially, Bruce took this as a sign not so much of her determination as it was a reflection of her profession as a cow inseminator, though he quickly learned that he was wrong. She wept each time she got her period, bitterly remorseful for having waited until she was two weeks shy of her thirty-fifth birthday to even begin to try.

  Bruce did what he could. He held her and stroked her hair and reassured her when she cried. He drank tea with her in the evenings called “Fertile Blend.” He took vitamins with zinc and avoided hot baths and had sex with her only missionary style and only on certain days, according to the demands of the chart she kept on the last page of her journal. And at last he even agreed to call her psychic, Gerry, and submit to a reading over the phone. “I sense a presence,” Gerry declared the moment Bruce finished giving him the numbers of his credit card.

  “Could it be the baby?” Bruce asked.

  “No!” Gerry shouted, changing his mind already. He had a Brooklyn accent, though he lived now in upstate New York. Kathy had met him years before, improbably, at a conference for people who raised and worked with cows. They had been drawn to each other immediately, she had told Bruce, seeing that they were of the same ilk, recognizing each other by their numinous jewelry. He was a small-time guru, holding workshops on occasion in a converted barn on his farm. Kathy had gone there once and camped out in his yard for a week, learning how to read rune stones and tarot cards. She showed Bruce a picture of Gerry she had glued inside her journal. He was a chubby, graying man who looked more like a college professor to Bruce than either a farmer or a psychic, his pink face pocked with old acne scars. “It’s not a presence. Not a person,” he continued with Bruce on the phone. He spoke with agonizing precision, making every few words its own sentence. “It’s an idea. A thought you’re having. It’s getting in the way. It’s blocking the road. There’s a logjam in the river. A mud slide on the path, so to speak.”

  “A thought?” asked Bruce, trying to empty his head of everything he knew and believed, not wanting Gerry to divine what was inside, just in case he actually could.

  He didn’t believe in psychics or crystals or any of this New Age business, but when they got off the phone, Bruce knew that, in a sense, Gerry had been right. He did have a thought. He had it each time he and Kathy made love during her fertile week, each time she got her period again. It was the thought that when he’d had the idea to marry Kathy, this was not what he expected. He realized now how ignorant and self-absorbed he had been, but Kathy’s desire to have children had taken him completely by surprise, so much was their courtship focused on his grief, his life, his wife and his kids and their loss. Kathy had been his counselor and confidante, his shoulder to cry on. She had been warm and female and sexually available, expert at drawing him out of his shell, back when the shell he needed to be drawn out of was composed entirely of his eternal love for Teresa Rae Wood.

  When they married, all of that changed in a day. Teresa was no longer his wife, Kathy was. “Kathy Tyson-Gunther,” she decided to be called. And even Claire and Joshua seemed to belong to him less than they had the day before. Kathy referred to them as his “late wife’s kids,” a shadowy dejection coming over her each time Claire or Joshua came up in their conversations, though she would not admit her mood had anything to do with them. All through the summer and early autumn, they had talked in an abstract way about having Joshua and Claire over for dinner, though nothing ever came of it. Finally, in November, he and Kathy extended a tentative invitation to them for Thanksgiving dinner, but then they learned that Joshua was going to be a father and their plans dissolved.

  “It isn’t that I’m not happy for them. I am,” Kathy said to him sincerely, after having wept over the news. “It’s …” she struggled to think of what, exactly, it was. “It’s that seeing Lisa’s belly will bring it all to the forefront. How we’ve failed.”

  “We haven’t failed,” he told her.

  “How about they all come over for Christmas?” she suggested.

  “Josh could be in jail by then,” Bruce said, and he could. His court date had been scheduled at last. Joshua had been arrested in August and charged with possession of marijuana, though Bruce had sighed a breath of relief when he heard the charge. All summer long, he had been hearing things around town, rumors that Joshua was dealing for Rich Bender and Vivian Plebo, and not just marijuana, though he had allowed himself to ignore the talk until he got the call from Claire. She had been distraught when she called, almost begging him to come to Blue River, where she was. She had driven up from Minneapolis the night before and spent half the day going from the bank to the courthouse and back to the bank again, getting money and notarized statements and filling out forms so she could bail Joshua out of jail. But Bruce hadn’t gone to Blue River. He couldn’t, he explained to Claire, especially since she already had it covered. He had a job to finish and then, that evening, a softball game to play. It was the regional semifinals and the Jake’s Tavern team had made it all that way.

  A few weeks later, he and Joshua were going in opposite directions on Big Pile Road. They stopped and talked to each other through the open windows of their trucks with their engines idling, the way they had taken to doing since Bruce had married Kathy and Joshua stopped coming home.

  “What you doing with yourself these days?” asked Bruce, not wanting to mention his arrest directly.

  “Pulling out docks for Jack Haines,” Joshua answered.

  “That’s good work.”

  “It’s just till the lakes freeze up,” said Joshua, and then they looked away, out their windshields, both of them thinking that by the time the lakes froze up Joshua might not need a job anyway, because very likely he would be in jail. He had been busted with a fair amount of marijuana, Claire had told Bruce. She kept him up to date on the tug of war between Joshua’s court-appointed attorney and the county prosecutor. He saw her about once a week, when he stopped in at Len’s Lookout. She worked there now, picking up her mother’s old shifts, living in the apartment above the bar, the way she had when Bruce had met her as a child. She had moved to Midden when Joshua got arrested, wanting to be nearby to assist in his defense. There was some debate as to whether the marijuana that Joshua had in his possession was for his personal use or for sale. On the eleventh of December, the judge would decide and sentence him accordingly.

  “Bruce!” Claire called to him now on the evening of the ice storm, a moment after Leonard handed him the Coke that Bruce wished were a beer, though she didn’t stop to talk. Instead, she glided past him with several plates in her hands and went to a table of customers he didn’t recognize. Bruce followed her with his eyes, nodding to the few people he knew and glancing briefly at the people he didn’t—city people up to hunt. He took his wool hat off and set it on the bar. “You’re busy, for the roads being what they are,” he told Leonard.

  “It’s these dumb Finlanders,” Leonard said, and laughed because he was a Finn himself. “They think they know how to drive. Them and the city apes. The Finlanders got the balls and the apes got their big fancy trucks.”

  Claire approached and thumped Bruce on the shoulder. Something caught inside of him and kept him from hugging her. It caught every time he saw her. “What’s new?” she asked.

  “Not much.” He took a sip of his Coke. “How about yourself?”

  To his surprise, she sat down on the stool beside him. “Did you get your hair cut?”

  He shook his head truthfully. He hadn’t cut it recently, though months before, he had cut his ponytail off.

  “It looks like you did,” she said. “Or that you’re doing something different to it.”

  He combed his hair with his fingers, feeling self-conscious. Kathy had bought him a sp
ecial conditioner and, after being repeatedly encouraged by her to try it, he’d started using it the week before. It made his hair softer, fuller than it had ever been. He wasn’t going to admit this to Claire. He took his hat from the bar and put it on, remotely regretting that he had stopped by. Since he married Kathy, whenever he saw Claire he got a little nervous, like she was watching his every move, analyzing his every word, like nothing he could do or say would be right. He felt the same way around Joshua. They were a committee, a club, an injured gang of two. He knew without needing to be told that they reported back to each other about him. That they’d look at each other with skeptical smiles and say, So guess who I saw.

  “Are you ready for tomorrow?” she asked, referring to Joshua’s court date.

  “I thought we couldn’t go in with him.”

  “I told you!” she said vehemently. “We can’t go in to the judge’s chambers, but we can go to the courthouse and sit outside in the hall.” She looked at him fervently. “Don’t tell me you’re not going to be there.”

  “I hope to,” he said. “But I got to finish up at Doug Reed’s place and if we can’t go in anyway, I don’t see why—”

  “For moral support, Bruce,” she interrupted, and then a bell rang back in the kitchen, Mardell signaling that an order was ready. Without another word, Claire bolted away from him, through the swinging doors.

  Bruce was relieved when she left. He was almost always relieved when she left, though it was her he came into the Lookout to see. He preferred to talk to her in fits and starts, in the pleasant exchanges they could manage as she strode past him bearing food or dirty dishes or stood waiting for Leonard to make her drinks at the bar. In this manner, he talked to Claire about once a week, though seldom did they actually talk. Kathy didn’t know that he saw Claire as often as he did, didn’t know that when he stopped off after work, he was stopping off at the Lookout. Sometimes, without directly lying, he let her believe that he had gone to Jake’s Tavern. It was their place.