Torch

  Joshua balanced his journal on his knee and placed the square of paper on top of that. He’d painted the entire cover of his journal midnight blue and then, with glitter and glue, added tiny white stars.

  “Your childhood dreams—or dream—one is fine,” said Pat McCredy, prompting them, as if they were on a TV quiz show and needed to have the question rephrased.

  He wrote: To move to California. It was true enough. It was personal enough. In individual he could work up the energy to discuss this dream with Pat McCredy, if called upon to do so.

  “Is everyone done?” she asked, looking around.

  “Hold on,” said Tiffany. Her hazel eyes flashed onto Joshua for an instant and in that instant he ached for her, felt that she ached for him, as if she’d placed her hand on his bare stomach or crossed the room and whispered something secret in his ear, but then he tamped it down. He was going to be good now, from here on out, nothing but strictly Lisa’s fiancé.

  “Okay,” Pat McCredy said when Tiffany was done. “Now I want you to pass your paper to the left.” A mumble of protest rippled across the room, but there was nothing to be done, they were powerless to her, and so they made their way around the circle, reading from the nine paper squares. To be a singer, said Tiffany’s. To work as a clown at Disneyland, said Frank Unger’s. To be rich, said Dan Bell’s. And so it went until they reached Vern. “To move to California,” he said while Joshua sat blank-faced and still as a doll listening to his own inane words.

  He talked about it with R.J. the next time he came to visit—how they would move to California and be mechanics together someday—though they spoke of it differently now, as if it had been a joke all along.

  “We should go just to prove my old lady wrong. She always said we wouldn’t go,” R.J. said, a flash of anger moving across his face, and then he laughed, like he always did when he spoke of his mother.

  “How is she, anyway?” asked Joshua.

  “The same.” He stared at Joshua for several moments with his dark eyes, as if he wanted to say more, though they both knew they couldn’t say much about Vivian and Bender with Tommy Johnson standing by, listening to every word. “Still fucked up,” he said at last, and cleared his throat. He’d slimmed down since he’d moved to Flame Lake. Without his baby fat he looked taller and older, and, even Joshua would admit it, more handsome. “Oh, and you know my dad went back to drinking.”

  Joshua nodded, expecting as much.

  “He’s an old drunk.” R.J. laughed, and reached up to adjust the pendant he wore, an oval cracked in half along a jagged line. His new girlfriend, who lived in South Dakota, wore the other half. “I knew it for a while, but I kept thinking he’d go back to not doing it. He started out with just kind of sneaking around. Having a beer now and then and acting like he didn’t, but now he don’t even deny it.” R.J. turned and looked at Tommy, then back to Joshua. “That’s the thing I learned, eh. People don’t change.”

  “Every once in a while they do,” said Joshua, feeling, without wanting to feel, affronted.

  “Like who?” asked R.J., and then Joshua told him all about Vern, going on, with a kind of glee, about the details he thought R.J. would be interested to know—about Vern’s retarded twin brother who lived in the nursing home, about how he beat his wife. It felt good to be talking about someone else’s problems, though when he was in group listening to it firsthand it made him want to throw up. At times Joshua became almost dizzy, witnessing the mastery with which Pat McCredy would get the inmates to divulge. Her voice was like the softest stroke on a piano key, so strong and sure and hushed. She had an entire orchestra of sounds and modulations. A single word from her mouth could be pitched in a manner to mean hundreds of things, to elicit the most revealing and incriminating responses. When she was done with one person, she would move on seamlessly to the next, fixing her gaze so intently it was impossible not to gaze back. “So,” she began each time, knowing, as she did with most of her questions, precisely what the answer was, “whose turn?”

  There were things that nobody knew, that he would never tell anyone, no matter how hard Pat McCredy pushed. The deep jelly core of him that only he knew. It could not be spoken of. He had no words for it, what made him, what pained him, what rocked him and fucked him. This thing for which he had no words was his life, and his job in jail was to protect it from Pat McCredy. And so he did, speaking to her of arguments he’d had with Lisa or Claire, of career paths he might take, or what had kept him from once and for all getting his GED. For Pat McCredy he created the story of his mother and the story of his father—sad, heartbreaking really, but he’d survived, he was forging on (he left the story of Bruce out of it entirely, by maintaining that all was well on that front)—and Pat McCredy gave him the words. She gave him closure and forgiveness, adult child and the five stages of grief. She was good, she pried, she challenged him and applied her techniques, made him pour what she thought was his soul out onto paper, but he was better, fiercer, more who he was than she believed he had the strength to be, and so he held on, safe against her.

  On one front she had made progress, he would grant her that. He’d made the mistake, in his first week in group, of writing the words drugs and alcohol on one of Pat McCredy’s squares of construction paper in response to her question, “What techniques do you use to ease your pain or sorrow?” He’d meant it as something of a joke, though in fact it was true. Over the past year he had become one stop short of what his mother would call a “big drinker”—not exactly an alcoholic, but someone who probably drank too much, too often. When he wasn’t drinking, pot kept him on balance throughout the day as he drove from place to place, delivering drugs. Meth he did not touch, a point that he, in his own defense, returned to over and over again in his individuals with Pat McCredy, though she was unmoved by this.

  “It’s not what others do, Joshua. It’s what you do. Marijuana can be an addiction as serious as any other. As can beer.”

  “But don’t tell me it’s like meth,” he insisted. “Are you aware of what’s happening with meth? It’s everywhere around here. It’s a serious, serious thing.”

  “I am aware,” she said sternly. She loved to talk drugs and alcohol; they were her professional forte. “We’re not talking about this as a societal problem, however. We’re talking about you.”

  “What about me?”

  “Well, why don’t you tell me?” She smiled at him, waiting, and then she couldn’t help but say more, “I’m not the one who wrote that I use drugs and alcohol to ease my sorrow, am I?” She waited again. “Who was it that wrote that down, Joshua?”

  “Me,” he almost yelled.

  “Okay,” Pat McCredy said, more calmly than ever. “Then let us begin from there.”

  In the end, much to Joshua’s relief, she did not pull out a yellow “permission to depart” sheet to request that he be allowed to attend the AA meetings in the basement of the hospital, as Vern and five of the other inmates, including Tiffany, had to do three times a week, all of them sitting there shackled in chains, one to the other, among the free-roaming alcoholics of Blue River. She warned him that this decision could change, as they “continued on this journey of self-discovery together.” For now, he was not an alcoholic or a drug addict and for that he was thankful. Instead he had what Pat McCredy called “issues with chemical dependency.” His use was situational, in her assessment, perhaps tied directly to his grief.

  And it was, he realized one afternoon after his session with Pat McCredy, having not realized it before. She was right—he had been right when he wrote those words on the square of paper in the first place. In jail, he missed his nightly drinks, his daily joints more dearly than perhaps he missed any person. Drink did not open him up, it did not allow him to think and weep freely. Instead it bolstered him against his thoughts, against her, his mother. It was the thing that had helped him, all those nights in his apartment, or lying next to Lisa, go into his torpor. Three beers or shots were all he needed, though often he ha
d more, each one a seal, a lid, a cure.

  The nights in jail were the worst, as he lay on his cot stone-cold sober next to Vern, staring at the dark ceiling, the yellow of the painted sun the only thing he could see. Early on, he’d had to strike a deal with himself: each night he would allow himself to cry, but only for thirty seconds. If he could not keep himself from crying, at least he could contain it with the voice in his head counting one, two, three as the tears streamed silently down his face, into his ears and hair. It wasn’t that he willed himself to cry, or that he was thinking particularly of his mother, or remembering things she’d said or done. It wasn’t even precisely his mother, though what he felt was directly tied to her—her life and her death. It was that he felt all of his sorrow, lodged in a furrow in his chest, palpable and real as an apple. It was there and it could not be avoided, would not be denied, and each night, for thirty seconds, he bowed to it. He was aware, as he wept, that his tears would gratify Pat McCredy, but he would never tell her about them. She would name them, define them, turn them into something other than what they were, something other than his own.

  When he finished crying, he got up and went to the little bathroom cubby and wiped his face and blew his nose into a wad of toilet paper. Vern sometimes turned then, though his breath never broke its long, deep sleeping rhythm. Joshua would lie back down on his cot and stare at the ceiling for a while longer. The jail always seemed, at this moment, quieter than it had been before, and also more open, as if there weren’t a series of barricades and bars and locked doors between him and the rest of the world, as if he could have stepped outside to take a look at the cold night sky if he’d cared to. From his cot he felt that he could feel the gentle presence of the entire town of Blue River that surrounded him: its every dim streetlight, its old brick school, its Burger King lit up like a circus on the town’s one low hill, and, more than anything, he could feel the river, the Mississippi. He could feel Midden, far off, to the north, and Flame Lake a paler star north farther still.

  Often, as he lay there after crying and before sleep, he had the sensation that his mother was in his cell with him. In the weeks immediately after she’d died he had invented various tests for her to see if she was watching him. He had commanded her to turn on or off a light or make a chair move or the wind come through the curtain at a certain time. She had failed every one, but now he didn’t need her to pass any tests. Sometimes he simply allowed himself to believe that she was there, above him in the painted sun, watching him. Other times he closed his eyes and let the breathing, sleeping person in the cot beside him be his mother, not Vern Milkkinen. To his surprise this was not so hard to do. The moment he allowed himself to hear the rhythm of his mother’s breath in that of Vern’s, she was there, in his every sigh and twitch. Twice he’d gone so far as to extend his arm midair into the center of the room. He imagined his mother reaching out from the opposite cot and taking his hand. He imagined all the things she would do and did, the things he hadn’t been grateful for when she was alive, the things he would say sorry for if he had one last chance and he could. But then Vern would move and an unmistakably masculine grunt would issue forth from his dry mouth, and as fast as she had appeared, Joshua’s mother would be gone.

  “They did a marathon on the radio of your mom’s old shows,” Bruce told him the next time he came to visit—it was only the second time he’d come.

  “They did?” asked Joshua, his voicing squeaking embarrassingly.

  He nodded. “I caught some of it. They did a segment at the end where they interviewed various people at the station who knew your mom. Who she was, what she did, what she was like, and so forth.” He reached up and twirled the diamond stud in his ear. “A tribute, I suppose.”

  A heat, a pressure, a vapor, rose like a hot hand behind Joshua’s face, making his eyes water, his cheeks grow warm, as if he’d had a glass of whiskey in one straight shot. “What did they say?”

  Bruce sat thinking about it for a moment, the expression on his face quizzical, as if he were pondering something philosophical, utterly unrelated to him. “That she was a nice lady,” he said, scratching his arm. “That everyone enjoyed listening to her show.”

  Joshua forced himself to cough, feeling the hand, the vapor that felt like whiskey but wasn’t rise again and press behind his face, wanting, with the cough, to force it down, for fear that he would burst into tears. Fuck, he thought over and over again, motherfuck, to get himself back in line. He shifted in his chair, wanting to be two people: to be the person who demanded, Tell me what my mother was like—he knew, of course, but still he wanted to know, to hear, and in particular to hear it from Bruce—and also to be the person who sat still and hard and calm as a statue in his chair, as if no part of him could be moved or reached or known.

  He opted, on instinct, to be the latter. It was the easier person to be. He willed himself to think of whatever he could that was not his mother, which, instantly, was Tiffany, and the way in group that afternoon she’d picked indifferently through the ends of her hair and then, suddenly, erotically, it seemed, looked up at him.

  “I wonder how much time we got left,” asked Bruce after a while, patting his hands on the metal table.

  “Twelve minutes,” Joshua said, staring at the clock behind Bruce’s head, in a voice as leaden as he could muster.

  “Feel this,” said Lisa the following week, pulling Joshua’s hand toward her, pressing his palm onto the side of her round belly. He had to lean forward hard, trying not to actually rise from his chair. Anything that could be construed as standing during the visit—other than the hello and the goodbye—was strictly against the rules. She pressed her palm more firmly on top of his and together they waited until he felt a tap and then another one in quick succession.

  “Cool,” said Joshua. It surprised him every time. Even with less than a month to go before the baby was due, he found it hard to honestly believe that inside of Lisa there was a baby.

  “It’s been like that night and day lately,” she said, letting go of his hand. “I can hardly sleep anymore.”

  “No?”

  “Oh, I try. I lay there. When you’re home I’ll sleep better.”

  “I don’t sleep well neither. But we only have a week to go.” He squeezed her hands. They were slightly puffy, like the rest of her except for her legs, which were as long and bony as they’d always been.

  “So, Claire and I are making progress. This class is really good, Josh. I wish you could go. Today they taught us how to breathe.” She took a deep breath in and then exhaled it.

  “To breathe deep?”

  “Yeah—but it’s a special deep breath. Like this.” She demonstrated it again. “In through the nose, out through the mouth. You’ll have to remind me to do that when I’m in labor.”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh—and guess what? Next week we’re going to see a video of an actual birth.”

  “That should be interesting.” He felt what he always felt when they were talking about the baby: that he had to smile and nod and say yes in all the right places, the way he did when he was listening to charming stories of someone else’s child. Lisa was the opposite, in love with the baby already. She’d put her hands on her belly and talk to it, telling it how they were going to spoil it, and how cute it would be and that they were going to get it special things to wear, like a pair of red baby cowboy boots.

  “Some people, when they see the video, get kind of afraid—that’s what the lady who does the class said—but other people get more excited.” She looked at him, her eyes fervent like they were whenever they spoke of the birth. “Are you afraid?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of the birth. Of everything going okay.”

  “It’ll go okay.”

  “It’s a big deal, you know.”

  “I know.” He rubbed the tops of her forearms.

  “Sometimes I don’t know if you know how big of a deal it is.”

  “I do,” he said, tracing around s
everal of the freckles on her arm with his finger. “It’s a very big deal. But we have to think positive.”

  She stared at him for several moments, her brown eyes getting watery. “I could die, for your information,” she said, her voice wavering with tears. “I mean, people have. Lots of people.”

  “But not anymore, Lees. That was back in the olden days.”

  “That isn’t true,” she said passionately, her eyes cutting back to him. She wiped her face with her hands. “Okay, it isn’t common, but it happens. You never know, Josh. Childbirth is a very serious matter.”

  “I know. But it doesn’t mean you’re going to die. Think of all the women who don’t die.” They sat in silence for several moments, until he asked, “Do you want me to rub your feet?”

  She shook her head. Last time he saw her, she’d taken her shoes off and propped her feet up on the table so he could massage them.