Torch

  On the morning she was meant to go there she woke early and made herself a cup of tea. “It’s going to be fine,” she said to the aloe vera plants and the chairs, the cuckoo clock that hung against the wall, its silver pendulum making a clicking sound each time it reached the end of its range. She did this often, spoke to herself and the objects in her apartment, telepathically or out loud, though she felt in some faraway place inside of herself that she was actually speaking to her mother. It was easy to do, surrounded as she was by her mother’s things. In September, when she’d moved in, she’d had to unpack not only all the boxes she’d left at Andre’s and then retrieved, but also all the boxes of her mother’s things that she’d packed up frantically and stored in the apartment back in June. She’d given Joshua a good portion of it. He had filled Lisa’s trailer with their old furniture, playing house, it seemed at first, and then making it a home for real. What remained in Claire’s apartment was an eclectic mix of the things she either needed or could not bear to let go of: a set of china and a plastic colander, the quilts Teresa had made for each of their beds and a rickety shelf that held Claire’s books.

  After breakfast she went down to the Lookout. It was her day to clean the bar. She did it each Sunday morning in exchange for rent. Inside, empty of the people and the sounds of the dishwasher or the jukebox or the deep fryer, the bar felt almost holy to her in its hush. It was her favorite time to be there, all alone each week, the first of her three days off. She took her supplies from the utility closet and got to work.

  When she was finished with the bathrooms she went behind the bar, poured a glass of orange juice, and switched the radio on. Ken Johnson was going on about something that the school board had done. It was the Ken Johnson Hour, a show, like most of the shows produced by locals, about anything Ken Johnson wanted it to be. Some weeks he played music—it could be the Grateful Dead or Maria Callas—other weeks he discussed whatever was on his mind, rambling and occasionally incisive, self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing in equal turn. Shows like Ken Johnson’s were punctuated by the national broadcasts that the station could afford to buy. Claire listened to them all, the local shows and the nationals, each Sunday morning as she cleaned and also upstairs in her apartment when she wasn’t at work. She didn’t own a TV, and the radio had become again the way it had been to her as a child, when she and her mother and Joshua had first moved in with Bruce and they didn’t have electricity yet, when a windmill had powered their radio. It was her friend and constant companion, shaping the rhythm of her days.

  One Sunday morning back in January, before Claire had gone downstairs to clean she turned on the radio and heard her mother’s voice. “Welcome friends and neighbors!” Teresa said, the way she always had. “This is Modern Pioneers!”

  Claire had the feeling someone had walked up and slapped her across the face. She switched the radio off immediately, as though dousing a flame. In the silence that followed she sat staring at the radio, as if it might combust, knowing that she would have to turn it back on. Of course she would. Her mother was there. Before doing so, she adjusted the volume down so low she couldn’t hear it when she turned it on. In slow increments, she turned the dial. Eventually, she heard the murmur not of her mother’s voice, but that of Marilyn Foster-Timmons, identifying, one after the other, the station affiliates, their lyrical numbers and letters and towns. When Marilyn was done she explained that nearly a year ago a woman named Teresa Wood had died of cancer—“Many of you will have known her,” Marilyn said in her voice that was at once gravelly and warm—and that she had hosted a show called Modern Pioneers. In a moment they would commence a broadcast of listeners’ top ten favorite editions of the show, a mini-marathon that would last all day long.

  Claire did not have to listen. Marilyn Foster-Timmons had sent her a box that contained CDs of every one of her mother’s two hundred and thirty-six shows. But she listened anyway. Reluctantly at first, rapturously by the end. She listened all through that Sunday, not bothering to go downstairs to clean. During a station break she scribbled a note to Leonard and Mardell, explaining that she had a fever, ran downstairs and left it on the bar, and then dashed back to her apartment before her mother came on again. Claire listened for hours, unmoving on her bed. To move, even in the meditative silence with which she cleaned the bar while listening to the radio on other Sunday mornings, would break her concentration and obliterate her mother. It would keep Claire from being able to believe things that weren’t true. Or rather, from believing one thing over and over again: that her mother was in a small dark studio in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, alive and well, her gigantic earphones clamped on her head. Believing she was there, talking to Mimi Simons about heirloom seeds, or Patty Peterson about dowsing, or John Ornfeld about building your own indoor compost toilet, or holding forth for two of the hours herself, telling all the listeners within a hundred-mile radius about the things they’d done, the life they’d had—Bruce and Teresa and Claire and Joshua, when there had been such a thing—about the garden she’d planted, the wool she’d carded and dyed, the loom Bruce had made, her recipe for dill pickles.

  Claire didn’t have to listen, but she listened like she’d never listened before, like her ears had been made for this one thing. Her mother’s voice was utterly unchanged and yet, to Claire, it was an entire revelation. In it, she heard every nuance and breath, every lilt and tilt and inflection that she used to know. Every hint of regret or braggadocio, satisfaction or scorn. “I’m moving into a time of my life when I can sit back and enjoy the full fruits of my labor,” she said, in the course of a soliloquy about Claire and Joshua becoming young adults. “Now, what you want to do is pulverize the eggshells first,” she advised her listeners, in a discussion of nontoxic methods of pest prevention.

  An hour after sunset, Teresa wound up the final show by asking a trivia question as she always did at show’s end, encouraging her listeners to call in with the answers. This one was: What is the traditional use of pipestone? Claire turned the radio off, knowing the answer already, not wanting to hear her mother say, “And this, folks, brings us to the end of another hour. Work hard. Do good. Be incredible. And come back next week for more of Modern Pioneers!” In the silence of the evening, Claire made her way around the apartment, turning on lights, the words work hard, do good, be incredible ringing in her ears. Those three phrases contained everything Claire had most loved and most despised about her mother, what she could not now shake herself loose from—all of her mother’s optimism and cheer, her munificence and grace, her indestructible belief that to be incredible was the most ordinary thing in the entire world, that most people, when you looked closely enough, were incredible. “Is Hitler incredible?” Claire had asked her mother once, trying to rattle her. “I said most, smarty-pants,” her mother had answered, jabbing her affectionately in the side. “How about Pol Pot?” Claire pushed on.

  After listening to the radio-show marathon that Sunday in January, Claire toasted a bagel and ate it slowly, feeling as if she were balancing a book on her head. Feeling that if she moved too quickly the false sense of restoration listening to her mother’s shows had given her would come crashing down and her mother would be dead again. Which happened, of course. It had happened also on the day she went to Duluth and held her mother’s ashes in her hands, and she feared it would happen again once she set foot in their old house. A small piece of what she was able to believe was still intact about her mother would reveal itself to her and show itself to be gone for good.

  She hadn’t been thinking of this when she’d called Kathy and offered to look after the place. But she thought of it now, on the Sunday in April that she was meant to go out to the house, as she scrubbed every surface of the Lookout, getting down on her hands and knees to scour the floor, polishing the wooden corners of the pool table to a glossy sheen.

  When she was nearly done with her work she saw Leonard and Mardell’s truck pull into the parking lot. She went to the door and held it open for them.
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  “Did you miss me too much to stay away?” she asked when they approached. On Sundays, the bar didn’t open until two, and usually Leonard and Mardell waited until well past noon to come in. After cleaning up, Claire had the rest of the day off.

  “Len forgot his thingamajig,” Mardell explained as they came up the steps.

  “My computer!” he bellowed. “For Christ’s sake, Mardy. Call it what it is.” He kissed Claire’s cheek as he passed by.

  “A year ago he didn’t know what e-mail was and now he can’t go twenty minutes without being on it,” said Mardell. She untied the strings of her transparent rain bonnet and put it on the bar to dry. “I said to Ruth and Jay if I didn’t know any better, I’d think their dad was having an affair.”

  “Oh, for God’s sakes, Mardy!”

  “Well, I didn’t say you were, Len. I said that’s what I’d think if I didn’t know any better.” She looked at Claire and winked.

  “Why don’t we all sit down and have a soda pop,” suggested Leonard from behind the bar. He reached into the locked cabinet beneath the till and pulled out his tangerine-colored laptop.

  “So you’re going out home today, isn’t that right?” Mardell asked, sitting down on a stool next to Claire.

  She nodded and took a sip of the root beer Leonard handed to her.

  “It’ll be nice to see it after all this time, I suppose,” said Mardell. She put a hand to her wrinkled throat, pulling back the sagging flesh there momentarily. “But emotional. What with all that’s gone on. You know, Claire, I don’t know if I ever told you how I cried when I found out Bruce married Kathy. It broke my heart, the way it came so fast. The way you and Joshie were just …” She made a whisking motion with her hand.

  “Mardy!” bellowed Leonard.

  She continued on, ignoring him. “If you want to know the truth, I had to ask the Lord to help me find forgiveness in my heart, Claire. I honestly did.”

  “There ain’t no need—” Leonard began.

  “I did!” crowed Mardell, looking at him now, instead of Claire. “And there isn’t a thing in the world wrong with saying it, Len. You tell me what’s wrong with saying it if it’s the God’s honest truth.”

  “You’re fanning the fires,” grumped Leonard.

  “I’m not fanning any fire.” She looked at Claire. “Am I fanning the fire?”

  Ever so slightly, Claire shook her head, hoping to seem neither entirely on Leonard’s side nor on Mardell’s, a pose she’d become expert at in the past months to keep herself from being drawn into their quarrels.

  “Claire don’t think I’m fanning the fire,” Mardell stated in a tone that conveyed that there was nothing more to say about it.

  “It’s okay,” Claire said to both of them, wanting to reassure them, without at all being reassured herself. “I mean, everything will be fine, with Kathy and all. With going out to the house.”

  “Of course it will!” Mardell yelled, and reached over to pat Claire’s arm with her soft hand, blue with veins.

  “It’s a long life, sweetheart, and time heals all wounds,” said Leonard.

  Claire’s eyes misted with tears. She swirled the ice in her root beer with her straw. She didn’t know whether she believed that time healed all wounds, but she believed it healed some. In regard to Bruce and Kathy, time had begun to do its work. She could feel it inside of her—softening, safening, making ordinary what was once appalling. She didn’t know whether she liked it or not, this healing. It made her feel like she was betraying her mother in some small way.

  “Here they come already,” said Leonard.

  They all turned to the front window, watching a car pull up and pause long enough for its passengers to absorb the CLOSED sign on the door and drive away.

  “So we’ve got a little announcement to make,” Mardell said.

  “We don’t have to go into it now,” Leonard protested.

  “Tell me one reason why not, Len?”

  “Because she’s got to go. She’s got to get out to the house.”

  “No. I’m fine,” Claire said, curious about the news. “Actually, I haven’t even finished up here. I’ve still got to mop the bathrooms.”

  “It has to do with the fact that we’re getting old, Claire—and tired.” Mardell looked at Leonard and winked. “Hon, why don’t you go ahead and tell her what we thought to do?”

  Claire dressed carefully, as if going on a date, fussing with the zipper on the sweater she wore, raising it and lowering it to various heights on her chest, trying to find just the right place, though she’d be arriving to an empty house. Bruce and Kathy had left early that morning. It would only be her and Shadow and the chickens and the horses.

  It was raining as she drove. The side windows of her car fogged up with the humidity, turning the woods and farms she passed into a blur of gray and green. She recognized them anyway, even at this level of abstraction. She’d covered this ground so many times before, in so many states of mind. The trees and weeds that grew along the sides of the road, the driveways that led to cabins owned by city people—so rarely used in the winters that by this time of year they had turned to phantoms. She thought about what Leonard and Mardell had told her that morning, thought about what she’d say to Joshua when she saw him. She pushed the thoughts from her mind as the miles ticked off, one by one. She slowed before she needed to, letting her foot off the brake so the Cutlass coasted down the highway, the only car in sight. And then she turned tentatively onto the gravel road—“our road,” she used to call it, as did Joshua and her mother, as did Bruce and, she supposed, Kathy. The road that led home.

  In the driveway she turned the ignition off and sat for several minutes looking at the house and the barn, the chicken coop and the old broken-down tractor that hadn’t moved an inch since she’d last seen it. It was the middle of April and blades of grass and the shoots of flowers her mother had planted years before were making their way up out of the mud in the yard. When she got out of her car she realized how strange it was, the silence, without the dogs. “Kitty,” she called when she saw Shadow. It was still raining, and the cat looked at Claire without moving from the dry haven of the porch.

  “How about we go inside?” asked Claire, finding the key on her ring, trembling as she pushed it into the lock. She was suddenly giddy with the foreignness of being here, which collided with an almost surreal familiarity. Her eyes landed on things she’d seen a million times, conscious of them only now that she was seeing them again: the grain of the wooden porch rails, the slant of the trim around the door. She stepped inside and comprehended the entire contents of the house in a single glance, felt instantly able to discern all that had changed and all that hadn’t. There were Kathy’s curtains, Kathy’s chairs, Kathy’s serving spoons hanging from hooks over the stove. And yet, despite this, the house felt to Claire profoundly, sickeningly, still theirs—still Claire and Bruce and Teresa and Joshua’s. The most banal objects of their life together remained, things that Claire had not opted to take because they seemed to belong more to the house than to any one of them: the pair of red oven mitts with the black burn across one fat thumb, the metal yardstick they used to measure the depth of the snow, the yellow book that said Birds in block letters along the spine. Even the least personal objects—the stereo, the refrigerator, the kitchen sink—seemed to speak to her, to know her, to reach out and grab hold of her throat.

  “Hello,” she called, not expecting anyone to answer. Shadow jumped up onto the kitchen table and Claire stood petting her, looking into her green eyes, feeling both wary and elated about being home—here, she corrected herself. She didn’t know what to call this place anymore.

  “So, I’m here,” she said to Joshua a while later on the phone. She took a tack from the corkboard and then dropped it and got down on her knees to see where it went.

  “How is it?” he asked. He had been out to the house once already, to return a pan that Kathy had baked lasagna in after Iris was born, though he hadn’t come ins
ide.

  “It’s …” She paused, searching the floor. “It’s weird and okay and interesting and bizarre.” She stood up, giving up on the tack. “It’s fine though.”

  “I’ll be down first thing in the morning. Probably about eight thirty.”

  “I was hoping you’d come this afternoon.” She pinched the hem of the new curtain, yellow cotton with white dots, store-bought.

  “I told you I couldn’t get there until about six and then it’ll start getting dark. Plus, it’s raining. It’s supposed to be nice tomorrow.”

  “Okay.” She sighed, and said goodbye to him.

  Tomorrow she and Joshua would do what they’d planned to do with Bruce the summer before—plant flowers on Teresa’s grave, in the dirt where they’d spread her ashes. Claire had gone to the nursery in Blue River the day before, wandering around for an hour, trying to figure out what to buy. In the end she’d purchased two packets of seeds, each one a wildflower mix that would start blooming in a month and bloom all summer long, one flower after another taking its turn in the sun—bloodroot and daisies, yarrow and Indian paintbrush. She and Joshua hadn’t been out to their mother’s grave since the day they’d mixed her ashes into the dirt. She thought about walking out there now by herself, to have a conversation with her mother. I’m sorry, she’d say, I’m sorry we never got around to planting your flowers until now. Over the months, it had weighed heavily on her, the neglect, the disrespect, but she hadn’t found a way to come out before now, hadn’t been able to muster up the composure to mention to Bruce how badly she wanted to come over—not to the house, but to her mother’s grave. She wondered if Bruce ever went out there and if he did, what he said.