Torch

  Her father got calm and her mother got hysterical, the way they’d been for as long as Teresa could remember. Her mother pounded against something, on the bed frame or a table, Teresa could hear it over the phone. She claimed she was going to leave the house at once and get on a plane to fly to Minnesota. Teresa’s father emphasized that this was just the beginning, that cancer was easily cured these days, that she was young and she should not—that he would not—get too worried yet. By the time they hung up it had been decided that they would come in one month. That they would call Tim and tell him and ask him to come too and they would all be together again for the first time in ages. She hung up the phone feeling slightly giddy and sick to her stomach, the way she always did at the prospect of a visit from her parents.

  In bed she lay awake, thinking about what she would feed them when they came. They were meat and potatoes people; she and Bruce and the kids were vegetarians. This always caused an uproar, even though when her parents visited she cooked them beef, chicken, pork—some kind of meat each night.

  Bruce rolled onto his side and let out a small groan.

  “Are you awake?” she asked, sitting up.

  He didn’t answer and she sat silently watching him, pondering whether she had the energy to get out of bed to get herself something to drink. She stared at the painting of the trees that hung at the foot of the bed. She’d painted it herself. Three trees, winter trees, not a leaf among them. Bare and black and big as boys against a landscape of snow. One tree represented love, another truth, the other faith. She couldn’t remember which was which now, though when she’d painted it she’d gone to such pains, such excesses to paint those trees. Which way the branches should reach, how thick the trunks should be, making small imperfections to show where an animal might have come to scratch or chew the bark. She stared at the painting so long in the dark that she began to see strange things in it: the silhouettes of glum faces, a tall spindly boot, the backside of a man who carried a candle in a sconce.

  “I can’t sleep,” she said loudly to Bruce.

  He inhaled sharply and reached for her hand and held it under the covers.

  “I had a dream and then I woke up thinking about it and now I can’t fall back asleep,” she said. She lay down again, nestling into him. “I dreamed there was this brown goop attaching itself to me. And then I dreamed of a woman I used to work for—Mrs. Turlington—I was her housekeeper. Not in the dream, in real life I was her housekeeper when I was a teenager. I would go after school. She had this gong that had supposedly belonged to some emperor at one point—some emperor in Japan. I had to dust it every day with a feather duster. And that’s what I dreamed—that I was dusting this gong.”

  She was silent then, considering whether she should tell him the dream about the cat in the middle of the freeway.

  “She fired me in the end. I can’t remember why. I moved away anyway. I got married.” She lay staring at the ceiling. “She gave me a ceramic rooster with a head that came off and had lotion inside.”

  “For being fired?”

  “For getting married.”

  He patted her leg. “Let’s sleep. You need your rest. Tomorrow’s a big day.”

  She closed her eyes, then opened them again, wild with anger about the rooster. “It’s ridiculous when I think about it. Why would she fire me and then give me a rooster?” Her voice wavered and then she sat up and cried.

  He tried to pat her back but she shook his hand away. She went to the bureau and took several tissues from the box and blew her nose. Her head was stuffed up from talking and crying and consoling everyone all weekend.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s okay. I’m just thinking all kinds of things right now.”

  “That’s the past,” said Bruce, wide awake now. “That’s not what you should be thinking about.”

  “I’m not thinking about it,” she said.

  “You just had a dream.”

  “I know.” She crouched down, feeling around in the dark for the socks she’d taken off before she went to bed. “Go back to sleep,” she said. She sat on the padded bench along the wall and pulled the socks on.

  “I can’t sleep if you can’t sleep.”

  “Yes, you can.” Through the window, she could make out Lady Mae and Beau standing close to each other just outside the entrance to their stalls, keeping each other warm.

  When Bruce began to snore, she walked quietly out of the room. The house was dark, but it felt alive, the way houses did to her when no lights were on and she was the only one awake. Claire and Joshua were asleep upstairs. In the morning Claire would drive back to Minneapolis. Teresa felt that Claire’s departure would mark a new era in their lives: the era in which she actually had cancer. At the moment she felt almost nothing—that cancer could not be real because her body was not real. She felt numb and stuffed and fuzzy, weightless and yet weighted. As if her veins had been filled with wet feathers. She’d felt that way all weekend, hazy and deeply sad, yet laboring to reassure Joshua and Claire and Bruce that she was actually just fine.

  She walked through the living room, where Spy and Tanner lifted their heads from the couch and flapped their tails. In the bathroom, she shut the door, turned the light on, and saw herself—a wreck—in the mirror. Her eyes were swollen, her skin craggy and pale with a patch of rough bumps across her cheeks. She turned on the cold water and let it run full blast till it was ice cold. There was a space heater in the room and she plugged it in. She held a washcloth under the running water and wrung it out and pressed it to her eyes, and then lay down on the floor, on a hooked yarn rug she’d made herself, and set the washcloth over her eyes. There had been a time when she’d done this often, when Karl had beaten her up. She remembered that now, the way a body remembers, with precision, though she scarcely remembered Karl himself at all. Her life with him, in memory, felt like a play she’d seen years ago. The first time he had beaten her they’d been married for three days. It was never going to happen again. It happened again. Her nose, her collarbone, a tooth. He had his good days and he had his bad days, and so did she, so did they. She had Claire and Joshua to think about and Karl had never hurt them—not directly. Once, Joshua cut his foot, having stepped on a dagger of plastic from a shattered radio that Karl had thrown against the wall. And Claire had to have stitches in her lip when her highchair was knocked over during one of their scuffles. But they did not remember these things. Years later, Claire had asked, “How’d I get this?” She pulled her lower lip out, examining the scar on the soft flesh inside.

  “In the tub,” Teresa said, smooth as butter. “You slipped when you were a baby.”

  But they did remember other things—there was nothing Teresa could do about that. They remembered Karl choking her almost to death and having to run barefoot to wake the neighbors in the middle of the night. They remembered being driven around while they slept and how Claire had to get dressed for school in the car. They remembered the things that clothing could not conceal—gashes and bruises and welts. But she got out, and that’s what mattered in the end. She was setting a good example now, in her relationship with Bruce. They would know what a good man was, what love was, what they should not accept.

  But Karl had left his mark. Claire had written a paper about him in a women’s studies class her freshman year. My mother was a battered woman, my father was a batterer. What does this make me? A survivor, the first lines said. Teresa’s stomach had flipped when she read this and her mouth felt funny, as if it were filled suddenly with blood, as if a lie were being told about her, as if the truth had not occurred to her until that very moment.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “It’s none of your business, that’s what it is.” Claire ripped the paper from her hands, then tore it viciously in half. Teresa had unknowingly picked it up from a nest of papers and books on Claire’s bed.

  “I would say it’s precisely my business,” she said, trying to sound conciliatory and motherly, superior but kind, t
hough she felt that she’d been struck. “Honey, you shouldn’t dwell on those kinds of things.” She sat on the bed, on the quilt she’d made Claire for her thirteenth birthday, composed of patches of clothes she’d worn throughout her childhood. She looked down almost shyly and ran her hand over a brigade of dancing vitamins that at one point had been Claire’s favorite pants. “All in all, you had a very happy childhood, wouldn’t you say?”

  She wouldn’t say. She pulled her hair back into a ponytail and told Teresa that she felt her childhood had been “mixed.”

  “Mixed?” Teresa asked. Things came into her mind, a series of things, most of them involving wanting to lock Claire in the house until she admitted that her childhood had not been “mixed.”

  “Oh—I always knew you loved me,” she conceded, then added, “But there was Dad. That was hard. There was having to worry about you all the time and feeling responsible. I was completely parentified by the age of, like, six.”

  “Parentified?”

  She nodded. “It’s where a child who is still a child doesn’t get to be a child entirely because he or she has to take on things that children shouldn’t have to take on. It’s very common in single-parent families—where the child has to look after younger siblings, cook meals, and stuff like that.” She looked at her mother sweetly. “I don’t blame you specifically.”

  Teresa sat without moving a muscle. Sometimes she hated Claire.

  “I thought you liked to cook,” she said in a shrill voice.

  The years with Karl had been difficult, she’d grant Claire that. Their life was nightmarish at times. She couldn’t honestly say she’d ever truly loved him beyond their high school infatuation, but they had made a family, they were companions of a sort. There were times when they’d tried to be happy. They had kids together, rented apartments together, ate dinner, went to parks, made love. This, despite the fact that Karl was a madman. When she left him for good, half of her believed he would kill her, the other half believed he would kill himself. He did neither, though their parting was not without its drama. He broke into and ransacked her new apartment across town from where she had lived with him. He tried to kidnap the kids. He became convinced that Teresa was sleeping with a sad man named Ray, who cooked in the restaurant where she worked as a waitress. Once, on Ray’s day off, Karl went to his house and beat him up and then drove to the restaurant and dragged Teresa out into the parking lot by her hair. He beat her while all of her customers looked on from a distance, indignantly yelling, “Hey!”

  Of course she hadn’t been sleeping with Ray. Sex was the furthest thing from her mind. She was never going to touch another man. She would stay single and celibate forever. But she saw that Karl would never leave her in peace, so she thought about where she could go. A friend had a cousin in Minnesota who was quitting her job in a town called Midden, somewhere in the woods a couple of hours west of Duluth. She made a few phone calls and within a week she and the kids were on a bus with a suitcase and a pillow apiece.

  They rode for days, meeting people. Good people who told her their life stories and helped her accommodate the kids. Smelly old men and enormously fat women who allowed Claire and Joshua to stretch out and sleep on their laps and when they woke gave them treats, licorice and peanuts and sticks of Juicy Fruit gum. Teresa felt more like their big sister than their mother during that trip—during that entire time in their lives really—so intimidated she was to be out in the world alone. She became sick from the motion of the bus and had to vomit into a plastic bag that had once held beef jerky. She stared out the window, watching Ohio roll by, then Indiana, Chicago, and Madison, contemplating Minnesota, feeling Minnesota waiting silently, darkly, like a giant iceberg that would rip a ship in two, so cold it was. That’s all she knew. How cold Minnesota would be.

  But when they arrived it was hot, August. She took off her sweater, which she’d worn because of the air-conditioning on the bus. They’d been dropped in the gravel parking lot in front of a bar called Len’s Lookout, about a mile outside of town. She stood next to their suitcases, looking around. They’d driven through the town—Midden—just moments before. It was smaller than she’d imagined. The sign on the highway had said “POPULATION 408” and she thought what she always thought when reading such a preposterous number: Who were the eight? The town consisted of a brick school and several houses and businesses in low buildings and a water tower with a giant M painted on it, jutting above everything else, but mostly, it seemed, of the trees and grasses that surrounded the town on all sides, as if the wilderness were gaining on the town, as if it had arrived more recently, rather than the other way around. Len’s Lookout itself was in the wilderness, the only building in sight.

  Joshua and Claire ran back and forth, from her to the doorway of the bar. They asked if they could go inside, if they could have a can of pop. She stared at the bar, her hand raised above her eyes to shield them from the glaring sun. The front windows were plastered with papers—advertisements for Labor Day festivals, the Lion’s Club Corn Feed, something at the VFW, someone who would do your taxes, another someone who would trim your horse’s hooves—with neon beer signs above.

  She walked toward the door, dragging the suitcases behind her. The man who greeted them was named Leonard, he told them immediately, and by the way he stood Teresa knew that he’d been watching them since they’d gotten off the bus. He owned the place with his wife, Mardell. His parents had owned it before he had. It was named after his father, the original Leonard. He gave them each a Shirley Temple and wouldn’t let Teresa pay for them. He gave the kids a bowl of peanuts and offered Teresa a bowl of her own, which she refused. She asked if there was a paper she could buy.

  “Paper?”

  “Yeah—a newspaper,” she said, sipping her drink.

  “Oh.” He laughed. “There’s the Coltrap Times. Comes out every Wednesday, but mostly you just gotta ask whatever you want to know because by the time it’s in the paper, it’s over and done with.”

  She told him about her job at the Rest-A-While Villa, about needing to find a place to live. He stared at her for a long while, leaning on the wooden bar, so long that she thought he wasn’t going to say anything and she’d have to leave.

  “Let me show you something,” he said. “Then you can tell me what you think.”

  They followed him back, behind the bar, through the small kitchen, past surprisingly jumbo-sized cooking equipment, out the back door, and up a flight of stairs that went up the side of the building to an apartment. Empty boxes were stacked haphazardly around the place. Near the door sat a giant mixer that looked broken. The apartment was one big room and not much else. There was an alcove with a half-sized refrigerator and stove and a closet beyond that was bigger than the alcove. Teresa walked around contemplatively, swatted a mosquito that had landed on her bare shoulder. Joshua touched the blade of the mixer with one finger.

  “Don’t touch that,” she snapped, almost reached to slap his hand the way she had when he and Claire were younger, before she’d read that hitting your kids in even the most minor ways taught them that violence was the way to solve problems. There were small things like that that she regretted, things she’d do differently now. There were a few years during which she fed Claire and Joshua mostly canned soup and Hamburger Helper and a ghastly amount of a certain kind of cheese spread that wasn’t manufactured anymore.

  “Is there a …”

  “The bathroom’s out back,” Leonard said. He gestured out a window to a shed in the yard.

  “It’s a bathhouse. There’s a shower and a toilet and a sauna. Mardell and I heat up the sauna about once a week and we have some folks over too. You’re welcome to join us anytime. Or you can light one yourself whenever you want. Our son, Jay, keeps us in wood.”

  The bathhouse was white, wooden, with a shingled roof the color of a ripe peach. Beyond it civilization ended and became dense woods that dipped down to a river that she could see in small glimmers.

  “It’s
the Mississippi,” said Leonard, as if he’d read the question in her mind.

  Without asking, Claire and Joshua ran out the door and down the stairs toward the bathhouse.

  “I can let you have it for two hundred a month, including everything,” he said. “You’ll be able to walk to work when it’s not too cold—it’s just a mile—and if you need a bed, Mardell and I got a couch that pulls out we can loan you.”

  “Perfect,” she said.

  Packages arrived at the post office that she’d mailed to herself from Pennsylvania. Blankets and pots and pans, forks and spoons and her good knives. The apartment was lovely in the afternoon when the sun shone in, and in the morning it smelled like the cakes and pies Mardell baked in the kitchen below. The bar never got too loud and Teresa rather enjoyed the sound of the music from the jukebox as it filtered up through the floor anyway.

  Everyone was curious about why they’d come and who they were. It seemed that nobody had moved to Midden for eighty years, but eighty years ago is when everyone who wasn’t Ojibwe had arrived. They came from Finland mostly, a few from Sweden, a few from Denmark or Norway. At the Rest-A-While Villa, Teresa heard stories about things that had happened years and years before—blizzards and fires, trains and dances, marriages and deaths and births—while she mopped the floors or scrubbed pots or went into the residents’ rooms to change bedpans. The residents were mostly women with names like Tyme and Hulda, with last names Teresa couldn’t pronounce if she read them on a page. The women had dozens of photographs taped to the walls behind their beds. Pictures of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. They were sorry to hear that Teresa did not have a Finnish bone in her body, but relieved to hear that at least her children’s father was a Swede. Being a Swede was better than nothing. They told her that she was nice for someone who was Irish, though it had never occurred to her until they asked that Irish was what she was.

  Winter came and she forgot about not having sex again. She met a man named Larry, who didn’t live in Midden, but came several times a week to deliver things to the Rest-A-While Villa. They had sex in his delivery truck. They had sex in the bed above Len’s Lookout while Claire and Joshua were at school. They had sex on a blanket in the grass near the river that ran several yards behind the bar, back in the woods. One day Larry said he didn’t like the idea that she had kids.