Torch

  Within a few days she didn’t mind vomiting in front of him. She took a plastic milk jug in the car with her, with the top cut off but the handle still intact, to vomit into while he drove. They had dozens of these jugs around the place to use as scoops for the dog food, the corn for the chickens, oats for the horses. By then his mother had had to stop working at Len’s. He didn’t know what was next for her, and neither did she. “What we’re going to do is wait and see,” she’d say, wiping her mouth, forcing herself to drink another sip of Gatorade.

  Despite the fact that the radiation made her sick, it would shrink the tumors that grew along her spine and ease her pain. The nurse named Benji had explained this on the first day they went. Before Benji radiated Teresa, he had shown them both around the radiation room.

  “This is where it all happens,” he said, waving his hand. There was a silver table and, hovering over it, a metal contraption that culminated in an arm that reached out with a dumb round eye, wide and conical like what Joshua imagined an elephant gun would look like. On one side of the room there was a wall that was not actually a wall, but rather a special kind of glass through which they could see the people in the waiting room, without being seen by them.

  “That way Mom can keep an eye on you,” Benji said, swatting Joshua’s shoulder. “To make sure you’re not flirting with the girls.”

  He looked out into the waiting room and didn’t see any girls. He saw a number of gray-haired people who wore brightly colored coats and ratty boots made of rubber and fake fur, and a woman with a cast on one foot, rocking a baby in a plastic carrier with the other.

  His mother came up beside him and tapped on the glass. “Yoo-hoo,” she called, testing it out, to see if she could get anyone’s attention, but nobody moved or looked.

  “I guess I’m safe,” she said, and laughed.

  “Very,” Benji said, handing her a gown.

  In the waiting room, Joshua sat near a tank of fish, then stood to gaze into it, feeling that his mother was watching his every move. From this side, the wall of glass was pure black. He pressed his face in close, making a tunnel around his eyes with his hands to block out the light of the waiting room.

  “Did you see me looking in?” he asked her when they were driving home.

  “Oh—did you? No. I wasn’t turned in that direction most of the time. What could you see?”

  “Nothing.”

  They drove in silence for a while. This was day one, several minutes before his mother would have to tell him to stop the car so she could vomit into the ditch. He could sense that she was waning as she rested her head back against the seat.

  “So, did it hurt—the radiation?”

  “No. Radiation doesn’t hurt, honey, it’s just … I don’t know … like powerful rays of light.”

  “What did it feel like when it was shooting in?” he asked.

  She thought about it for a few moments, fanning her face with her gloves.

  “Nothing.”

  • • •

  When he saw all the buses driving through town to line up at the school, he blended in with the kids streaming into the parking lot, to avoid being noticed, and got into his truck. Before he started the engine, he saw R.J. walking toward him. He waved, and R.J. got in.

  “You’re so fucking busted,” he said. “Spacey saw you leave. She was standing right by the window when you took off.”

  “I don’t care,” Joshua said. “What are you doing now?”

  “Nothing.”

  When they pulled up to R.J.’s house, Joshua got out too.

  “Don’t you have to go to Duluth?” R.J. asked, and blushed. He couldn’t even allude to Joshua’s mother being sick without blushing.

  “Pretty soon.”

  Inside, R.J.’s mother, Vivian, was sitting on the floor with her elbows propped on the coffee table, rolling joints. A pile of them was stacked neatly like logs inside a tin container. “My boys! How are my boys?” she asked.

  “Fine,” Joshua said, sitting down in a chair near the stereo. R.J. went into the kitchen and came back holding a tube of cookie dough he’d sliced open, gouging out chunks to eat with the blade of a knife.

  “You want some?” he asked, holding a slab of dough out to Joshua, who took it and ate it in one big bite.

  “You want some, Mom?” R.J. asked, turning to Vivian.

  “That’s why you’re so fucking fat,” she said. Her hair was parted in the middle, shoulder-length, feathered into brown sheets on each side of her head.

  She finished rolling a joint, then lit it up, inhaled, and handed it to Joshua. He was high already—he and R.J. had smoked on the drive from school—but he took a couple hits anyway and passed the joint to R.J., who passed it back to his mother without smoking.

  “This is good stuff,” she said, smoke coming out of her mouth. “Bender’s special batch.” She gave it back to Joshua. “I’m all done.”

  “Me too,” he said.

  “You can keep it,” Vivian said, sprawled back on the couch. Her fingernails were freshly painted red, so long they curved in toward her palms at the ends. “My little gift to you.”

  Joshua gently tamped the burning end out in an ashtray that sat on the arm of his chair. He tucked the rest of the joint in his coat pocket.

  “So did R.J. tell you about our little plan?” she asked Joshua.

  “It’s not our plan,” R.J. said. “I told you I’d think about it.” He held the tube of dough in his lap, sitting in a chair that was the twin to Joshua’s, an itchy brown plaid.

  “Bender and I thought we’d let you sell to your friends and whatnot. Dime bags and loose joints. Whatever they want.” She lit a cigarette and sat back, smoking and gazing intently, but dreamily, at Joshua. “We figured you two could use the money, with graduating and all, and our place wouldn’t be like Grand Central Station. It’s making me fucking paranoid, you know? All the people coming in and out. And half of them are your friends anyway.”

  “They’re not our friends,” R.J. said, holding up the remote, trying to turn the TV on. He banged it on his chair and then it worked.

  “Well, they’re your peers. They’re people you know.” She flicked the ash from her cigarette. “What do you think, Josh?”

  “I think it sounds cool,” he said, looking tentatively at R.J. “If we keep it low-key.”

  “Completely,” said Vivian. “No way would we be anything but low-key. Everything is totally mellow. It’s not on the level of dealing. It’s on the level of just having mellow connections with people and you guys making some extra cash.”

  “I don’t need any cash,” R.J. said.

  Vivian looked at him for a while, then crushed her cigarette out. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about how I don’t need cash,” he said quietly. He turned the TV off.

  “You don’t need cash, my ass. Who you think’s gonna buy the food you stuff into your big fat face? Huh? You think it’s gonna be me for the rest of your life? Well I got news for you, porky pie. I got news the day you turn eighteen.”

  R.J. stood up. “I got news for you the day I turn eighteen too,” he yelled as he went back into the kitchen.

  “What’s that?” she asked tauntingly, smiling at Joshua. “I’m just dying to hear your news,” she yelled, then fell onto her side on the couch laughing.

  Joshua stood up and stared at a newspaper flyer that sat on the floor, advertising the things on sale at Red Owl—Granny Smith apples, an economy pack of paper towels.

  “I gotta go,” he said. Then hollered, “I gotta take off, R.J.”

  “I’ll go with you,” he said, walking back into the living room.

  Joshua didn’t want R.J. to come but was afraid to say anything that would get him in trouble with Vivian again. “Okay,” he said, and they left.

  He dropped R.J. off at the bowling alley, where he would play pinball and then walk down the street to the Midden Café, where he would play Ms. Pac Man. He did this almost eve
ry night.

  Once he was alone in his truck, Joshua drove away slowly, convincing himself that he had time. Plenty of it. A full half-hour before he and his mom technically needed to be on their way to Duluth. His house was a twenty-minute drive from town when the roads were good. He told himself these things, watching the clock that he’d glued to the dash of his truck, but a strange panic rose in him anyway. Why had he wasted his time after school? Why hadn’t he come home during seventh hour instead of walking around town? He became aware of the fact that he missed his mother, ached for her in his gut. The thought that maybe when he arrived at home his mother would be dead entered his mind and would not leave. He tried to make himself relax by imagining her doing what she was most likely doing now: lying on the couch, storing up her energy for the trip to Duluth. He imagined himself walking in the door and taking her hand. He imagined her saying what she said every day to him when he got home: “How was school?”

  “Good,” he’d say, like he always did.

  But when he walked in the door his mother was alive and well and standing in the kitchen drinking a glass of water. He didn’t go to her and take her hand.

  “How was school?” she asked.

  “Good,” he said, standing in the door, keeping his voice flat and disinterested. “Are you ready to go?”

  She was dressed in a manner that she called “funky” or sometimes “all hipped out,” in an outfit that embarrassed and repulsed him: cowboy boots and grape-colored tights, a black miniskirt and a slim lilac sweater that ended at her waist but had a cascade of yarn tassels that came down almost to the edge of her skirt. Her legs in the tights looked bony and taut, like those of an adolescent girl.

  “Well, I had a pretty good day myself. I raked the stalls. I’m not so nauseous. I think it’s thanks to the weekend being off radiation.” She wore lipstick the color of rust; the rest of her face was bare, which made the rust of her lips even more striking, her eyes more blue. She put her hat on, another funky thing, velvet leopard print, a get-well gift from her friend Linea.

  “I’ll be in the car,” he said.

  “Wait, hon. I’m coming right now.”

  Spy and Tanner wagged their tails, pushing up to Teresa as she put her coat on. “Oh, you think you’re going with us, don’t you?” she said in her baby voice, bending to let them lick her face. “You’re saying, ‘We want to go too!’ You’re saying, ‘Where are Mommy and Joshie going?’ Aren’t you? Oh, yes you are.”

  “Mom, they’re not saying anything, okay? They’re dogs.”

  “Spy thinks that Joshie is grumpy today,” she said in a baby pout voice.

  “Don’t call me Joshie,” he said savagely. “I told you. Don’t ever call me that again.”

  He walked out and slammed the door so hard the dried-flower wreath that hung on the front fell off its nail. He hung it back up crooked. He didn’t know what he was doing. All he knew is that everything about his mother enraged him, especially her habit of reporting what the animals were thinking and saying, as if her mind were the conduit of all things. For hens and horses and dogs and cats his mother delivered a steady stream of translation to anyone who would listen—even to R.J. or Tammy or whoever he had over.

  She stepped outside. “What’s wrong with you today?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with me, Mom. It’s what’s wrong with you. Did you ever think of that? That maybe it’s you? That maybe you don’t know what the dogs are thinking? Or maybe that you don’t know everything in the universe?”

  “Oh, but maybe I do,” she said like a sorceress, smiling, impervious to his mood.

  This enraged him even more. He got in the driver’s seat and turned the engine on.

  She got in next to him, buckling her seat belt. “So, how’d Mr. Bradley’s class go today?” she asked happily, tapping his knee. “Who’s your wife?”

  At school the next morning Ms. Keillor intercepted him before he went to class.

  “Mr. Wood,” she said dispassionately. “You’re to come with me.”

  “Why?”

  She turned and began to walk away from him.

  “I didn’t do anything,” he said, but then followed after her, down the hallway, past the bathrooms and drinking fountains, one low, one high, through the gym doors and through the glossy, peaceful, honey-colored world of the empty gym, to the door at the back that had a warning, EMERGENCY ALARM WILL SOUND WHEN OPENED, emblazoned across it, though the alarm never sounded when Ms. Keillor opened it with her key. She wore the key on a yellow bracelet that looked like a telephone cord. The principal’s office was in a trailer out behind the school, and Ms. Keillor’s job was to escort students there, to take papers back and forth, and to keep track of the accounting in the cafeteria.

  “After you,” she said, holding the door open for him, but then walked ahead of him once they were outside. She was barely five feet tall, slightly plump all over, like a teddy bear.

  “You don’t have to take me. I know the way,” he said, but she ignored him. He unwrapped a stick of Big Red gum and put it in his mouth.

  There were two trailers out back—both had small patio porches in front that had been built by the students taking shop. One trailer was for the principal and his secretary and the copy machine and teachers’ mailboxes, the other was where the special-ed and developmentally disabled students had their classes. Beyond the trailers was the playground for the elementary kids and beyond that a football field and bleachers, all of it covered in snow now. Ms. Keillor went up the stairs to the door and then turned to him. “Dr. Pearson is expecting you. You can tell Violet.”

  He nodded, waiting for her to step aside so he could go in.

  “I wanted to say that I heard about your mom and I was sorry to hear that.”

  He nodded again, less perceptibly this time, chewing his gum, the cinnamon so fresh in his mouth it almost hurt. What did she expect him to say?

  “You all don’t eat meat, do you?”

  “What?”

  “Your family. You’re vegetarians.”

  He was used to this. He nodded again.

  “We thought we’d make a dish and send it home—the ladies in the school would like to do something. We thought a pan of scalloped potatoes with something instead of the ham. Maybe peas or carrots.”

  He couldn’t bring himself to look at her. He concentrated instead on her white Adidas.

  “Which would you like better?”

  The wind picked up and a wooden cardinal that was hanging on a fishing wire from the eave banged rhythmically against the outside wall of the trailer. He reached up and stilled the wooden bird.

  “That’s not your property,” Ms. Keillor said.

  He let go.

  “So why’d you feel the need to skip seventh hour yesterday?”

  “Because I felt the need to walk to the river and get high.”

  Deep pink splotches appeared on her face, then spread like a rash down onto her throat. “Why are you saying that? Why would you do that?”

  He shrugged, blushing too, surprised at his own admission.

  “You know there are people who you can talk to about this, Josh. There’s Mr. Doyle. That’s exactly what he’s here for. Those social-problem-oriented issues.” She put her hands into her coat pockets. “The brain does not do well on drugs, I don’t think I need to tell you.” Her face was slowly going back to its normal dough color. “Okay. You’d better get inside. And I’ll tell the cooks that scalloped potatoes would be fine. Which do you prefer, carrots or peas?”

  He didn’t prefer either, but told her peas.

  “That’s what I thought too,” she said. “Peas are awfully nice for color. And we wanted to help. I know that at a time like this, every family would need some help.”

  They stood together for a moment on the porch. Joshua put his hand on the doorknob. He didn’t know what to say. Goodbye? I look forward to having scalloped potatoes? His mind was blank.

  “Thank you,” he said, and walked inside.


  He had to eat his lunch in detention, going to the cafeteria to get it at 10:45, before the rest of the students arrived. He saw Lisa in the empty hallway as he walked back to the detention room.

  “My husband’s a prisoner,” she said. Her face was pale against her hair, as black as a crow’s wing, French Canadian.

  “Spacey won’t even let me sleep,” he said, holding his tray. They both looked down at his food, chow mein, covered with a waxy brown sauce that had formed a skin on its surface.

  “Did you write your rough draft?” she asked him.

  “What rough draft?”

  “The one that’s due today.” She looked at him, irked, but smiling. “We were supposed to write our dreams and share them with each other to see if they match. Didn’t you pay attention? What am I going to do today when you’re not in class?” She held a block of wood the size of a rolling pin with HALL PASS written in red marker on all four sides.

  “I’ll write it now,” he said.

  “But how are we going to discuss them if you’re not in class? They have to match or it won’t work out.” She took a slice of apple from his plate and ate it.

  “What are your dreams?” he asked. “Just tell me and I’ll say what you said.”

  He felt like they were very alone and intimate, sharing food. Her shirt was nearly as black as her hair, the sleeves translucent and speckled with glitter.

  “Well. We have the dream about being astronauts and having lots of kids. I wrote about that. And the importance of having a good relationship,” she looked at him. “Those are my dreams.”

  “They’re my dreams too,” he said.

  “Joshua!” Mrs. Stacey yelled from a doorway down the hall.

  His desk in the detention room had its own little cubby, half walls rising up on three sides. He ate his chow mein and the rest of the apple sections and drank two cartons of milk with his back to Mrs. Stacey.