Torch Page 6

  He opened the back door of the car and got in and lay down on the seat, his knees bent, his feet crammed onto the floor. Snow covered the windows all around him, making the inside like a cocoon. The car had belonged to his parents, who’d died a few years ago, his father first, then his mother a couple months later. Bruce had given the car to Claire when she moved to Minneapolis to go to college. By the time his parents owned the car, Bruce had been living on his own, so he hadn’t ridden in it all that much, but being inside of it made him feel as if he were in the presence of his mother and father again. His parents had died old, nearly eighty. Bruce was their only child, conceived late, after they’d given up hope. The car smelled good, the way all cars did to him, like his whole life pressed together in a room. A combination of metal and gas and bits of food and velour and vinyl and fake pine needles and plastic where people had been, where their hands had touched and touched again. There was a long rip in the fabric that covered the ceiling of the car, causing the whole thing to sag. He closed his eyes, and soon the dogs started up their ecstatic barking, hearing Teresa’s car approach. Bruce stayed in the back seat as she turned into the driveway and made her way up the hill. He kept his eyes closed and a list formed again, not of the work he had to do, or the money he had to make, but of what he and Teresa were going to do now, what they’d decided to say, and how.

  The engine stopped and he heard them get out; none of them said a word, not even to the dogs. He was going to sit up and get out in a minute, but something held him there. He heard them walking through the snow, up onto the porch. It occurred to him that he could stay in the car. They would think he was in the barn. How long could he stay there before they went looking for him? His hands were numb from the cold. He sat up, slowly, and one of the eggs in his pocket rolled out onto the seat. He put it back into his pocket and got out of the car. When he shut the door all the snow that had clung to the windows fell off like a large curtain.

  The outside light went on, and Teresa stepped out onto the porch without her coat on. “There you are,” she called to him, and stood waiting for him to come to her.

  They hugged without looking at each other, and she held him for a very long time, then stepped back and said, “They know. I told them on the way home. I couldn’t wait.” He could see that she’d been crying. She looked down and then turned and went inside, and he followed her, straight into the living room without taking his boots off, where Joshua and Claire sat on opposite ends of the couch. Shadow was on Claire’s lap. She stroked her as if she were concentrating very hard on following precisely the same line each time, tears falling quietly down her face.

  “Cancer means a lot of things these days,” said Teresa encouragingly, and sat down between them. “It can do different things. We don’t know what mine will do.”

  Simultaneously Claire and Joshua began to weep, each of them scrambling to sit on the floor at Teresa’s feet, their heads pressed into her corduroy-covered knees. Bruce pursed his lips, to keep his mouth from quivering, but then his jaw began to tremble and he coughed into his hands. He gazed at the gold-colored towels that sat always on the arms of his stuffed chair, to cover the places where the fabric had worn away. He smoothed the towels down with his rough hands, straightening them back into place, and tried to make his mind go blank as Teresa continued to speak, her voice like a band playing a march, reciting the numbers, the dates, the seasons, the estimations and the speculations and the calculations, the Septembers, the Marches, and the maybe-not Mays.

  At last she stopped talking and Bruce watched her stroke Claire and Joshua’s hair while they wept, stroking it in all the different ways that he had seen her stroke their hair over the years. Rubbing it like it was cloth, raking through it like it was leaves, then taking it in tiny tendrils and pulling delicately on it, as if she were playing the strings of a harp. His insides leapt and were still and then they leapt again as he thought of what to say but he said nothing. Pain washed through him in waves at seeing the sorrow of his children, and solace washed through him as well, for precisely the same reason.

  “We’re going to get through this,” he said at last, his voice ghoulish and tinny, an echo from afar. Teresa looked at him gratefully, her eyes aflame and at the same time calm, as if she’d arrived at the scene of an accident and had come prepared to help. With their eyes they said things to one another, domestic and romantic, grandiose and mundane, but mostly they said, without any surprise, Cancer. Cancer. It’s truly cancer now. The realization crackled starkly between them across the room. Bruce felt as if he were seeing it—the word itself—and understanding it for the first time. Fraught with horror. And beauty now too, because it lived in her, like a fish that swam or a sapphire of coal that burned. “We’re going to get through this,” he repeated, suddenly giddy, believing it, that if cancer could be beautiful, she would live. “We are.”

  “We are,” Teresa agreed quietly, stilling her hands.

  And then she turned away from him, as if all alone in a room, and rested her head back against the ruined velvet of the couch.

  PART II

  The face of this love was quiet and feral. It was a ruthless act, but not a guilty one. A waterfall, a flood, is neither guilty nor not guilty. It simply drowns the people in its way.

  —Mary Lee Settle, Charley Bland

  5

  THE CLOCK on Bruce’s side of the bed was relentless. Two twelve, its terrible little red face said. Teresa reached for the cold mug of peppermint tea on the shelf beside her, pushing herself up to sit, and took a big sip. She’d fallen asleep, but then woken from a dream about a mass of brown goop attaching itself inextricably to the front of her shirt. Cancer, she thought now. Her first dream of cancer.

  “Bruce?” she said quietly, her voice a drop of water, not really wanting to wake him. His breath remained unaltered, so deep and sure. She set the mug of tea back on the shelf and then lay down, the side of her arm just barely grazing Bruce’s body under the covers. It was late Sunday night, actually the wee hours of Monday morning, the day on which she’d drive to Duluth for her first radiation treatment.

  She closed her eyes and concentrated on relaxing her body, letting its weight sink into the bed, feeling how the blood moved through her, but then she opened her eyes, unable to feel anything. She felt that she was made of air and cold peppermint tea, her body a vessel that held only those two things. She stared at the shadows on the ceiling and remembered the other dreams she’d had: a cat in the median of a freeway that she had to rescue, and another in which she was dusting a gong. She realized that perhaps they were about cancer too, that, from now on, all of her dreams would be.

  She would have to ask her brother, Tim. He believed that he knew everything about dreams—what it meant when something was pink, what it meant if you were on a train or a ship. Sometimes she agreed with his analysis, other times she thought it was a bunch of New Age crap. She seldom spoke to him anymore. As children they’d been fierce friends and as adults they had various things in common, but not much to say to each other about them. When they talked, they talked about their parents—Tim lived near them, so he gave her updates—how their health was, what insulting thing they’d said about Laura, Tim’s girlfriend of twenty years. Tim and Laura owned a rock shop together. They dealt in crystals and agates, semiprecious stones, things Claire and Joshua had gone wild over when they were younger. She supposed Tim knew by now—his baby sister has cancer—thankfully, her parents had volunteered to tell him. Telling them had been all that Teresa could bear to do. Tim knew everything about what stones meant too, what curative powers they had. He would send her one by express mail, she knew. A rock to carry around in her purse or pocket or wear around her neck.

  Teresa reached for the necklace that hung there now—a seashell on a leather string—and held it in the dark, a habit of hers when she was thinking. She hardly ever took the necklace off. Joshua and Claire had found the shell and given it to her the one time that they’d gone to the ocean. It
was readymade for a necklace. Small and lovely, with a tiny hole bored through the top. They’d gone to Florida; somehow she’d scratched together the money. She tried now to recall how she’d gotten the money: her tax return. Usually she’d spent it on something more practical. Clothes for the kids or a new used junk heap of a car, but that year—the first year after she’d finally left their father—she wanted to take Claire and Joshua on a vacation, so she did. They rode a Greyhound bus for thirty-some hours from Minnesota to Florida, to the beach, to a forlorn-looking campground called Sea Scape, near the town of Port St. Joe. They set up the tent she’d borrowed from a friend. She’d borrowed everything—the sleeping bags and the Coleman stove, the flashlights and the tarp, even the enormous suitcase on wheels that she’d packed it all into. They stayed for almost a week, going to town only once to get more food, hitching a ride with an elderly couple who’d been camped near them in a ramshackle RV.

  At night they played Old Maid and Go Fish, sitting at the picnic table, holding the flashlights to see. Teresa had been twenty-four, Claire almost seven, Joshua, five. This was their first real vacation.

  They spent the days on the beach. It was beautiful, desolate; almost always they had it to themselves. Strange sharp reeds grew where the sand ended, a kind of ocean swamp that kept people from building houses there. They walked the beach up and down, finding shells and chunks of glass that had been worn and polished by the sea. The kids did gymnastics, yelling for her to watch every time. Cartwheels, backbends, tricks they’d practiced as a team, then performed. Each of them could do a complete back flip, somersaulting in the air from a standing position and then landing in that same position. “Do it again,” she’d say, amazed each time. But then, after a while, she commanded them to stop. They were doing it too much. Surely they would tire and falter and land on their heads and break their necks and die. She had a precise image in her mind of what her children would look like with broken necks. She clutched their shoulders and forbade them from jumping when not in her sight. They laughed at her, giggling and giggling. Her kids were always giggling, as if a pair of invisible hands were tickling them, and also they hopped, up and down, down and up—so much hopping and giggling she thought she would go insane at times.

  When they ran ahead of her on the shore she walked intentionally slowly so that she could pretend for a while that she was a normal person, not a mother. That those children in the distance belonged to someone else. That she was a woman on the beach contemplating things, letting the day go, or greeting it with calm, thinking ahead or back, instead of the endless present tense in which she lived. Or thinking nothing at all, thinking, I wonder if God exists? And then the kids ran toward her giggling, hopping, shrieking, “Mom! Mom! Look what we found!”

  Joshua offered her his palms full of wet sand, and he and Claire told her to dig into it, to get her surprise, and she found the shell with the hole bored naturally, perfectly through it. She would wear it around her neck for the rest of her life.

  “Thank you,” she said, the tears rising in her eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” they both asked, in a chorus, walking back to the campground.

  “Nothing,” she answered, though she began to cry harder. “It’s that we’re so happy,” she said at last. She put her hands on their heads. The three of them had the same hair. Not blond, not brown, but something in between: the faded yellow of grass where an animal had slept.

  On the way back to Minnesota they got off the bus in Memphis to visit her parents. When they arrived, tanned from Florida, tired from the ride, her parents were so overjoyed to see them that they all five grabbed onto one another in one big embrace. Her parents weren’t rich, but Claire and Joshua thought they were, running victoriously through the house, not used to such things. Cars without rust, walls without cracks, rooms with beds that no one slept in, things in the cupboard like bags of Doritos and Chips Ahoy! cookies that hadn’t been immediately ripped open and consumed. Teresa had not grown up in Memphis, but this is where her father worked now. They had moved all over the country when Teresa was a child, following her father’s job selling a special kind of paint that held up when exposed to extreme heat. The last place she’d lived with her parents was in El Paso, when she was seventeen and pregnant, a few days out of high school.

  Her parents had disapproved bitterly when she decided to continue with her pregnancy. They said she was going to be the worst kind of mother—a teen mom, a single mom—but then when she eloped with Karl they’d also disapproved of that, because Karl was a coal miner who’d dragged her off to Pennsylvania to live in a trailer. They disapproved when she left him the first time and the second time and the third and the fourth, because when you get married you stick it out no matter what; but they also disapproved when she went back because how could she continue to be married to such a loser of a man. They disapproved when she left him for real the fifth time and moved across the country to a remote town that didn’t even appear on the map, because how was she going to make it on her own, and then later, they disapproved when she met Bruce and committed herself to what they called a “hippie charade of a marriage.”

  Against this backdrop, she lived her life. She hated her parents at times, loved them at other times. She talked to them each Sunday on the phone and often after they’d hung up she decided to never speak to them again, but then she would call the next Sunday. She was a slave to Sundays.

  How are you? Good. How are you? Good. How are the kids? Great.

  Her mother would be on one phone, sitting on the aqua bedspread that covered her parents’ king-size bed, her father on the other phone, standing in the dining room with a grandfather clock ticking nearby.

  Several times a year they sent her boxes of things they wanted to get rid of. Things they said they thought she could use. Old towels and impossible kitchen equipment that performed only one simple task: shredding cheese or mashing fruit. Or hideous swaths of fabric that it took Teresa several minutes to figure out were curtains—as opposed to other hideous swaths of fabric that she had first thought to be curtains, but turned out to be pants her mother had worn in the seventies. But every once in a while, in the midst of all the crap, there would be a shirt she loved and wore and wore and wore. Her parents took out life insurance policies on Claire and Joshua, just enough to cover their funerals, but wouldn’t give Teresa a dime. Not at Christmas, not for her birthday. When she’d married Karl they told her that she was an adult now. When she left him, they said she had to weed the garden that she’d planted.

  And she did. She weeded her garden. She had a million jobs. As a waitress, a nurse’s assistant, a factory worker, a janitor. Her million jobs were always doing one of these four things, but the place changed a million times. It turned out that Claire was smart, good in school, good at math and reading, good at tests, her mind like flypaper. She would go to college and be famous somehow. She would be rich and buy her mother a house in Tahiti, they said, without any of them being exactly sure where Tahiti was. She would be the first woman president of the United States. Imagine that! They did. She won a scholarship to the University of Minnesota. A full ride and off she went, majoring in political science, in dance, in Spanish, and in English, and then a combination of all four things.

  Joshua was not as much of an overachiever, but kind and goodhearted, hardworking and honest. He’d had some trouble with his ears in first grade—couldn’t hear what the teacher was saying—so they put him in the front row. Teresa took him in for a procedure. Tubes. He was mildly dyslexic, wrote gotfor instead of forgot. He liked to imagine things, that they had a swimming pool or a pet giraffe named Jim. He excelled at drawing automobiles meticulously, beautifully in pencil, perfectly to scale. He knew everything about cars and trucks—the models, years, makes. Like Bruce, he was a Chevy man, and everything made by Ford sucked. He could fix cars too. His hands a gentle pair of tools taking things apart, then putting them back together again, better than before.

  One Sunday on the phon
e her father said, “It’s a shame that the brains got wasted on Claire. If only one person in the family gets the brains, you hope they go to a boy. It’s just like with you and Tim, the brains got wasted on you.”

  She set the receiver back into its cradle without a word, but quietly, not slamming it down. Who were these assholes? What had happened to them? Her childhood had been filled with a reasonable amount of joy. Barbecues and birthday parties, pushing a pin through a paper plate and holding it up to the sky in their backyard to see the solar eclipse.

  She called the next Sunday and nobody mentioned the Sunday before.

  Years passed. She was thirty, then thirty-five. Slowly, stingily, she forgave them without their knowing about it. She accepted the way things were—the way they were—and found that acceptance was not what she’d imagined it would be. It wasn’t a room she could lounge in, a field she could run through. It was small and scroungy, in constant need of repair. It was the exact size of the hole in the solar eclipse paper plate, a pin of light through which the entire sun could radiate, so bright it would blind you if you looked. She looked. And something astonishing happened: she loved them, felt loved by them, all the love traveling back and forth through that small shaft. She saw her parents in their most distilled form, being precisely who they’d always been. The people who sent her garbage in the mail. The people who made her cry each Sunday. The people who would gladly give their lives to save hers. The only people who would do that. Ever, ever. Her mom and dad.

  She’d told them about her cancer the previous morning. It seemed better, somehow, for her to tell them in the morning. She’d allowed only a few tears to escape when she told Claire and Joshua, but when she’d heard the voices of her parents, she cried hard enough that it took her several minutes to get a single sentence out. “I … I … I have …”