Torch: A Novel Part 10

"I wouldn't say that."

"What was it like?"

He stood up, jerked his jeans on. "Like a million bucks."

"There's a lady down the hall who's a high school teacher," Claire said to her mother, even though she appeared to be sleeping. She was standing by the window, looking out at the street below, from where she'd just come. There was a long silence, and then her mother's low voice.

"What's her name?"

Claire turned and went to stand by the bed, near her mother.

"Nancy Ristow."

"Is she a visitor or a resident?" She smiled, a small glorious smile.

"Resident. She's a history teacher."

It was nearly four. Claire had had a panicked feeling when she and Bill had rushed back to the hospital, but when she'd entered her mother's room, it was as if she'd never left.

"Ask her what she thinks happened to Amelia Earhart."

"Who?"

"This teacher. Nancy."

"Why?" Claire snapped.

"You said she teaches history, right? History interests me. I'd be curious to know if she has a theory, since she's in the know. I always liked Amelia Earhart." She opened her eyes and tried to push herself up to a sitting position against the pillows, the tubes swaying around her. "I think of her going off like that. Can you imagine? I mean, can you imagine? Having no idea what would happen? Imagine how brave she was. She was one of my personal heroes."

"Is."

"What?"

"Is, Mom. She is one of your personal heroes."

"Yes," she said. "Is."

She sat looking carefully at Claire. "Where have you been?"

"Nowhere. You were sleeping. I walked around."

She continued to look at Claire. Her face pale, drained, regal.

"What?"

"You've been somewhere."

"I told you."

"You're different."

That night, back at home, she called David.

"How are things?" he asked. "How's your mom?"

"Hard. It's ... horrible." She began to cry and he listened to her crying over the phone. She could hear music playing in the background. "She seems to be getting sicker. Every morning when I go in, it's worse. I can see the difference. And Josh is still being an a.s.s-he came home last night. I saw him this morning, but he squirmed out of coming to the hospital with me."

"That sucks," David said.

Claire sat at the kitchen table, pulling the phone to reach from the wall. She drew arrows and triangles and spiraling lines on the back of an envelope that had been sitting there. She hadn't talked to David for two days, yet now she couldn't think of what to say to him.

"You seem far away," she said.

"I am," he said, and laughed.

"No, I mean, actually far. Like Russia or something. I don't even feel like I'm on the same planet with you."

"We're on the same planet," he said irritably.

"Not just you and me, but me and everyone else. Like I'm on this other planet. Or in a dream, a nightmare. That's what everyone always says, 'It was like being in a nightmare,' and that's totally how it is. Like I'm going to wake up."

"I'm here for you," David said. The music had stopped and now she could hear a remote crackling on the line, a mysterious, celestial sound that made her feel even lonelier.

"Do you hear that?"

"What?"

"The phone. It's making a sound. It's creeping me out. Say something. Talk to me."

"I love you," he said.

She thought that she loved him too, but she didn't have it in her to say it anymore, the way they'd always said it, every day, back and forth, a Ping-Pong of words. I love you. I love you too. Sometimes, she couldn't help it, she wished that one of his parents were sick or dead or long gone from his life. It didn't seem fair to her that he should have two loving parents, still married and madly in love with each other, perfectly alive and well, even though they were fifteen years older than her mother.

"I could read to you," he said. That was something they did at night, one book at a time.

"Okay," she said glumly. And he began. She found herself listening to his words in a way that she'd never listened to anything before: with all of her attention, and yet also forgetting each detail the moment it registered-who was married to whom, for how long, and why the characters were where they were. It didn't matter. The story lulled her into something like a trance.

After they hung up, she walked into her mother and Bruce's room and turned on all the lamps and lay down on the bed sideways, her feet hanging off. She wished her brother were here. She thought maybe he would come home in the middle of the night and then in the morning she could talk to him, convince him to come to the hospital with her. The phone rang and she waited for the answering machine and listened to her mother's voice saying h.e.l.lo, please leave a message, and then the somber voice of their neighbor, Kathy Tyson, offering to look after the animals if they needed it. On impulse, Claire lunged for the phone, but by then Kathy had hung up. She'd had the idea that maybe Kathy could come over and have a cup of tea with her and distract her from her sorrow. They could talk about men and how few eligible ones there were in Midden, the way they had the year before, at Gail Nystrom's wedding reception, when they'd been a.s.signed to sit next to each other at the singles table because there were too few men to go boy-girl. Kathy had confided that she'd posted a listing on a Web site for singles who liked country living, that the very next day she was driving to Norway to meet a man who'd answered her ad.

Claire didn't know her number and to look for it seemed too much of an effort, so she hung up the phone and stood. She realized that she was still wearing her mother's wool coat, not having taken it off for the nearly two hours she'd been home. She pushed her hands into the pockets and instantly found the ca.s.sette tape she had put there earlier. She pulled it out and looked at it for the first time. Kenny G, it said. She'd taken it that day, from Bill's house. She didn't know why. It sat next to the tune box in his bedroom among a scattering of other ca.s.settes that Bill and perhaps Nancy had been presumably listening to recently. Instinctually she'd reached for a ca.s.sette and shoved it into her pocket. She sat up now and opened the drawer of the small table beside the bed and tossed the ca.s.sette in and then shut the drawer.

She met Bill twice the next day. Once just after ten, and then again in the late afternoon. Both times they went to his house and had s.e.x in almost precisely the manner they had the day before. They already had a ritual: afterward they would dress and sit in the kitchen, drinking warm apple cider and eating toast with peanut b.u.t.ter. They told each other stories about the lovers they'd had. Claire's list was short, only four men long, Bill being the most interesting, the one least like her. Bill's list was long and complicated, grouped mostly into categories, rather than individuals. He told her about losing his virginity with Janet in a closet where his mother stored cleaning supplies; about prost.i.tutes he had slept with in various ports during his Navy years; a series of alcoholics in Alaska; and then Nancy. He told her about how they'd gone to Puerto Rico for their tenth wedding anniversary. They'd lolled in bed and made love and ate a bag of plums they'd bought on the street. In jest, Bill put one of these plums into Nancy's v.a.g.i.n.a and it sucked itself up inside of her and they couldn't get it out.

"Well, it came out eventually," he said, laughing, rubbing his face, laughing again, laughing so hard that his eyes filled with tears.

Claire sat with him and smiled. She nibbled her toast.

"Now there's something," he said, finally getting ahold of himself, wiping his tears away. "There's something you don't do twice."

She didn't see him the next day at all. Her mother had become so ill that Claire hardly left the room.

"You're interrupting me," she'd said as soon as she saw Claire that morning, a new edge to her voice.

"What?"

"That's what you do. You interrupt." Teresa swung her head in Claire's direction. Her eyes blue, beloved, uncomprehending as a buzzard.

"Mom."

Bruce was still there, asleep in the cot, and he sat up, startled and confused.

"Why is she here?" Teresa demanded, banging on the rails of her bed so hard the yellow pan that was clipped onto it fell off.

Bruce reached out and stroked Teresa's shoulder. "It's Claire, Ter."

"It's me, Mom. What's wrong?"

Teresa sat quietly for a while and then closed her eyes.

"Mom. It's me, okay? Do you understand that?"

She opened her eyes, soft now, back to normal. "I understand that. It's you. I'm glad."

"Stay awake with me, Mom."

"Okay," Teresa said, then closed her eyes and slept. She slept all morning and into the afternoon, and Claire sat next to her bed, not reading or watching TV, not doing anything but watching her mother. She said the beginnings of prayers silently to herself but then petered out, not remembering how they went. "Our Lord, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name ..." and "Now I lay me down to sleep ..." When the afternoon sky began to darken Claire could not keep herself from it anymore. She shook her mother hard until she opened her eyes and kept them open.

"h.e.l.lo," she whispered.

"h.e.l.lo," her mother said back to her, as if she were hypnotized.

"I miss you."

Teresa said nothing.

Claire held out her fingers; on one there was a mood ring that belonged to her mother. "What does it mean when it's red?"

"That your hands are cold," Teresa answered, then closed her eyes.

Claire s.h.i.+fted the ring. When she pressed on its little oval surface, it became a purplish green. "I've been going through things. Remember the macrame feather earrings you made?"

Teresa didn't answer or open her eyes, but turned her head toward Claire.

"I found them. And also that skirt you made out of your jeans."

"You can have them. Take whatever you want."

"Okay," she said, though she had already-taken what she wanted-a lion figurine, a shawl made of string. She'd felt compelled to search through her mother's things since she'd been admitted to the hospital, like a child left home alone for the afternoon, not knowing what she'd find, but then knowing everything she did find, being shocked over and over again by the excavation of her mother's life. The things she'd remembered and forgotten: garish beads that had fallen from necklaces, a square of lace, a photo of an old boyfriend of her mother's named Killer. All these things she'd found and more, none of it mysterious, all of it astonis.h.i.+ng in its familiarity, as if they had been embroidered onto her skin all along.

"Also, I found this." She touched the pewter belt buckle she now wore. It was perfectly round, etched with an image of a woman with flowing hair who held a feather, a relic from her childhood. The buckle was attached to a braided leather belt that her mother had made herself.

"You can have it," Teresa said, and then appeared to instantly fall asleep.

Claire stood, watching her mother, running her fingertips over the engraving on the buckle. Since her mother got cancer she'd become superst.i.tious. She believed that everything she did was in direct relation to the survival of her mother, that wearing the belt would save her. As a child she'd believed that the pewter woman with the flowing hair who held a feather on the buckle was her mother. This made some sense on a practical level. Teresa's hair had been flowing for a time. She'd worn necklaces, earrings, halter-tops made of feathers. But this isn't why Claire believed it. She'd believed it because her mother was that omnipotent and omnipresent, her power over Claire absolute. She believed it again now, or perhaps she had believed it all along.

Her mother: Teresa Rae Wood. Anything she said would be true.

After several minutes Claire rose and silently walked to the Family Room to make a cup of tea. Bruce would return in an hour or two, perhaps Joshua would be with him. She let her fingers graze against the wall as she walked, as if to help her keep her balance. Her body felt weightless, like she was not walking but floating down the hall, a pretty ghost. She didn't see Bill as she pa.s.sed by Nancy's room, its door closed, but she imagined Nancy behind that door, lying on her side, her thin hip a triangle, her blond frizzy hair matted into a flat nest at the back of her head. Claire thought of that plum. Imagined it warm inside Nancy, as if it were still there: a thing she would not release. Purple, red, and black. Sweet and soft and bruised.

The door to the Family Room was also closed, but she went inside. Bill was there, emptying his part of the refrigerator, clutching a paper bag.

"Hey," he said dreamily.

"Hi," she said, wiping her face with her hands. It was only six, but it felt like the middle of the night. Her life always was the middle of the night now.

"It happened," Bill said, turning to her. "She died."

Claire shut the door behind her and locked it. She felt shocked beyond words, as if death were an enormous surprise. She hugged Bill and the paper bag. "Oh my G.o.d. I'm so sorry," she said. "I'm so, so sorry."

"It isn't what I expected," he said.

"What did you expect?"

He set the bag on the floor. "I'm not taking these. They're those frozen dinners. You can have them if you want."

"Okay," Claire said gravely. Bill's face was pale and puffy. He smelled like worn-out peppermint gum and French fries. She hugged him and cupped her hand around the back of his neck, and he pressed into it the way a baby who can't hold his head up does.

"Look," he said, almost inaudibly. "I feel that I should apologize."

"For what?" She let go of him, took a step back.

"For what's gone on with you and me."

"There isn't anything to be sorry about."

"I feel that I behaved badly."

"No." She peered at him. "n.o.body behaved badly."

He took several deep breaths, panting almost, his hand on the counter. "I didn't want to leave the room. They took her-her body-out after a couple of hours. People came to see her, to say goodbye. Her folks, her brothers, and a couple of her best friends. And then they took her away and I didn't want to leave, you know. The room."

"That's understandable," Claire said gently. She was holding herself, her arms crisscrossed around her waist. "I can see wanting that."

He sobbed. He made small whimpering noises, and then he found a rhythm and his cries softened. Claire rubbed his shoulders. He let her do this for a while, and then he went to the sink and leaned deeply into it and rinsed his face and dried it with a hard paper towel from the dispenser.

"Anyway, you know something? I never cheated on Nancy up until now. That's the G.o.d's honest truth. Maybe you don't know that, but thirteen years plus and I never cheated. I almost did once or twice, but I never followed through. That's normal human temptation. That can happen in any marriage. But I didn't do it. I honored the vows." His voice quavered and he tried to breathe deeply again. "The vows meant something to me once upon a time." He paused. "And don't get me wrong. None of this is your fault. I hold you responsible not one iota. You are a beautiful girl. A top-notch young lady. I was the one married. It has nothing to do with you."

The bag of frozen dinners s.h.i.+fted without either of them touching it.