Torch: A Novel Part 29

"And Shadow," Claire said, more collected now that she'd gotten the gist of it out. "I mean, I wouldn't stay there, the nights or anything. I just thought ... if you needed someone to come out."

"That's very nice," said Kathy. "But only if you've got the time. I could ask my folks."

"I can do it. I'll get Josh to help me."

"Great." There was a beat of silence and then Kathy said, "Well, Bruce isn't home or else I know he'd want to talk to you."

"Okay."

"He can talk to you about where the key is now and everything. We moved it from its old hiding place."

"I have one on my ring," said Claire, and then wished she hadn't. "Good." She paused. "I'll let Bruce talk to you about the details later."

When they hung up she called Joshua immediately, even though he was at work. He had a job at the oven factory now, thanks in part to Lisa's mom's boyfriend, John Rileen, who was a manager there and had pulled some strings. When the secretary answered, Claire insisted that she go out onto the floor and bring Joshua back to the phone, a thing she was supposed to do only in emergencies.

"We're housesitting for Bruce and Kathy," she burst the moment he said h.e.l.lo.

"What?"

"They're going camping in Arkansas, on some honeymoon they never had, and I said we'd take care of the place." She attempted to modulate her voice so it sounded both casual and authoritative at once, so he would not dispute anything she said, but it didn't work.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Claire. I have my job and Iris. I never said I'd stay out at the house."

"We don't have to stay there!" she said, as if that would change everything, but he didn't reply. "Okay. I know you've got to get back to work. We can talk about it more later."

She hung up the phone and shot out of her chair and paced around her apartment, galvanized by what she had done, what she'd said she would do, with Joshua or without. She tried to imagine the house now, with Kathy's things inside. She had been to Kathy's little cabin once years ago, but she'd only stepped inside the door, dropping something off. In honor of her profession, Kathy had on display a collection of black and white mugs shaped like cows, their tails the handles, their comical faces jutting out near the curvy rim. Claire imagined them in her mother's kitchen now, sitting on the shelf above the sink. But then she couldn't imagine anything else, or at least not anything else about the house. Her mind jangled and jumped from one thing to another, to a series of disconnected memories of home. Of her mother standing on a chair pounding a nail into the wall to hang one of her paintings, the tiny, secret veins that flowered at the backs of her knees. Of the way Bruce's hair would look, knotted and flattened, in the winter when he removed his hat after wearing it all day. After a while, she was able to see it, but only from a distance, as if she were standing at the end of the driveway. The house, the chicken coop, the barn, and Bruce's shop: the tribe of buildings that used to be home.

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 gla.s.s 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 eggsh.e.l.ls 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. .h.i.tler 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 cras.h.i.+ng 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, polis.h.i.+ng 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.

"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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d'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 Jos.h.i.+e 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 G.o.d'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 rea.s.sure them, without at all being rea.s.sured 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 pa.s.sengers 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 pa.s.sed 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 Cutla.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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 ba.n.a.l 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.

"h.e.l.lo," 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 inside.

"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.

She turned back to the house, studying it more carefully now, picking things up to examine them and setting them back down precisely as they had been so that Kathy wouldn't think she had been snooping. She walked upstairs, giving herself a tour. Her bedroom had been turned into an office and Joshua's something of a storage s.p.a.ce. There was a stationary bicycle and a tiny wooden rocking chair meant for a toddler and a dartboard hanging lopsided on the wall. Claire removed all the darts and then threw them one by one, never hitting a bull's-eye. She went back downstairs and pushed the door to Bruce and Kathy's room open and peered inside from the doorway. A white dresser sat where her mother's vanity had been and a cedar chest where there had once been a bench. She closed the door, feeling light and happy with herself, pleased with her capacity to see it plainly at last, to stare it frankly in the face without feeling much of anything.

At four it was late enough to feed the animals and she went outside.

"h.e.l.lo, girls," she cooed, the way her mother used to, herding the hens into their coop for the night, reaching into the straw to check for eggs, filling their troughs with fresh water and cracked corn. After she fed the horses, she got a brush and groomed them while they ate, and then followed them out to the pasture when they were done, brus.h.i.+ng them for close to an hour, despite the light rain. Every few minutes she switched from Beau to Lady Mae so neither of them got jealous, moving with them as they searched out the new gra.s.s, pressing their mouths into the dirt to retrieve the tiniest blades. She'd spent a lot of time out here in the pasture during an era of her childhood-in the years after they'd moved in with Bruce and before she and Joshua became teenagers, resistant to everything their mother suggested. In the summer they would camp out without pitching a tent. They would make a fire and lay a tarp down and set their sleeping bags on top of it, the four of them sleeping lined up in a row, like logs. The horses would be with them all night, approaching at various hours to smell their hair or to push their noses into their sleeping hands. In the winter they would build snowmen and make snow angels in the deep places the horses didn't walk. Or Bruce and Teresa would bury her and Joshua, covering them entirely, aside from the small domes of their faces, and then walk away, calling their names. Calling "Claire! Joshua!" Asking "Where have our children gone?" Saying "We've lost our babies!" And no matter that Claire knew that they were only joking, that it was all a game, something enormous would mount inside of her, an unbearable mix of antic.i.p.ation and unease, delight and distress, and she would crash up out of her snow grave, with Joshua a moment behind her, cras.h.i.+ng up too, and they would run after their mother and Bruce screaming and laughing, "We're here! We're here!"

She remembered this now, out with the horses, allowing every detail she could conjure into her mind, and yet also holding them at a distance. She'd become adept at this over the past months, learning how to keep things at the same time as letting them go. She stopped brus.h.i.+ng Beau and looked back at the house. It was getting toward evening now and her eyes caught on her car. She had left her headlights on, she saw now, having turned them on as she drove here in the rain. She was not going to spend the night here, she almost screamed as she sprinted to her car, bending to wend her way through the fence, as if the few seconds longer it would take to go through the gate would make a difference.

There was only a clicking sound when she turned the ignition. She pounded on the steering wheel and got out and slammed the door as hard as she could and stormed into the house.

She called Joshua, leaving him a message, and then stood near the phone for several moments, waiting for it to ring, though she knew that it was futile. It was too late for Joshua to agree to come down to jump her car, not when he was coming the very next morning anyway. She considered walking to Kathy's parents' house a couple of miles away, but she knew she wouldn't do it. She could call Leonard and Mardell, but they'd be at the Lookout until at least ten.

She took her coat off and sat down at the kitchen table and almost burst into tears of rage over her own stupidity. She picked up The Nickel Shopper and distracted herself by reading the ads, all the while vowing that she would not spend the night here, despite the fact that another voice inside of her knew she would. After several minutes, she went to the refrigerator and opened it up. In the freezer there was a stack of frozen dinners in slender white boxes: chicken cacciatore and fettuccine Alfredo and a thing called "Southwest Fiesta." She chose the chicken and removed it from its box and stabbed the sheet of plastic that covered it with a fork.

As she waited for it to cook in Kathy's microwave, she thought of Bill Ristow. He used to eat food like this at the hospital for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Its very odor, as it cooked, reminded her of him. He would eat it standing up in the Family Room while his wife was dying down the hall, eating whatever she could manage. Eating canned peaches, Claire supposed, like her mother had on her good days, or one unbearable grape at a time. Eating Jell-O and hard candy just so she could claim to have eaten at all. She hadn't seen Bill since August, and shortly after she'd moved back to Midden, their phone calls had tapered off and then ceased altogether. At Christmas he'd sent her a card. Thinking of you, kiddo, it said. She'd held it for a long time, reading those words over and over again. How sweet they were to her, and simple and plain and true. How they seemed to contain both what they said and what they didn't: how unlikely it was they'd ever speak again. She didn't feel sad about it, didn't any longer feel the blend of sorrow and inevitability she used to feel when she thought of Bill.

Her feelings for David were more complicated, though no longer fraught. They'd spoken on the phone a few times over the autumn and winter, talking like old friends, laughing about the things they used to laugh about, critiquing the things they used to critique together, in almost perfect agreement. He had a new girlfriend, a woman who lived in his apartment building. He told Claire tentative, considered facts about her. That her name was Elise. That she worked at a legal firm and liked to run. That he had taken up running too. Claire's heart seemed to simultaneously speed up and slow down when he spoke of her, but later, thinking about it, she wished him well.

"What about you?" he'd asked her the last time they spoke.

"I'm on a s.e.xual hiatus," she said in a funny voice, to make a joke of it, though it was true. She was getting her mind and body clear of men, though from time to time she wavered. She allowed herself to flirt with a few of the guys she'd gone to high school with, when they came into the Lookout. She pondered pairings that, upon reflection, were patently absurd.

"Do you think R.J. would go out with me?" she'd asked Joshua one day when she visited him in jail. R.J. had always been around, all the years that Claire was growing up, spending the night at their house on the weekends, but she hadn't truly noticed him until she moved back home and he'd stopped into the Lookout one day.

"Go out?" Joshua asked, aghast.

"Yeah."

"Like on a date?"

She nodded.

"No f.u.c.king way, Claire. He's my friend."

"Well, I'm not proposing to kill him." She laughed and held her hands up in surrender. "Okay, okay. Forget I said anything."

"I will," he said, disgusted. "He's got a girlfriend who he's whipped over anyway. You wouldn't have a chance."

After dinner, after Joshua called and they argued and finally agreed that it was silly for him to come out only to return again in the morning, she made a bed for herself on one of Kathy's loveseats. There were two facing each other. When she couldn't get comfortable on the first one, she moved over to the second, but they were equally uncomfortable and neither of them was long enough for her legs. She pulled the blankets onto the floor and lay wide-awake, growing more despairing and miserable and exhausted and agitated with each pa.s.sing hour. Somewhere in the depths of the night, she stood up and went to the window and looked out. It had stopped raining and the sky was clear and she could see the horses standing outside of their stalls in the light of the moon. She considered going out to sleep near them, bundled in a sleeping bag, but then she turned away and walked through the dark house.

She went to Bruce and Kathy's room and switched the light on and stood staring at the bed. It was the same bed, the one that had been her mother's too. It was the only bed in the house, the only place she could expect to get any actual sleep. She sat down on the edge and ran her hand along the unfamiliar quilt that covered it. On the nightstand beside her there was a statuette of a cow. She picked it up and examined it and put it down and opened the nightstand drawer. When she'd lived here, this had been Bruce's side of the bed, and she could tell by the contents of the drawer that it still was. There was a jackknife his father had given him and a wallet in a transparent box that he had yet to use, his old high school cla.s.s ring and three rolls of pennies. Way back in the depths of the drawer there was a ca.s.sette tape. She reached inside and pulled it out: Kenny G. She recognized it immediately as the ca.s.sette she'd stolen from Bill the first time she'd gone to his house, though she didn't recall what she'd done with it afterward and didn't have any idea how it had ended up here. She had a.s.sumed it was still with her, lost in the boxes out in the storage shed behind the Lookout that she hadn't yet unpacked. She put the ca.s.sette into the stereo near the bed and reclined on top of the covers listening to it. The music struck her as corny and cloying and monotonous and after a few minutes she turned it off.

She remembered how she used to search the house on the weekends when she came home after her mother died. Remembered that hungry, insatiable urge she'd had to find what was missing without having any idea what it was she was looking for. She could let it be this, she thought. She could let it be this ca.s.sette and then she wouldn't have to search anymore. Slowly, methodically, without sorrow or anger or fear, she took the ca.s.sette out and began to pull the tape from its spool inside the cartridge, unfurling the metallic ribbon onto her lap. As it gathered into a pile she felt a kind of curiosity, a kind of childlike scrutiny that she'd had when she was picking a flower apart one petal at a time, waiting to know her fate, chanting he loves me, he loves me not. Only now she didn't chant anything to herself. She just let it be what it was: benign destruction, a thing that was no more. When she was done she balled it into her hands and put it in the garbage and closed the lid.

"Rise and s.h.i.+ne," said Joshua in the morning, standing over her near the bed.

She startled awake and rubbed her face. "What time is it?"

"A little after nine," he said, and left the room.

"I didn't hear you," she called to him.

"I know. It's weird, isn't it? No barking dogs."

She could hear him opening the refrigerator and then closing it. She sat up and looked around. She'd fallen asleep finally, after crawling into Bruce and Kathy's bed with her clothes still on. "Did you bring Iris?"

"Nah," he said from the living room. "Lisa wanted to take her over to her mom's."

"I was hoping you'd bring her." She got out of bed and pulled her sweater on and ran her fingers through her hair. She had let it fade back to its original color over the past few months. From the top of Kathy's dresser she took an elastic band and used it to tie her hair back into a ponytail.

"You can see her tomorrow morning, if you want. We need someone to take her for about an hour."

"Sure," said Claire. She looked after Iris whenever she could-whenever Lisa and Joshua had to work at the same time. She loved Iris in a way that she'd loved only her brother, she came to realize, in the hours that she held her, gazing at her beautiful face, exploring her every toe and curve, her every wrinkle and bend, marveling over the excruciating softness of her skin, the exquisite bounty of her head as it reclined in the palm of her hand. She'd been there when Iris was born, though that hadn't been the plan, and had watched her emerge from Lisa, wet and gray, two weeks and three days before her due date, four days before Joshua was released from jail. The powers that be at the jail had refused to let him out to see his child born, despite Claire's pleadings, despite the pleadings of the counselor in jail, despite, even, the wishes of the guards, Tommy and Fred. An order from the judge or the warden was needed, and they were both unavailable on the day Iris was born. As a consolation, Joshua had been allowed to wait in the room where he received his visitors, shackled to the table. Minutes after Iris was born, Claire ran down the stairs and into the hallway that became the tunnel that led to the jail. "It's a girl!" she shouted from the processing room, knowing that Joshua could hear her. "It's a girl?" he hollered back to her, exuberant and stunned.