Torch: A Novel Part 30

She came into the kitchen and got herself a gla.s.s of water.

"So, what's on the agenda?" said Joshua, solemn now.

"I bought seeds. But let's just walk out there first. To see her."

Shadow followed them out the door and off the porch and onto the little path that led to their mother's grave, trailing them like a dog. They slowed as the woods gave way to the clearing, as the oval of dirt they'd made the year before came into sight.

Joshua picked up a pine bough that had fallen from a tree and swept the dried leaves from the dirt, and Claire stooped down and raked some away with her hands. Beneath the layer of leaves they could see that it wasn't only dirt any longer. There were tiny white flowers blooming and the shoots of other flowers pus.h.i.+ng up, an entire garden about to burst forth.

Claire took a sharp breath in, trying to make sense of it. Her mind leapt from one thing to the next, from believing that it was her mother working her magic, sending a signal from wherever she was, to the realization that it must have been Bruce. He'd planted the flowers without them, without even so much as telling them that he'd done it.

"What happened?" Joshua asked.

"I don't know," said Claire.

"Do you think Bruce did this?"

"I don't know." She looked at him. "Maybe it's Mom. Maybe this is her way of speaking to us." She didn't believe it herself, but she had the compulsion to make him believe, the way she'd had to carry on the myth of Santa Claus a couple of years after she knew the truth.

"Maybe," he said, and she could tell by his voice that he was doing the same thing, knowing the truth but protecting her from it.

"Or maybe Bruce just went ahead without us," Claire blurted.

"Maybe," Joshua whispered.

They looked at each other-they were both crying now-and something came over them simultaneously and they both began to laugh.

"What's so funny?" Claire asked through her tears.

"Nothing!" said Joshua, and then they laughed harder.

"I thought it would feel different," Claire told Joshua when they had stopped laughing. "Being here. I thought I would feel like Mom was here-not just out here, but all around. In the house. On the road." She plunged her hands into the dirt on the edge of the plot, where no flowers grew or were beginning to grow. It was wet and it turned to mud when she brought up two fists of it and then shook it off.

"So what are we gonna do with all those seeds you bought?" he asked.

Claire shrugged.

He still held the pine bough. He tossed it back toward the woods. "I got an idea."

"What?"

He smiled. "Just come on." He left her standing there, starting back on the path without her, Shadow following behind him.

"Come where?" she yelled, without moving. But he didn't answer; she just had to go after him.

As they drove down their road in Joshua's truck and out onto the highway, she remembered she had a surprise too. She hadn't told Joshua what Leonard and Mardell had told her the day before. She turned and looked at him in profile, at his sharp nose that was like hers and at the dark stubble that grew on his chin and across his cheeks.

"What?" he asked, swatting at his face, as if there might be something on it.

"Nothing." She smiled, because she knew it would irk him.

"Don't look at me, then."

She laughed. She felt strangely free, deeply relieved, like it was the last day of school and she would never have to go back.

"And don't laugh at me neither," he said, smiling too.

"So where are we going?" she asked.

"To the river."

She nodded, immediately comprehending his plan, and they didn't say another word to each other as they drove.

The Lookout parking lot was empty. It was Monday, the bar closed. They walked out the little path, to the river. Claire went to the rock and pressed her hand against it, feeling its cool surface, while Joshua spread out the blanket he'd brought from his truck.

"Let's just relax for a while," he said, and sat down on the blanket.

Claire sat next to him and watched the river. The water was high and muddy from all the rain they'd had and the snow that had melted weeks before. The cattails that grew on the other bank were flooded almost to the ends of their soft beige tips. "It's nice to get some sun," she said, and leaned back on her hands, letting the warmth settle over her face. After several minutes, she took her raincoat off and set it beside her. She turned to Joshua. "Len and Mardell want to give you the Lookout. They're going to retire in a year and they just want to give it to you."

"What?" He s.h.i.+elded his eyes with his hand so he could see her better.

"Ruth and Jay don't want it and Len and Mardell saved their money all these years-Len's dad gave him the bar in the first place, so they don't owe anything on it-and they just want to give it to you. They want it to go to someone they know. Someone they trust."

"Holy s.h.i.+t," said Joshua. He sat thinking for several moments. "What about you? Why don't they give it to you?"

She shrugged. "They want you to have it." In truth, they had offered it to her as well-to both of them-but she'd rejected the idea immediately. She couldn't stay in Midden. Their offer had crystallized that fact in her mind. "You and Lisa and Iris can live in the apartment upstairs. Or you could rent it out for money if it's not big enough for you."

"But you live there."

"Not for too much longer, Josh." She waved her hand into the new gra.s.s that grew at the edge of the blanket and pulled a blade of it from the ground. "I think I'll work through Labor Day while the money's good, but then I have to move on."

"Back to the Cities?"

"I don't know." She shredded the blade of gra.s.s into tiny pieces, pondering the question. "Maybe. I could go somewhere else too." She looked up at him and smiled. "Somewhere new to go off and seek my fortune," she said in an intentionally dramatic voice.

"You should," he said, earnestly.

"Yeah," she said, though her stomach flipped with the notion. She flung the strings of gra.s.s away from her, but the wind blew them back, scattering them over her and Joshua.

"You're too smart to be staying here, that's for sure. You need to go and be around other smart people."

"I am around smart people, Josh. Smart people live in Midden. You're smart," she said, emphatically. When she said it, she realized she'd never told him that. She wondered if anyone ever had.

"You know what I mean."

"No," she protested gently, but she did. She would always be from here, of here, but she could not stay here. She remembered how it felt to walk down the streets of Minneapolis the way she used to, yearning and yearning. For what, she didn't precisely know. Since her mother died that unknowingness had felt to her like a weakness, a hopeless surrender, instead of the glorious question it had been before, back when she was a daughter, a girl. She watched an empty plastic milk jug float past in the river, washed in by the high water, and tried to let the question return.

"Well, Iris is going to miss you. I can tell you that right now."

A tender urge rose in her to take his hand and hold it the way she held it when she went to visit him in jail, but she didn't. It would seem strange now, out here in the real world, where love had the luxury of being diffused and sheltered from itself. They sat together for several minutes in silence. Wispy white clouds appeared above them, blocking the sun for moments at a time.

"So, what do you think of taking over the bar?"

"I think it's interesting."

"I thought so too. It could be a good thing for you and Lisa and Iris."

"It could," he agreed. She could see the thoughts moving across his face as the idea set in. He leaned back on his hands and gazed at the sky and in that gesture Claire could see his excitement and joy, his amazement and relief.

"Would you live upstairs or would you rent it?"

He was silent for several moments and then he turned to her abruptly and said, "I used to live there."

"I know," she replied, not certain of what he was telling her, wanting to let him do it on his own.

"No. I mean, not with you and Mom. I lived there by myself when Mom was sick and for a while afterwards. n.o.body knew about it. I sort of broke in."

"Len knew." She watched the surprise ripple over his face. "He told me about it the night before Mom died, when I was looking all over for you. I called Len and he said to go to the apartment and you'd be there, so I did, but you weren't. Your truck wasn't here, so that's when I went out to the lake."

"I always parked my truck in town," he said. "Otherwise Len and Mardell would know I was here. I would park behind the cafe and walk down."

"Oh," she said, understanding it now. "Of course. How dumb am I?" She laughed, though a bird of pain fluttered into her chest, the entire memory coming to her with a sting. Of course he wouldn't have parked here, she realized now, though it hadn't occurred to her then, in the depths of her grief and fear. If only she had ascended the stairs and knocked, then they would have been there with their mother when she died. They wouldn't have sat for hours on a frozen lake, mired in the ice. They wouldn't have driven the highway to Duluth so fast it made her shake in terror, all to no avail.

"I'm sorry, Claire."

He tried to get her to look at him, but she wouldn't. She stared at her shoes or else she would cry. She'd forgiven him months before, but she couldn't tell him about it yet.

"It seems like we're both doing okay," she said instead.

He nodded. "We're moving on."

Claire remained silent, not wanting to agree or admit that that was what she'd been doing. Moving on, moving away, moving forward and beyond, past her mother. My mother, my mother, my mother, she said silently to herself. How much she missed her mother.

"Do you remember how we used to play Blue River p.i.s.s Off?" Joshua asked.

"Yeah," she said, a smile spreading across her face.

"We were funny."

"We were."

"I used to still do it. All the way up until-I don't know-not very long ago. I used to skip school and come out here and sit by the river and get stoned and then I'd put stuff in the river and I'd think, Blue River p.i.s.s Off."

"It's funny, the way things stay with you." She stared at the water. A jagged branch floated by. She remembered putting the lilac boughs in the river when Bruce and her mother had taken their commitment vows. "So why'd you stop?" she asked Joshua.

He shrugged. "I suppose I grew up." He thought for a while longer and then turned to her. "Iris was born in Blue River. Maybe that was it."

"We don't want Blue River to p.i.s.s off anymore!" Claire hollered comically to the sky and the trees and the rock and the river itself, as if they would hear and forgive them. And then a hush settled over them all, as if they had heard, had forgiven.

She unzipped the pocket of her coat and took the packets of seeds out and handed one to Joshua. They walked to the river and ripped the packets open and poured the seeds into their palms and then bent down and plunged their hands into the icy water, letting the seeds wash away. Their hands appeared whiter, more fragile than they were, almost glowing beneath the surface of the water as the current moved past them, through them, making rivulets along their fingers.

"Teresa Rae Wood," Claire said softly, slowly, like a secret, like a sacrament, like a prayer.

"Teresa Rae Wood," Joshua said after her.

Those three words were a flame, a torch they would carry forever.

They shook the water from their hands and stood watching the river. Claire was thinking what Joshua was thinking, she knew without having to ask, without even having to so much as look at his face.

They were thinking what they would do now: be incredible. Like most people.

Cheryl Strayed.

Cheryl Strayed is the author of Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar and Wild. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including The New York Times Magazine, The Was.h.i.+ngton Post Magazine, Vogue, The Rumpus, Self, The Missouri Review, The Sun, and The Best American Essays. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Also by Cheryl Strayed.

Tiny Beautiful Things.

Wild.

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Cheryl Strayed.

A powerful, blazingly honest memoir of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike: Cheryl Strayed's best-selling story of a lifetime.

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