Torch: A Novel Part 4

-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, pus.h.i.+ng herself up to sit, and took a big sip. She'd fallen asleep, but then woken from a dream about a ma.s.s of brown goop attaching itself inextricably to the front of her s.h.i.+rt. 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 s.h.i.+p. Sometimes she agreed with his a.n.a.lysis, other times she thought it was a bunch of New Age c.r.a.p. 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 seash.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.ls and chunks of gla.s.s 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 sh.o.r.e 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 G.o.d 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 sh.e.l.l 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 gra.s.s 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 mas.h.i.+ng 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 c.r.a.p, there would be a s.h.i.+rt 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 a.s.sistant, 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 scholars.h.i.+p 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 phone 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 a.s.sholes? What had happened to them? Her childhood had been filled with a reasonable amount of joy. Barbecues and birthday parties, pus.h.i.+ng 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 n.o.body mentioned the Sunday before.

Years pa.s.sed. 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 ..."

Her father got calm and her mother got hysterical, the way they'd been for as long as Teresa could remember. Her mother pounded against something, on the bed frame or a table, Teresa could hear it over the phone. She claimed she was going to leave the house at once and get on a plane to fly to Minnesota. Teresa's father emphasized that this was just the beginning, that cancer was easily cured these days, that she was young and she should not-that he would not-get too worried yet. By the time they hung up it had been decided that they would come in one month. That they would call Tim and tell him and ask him to come too and they would all be together again for the first time in ages. She hung up the phone feeling slightly giddy and sick to her stomach, the way she always did at the prospect of a visit from her parents.

In bed she lay awake, thinking about what she would feed them when they came. They were meat and potatoes people; she and Bruce and the kids were vegetarians. This always caused an uproar, even though when her parents visited she cooked them beef, chicken, pork-some kind of meat each night.

Bruce rolled onto his side and let out a small groan.

"Are you awake?" she asked, sitting up.

He didn't answer and she sat silently watching him, pondering whether she had the energy to get out of bed to get herself something to drink. She stared at the painting of the trees that hung at the foot of the bed. She'd painted it herself. Three trees, winter trees, not a leaf among them. Bare and black and big as boys against a landscape of snow. One tree represented love, another truth, the other faith. She couldn't remember which was which now, though when she'd painted it she'd gone to such pains, such excesses to paint those trees. Which way the branches should reach, how thick the trunks should be, making small imperfections to show where an animal might have come to scratch or chew the bark. She stared at the painting so long in the dark that she began to see strange things in it: the silhouettes of glum faces, a tall spindly boot, the backside of a man who carried a candle in a sconce.

"I can't sleep," she said loudly to Bruce.

He inhaled sharply and reached for her hand and held it under the covers.

"I had a dream and then I woke up thinking about it and now I can't fall back asleep," she said. She lay down again, nestling into him. "I dreamed there was this brown goop attaching itself to me. And then I dreamed of a woman I used to work for-Mrs. Turlington-I was her housekeeper. Not in the dream, in real life I was her housekeeper when I was a teenager. I would go after school. She had this gong that had supposedly belonged to some emperor at one point-some emperor in j.a.pan. I had to dust it every day with a feather duster. And that's what I dreamed-that I was dusting this gong."

She was silent then, considering whether she should tell him the dream about the cat in the middle of the freeway.

"She fired me in the end. I can't remember why. I moved away anyway. I got married." She lay staring at the ceiling. "She gave me a ceramic rooster with a head that came off and had lotion inside."

"For being fired?"

"For getting married."

He patted her leg. "Let's sleep. You need your rest. Tomorrow's a big day."

She closed her eyes, then opened them again, wild with anger about the rooster. "It's ridiculous when I think about it. Why would she fire me and then give me a rooster?" Her voice wavered and then she sat up and cried.

He tried to pat her back but she shook his hand away. She went to the bureau and took several tissues from the box and blew her nose. Her head was stuffed up from talking and crying and consoling everyone all weekend.

"I'm sorry," she said. "It's okay. I'm just thinking all kinds of things right now."

"That's the past," said Bruce, wide awake now. "That's not what you should be thinking about."

"I'm not thinking about it," she said.

"You just had a dream."

"I know." She crouched down, feeling around in the dark for the socks she'd taken off before she went to bed. "Go back to sleep," she said. She sat on the padded bench along the wall and pulled the socks on.

"I can't sleep if you can't sleep."

"Yes, you can." Through the window, she could make out Lady Mae and Beau standing close to each other just outside the entrance to their stalls, keeping each other warm.

When Bruce began to snore, she walked quietly out of the room. The house was dark, but it felt alive, the way houses did to her when no lights were on and she was the only one awake. Claire and Joshua were asleep upstairs. In the morning Claire would drive back to Minneapolis. Teresa felt that Claire's departure would mark a new era in their lives: the era in which she actually had cancer. At the moment she felt almost nothing-that cancer could not be real because her body was not real. She felt numb and stuffed and fuzzy, weightless and yet weighted. As if her veins had been filled with wet feathers. She'd felt that way all weekend, hazy and deeply sad, yet laboring to rea.s.sure Joshua and Claire and Bruce that she was actually just fine.

She walked through the living room, where Spy and Tanner lifted their heads from the couch and flapped their tails. In the bathroom, she shut the door, turned the light on, and saw herself-a wreck-in the mirror. Her eyes were swollen, her skin craggy and pale with a patch of rough b.u.mps across her cheeks. She turned on the cold water and let it run full blast till it was ice cold. There was a s.p.a.ce heater in the room and she plugged it in. She held a washcloth under the running water and wrung it out and pressed it to her eyes, and then lay down on the floor, on a hooked yarn rug she'd made herself, and set the washcloth over her eyes. There had been a time when she'd done this often, when Karl had beaten her up. She remembered that now, the way a body remembers, with precision, though she scarcely remembered Karl himself at all. Her life with him, in memory, felt like a play she'd seen years ago. The first time he had beaten her they'd been married for three days. It was never going to happen again. It happened again. Her nose, her collarbone, a tooth. He had his good days and he had his bad days, and so did she, so did they. She had Claire and Joshua to think about and Karl had never hurt them-not directly. Once, Joshua cut his foot, having stepped on a dagger of plastic from a shattered radio that Karl had thrown against the wall. And Claire had to have st.i.tches in her lip when her highchair was knocked over during one of their scuffles. But they did not remember these things. Years later, Claire had asked, "How'd I get this?" She pulled her lower lip out, examining the scar on the soft flesh inside.

"In the tub," Teresa said, smooth as b.u.t.ter. "You slipped when you were a baby."

But they did remember other things-there was nothing Teresa could do about that. They remembered Karl choking her almost to death and having to run barefoot to wake the neighbors in the middle of the night. They remembered being driven around while they slept and how Claire had to get dressed for school in the car. They remembered the things that clothing could not conceal-gashes and bruises and welts. But she got out, and that's what mattered in the end. She was setting a good example now, in her relations.h.i.+p with Bruce. They would know what a good man was, what love was, what they should not accept.

But Karl had left his mark. Claire had written a paper about him in a women's studies cla.s.s her freshman year. My mother was a battered woman, my father was a batterer. What does this make me? A survivor, the first lines said. Teresa's stomach had flipped when she read this and her mouth felt funny, as if it were filled suddenly with blood, as if a lie were being told about her, as if the truth had not occurred to her until that very moment.

"What's this?" she asked.

"It's none of your business, that's what it is." Claire ripped the paper from her hands, then tore it viciously in half. Teresa had unknowingly picked it up from a nest of papers and books on Claire's bed.

"I would say it's precisely my business," she said, trying to sound conciliatory and motherly, superior but kind, though she felt that she'd been struck. "Honey, you shouldn't dwell on those kinds of things." She sat on the bed, on the quilt she'd made Claire for her thirteenth birthday, composed of patches of clothes she'd worn throughout her childhood. She looked down almost shyly and ran her hand over a brigade of dancing vitamins that at one point had been Claire's favorite pants. "All in all, you had a very happy childhood, wouldn't you say?"

She wouldn't say. She pulled her hair back into a ponytail and told Teresa that she felt her childhood had been "mixed."

"Mixed?" Teresa asked. Things came into her mind, a series of things, most of them involving wanting to lock Claire in the house until she admitted that her childhood had not been "mixed."

"Oh-I always knew you loved me," she conceded, then added, "But there was Dad. That was hard. There was having to worry about you all the time and feeling responsible. I was completely parentified by the age of, like, six."

"Parentified?"

She nodded. "It's where a child who is still a child doesn't get to be a child entirely because he or she has to take on things that children shouldn't have to take on. It's very common in single-parent families-where the child has to look after younger siblings, cook meals, and stuff like that." She looked at her mother sweetly. "I don't blame you specifically."

Teresa sat without moving a muscle. Sometimes she hated Claire.

"I thought you liked to cook," she said in a shrill voice.

The years with Karl had been difficult, she'd grant Claire that. Their life was nightmarish at times. She couldn't honestly say she'd ever truly loved him beyond their high school infatuation, but they had made a family, they were companions of a sort. There were times when they'd tried to be happy. They had kids together, rented apartments together, ate dinner, went to parks, made love. This, despite the fact that Karl was a madman. When she left him for good, half of her believed he would kill her, the other half believed he would kill himself. He did neither, though their parting was not without its drama. He broke into and ransacked her new apartment across town from where she had lived with him. He tried to kidnap the kids. He became convinced that Teresa was sleeping with a sad man named Ray, who cooked in the restaurant where she worked as a waitress. Once, on Ray's day off, Karl went to his house and beat him up and then drove to the restaurant and dragged Teresa out into the parking lot by her hair. He beat her while all of her customers looked on from a distance, indignantly yelling, "Hey!"

Of course she hadn't been sleeping with Ray. s.e.x was the furthest thing from her mind. She was never going to touch another man. She would stay single and celibate forever. But she saw that Karl would never leave her in peace, so she thought about where she could go. A friend had a cousin in Minnesota who was quitting her job in a town called Midden, somewhere in the woods a couple of hours west of Duluth. She made a few phone calls and within a week she and the kids were on a bus with a suitcase and a pillow apiece.

They rode for days, meeting people. Good people who told her their life stories and helped her accommodate the kids. Smelly old men and enormously fat women who allowed Claire and Joshua to stretch out and sleep on their laps and when they woke gave them treats, licorice and peanuts and sticks of Juicy Fruit gum. Teresa felt more like their big sister than their mother during that trip-during that entire time in their lives really-so intimidated she was to be out in the world alone. She became sick from the motion of the bus and had to vomit into a plastic bag that had once held beef jerky. She stared out the window, watching Ohio roll by, then Indiana, Chicago, and Madison, contemplating Minnesota, feeling Minnesota waiting silently, darkly, like a giant iceberg that would rip a s.h.i.+p in two, so cold it was. That's all she knew. How cold Minnesota would be.

But when they arrived it was hot, August. She took off her sweater, which she'd worn because of the air-conditioning on the bus. They'd been dropped in the gravel parking lot in front of a bar called Len's Lookout, about a mile outside of town. She stood next to their suitcases, looking around. They'd driven through the town-Midden-just moments before. It was smaller than she'd imagined. The sign on the highway had said "POPULATION 408" and she thought what she always thought when reading such a preposterous number: Who were the eight? The town consisted of a brick school and several houses and businesses in low buildings and a water tower with a giant M painted on it, jutting above everything else, but mostly, it seemed, of the trees and gra.s.ses that surrounded the town on all sides, as if the wilderness were gaining on the town, as if it had arrived more recently, rather than the other way around. Len's Lookout itself was in the wilderness, the only building in sight.

Joshua and Claire ran back and forth, from her to the doorway of the bar. They asked if they could go inside, if they could have a can of pop. She stared at the bar, her hand raised above her eyes to s.h.i.+eld them from the glaring sun. The front windows were plastered with papers-advertis.e.m.e.nts for Labor Day festivals, the Lion's Club Corn Feed, something at the VFW, someone who would do your taxes, another someone who would trim your horse's hooves-with neon beer signs above.

She walked toward the door, dragging the suitcases behind her. The man who greeted them was named Leonard, he told them immediately, and by the way he stood Teresa knew that he'd been watching them since they'd gotten off the bus. He owned the place with his wife, Mardell. His parents had owned it before he had. It was named after his father, the original Leonard. He gave them each a s.h.i.+rley Temple and wouldn't let Teresa pay for them. He gave the kids a bowl of peanuts and offered Teresa a bowl of her own, which she refused. She asked if there was a paper she could buy.

"Paper?"

"Yeah-a newspaper," she said, sipping her drink.

"Oh." He laughed. "There's the Coltrap Times. Comes out every Wednesday, but mostly you just gotta ask whatever you want to know because by the time it's in the paper, it's over and done with."

She told him about her job at the Rest-A-While Villa, about needing to find a place to live. He stared at her for a long while, leaning on the wooden bar, so long that she thought he wasn't going to say anything and she'd have to leave.

"Let me show you something," he said. "Then you can tell me what you think."

They followed him back, behind the bar, through the small kitchen, past surprisingly jumbo-sized cooking equipment, out the back door, and up a flight of stairs that went up the side of the building to an apartment. Empty boxes were stacked haphazardly around the place. Near the door sat a giant mixer that looked broken. The apartment was one big room and not much else. There was an alcove with a half-sized refrigerator and stove and a closet beyond that was bigger than the alcove. Teresa walked around contemplatively, swatted a mosquito that had landed on her bare shoulder. Joshua touched the blade of the mixer with one finger.

"Don't touch that," she snapped, almost reached to slap his hand the way she had when he and Claire were younger, before she'd read that hitting your kids in even the most minor ways taught them that violence was the way to solve problems. There were small things like that that she regretted, things she'd do differently now. There were a few years during which she fed Claire and Joshua mostly canned soup and Hamburger Helper and a ghastly amount of a certain kind of cheese spread that wasn't manufactured anymore.

"Is there a ..."

"The bathroom's out back," Leonard said. He gestured out a window to a shed in the yard.

"It's a bathhouse. There's a shower and a toilet and a sauna. Mardell and I heat up the sauna about once a week and we have some folks over too. You're welcome to join us anytime. Or you can light one yourself whenever you want. Our son, Jay, keeps us in wood."

The bathhouse was white, wooden, with a s.h.i.+ngled roof the color of a ripe peach. Beyond it civilization ended and became dense woods that dipped down to a river that she could see in small glimmers.

"It's the Mississippi," said Leonard, as if he'd read the question in her mind.

Without asking, Claire and Joshua ran out the door and down the stairs toward the bathhouse.

"I can let you have it for two hundred a month, including everything," he said. "You'll be able to walk to work when it's not too cold-it's just a mile-and if you need a bed, Mardell and I got a couch that pulls out we can loan you."

"Perfect," she said.

Packages arrived at the post office that she'd mailed to herself from Pennsylvania. Blankets and pots and pans, forks and spoons and her good knives. The apartment was lovely in the afternoon when the sun shone in, and in the morning it smelled like the cakes and pies Mardell baked in the kitchen below. The bar never got too loud and Teresa rather enjoyed the sound of the music from the jukebox as it filtered up through the floor anyway.

Everyone was curious about why they'd come and who they were. It seemed that n.o.body had moved to Midden for eighty years, but eighty years ago is when everyone who wasn't Ojibwe had arrived. They came from Finland mostly, a few from Sweden, a few from Denmark or Norway. At the Rest-A-While Villa, Teresa heard stories about things that had happened years and years before-blizzards and fires, trains and dances, marriages and deaths and births-while she mopped the floors or scrubbed pots or went into the residents' rooms to change bedpans. The residents were mostly women with names like Tyme and Hulda, with last names Teresa couldn't p.r.o.nounce if she read them on a page. The women had dozens of photographs taped to the walls behind their beds. Pictures of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. They were sorry to hear that Teresa did not have a Finnish bone in her body, but relieved to hear that at least her children's father was a Swede. Being a Swede was better than nothing. They told her that she was nice for someone who was Irish, though it had never occurred to her until they asked that Irish was what she was.

Winter came and she forgot about not having s.e.x again. She met a man named Larry, who didn't live in Midden, but came several times a week to deliver things to the Rest-A-While Villa. They had s.e.x in his delivery truck. They had s.e.x in the bed above Len's Lookout while Claire and Joshua were at school. They had s.e.x on a blanket in the gra.s.s near the river that ran several yards behind the bar, back in the woods. One day Larry said he didn't like the idea that she had kids.

"Idea?" she said, laughing coolly, pulling her s.h.i.+rt back on. "They're a bit more than an idea, Lar."

They fought, and he apologized and claimed that actually he was crazy about Joshua and Claire. He bought them a stuffed purple gorilla to prove it. The gorilla was as big as a chair. Aside from the couch, it was the only place in the apartment to sit and Claire and Joshua fought over whose turn it was to sit in his lap. They named him Little Larry and had it for years-long after the real Larry had disappeared-until one day tiny white b.a.l.l.s started coming out in the place where his big leg met his crotch and Teresa threw him out.

After Larry, Teresa dated a man named Killer and didn't ask him how he got the name. Killer, it said on his arm in a cursive tattoo. He was a beautiful, s.k.a.n.ky man with an incredibly thin and sinewy body. He liked her version of tuna ca.s.serole. He liked it so much they didn't call it tuna ca.s.serole anymore, but Killer ca.s.serole. He was good in bed, the first man who could honestly make her come. She took him back to the river too, on a trail that started behind the bar, worn by Joshua and Claire in the daytime. She went back at night, while the kids slept, feeling somewhat guilty to be leaving them alone in the apartment, but also gloriously free. She left a light on and she could see it just barely through the trees when she crawled up onto a big rock that sat near the bank of the river. Seeing the light made her feel reasonably a.s.sured that everyone was safe inside. Killer sat on the rock next to her and they smoked a joint and f.u.c.ked and smoked another joint and she felt like maybe this was her life now, that he was her man, though in the light of day she knew this was not remotely true. He drank too much, smoked too much weed. He was a biker and he bought her a leather lace-up top for her birthday that she was supposed to wear when she rode on the back of his bike.

There was a long spell of n.o.body, and then she met Bruce.

Bruce Gunther, Bruce Gunther, Bruce Gunther. His name was like a cure that had taken her a century to find. She was twenty-seven and so was he. She'd noticed him at the laundromat, drinking a can of c.o.ke. She saw him again at the Rest-A-While Villa, visiting his Aunt Jenny. "h.e.l.lo," he said. "h.e.l.lo," she said. His eyes were so pale and blue and kind; his hair so fine and blond, like a doll's. He fixed the handle of her car so she didn't have to use a screwdriver to open it anymore. He was a carpenter, an only child, and the year before she met him he'd broken up with a woman named Suzie Keillor, who worked at the school. Teresa wouldn't let him meet her kids, wouldn't even take him back to the river in the middle of the night. She'd become more careful again, wary of men, not wanting to get anyone's hopes up, so she and Bruce kept their relations.h.i.+p a secret until they were truly in love. Finally, she invited him to dinner, to meet Claire and Joshua. He was not to touch her, or to act as if they were anything but friends. When he pulled up in his truck, the kids ran down the stairs to greet him. She stood on the landing, watching from above.

Instantly he began playing a game with them, teaching them a song. She finished making dinner, hearing her children shrieking with joy through the open window. He chased them around the bathhouse on the path they'd worn. He didn't come up to the apartment to see her until she called them all in to eat. They sat on the couch, all four of them, Little Larry sitting across from them against the beige wall. The kids could hardly eat, so besotted they were with Bruce.

Afterward, when he stood to leave, the room became smaller with his standing. He shook their hands with a special handshake they'd made up outside. He shook Claire's hand, then Joshua's hand, and then hers, but she grabbed him and kissed him instead.

The kids hopped and giggled, giggled and hopped.

"Bye," she called ecstatically, as he descended the stairs.

There, she thought, there you are.