Torch: A Novel Part 7

"It's very informative," Vivian said.

Joshua turned the radio off. He wasn't usually so bold, but he wasn't able to keep himself from doing it. He said, "So, Viv was telling me about maybe me and R.J. selling for you."

Bender laughed. He was tan, despite the fact that it was winter, but his face turned red from the laughing. "Sure, I got plenty to sell," he said. "I got some new things too. We're branching out. R.J. said he showed you the meth I made."

"Where'd you make it?"

"Out in the garage," Bender said. "There's more money in meth than there will ever be in weed."

"It's not just anyone we would trust, Josh," Vivian said. "I hope you know that. Because if you f.u.c.k with us, your a.s.s is gra.s.s."

"I know."

"Good," she said, putting her hand on Bender's shoulder. " 'Cause you're just like a son to us."

He went to school the next day acting like nothing had happened the day before.

"Well, h.e.l.lo there," Ms. Keillor said when she saw him in the hall. And then added, "Come with me" before he had time to say h.e.l.lo in return.

They walked out to Dr. Pearson's trailer without a word. When they got to the door, Ms. Keillor opened it and said, "I've got a dish to send home with you. I'll send it up to Mrs. Stacey by the end of the day."

He walked into the trailer, over the plush cream carpet, to Violet's desk. Before she looked up from her computer screen, Dr. Pearson appeared in the open doorway of his office.

They entered without speaking. Joshua sat down on the varnished wood chair he'd sat on the day before, and the week before that.

"You're skipping school," Dr. Pearson said. "And now you're skipping detention too." He stared at Joshua, as if waiting for the answer to a question he'd posed. Joshua tried to meet his gaze, but then looked away at a row of metal b.a.l.l.s that hung on wires from a stand on the desk. He reached for one of the b.a.l.l.s and then let it go, so it hit the other b.a.l.l.s and they all swung and banged into each other.

"Do you have something to say about that?" Dr. Pearson asked.

"Not really," Joshua said, trying to sound polite. He didn't mean anything personal against Dr. Pearson and he considered telling him that.

"Pardon me?"

"I said, no. I don't. I have no explanation for skipping school."

"And skipping detention."

"It was boring."

Dr. Pearson smiled. "Well. That's a shame. I'm sorry to know that we didn't keep you well enough entertained."

"I wasn't saying you had to."

They sat in silence again.

"You know what's next, don't you?"

Joshua shook his head.

"I think you're lying to me. I think you know full well what's next. In fact, I know you do because I told you yesterday."

Joshua waited.

Dr. Pearson leaned against the back of his chair so that it rocked away from the desk. He took his gla.s.ses off and set them on his knee. His brown hair grew only in a ring that ran around the sides of his head.

"You did this to yourself, do you understand?"

"Yeah," Joshua said.

"You're to sit in detention the rest of the day, all right? And it doesn't matter if you're bored. I don't give a rip. You're to stay there. And then tomorrow you don't come at all. You don't come until next Thursday. You're not welcome here. You understand? You're being suspended for one week. Those are the consequences, Josh. You know that full well."

Dr. Pearson stared at Joshua for several moments, then put his gla.s.ses on and stood up. "Ms. Keillor will send a letter home to your folks and it will tell you what work you need to do while you're out. Being suspended doesn't mean you aren't responsible for the work you miss. You do all the same work. Violet will walk you back."

Joshua spent the morning drawing engines, carburetors, air filters, and cans until Mrs. Stacey saw what he was doing and took all of his paper away. He read for a while, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, poems he was supposed to have read three days before. He went down the list, checking them off as he read, twenty-six in all, poems by Stevie Smith, W. H. Auden, and HD. He had no idea what they were about. At least most of the poems were short. He shut the book and wrote p.o.r.no in pen on his forearm and then, next to it, drew a man with a long beard and horns.

When the last bell of the day rang Mrs. Stacey came in with a ca.s.serole dish covered with aluminum foil. "Ms. Keillor asked me to give this to you." And then when he took it from her she said, "You can bring the pan back next week when you come."

He walked out in the crowded hallway, mortified to be holding the pan. He hesitated, considered setting it on top of the pop machine and walking away. Kids laughed and talked and ran and screeched all around him, happy to be done with school. He spoke to no one, carrying the pan, his silence almost making him feel invisible. He went out to his truck in the parking lot. R.J. was nowhere in sight. Maybe he had skipped seventh hour. Just as he drove out of the lot, Trent Fisher pulled in. He saw Lisa Boudreaux in his rearview mirror, running from the school doors to Trent's Camaro.

"I brought something from Ms. Keillor and the cooks. Scalloped potatoes," he said to his mother when he walked in.

"That's nice," she said, lying very still on the couch. "That's what you can have." If she moved, if anything moved, if the light in the room changed, it hurt her. He could see that.

"How was school?" she asked, with her eyes closed.

"Good," he said. "Are you ready to go?"

She didn't answer for a long while and then she opened her eyes, as if she were startled to see him.

"Are you ready?"

"Oh-I thought I said-we don't have to go today. They decided I should take a day off because the radiation is making me so sick."

He sat down on the floor next to her, next to the dogs. He rested one of his hands near her hand, near where Shadow was sleeping, curled up like a lima bean against her hip.

"I thought the radiation was supposed to make you better."

"It will, honey. It just takes a while to kick in."

She turned to him. "Bruce is working at the Taylors' place-he's got so much work-but he wants to finish up there tonight. He's not going to come home until it's done, so he'll be late. You can go ahead and have what you brought for dinner."

"Okay," he said. Shadow's tail waved slowly up and down, grazing lightly against his hand.

"You got the application from the Vo Tech today."

"I saw."

"I know how well you'll do. You don't even have to go-you know so much about cars already-but they like you to have your degree, the places that hire now."

He took his shoes and socks off. "I heard your show today."

She didn't reply or make any indication that she heard him.

"It was the one about not taking sleeping pills. About how you can do things like drink chamomile tea instead." She'd done that with them for years, made them chamomile tea before bed. She grew the chamomile herself out in the yard. "Do you want some tea?" he asked, though it seemed she was already asleep.

"No thanks." She opened her eyes. "Aren't you hungry?"

"Kind of."

"Well, then, you should eat. But help me to bed first. I think I'll just spend the night in bed to get my strength back. I need you to arrange the pillows right." She stood up and he followed her into her room.

Once she was settled he sat on the couch eating the scalloped potatoes, picking out the peas. Even the dogs wouldn't eat the peas. He washed his plate and then dried it immediately and put it away, trying to be helpful. He got a gla.s.s of water to bring to his mother, to set on the shelf near her bed so it would be there when she woke, but then he couldn't make himself go into her room, feeling strange and shy all of a sudden. He could see her bare feet poking out from under the blankets from where he stood in the hallway. It struck him how familiar her feet were to him, even the calluses on the insides of her big toes. His stomach hurt, and he was acutely aware of all the sounds she made, the small moans and shallow coughs, her body s.h.i.+fting in bed. He went back into the living room and sat down on the couch in the nest of blankets his mother had left behind. He wished they had a television. He would never forgive his mother and Bruce for denying him that.

It was silent except for the damper of the wood stove clicking the way it did when the fire began to die down. He got up and stoked the stove and went to the phone. Why hadn't anyone called-Claire or Bruce? He dialed Claire's number and David answered, told him Claire was at work, that she worked until midnight, but would be "so glad to hear he'd called." Hearing David say this made him want to rip the phone out of the wall for a reason he could not comprehend. What did David know about him and Claire? What did David know at all?

"Do you want me to have her call you when she gets in-is it urgent?" He could imagine David sitting there with a little pad and pen, waiting to write down whatever he said. He said no thanks and hung up. He called R.J. and R.J. picked up.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Nothing," R.J. said. "What about you?"

"Nothing."

"Did you tell your mom and Bruce about getting suspended?"

"Nope." There was a corkboard near the phone and Joshua rearranged the thumbtacks so they formed a J.

"What are you going to do tomorrow?"

"Nothing," Joshua said.

When he hung up, he turned the lamp off and lay down on the couch. The moonlight cast shadows on the walls, on the outlines of the furniture and his mother's paintings. He sat up and looked out the window for a while at Lady Mae and Beau, who stood in their pasture, and then lay back down, covering himself up with the blankets.

A couple of hours later he woke with a start. He realized that his mother was up, that she was in the bathroom with the door open, its light beaming out in a bright rectangle on the floor several feet away from him. She coughed and then vomited into the toilet and he sat up, listening, wide-awake.

"Mom?" he said, without getting up to go to her.

She didn't hear him, but continued to vomit, roaring now, and then choking and roaring again. When she was done he heard her crying softly, still leaning against the seat of the toilet, her voice echoing against the bowl.

Incrementally, he lay back down and closed his eyes, pretending so fiercely to still be asleep that he began to believe it himself, not so much that he was sleeping but not present-the way he believed himself to be invisible to Claire when he was very young and they would play hide and seek, even when he was standing in full view.

At last his mother stopped crying and blew her nose. He could hear the squeak of the cold-water faucet and the water running, his mother lapping it into her hands and splas.h.i.+ng it onto her face several times, and then finally she turned the water off and called his name.

He didn't answer. He stayed so still he hardly allowed himself to breathe. He willed himself to relax his hands, which were clasped tightly on his chest, releasing them bit by bit, trying to make them look like the hands of a sleeping person.

"Jos.h.i.+e," she said again. Then, "I'm sick, honey." Her voice wavered, squeaked, gave way to tears. "I'm just so, so sick, and I need your help."

He was asleep. He could not help her because he couldn't know she needed it. She would walk into the room and see that any minute. He clamped his eyes shut, waiting for her, willing her to come. He breathed through his nose, concentrating on allowing the breath to go further than just to the tops of his lungs. He would never go to her. Nothing in him would. She would gather herself, he knew, and then walk into the living room and see him on the couch and he would pretend to wake up in response to her presence and she'd say, "Why don't you go to bed?" and he would stumble past her, up the stairs, a pattern the two of them repeated at least a couple of nights a week.

But she didn't. With new vigor she said, "Josh, I need you to go get Bruce. I need to go to the hospital. I'm too sick. I'm very, very, very sick."

Delicately, without moving his hands, with one finger, then another, he applied pressure to his chest, as if he were playing a keyboard. It calmed him. He pressed harder and harder against his rib bones, with one finger, then the next.

"Oh, G.o.d," his mother whimpered. "Just one thing. Just don't let me die. I don't want to die." Her voice cracked and she sobbed. He'd never heard her sob like that. n.o.body had ever sobbed like that. With such velocity, at such length. She sobbed so hard that Tanner and Spy rose simultaneously from where they lay near Joshua and went to her, their nails clicking along the floor, and stood and barked at her.

"Shhh ..." she said finally. He could imagine her hands. How they went to her face to brush her tears away, how she would push her hair back behind her ears, collecting herself, and then he heard her scratching the dogs' necks the way they liked it, so robustly that he could hear the metals on their collars jangling.

"It's okay," she said in her baby voice, sounding exactly like herself now. "You're worried about Mommy, aren't you? Mommy made you upset, but now it's okay. Mommy's fine. And now you have to be quiet. You have to be good dogs. You don't want to wake Josh."

7.

AT FIVE IN THE MORNING Claire took a long bath. She closed her eyes and almost dozed off, then woke, confused, believing for an instant that she was in her apartment in Minneapolis. But she had been home, in Midden, for two weeks, shuttling back and forth to the hospital in Duluth to sit with her mother, trading off s.h.i.+fts with Bruce. He took the nights; Claire, the days. In the dark of each evening she'd return home exhausted, but then she would not be able to sleep. She would walk through the house turning on lamps in rooms she wasn't using, and then walk through them again turning them off. She cuddled with the dogs; pulled with mock enthusiasm on the knotted ropes they'd offered her to play tug of war. She'd wish that Joshua would come home and talk to her, though on the couple of occasions he did come home, she wished he'd leave.

She got out of the tub and dressed by the light of the candle that burned from an old wine bottle on the edge of the tub. Several minutes before, she'd heard Bruce's truck driving up the driveway, and then she heard him come into the house. Joshua was home too, still asleep. She switched the bright light on and watched herself in the mirror, solemnly brus.h.i.+ng her wet hair. She thought of her mother, alone at the hospital, an unbearable thought. Usually Claire tried to be at the hospital by now, but this morning she had trouble making herself get out of the tub.

"How is she?" Claire asked when she walked into the kitchen.

"The same," said Bruce.

It was dawn, but dark still. She opened the refrigerator and took out a carton of eggs. "As when? As yesterday?"

"As yesterday." He sat at the table drinking coffee from the small metal cup that went with his Thermos.

She made scrambled eggs and toast and put it on two plates and set them on the table. Bruce made a sandwich with his and dug into it hungrily with big bites, his elbows resting on the table.

"So, when you mean the same as yesterday, how do you mean?" she asked, not touching her food. "Because actually she was fine when I left last night, though she'd had some rough patches during the day."

Bruce set his sandwich down. He looked at her and his face got tight as though he were about to say something, but then he didn't, and instead he reached over and rubbed Claire's shoulder.

"She's very tired," he said after a while.

Yesterday Teresa had begun to say strange things, to see people who were not there, to insist the phone was ringing when it wasn't. One of the doctors had asked Claire to go out into the hall with him so he could tell her "it didn't look good." She had gotten into an annoying conversation with him that centered around her trying to get him to define his terms. All of them. What did it mean? What did look mean? What did he mean by good? Teresa had been admitted into the hospice section of the hospital a couple of weeks ago not because she was dying, but because all of the beds in oncology were full, but now that there were beds available, the doctors had decided that there was no use in moving her.

Joshua came into the kitchen dressed, but hardly awake, his hair poking out in different directions. "Morning," he said.

"There are eggs for you," Claire said, gesturing toward the stove.

Joshua got himself a plate and scooped the eggs from the pan and sat down at the table.

"You can go with me today, Josh. Mom will like that."

He slowly chewed his toast, which was covered with chokecherry jam that Teresa had made last fall. "I was gonna go and see Randy about that truck."