Torch (18 page)

The bag of frozen dinners shifted without either of them touching it.

“It didn’t take anything away from what you had with Nancy,” Claire said. “I never thought that.”

“No. Definitely not. My allegiance was always with her. No offense. I think you’re wonderful. You’re one very pretty girl. And smart too.
Kind.” He clutched the edge of the counter. “And what am I when Nancy needs me most? I’m a pathetic old man.”

“You aren’t old.”

“Not old. But to you I am. I’m too old for you. I lost my morals.”

Claire stared at the floor. A spoon had fallen there, crusted with hair and what looked like bits of dried chocolate pudding.

“Plus, what was I doing gallivanting around and meanwhile she’s dying?”

“She was sleeping. She didn’t even know you were gone.”

“Oh, she
knew
. She
knew
.” He put his hand to his forehead and pressed hard.

“We weren’t gallivanting anywhere. We were at your house.”

He kept his hand pressed to his forehead. Claire bent to pick up the dirty spoon and set it soundlessly in the sink.

“Well,” he said. “I wish you the best. I’m hoping for a miracle for your mom.”

“Thank you.” She touched his hand on the counter and they looked at each other, their eyes as serious as animals. He took her hand and kissed it and then pulled her into him and held her hard against him. His breathing was heavy and she thought he’d started to cry again, but when she looked at him his eyes were calm and dry.

“Claire,” he said, but didn’t say anything more. His fingers began to slowly graze her throat, down over the top of her chest, over her breasts, barely touching her. He grabbed her face with both of his hands and kissed her fiercely and then stopped abruptly. “What am I doing?” he asked sadly, and then pulled her back to him and squeezed her hips, her ass, her thighs.

“Stop it then,” she said. She unbuckled his belt, unzipped his jeans, got down on her knees.

“This is completely wrong.”

“Stop me then,” she hissed. She took his cock in her mouth. She had the sensation that he was going to hit her; that he was going to smack the side of her head or yank her away from him by the hair. She also had the sensation that she wanted him to do this, though she had never wanted this from a man. She wanted something to be clear, right, and she wanted him to be the one who made it that way.

“Jesus,” he whispered, and leaned back against the wall and gripped onto it to keep him up.

She smelled his man smells, his cock smells: a sour salt, a sharp sub-aqueous mud. He came without a word and she sat back on her heels and swallowed hard. She touched the hairs on his thighs, kissed one knee.

He reached for the sides of her face. “Oh,” he moaned. “I can’t stand up.”

“Something about you sitting in that window reminds me of when you were little,” Teresa said to Claire as the sun rose through the windows. “Sometimes I see your face and I can see just exactly what you looked like when you were a baby and other times I can see what you’ll look like when you’re old. Do you know what I mean? Does that same thing happen to you?”

“Yeah. I know what you mean,” Claire said, turning from the window to her mother, grateful that she had spoken at such length. “Are you feeling better?” she asked. “We were scared. You hardly woke up all yesterday. You slept for like twenty hours straight. And then you were weird.”

“I needed my sleep,” Teresa said. “Where’s Bruce?”

“Getting coffee. It’s about six, Mom. In the morning.”

“Where’s Josh?”

“I don’t know,” she snapped, then caught herself and continued more gently, “He’ll be here in a little bit.” She got down from the windowsill and pulled a chair up next to her mother, coiling her way through the IV lines.

“Yes. Come sit with me,” Teresa said, her words slurred from the morphine. “That’s what I’m glad of. That you’re here with me. I’ll never forget you were here with me during the hardest time. And sitting the way you were in the window, it made me think of that, of all the things, of you and Joshua being little and now being grown-up.”

“We’re not grown-up.”

“Almost. You almost are.”

Claire tugged on a thread that dangled from the edge of the blanket that covered her mother; it caught, still attached.

“It was the same way when you used to sit in that window in Pennsylvania. Do you remember the window seat in the apartment in Pennsylvania?”

Claire shook her head.

Teresa smiled. “Oh, sure. You were too small then. You wouldn’t remember.
But that was
your spot
. You liked to sit in that window seat and wait for the mail to come.” She paused, as if a wave of nausea were about to overtake her, but then continued. “You liked to see the mailman come and put the mail in the box and then you wanted to be the one to go and take it out. You
had
to be the one! You always liked to be involved with things, to be a helper, to be at the center.”

“I don’t remember,” she said, and leaned forward to rest her head on the bed, the top of her head pressing into her mother’s hip.

“Well, that’s how you were,” Teresa said happily. “It’s how you are.”

“How’s that?”

“The way I taught you to be. Good.”

Teresa lifted her hand from the bed. Softly, she stroked Claire’s hair.

B
RUCE DID NOT WONDER
. He knew. He had not a single doubt about what he would do after Teresa died. It played in his mind like a movie with him as the only character, its solo shining star. He knew
before
she died—seven weeks to the very day, it turned out, to everyone’s sorrow and surprise. The knowledge of what he would do did not come to him immediately, in the moment they learned that she had cancer, but later on that night, in the wee hours of the next morning, after they’d left the hospital and gone—amazingly—to eat dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and then driven home and lain in bed thinking they would make love, but then not been able to make love because they were weeping so hard and Teresa’s back hurt.

Her back did more than hurt.

Hurt
was too small a word to contain what was going on in her back. It was
killing
her, she’d said before they’d found out about the cancer. Once she’d said it afterward too, about a week after they knew about the cancer, when the reality had hunkered down and stayed. “My back is killing me,” she’d muttered, turning to him in the kitchen, holding two glasses of water, one for each of them, in the short window of time they had when a thing such as holding two glasses of water did not seem to them an utterly Herculean task. He looked at her and for a moment they both hesitated, as if taking a breath in unison. They’d been balling their brains out since noon. Her back
was
killing her, they realized, and then they almost fell onto the floor laughing in hysterics. The water was dropped. The glasses were shattered. Their house was a madhouse from that moment on. Nobody gave a fuck about a glass.

It felt like a zipper, she’d explained to the doctor that day they’d found out. That her spine was a zipper and someone was coming up behind her and zipping it and unzipping it mercilessly. She’d almost cried
saying this, almost seemed to grovel and beg. It pained him. He rose and went to stand behind her chair and rubbed her back uselessly. The doctor nodded his head, as if he’d known about the zipper all along, as if people marched through his door every day to complain about mechanical devices embedded in their spines.

Later, they learned her spine
was
a zipper, the cancer pulling it apart, stitching it back together in a way that it was never meant to be. Her lungs were also a zipper, and likewise her liver, and ovaries, and parts of her body they didn’t even know were there. It was like a root that went on and on, blocking the way no matter where they dug. Even the doctor used these words. The zipper. The root. Nothing was a metaphor. With Teresa’s cancer the most absurd things were literal.

And so Bruce, by necessity, was literal too. He wasn’t kidding when he decided that after Teresa died he would kill himself. He had not, in his life, in his
before Teresa has cancer
life, been the type of person to say, “I would just die” or “It made me want to die” or anything along those ridiculous lines, the way people did when they in fact had no intention or desire to actually die—when they thought they were being funny or needed to exaggerate a point.

Bruce was not a man to exaggerate. He would truly, absolutely, cross-his-heart die.

He would live through the funeral and then he would act. He reasoned this would give Joshua and Claire a moment to catch their breath, but not enough time to even begin to accept their reality. Reality for Joshua and Claire would be that, in one horrible week, they lost their mother and then their father. Not what they called their
real father
, a man named Karl they scarcely knew, but their stepdad, their
Bruce
, the guy they’d loved as their father since they were six and eight. Of course they would grieve their mother harder. Bruce did not begrudge them that, but still he knew his death would be a mighty hard blow. It did not make him happy to think of them and what they would do all by themselves; in fact, it pierced his heart. But the pain of that was not as great as the pain of having to go on living without their mother, and so his mind was made up. If this was to work, he could not afford compassion and he could also not afford pity. Not for Claire, not for Joshua, not for Teresa.

Regrettably, he had promised Teresa things on which he was simply not going to be able to follow through. At the time that he made the promises, he had not lied. The promises had been made dry-eyed and
immediately, while they ate that first night in the Chinese restaurant, before he’d known what he would do. Of course he said he would raise her children, who were essentially both already raised.

“But they still need their mother,” Teresa had crooned, almost losing it entirely. Years before, she had told him that her secret way of collecting herself was to think of things, things that had nothing to do with anything. Often, she kept herself from crying by thinking
can of beans, can of beans
, again and again. In the Chinese restaurant, while she had gazed at the goldfish, he wondered if she was thinking
can of beans
. She didn’t seem to be. She seemed to be honestly concerned about the fish. Out loud, she wondered if they were hungry and looked around, as if for food, and then her eyes latched back onto him.

She told him she wanted to discuss this issue once and right away and then they would never speak of it again.

Yes, he would be there for Claire and Joshua, Bruce told her. Yes, he would be both mother and father. Neither of them at this point had actually absorbed the information that she was truly going to die soon. They’d been told, but they didn’t believe. For that blessed hour in the Chinese restaurant his future life as a widower played before him sweetly as a benign dream. It was the movie that played in his mind before the movie of him killing himself supplanted it. He would comfort Joshua and Claire in their grief. He would hold them and weep and remind them of all the things their mother had said and done. He would tell them things they hadn’t known—how their mother used to think
can of beans
when she didn’t want to cry. The three of them would go on a camping trip—perhaps they’d canoe down the Namekagon River like they’d done several times as a family—or to Florida, to Port St. Joe, where they’d been with their mother, before they knew him. This trip would heal their grief. They would laugh, they would weep, they would return home stronger and better and basically okay. They would take this trip annually, to commemorate the anniversary of her death. When they married he would walk them down the aisle and give them a special flower that represented their mother. Their children would call him
grandpa
or maybe simply
papa
, the name he’d called his own dad’s dad.

At the Chinese restaurant, Teresa had put her hands over his on the table. “I wasn’t questioning you. I hope you know that,” she said. “I know how much you love them. It’s just that I needed it all to be spoken out loud.”

She took her hands away and looked again into the pond and it was done.

There was nothing administrative to take care of. She had not written a will, but why should she? She had no life insurance policy. The land and the house would of course someday go to the kids. This, they hadn’t even thought to say.

Later that night almost everything he’d promised was washed away by his new plan. He decided he would live five, maybe six days without her. They would have the funeral and he would wait a day, letting everyone get a good night’s sleep, and then he would make his move.

Once the idea came to him it took about five minutes to make up his mind between rope or gun. He chose the rope. He was not a hunter. The gun in their house had been used for only three purposes: to scare away the raccoons that came on occasion to harass the hens, to scare away the porcupines that came to gnaw the wood of their front stairs, and to teach them all how to shoot the gun so they, when necessary, could scare away the raccoons and the porcupines. If he used the gun, there was a chance he would botch the job. He knew how to tie a knot. He knew how to tie
seventeen
knots, each perfect for one task or another. This, he owed to his mother, whose father had been a sailor on the Great Lakes and who had insisted that he learn all the knots that her father had taught her.

First he imagined the exact knot he would use, then he imagined the exact tree. It was a maple. It grew in the place on their land they called “the clearing”—a small meadow, the only meadow on their forty acres amid the trees—a good spot to die. The place calmed him. He and Teresa and Claire and Joshua had had many good times there. When he could honestly picture himself hanging dead from the maple tree in the clearing he was more sorry than ever about Claire and Joshua. But in this he had to be selfish. He knew what he could do and what he could not do and he could not go on living without Teresa no matter how much he loved her kids.