Torch (31 page)

“And then we’ll have our little celebration,” Claire said, without looking at him. She didn’t want him to notice that her face was puffy from having wept a few hours before. While the cake baked, she’d pressed a cool washcloth against the lids of her eyes.

“So, how was Duluth?” Bruce asked.

“Fine.” She set the spatula down and turned the cake from side to side to make sure she’d covered all the bare spots. It was their tradition to eat cake for breakfast on their birthdays. “Actually, it’s there.” She pointed to the box of her mother’s ashes, which sat inside the curio cabinet. After David left, she had placed it there, among her mother’s best things, among the breakables and fragiles that she had purchased at flea markets over the years and a few worthless family heirlooms. There was a collection of dinner bells and half a dozen porcelain birds and a single open fan, made of white feathers tipped in black, that had once belonged to a relative that Claire couldn’t name. As a child Claire used to beg to be allowed to play with this fan and would sometimes be granted permission. She would twirl it before her face, then peep coquettishly over it, pretending to be a beautiful debutante at a ball, vigorously fanning herself with it until her bangs lifted from her forehead.

Bruce went to the cabinet and looked in, but he didn’t open the door to touch the box.

“I was thinking we could spread the ashes next weekend,” she said.

Bruce nodded and pulled his boots on and went outside.

Claire walked through the house, picking things up, wiping the surfaces of tabletops and shelves whether they needed it or not, arranging the pillows neatly on the couch. She stopped at the doorway of her mother and Bruce’s bedroom—it was only Bruce’s now, but still she thought of it as theirs—and looked in at the unmade bed. Dust had settled on all of the surfaces; this room and Joshua’s were the only two that Claire left untouched each weekend. She stepped inside and lay down on the bed, remembering the nights she had slept there when her mother and Bruce were at the hospital and Joshua was God knows where. She had thought those were the worst nights of her life. But now she knew how wrong she’d been. How sweet they were, those nights when her mother was still alive, when in the mornings Claire could drive to the hospital and see her and say hello, to ask how did you sleep or did you
have breakfast, or to be asked these things and to answer in return. She lay staring at the objects on the table on her mother’s side of the bed—a green lamp shaped like a tulip, an alarm clock, and a tune box that Bruce had put there after Teresa died. Claire sat up and opened the little drawer beneath the table.

“What are you looking for?” Joshua asked, standing in the door.

“Nothing,” she said. She shut the drawer. His face was still sleepy, his feet bare. He wore a T-shirt that had
MIDDEN MONARCHS
printed on the front, a relic from their childhood, back when the Midden school team was still the Monarchs, before the school in Two Falls closed down and all the students had to transfer to Midden and together they became the Pioneers.

“You’re snooping around again.”

“Not snooping. Looking.”

“For what?” he said.

“For things,” she said nonchalantly, though the question rattled her.
What was she looking for?
It hadn’t occurred to her until this very moment that looking was what she’d been doing every weekend since her mother died. Searching for something she would never find.

“Mom had this vibrator thing that was like the size of a lipstick,” said Joshua. He paused, waiting for Claire to react. When she didn’t, he continued on. “I found it in a shoebox in the closet.”

She turned to the closed doors of her mother’s closet, stunned that Joshua had gotten there before her.

“I wasn’t snooping like you, though. I just needed the box,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “It’s all still there for you to explore.”

She felt a strange gratitude. She had to keep herself from pulling the doors open this very instant, continuing the search.

“I thought David was coming up with you.”

“He was. I mean, he did, and …” A temptation to tell him the truth pulsed through her, but then she waved her hand as if the story was too complicated to explain. “He had to get back to the Cities.”

He nodded.

Claire looked at the painting at the end of the bed, the one their mother had done,
The Woods of Coltrap County
, and then Joshua turned to it as well. She didn’t know if he remembered that the three trees represented the three of them—she and her mother and Joshua. She didn’t know what he remembered or knew or what his life was like now. Until
recently she’d always believed she’d known—what he did, what he thought, who he liked and didn’t like. She hadn’t had to work at knowing these things. They’d been, all her life, on full display, and in more recent years, when she hadn’t looked closely, hadn’t even really wanted to know who her brother was, it had been telegraphed to her through her mother and Bruce.

“Aren’t you going to say happy birthday?” he asked.

“I did.” She stood. “When you first came in. But happy birthday again,” she said, thumping him on the shoulder as she walked past.

He followed her into the kitchen. It had begun to rain, and the house had grown dark though it was only ten in the morning, a storm moving in. Claire reached to close the window over the kitchen sink. Outside the tree branches were waving violently in the wind. “So what does it feel like?” she asked Joshua. “Being eighteen.”

“Like normal,” he said.

She wanted to say something meaningful about him being grownup now, but she couldn’t think of what exactly to say, so she said nothing.

Bruce came running in the door, wet from the rain and the dogs wet too, running in behind him. A loud clap of thunder sounded and then the rain began in earnest, beating hard against the roof. “Your tent’s getting soaked,” he said to Claire.

“What tent?” asked Joshua.

Together they went to the window and looked out. She’d neglected to zip the tent door entirely shut, she saw now. A pool of water was forming on its nylon roof. She thought of David in Minneapolis, packing his things.
Maybe he was watching this same rain, thinking about her
, she thought. Maybe he would be waiting for her when she arrived at their apartment tonight and they’d take back all the things they’d said. They’d pull their contract out and read it over, vowing to obey it this time.

“I’m ready for cake,” said Joshua.

“Me too,” said Bruce. “Happy birthday, by the way.”

Claire got a tube of icing from the refrigerator to put the final touches on the cake.

“So guess what?” Bruce asked lightly as he poured himself a cup of coffee. “I joined the softball team. The Jake’s team.”

“
Jake’s?
” Claire asked suspiciously, pausing in her work to look at him.

“Yeah.”

“Since when did you like softball?” asked Joshua.

“I always liked softball,” he answered, unconvincingly, stirring the sugar into his cup. “And Jake’s needed more players, so I thought, well, it’s something to do. I have to keep myself busy or I get depressed.”

“What’s wrong with being depressed?” asked Claire. “Of
course
you’re depressed. Something horrible just happened. That’s how we’re
supposed
to be. Plus, you seem to be coping,” she said. “You’re back at work.”

“Which is my point. If I stay busy, then I’m fine. Softball gives me something to do when I’m not at work.”

“What about your knees?” asked Joshua.

“My knees are fine,” he said defensively. “It’s softball, for Christ’s sake. Why would it hurt my knees?” He looked helplessly at each of them. “It’s something to keep me occupied.”

“Leonard is going to be pissed,” said Joshua.

“That’s what I was wondering,” agreed Claire, assessing her cake. “What Leonard and Mardell will think.”

“Why would they think
anything?
” he asked them, and then continued without waiting for a reply. “If you mean will he be mad about why I’m not playing on his team, I think you’re being ridiculous.”

Claire set the cake on the table and forced a smile onto her face.

“There you go, cowpoke,” Bruce said.

The cake was covered with yellow frosting and on its round surface there was a giant smiling face, a black stripe for a mouth and two black dots for eyes. “I was going to write happy birthday,” she explained, “but then I thought this would look more cheery.”

“It does,” said Joshua.

There was a long silence. Claire regretted now not having written
Happy Birthday Joshua
on it, the way they always had. She felt the presence of her mother so strongly now, even more strongly than before, as if the box that contained her ashes wasn’t sitting in the curio cabinet but on her chest.

“With all this cake, it’s too bad David isn’t here to help us,” Bruce said.

“I’ll bring a piece home for him,” Claire said.

“Is Lisa coming over?” Bruce asked Joshua. “I mean, later.”

Joshua shook his head and tilted back in his chair. “She’s gotta work.”

“We could ask Kathy Tyson if she wanted to come over for cake,” Bruce suggested, obviously straining to sound casual but trying so hard that Joshua and Claire abruptly looked up.

“Kathy Tyson?” Claire asked. She said the name distinctly, as if she’d never spoken it before, a sick panic filling her. Instantly, she remembered having sat next to Kathy at a wedding reception the year before. How eager Kathy had been to find a man. Claire had egged her on, giving her ideas, laughing and lamenting about men in the intimate way she did with her best women friends, though Kathy was almost as old as her mother. “Why would we invite Kathy?” She took a butcher knife from its block and set it near Joshua on the table.

“To be neighborly.”

“What about the other neighbors?” Joshua asked.

“We could invite them too,” Bruce said falsely. “It’s that we have all this cake.”

He had never worried about having too much cake before
, Claire thought. She felt that Bruce was emitting a sort of heat that rose to a vibration, and it occurred to her for the first time that he was different now, that the Bruce without her mother would not be who the Bruce with her mother had been.

“Do you two have something going on?” she blurted, feeling tears rise into her eyes. She shook white candles from a tiny box onto the table and began to push them one by one into the cake.

“We’ve become friends,” he said, too gently. “She’s been very good to me.”

“How so?” Joshua asked.

“She’s been a friend, you know. She’s there for me when I need to talk.”

Claire could feel Bruce watching her, waiting for her to say something, to press the subject harder, so the entire truth would come out. To do what she now realized she always did with him, and with Joshua too, to ask and ask until he said whatever it was he was too afraid to say all by himself. But she wouldn’t, she couldn’t. This was going to be a normal birthday party. This was going to be like it had always been before. She concentrated on arranging the candles in a formation that went all the way around the rim of the cake, her hands trembling. Satisfied with the candles at last, she looked up. “Who has a light?”

With his lighter Bruce moved from one candle to the next until all
eighteen were aflame, and then he turned off the lights. Claire pushed the cake toward Joshua, his face glowing above the candles.

“Are we going to sing?” Bruce asked.

“You don’t have to sing,” Joshua said.

“Absolutely, we’re going to sing,” roared Claire from the darkness.

And immediately, she began.

PART IV

All the conventions conspire

To make this fort assume

The furniture of home;

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

—W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939”

T
HE GIRL AT THE
Calhoun Square Mall ear-piercing shop wore a low-slung apron with three large pockets in the front. In one pocket she kept a purple marker, in another a purple gun, and in the last was her cell phone, which trumpeted like an electronic elephant the moment she pulled the trigger against the fat lobe of Bruce’s ear.

“Hey,” she said morosely into the phone, holding the gun in the other hand. Her hands were chubby, unlike the rest of her. Bruce waited on his stool, staring, inevitably, at the bony features of the girl’s bare abdomen. “Uh-huh,” she said into the phone. “Yes. Yes. No,” she said in the same monotone each time, with a contempt so entrenched that of all the people in the world the girl could possibly be talking to, Bruce knew it could only be either her mother or her father.

“Did it hurt?” Kathy asked, thumping on his back and then rubbing it, as if to warm him. The earring had been her idea.

“No,” he said, though his ear throbbed with a small, focused pain. He examined it in the star-shaped mirror that was framed by tiny light bulbs. It looked like it felt, like it had a fever. He touched the fake diamond stud, but the girl saw this and waved urgently at him to stop.