Torch (16 page)

Claire wiped her face with the balled-up tissue. She got the hiccups and listened hard. It was immensely helpful.

“So now you’re friends with the Bible thumper,” her mother said the next morning. And then, before Claire could answer, “To think it was me who raised you.”

“Pepper isn’t a Bible thumper. Anyway—who said we’re friends? I talked to her once. I wouldn’t call that friends.”

“I’m not going to say a word about it,” Teresa said. She tapped her feet together. “Far be it from me to tell you what to do. I always raised you to think for yourself. You want God, go take a walk in the woods. Read a book. Read Emily Dickinson! What are you reading these days? Don’t tell me it’s some religious blather.”

“
Mom.
”

Claire told Teresa about Pepper almost being murdered by a rightwing death squad, about the Navajo reservation, and about her new husband, Keith.

Teresa scratched her arm, softening. “It isn’t that I am against faith,” she said warily. “I’m against the thinking that says that humans are shameful and bad. I know all about that, thank you very much. Had it shoved down my throat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for eighteen years, but I kept you and Joshua from all that.”

“Why’d you have us baptized then?”

Teresa turned to Claire, alarmed, like an eagle with its feathers ruffed up.

“I was weakened by childbirth, for your information. I was in a maternal daze. It was what you did with babies then, smarty-pants. Plus, in case all that mumbo-jumbo about going to hell turns out to be true, you’ll have me to thank later. I was safeguarding you against eternal damnation.”

“Well, you can’t have it both ways, Mom.”

“Fine. I’m a terrible mother. I did everything wrong. Forgive me.”

“I’m not saying that. I’m saying that Pepper is not a Bible thumper.”

“Apparently not,” Teresa said grimly.

“What?”

“I said okay!”

Claire sat in the wide bay of the windowsill.

“What’s it doing out there?” asked Teresa.

“Snowing.”

They sat in silence for several minutes and then Claire said, “It’s nothing, Mom. I just talked to Pepper. I’m not going to be a Jesus freak now.”

“I know, honey.” Her voice lilted from the morphine in a way that
Claire had come to recognize. “I don’t mean to argue. I understand you perfectly. You’re just exactly like me. A seeker.”

In slow increments, she turned her head toward Claire sitting in the window.

Once her mother had fallen asleep, Claire walked down the hallway, but differently now, self-consciously trolling, looking for Bill without allowing herself to believe that. She passed his wife’s room, keeping her gaze straight ahead and then after a while she heard her name being called.

“You want to grab some lunch?” Bill asked, coming toward her. His face was marked with creases on one side, as if he’d been lying down.

They walked to a place a couple of blocks from the hospital called the Lakeshore Lounge. The bar was dark, windowless, lit with dim yellow light bulbs and Leinenkugel beer signs. They ordered vodka and grapefruit juice and sat down in a booth. The only other person in the place was the bartender, an old lady with painted-on eyebrows who sat on a stool and watched television.

Bill told Claire that he’d grown up in Fargo and had joined the Navy and spent most of two years on a ship in the Middle East. He’d married his high school sweetheart, a woman named Janet, before he went into the Navy and by the time he’d returned Janet had a tattoo of a fire-breathing dragon on her ass and was running around with a man called Turner, who was the leader of a Manitoba motorcycle gang.

“Such is life,” he said, sipping tentatively from his drink. It meant something to him that they had the same kind of drink. Initially, he’d asked for beer. “Let me ask you this. You got a tattoo?”

Claire shook her head. Bill rolled his sleeve up and showed her the inside of his forearm: a cougar, ready to pounce.

“Take my advice and don’t. It’s a bad idea, especially for women.”

“I’ve thought about it. Maybe a chain of daisies.”

“Anyhoo,” he said. “After all that with Janet, I took my broken heart to Alaska to work in a salmon cannery. Now that’s good money. But that’s work. That’s not like what passes for work with some of these guys. These white shirt types. That’s where I met Nancy. She worked at the cannery too—women do it too—but that’s not where we got together. Where we got together is about five years later when I moved to Duluth to take a job—I schedule the ships that go in and out of the harbor—and I thought, Who the heck do you know in Duluth? And I had
never forgotten about Nancy, you know. I met her and never forgot her and I knew she was from Duluth, so I looked in the phone book and thought, Why the heck not call her up? The rest, as they say, is history.”

Bill asked Claire where she lived, who her family was, whether she liked the Minnesota winters or not, if she’d ever been to California. He wanted to know what her favorite movie was, if she believed that life existed on other planets, if she ever wanted to have children.

“We were planning on kids, but then
boom
—Nancy has cancer.” He looked around the room. There was a row of video games across from them repeating a display of wrecking balls and exploding rockets, automobile crashes and little hooded men wielding axes. “So are we going to have lunch or not?” he asked.

“I’m not hungry anymore.”

“Me, neither,” he said. “You want another drink?”

“I don’t know,” Claire said. She could feel the one drink running pleasantly through her. She had the sensation that everything was going to be okay, that her mother was not as sick as she seemed, and if she was, Claire could accept that fact with calm and reason. “I could go either way. I’ll have one if you do.”

“I don’t need one,” Bill said, and they sat in silence together.

A woman with a rash on her face came into the bar with a bucket of flowers and asked them if they would like to buy some and they said no, but then Bill called her back and bought a bouquet after all. Red carnations with a tassel of leaves and baby’s breath. He set them beside him on the seat.

“It’s nice to talk to you, Claire.”

“Yeah.”

“There aren’t many people you can talk to. People in this situation, so to speak.”

“No.”

“Nobody wants to hear it. Oh, sure, they want to know what they can do for you and so forth. That’s nice. But no one really wants to hear about it.”

“No,” Claire said. She was sitting on her hands. She rocked forward every few moments to sip from her straw. “I know exactly what you mean about all that.” People had carved messages and names into the table.
Tammy Z
. it said in front of her,
cunt
.

Bill coughed into his fist, then asked, “You got a boyfriend in Minneapolis?”

Claire told him about David, about what he was studying in graduate school—a mix of political science and philosophy, literature and history, but none of those things solely.

“I know the kind of thing you’re talking about. The humanities,” Bill said, coughing some more. “You go to bars much?”

“No. Not too much. Actually, I just turned twenty-one a few weeks ago.”

“No kidding,” he said, and fished an ice cube out of his glass and tossed it in his mouth. “You seem older. I’d’ve guessed twenty-five. You strike me as a sophisticated lady. You’ve got a way that’s very grown-up.”

He had a small, firm belly and a thick bush of graying hair on his head. Tufts of hair sprang from his eyebrows and nostrils and the backs of his hands. His ears were red and burly and sat like small wings. He reminded Claire, not unkindly, of a baby elephant, in a lordly, farcical way.

Claire crossed her legs under the table. She rattled her ice. “We should be getting back. My mom is probably waking up now.”

“Well. It was nice to get away. Everyone’s got a right to that from time to time.” He raked his hands through his hair, as if he were waking from a nap.

Claire was acutely aware of his body across the table, of her own pressing luxuriously back against the ripped-up vinyl. “Where do you live?” she asked.

“Not far from here. About a mile.”

He set his hands on the table and knocked on it with his knuckles. She reached out and set her hands lightly on top of his. He stayed still for a moment, then turned his hands over and laced his fingers into hers.

“Shall we?” he asked, after a while.

“Yes,” she said. “We shall.”

Bill’s house was white, surrounded by a picket fence, and cloistered in a thicket of pines. It sat a few steps below the street, but above everything else—the buildings of downtown Duluth, the lake. Claire could see the roof of the hospital far off and she pointed it out to Bill. It was freezing. Claire was shaking but impervious to the cold.

“The snow is sparkling like diamonds,” she said, idiotically.

“Diamonds?” Bill smiled at her curiously.

“I mean, the ice crystals. They’re sparkling,” she said, and blushed. “I like the word
sparkle
, don’t you? It’s one of my favorite words. Sometimes I’ll just be attracted to a certain word for no reason at all, but that it sounds nice. Or it looks nice on the page.”

“I can see what you mean,” he said, guiding her onto the porch. “Sparkle has a ring.”

They stepped into the house. Claire felt slightly dizzy, but alert, not at all like she’d had a drink and no lunch in the middle of the day. She took her coat off, and her gloves. She wanted to take everything else off as soon as possible so she’d stop being nervous. She wore jeans and a shirt that exposed a sliver of her lower abdomen, despite the cold, and boots that echoed loudly against the wooden floors as she followed Bill from room to room, on a tour.

“It’s lovely,” she kept saying, and it was. Every room was painted beautifully, a different color, but none of the colors clashed. She reached for the earring that she usually wore in her nose—often she twisted it when she was nervous—but it wasn’t there. More and more, she’d been forgetting to put it in before leaving for the hospital. She held her little braid instead, pulling on one of the tiny bells as he showed her the cabinets that he’d built, the place where there had once been a wall that he and Nancy had knocked down to let more light into the dining room, the hardwood floors they’d sanded and refinished themselves.

In the bathroom, where Bill left her alone at last, there was a bowl of stiff rose petals on a narrow shelf and a photograph of Bill and Nancy—both of them completely bald—with their heads tilted toward one another. Claire washed her hands and face with a bar of green soap that smelled like aftershave and then went into the living room.

“You like Greg Brown?” Bill asked her, holding a record, blowing on it, putting it on the turntable.

“I love him,” Claire said.

“This is some of his older stuff,” he said, and the music began.

“You never see records anymore.”

“I collect them.” He opened a cabinet with several shelves of albums. “I’ve got all kinds of music—anything you could want. Country, rock, classical, bluegrass, you name it.”

“Me, too. I mean, that’s what I like. All kinds.” The skin of her face was tight from the soap. She sat down on a blue couch and instantly stood up again. “So … come here,” she said, smiling like a maniac.

He took her hair by the ends and pressed it to his nose and smelled it. He wound it around his fingers, pulling her toward him, and kissed her. His mouth was cool and shaking and strange, but nice, nicer to her than anything. She shoved her hands into the back pockets of his jeans and felt his ass.

“I’m glad I met you,” he said.

“Me too. Take this off,” she said impishly, tugging at his shirt. He gathered her wrists in his hands and pulled her into the bedroom. The walls were the same color as the comforter on his bed. Amber, with an edge of smoke.

“Now,” he said, unbuttoning her shirt. They laughed awkwardly, pawed at each other. He bent to kiss her breasts, biting her nipples tenderly, and then harder. They teetered, finally onto his bed.

“Do you have a condom?” he asked her.

“No.”

But they went ahead anyway. It seemed impossible that she would get pregnant, that anything at all could be transmitted or take root or live in them. She knew it. He knew it. This didn’t make sense, but they were right.

Claire watched Bill’s face while they fucked. It was haggard and tense, as if he were concentrating on something either very far or very near, as if he were attempting to remove a splinter or thread a needle or telepathically shatter a glass in France. He saw her watching him and then his face became animated again, wide-eyed and carnivorous, until it crumpled as if he were about to sob in agony, and he came.

“That was nice,” he said after a while, looking up at her, straddled over him. She rolled off of him and lay down beside him. A mobile of fat chefs dangled overhead, and farther, down near their feet, a birdcage without a bird. He turned onto his side and placed his hand delicately on her stomach. He found her birthmark and petted it and outlined it with his finger, as if he’d known her all of her life.

“Was that weird for you?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“What was it like?”

He stood up, jerked his jeans on. “Like a million bucks.”

“There’s a lady down the hall who’s a high school teacher,” Claire said to her mother, even though she appeared to be sleeping. She was standing
by the window, looking out at the street below, from where she’d just come. There was a long silence, and then her mother’s low voice.

“What’s her name?”

Claire turned and went to stand by the bed, near her mother.

“Nancy Ristow.”

“Is she a visitor or a resident?” She smiled, a small glorious smile.

“Resident. She’s a history teacher.”

It was nearly four. Claire had had a panicked feeling when she and Bill had rushed back to the hospital, but when she’d entered her mother’s room, it was as if she’d never left.

“Ask her what she thinks happened to Amelia Earhart.”

“Who?”

“This teacher. Nancy.”

“Why?” Claire snapped.