Torch (19 page)

He hoped they wouldn’t be the ones to find him. But then, who else would? He imagined them trudging through the woods calling his name—at the time he decided to kill himself he didn’t know how quickly Teresa would die, so he could not know whether there would be snow in the woods or not—but for all of their sakes, he imagined there would be snow. Not this year’s snow, but next year’s snow. Snow that hadn’t even been formed yet, snow that wasn’t even remotely thinking about falling, snow
that would be made in the sky and let drop to the ground in the farthest reaches of the time that the doctor predicted Teresa could be expected to live. One year. And so, in next winter’s snow Claire and Joshua would be trudging through the woods calling his name. When he had first met them he had told them his name was not Bruce. They had been waiting for him in the parking lot of Len’s Lookout, but when he finally pulled up, they ran, frightened as wild animals who were instantly tamed once he called their names. “Are you Bruce?” asked Claire, giggling and hopping on one foot. “No,” he’d said, “I’m Bruce, Bruce-Bo-Buce-Banana-Fanna-Fo-Fuce …” They shrieked with delight when he was done and begged him to sing it again. Then he taught them the song using their own names. They scared him a little, how fast they loved him, how they clenched his hands with theirs as they sang, how later, at dinner, they did not want to sit beside him but on him, fighting with each other over his lap.

These children whom he had met when he was twenty-seven, these children who had been born in a state where he’d never been, these children whom he had bossed and cajoled, kissed and scolded, grounded and applauded and taught how to drive a stick shift, they would be his search party of two.

He did not think they would make a big ruckus. At first they would believe that he was sad and had simply gone out to chop wood. He was a worker, they’d always known him to work, and they would assume that it was to work he turned in his grief. Slowly, dimly, they would wonder why they didn’t hear the chain saw, the ax. They would stand first on the porch and call his name, and then in the driveway. Finally, before dark, they would go out to look for him. Claire would most likely be wearing the scarf her mother knitted for her, red, soft wool, with a white star near each end. Her nose would run and, along with the mist from her breath, the whole mess would freeze on her chin and on the scarf that pressed against it. She and Joshua would stop walking and listen for him, then hearing nothing, holler his name. They would look at each other and then into the trees despairingly. Possibly, Joshua, on some gut instinct, would be carrying the gun.

He attempted to keep from imagining their faces in the moment when they actually came upon his body hanging in the tree, but he could not keep the image from surfacing in his mind and the grief that shot through him as he lay in bed beside Teresa was so great that he almost decided to live.

Then it dawned on him that he could write a note.

Of course he could, and he would. The note would be left in the middle of the kitchen table and they would find it well before beginning to wonder where he was. In the note he would strongly discourage them from going into the woods themselves. He would
forbid
them from going into the woods. He would command them to call the sheriff. This was precisely the kind of thing the sheriff was for. He would write that he was sorry and that everything he owned belonged to them. His truck, his tools, the house and land. He assumed they would assume this, but since they were not related by blood or in any way legally bound to him, he did not want them to have any trouble. His note would serve as his will. He would tell them other things they already knew but would need to hear one last time. That he had loved their mother and he loved them like his own children since day one. He would write that they should stick together and take care of each other—they only had each other now—and that someday in many, many, many years they would all be together as a family again, reunited in heaven. He did not necessarily believe in heaven, and they knew this, but neither did he
not
believe in it, and he hoped they knew this too. For the sake of Joshua and Claire he would become a believer in heaven. Heaven would soften the blow.

In bed that first night beside Teresa, and then later, while he sat next to her hospital bed or lay in the cot the nurses had set up for him in her room, he wrote his note to Claire and Joshua in his mind over and over again. He scanned for other details, things he might have overlooked. He pictured himself hanging in the tree. And then the dogs came running up, right into the picture. Thank God he was planning ahead. He would have to leave Spy and Tanner inside—shut into a room—so they wouldn’t dash out when Joshua or Claire entered the house and go directly to the clearing to howl frightfully up at him hanging in the tree, causing Claire or Joshua to follow them, inevitably drawn, curious and entertained, before having noticed the note.

He would see to it that they absolutely noticed the note. This was his solemn vow, his version of keeping his promise to Teresa. Her children would never have to see their “father” dangling by a rope, with a broken neck, dead in a tree.

At the very end, Bruce confessed his plan to Teresa while she lay in her bed in the hospice wing of the hospital, but she made no response. Her skin was the texture of dust, her body like that of a paper doll. He
pinched her arm hard then—he had to do that sometimes, just to keep his sanity—and she opened her eyes like a drunkard and closed them and fell instantly back to sleep. They’d reached the point where her morphine dose needed to be so high that most of the time she slept or when she woke she spoke of things that made no sense—not even to her, when pressed to explain—though on occasion she was as conscious and lucid as if she’d simply arisen from a long, restorative nap.

“I’m going to kill myself,” he almost shouted, and then he put his head on the bed, too exhausted to weep. Again she did nothing. It was almost midnight. He’d just gotten off the phone with Claire, who’d called to report that she’d be there in the morning and at last—they believed—she’d have Joshua with her. They would arrive in the morning and then the long wait would begin, the vigil that the three of them would keep night and day in the hospital until it was
—the words were ridiculous
, Bruce thought,
he didn’t even want to use them
—over. Earlier in the evening a doctor had asked Bruce to come out into the hallway and informed him that Teresa was “actively dying.”

Afterward he hadn’t returned to her room. Instead he began walking, not knowing where he was going. The hallways were lit dimly, soothingly, good lights to die by, lit only by the glowing lights of vending machines, and punctured by the bright lights that spilled occasionally from patients’ rooms or the nurses’ station, a beacon at the center of everything. He passed the room of an angry hippie man who didn’t seem to be dying because he spent the better part of each evening dragging his IV to the third-floor patio where patients were allowed to smoke. He passed the room of an old man who was strapped into his bed by all four limbs. He passed the room of a frizzy-haired blond woman and noticed that she wasn’t there anymore, her bed now made with a clean white sheet, the room empty. Bruce had met her husband once. Bill. He imagined that Bill’s wife was dead now. He imagined it and didn’t feel a thing. Nor did he feel anything for the angry hippie man or the old man strapped in four places to his bed. In the smallest, hardest part of him he didn’t care if any of them suffered or died. He was sorry, but he couldn’t. To pity them would be to doom his wife.

He seemed to have no control over where his feet carried him. They carried him to the stairwell and then down five flights of stairs, each flight turned back on itself, until he had followed them as far as he could go. He went to the door that led back into the hospital and pushed it open.

Now he was in the basement, where the light was entirely different
from the hospice wing. Brutal and fluorescent: a comfort to him. He walked down the long hallway. There was no one in sight.
Maybe this is where the morgue is
, he thought. Farther down the hall, in an industrial-sized kitchen, a black woman dressed in white stirred a giant pot of something with a paddle. He passed several orange, windowless doors, all of them closed. His earliest sexual fantasies had involved these sorts of mysterious doors that occupied public, yet seemingly forbidden, spaces. At the age of nine he’d been told by a friend’s older brother that gangs of beautiful naked women waited behind such doors, harems of sex-starved beauties, locked in, yearning for a man to walk through. He hadn’t thought of this for years, and a remote, perverse ache thrummed through him. He walked past a pay phone and then stopped and went back to it and dialed his home phone number. Claire didn’t pick up until the answering machine had and he’d spoken into it.

“Bruce,” she said, her voice sounding clogged, as if she had a cold, though he knew she didn’t.

“What’s happening?” he asked.

“Nothing … Josh—he’s allegedly out ice fishing with R.J. That’s what Vivian said. I’m waiting for him to come back and then we’ll come first thing in the morning. What’s happening there?”

“Things have …” How was he going to say it? He decided to say what the doctor had first said to him. “It seems as though this is it.” He wasn’t going to say what the doctor had said second. That she was dying.
Actively
.

“It?” howled Claire. She made a noise, like she was choking, gasping for air, but he pushed through it.

“So you should come with Josh as soon as you can.”

“But Josh is out ice fishing,” she said through her tears, her voice high-pitched and jagged. “And I’m afraid my Cutlass will get stuck if I drive out to the ice house to get him.”

“Well, then just wait until he comes back. We have some time, Claire. Come when you can.”

“Okay,” she said intently, as if he’d just given her a complicated list of instructions, and then hung up the phone without saying goodbye. He hung up too and then began to walk down the hall again, in the same direction he’d been heading, still not knowing where he was going or why. Maybe he would find a door that led out into the parking garage. He’d go there and look at cars.

“Excuse me,” a woman’s voice called from behind him.

He turned. He felt that he was being busted for something. Like trespassing.

“I could use a hand if you don’t mind.”

It was the woman who’d been stirring with the paddle in the kitchen. Before Bruce could move or reply, she turned and disappeared back into the doorway from which she’d emerged. He walked quickly down the long length of the hallway until he came to the kitchen again and he entered, weaving his way past enormous cooking machinery, until he got to where she stood.

“I need some muscle,” she explained. The woman’s hair was covered with a translucent plastic cap. She wore gold earrings shaped like turtles with little green gems for eyes. “I don’t know if they told you, but the guys in maintenance usually help me out when I need it since I’m here by myself for a couple of hours.”

He followed her to the gigantic pot that she had been stirring. It was full of a green liquid: Jell-O before it set.

“I’ve got to get this from the pot into these pans.” She gestured to more than a dozen pans lined up on a long wooden counter. “It’s real heavy, so it takes two.”

She gave him a pair of silver insulated mitts, burnt in places along each thumb. Bruce put them on and then gripped the handle on one side of the pot and the woman took the other handle and together they poured the liquid into the pans, working their way carefully down the counter, filling each one.

“Thanks,” she said, after they’d set the empty pot down. She took off her mitts and wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of one hand. “How do you like it so far?”

“Like what?”

“Maintenance,” she said. “Aren’t you the new guy?”

He put his hands in his pockets and shook his head. “I was just taking a walk.”

“Oh!” She laughed deeply, throwing her head back. “All right, then. Well, I guess you fooled me,” she said, waving him away, turning back to her Jell-O. “I guess you’re just a Good Samaritan.”

He stood there for a few more moments, watching her slide the pans onto a cart that held each of them in racks, one on top of the other. She began to roll the cart, pushing on it with all of her weight, and he stepped forward to help her.

“I got it,” she said, pushing harder, so the cart pulled away from his hands. She opened a door that led to a walk-in cooler and then guided the cart in. “Happy St. Paddy’s Day,” she called to him. She came out of the cooler and slammed the door shut behind her. “It’s tomorrow. That’s why I made green.”

But by then he was already gone.

When he returned to Teresa’s room, Pepper Jones-Kachinsky was sitting next to her, holding her limp arm, two fingers pressed against Teresa’s wrist.

“I’m checking her pulse,” she whispered, without looking up.

Bruce watched her for several moments, the silent concentration of her face as she counted his wife’s heartbeats. Teresa didn’t stir or give any indication that she was aware of Pepper by her side, or of his presence in the room. She’d never met Pepper, technically speaking.

“It’s an ancient Chinese practice,” she said when she was done. “A holistic method. They believe you can learn everything you need to know about the condition of the patient from the pulse, and then you respond accordingly.”

He nodded. He didn’t have the heart to ask her what she had divined. He wanted only to be alone with his wife. Pepper came in the evenings to visit Bruce, and he imagined she’d been of some comfort to Claire in the daytime. He supposed he was grateful for that. Pepper meant well, and yet whenever he was in her presence it was as if a wasp were loose in the room.

“How
are
you?” she asked, standing up, coming to him. She took both of his hands and squeezed and looked directly into his eyes and would not look away. She did this every time she looked at him.

“Okay.” He turned to Teresa, and then Pepper did too. Teresa’s face in repose was as delicate and tranquil as a shell.