Torch (21 page)

“Do you want me to say it’s okay if you die?” Pepper had told him this, that Teresa might need permission. That dying people will often wait until the people who love them encourage them to let go. “Because it isn’t, Ter. It’s
not okay
. You have a life to live, and we have our lives to live, and everyone needs you, so you can’t just give up now. Do you hear me?”

She made no move or acknowledgment of him. He sat silently watching her until light began to filter into the room from the window, soft and pale, first purple, then blue.

He bent and took his boots off and then pulled off his jeans and unbuttoned his flannel shirt and tossed them both onto his cot and crawled into the bed beside her and arranged the blankets over them. She wore only her hospital gown, and he pushed it out of the way so he could feel her skin against him.

“Let’s watch the sun rise,” he whispered into her ear and then closed his eyes. He stroked her arm, tracing his fingers down to her wrist until he found her pulse. It was strong, like he knew it would be. And fierce and small and fast. Like a force that could not be stopped or changed or helped or harmed. Like a woman who would live forever.

PART III

… there is really no such thing as youth, there is only luck, and the enormity of something which can happen, whence a person, any person, is brought deeper and more profoundly into sorrow, and once they have gone there, they can’t come back, they have to live in it, live in that dark, and find some glimmer in it.

—Edna O’Brien,
Down by the River

E
IGHT DAYS AFTER TERESA DIED
, Bruce woke in a field.

He was still alive. It took him several moments to understand this, as he lay numb from the cold under the blue morning sky. The horses hovered over him, making chuffing sounds with their warm brown noses, and he listened to them without opening his eyes. For those moments he had no past, no life, no dead wife. He was no man in a no man’s land, and reality was a glimmering series of pictures in a dream that went back no farther than the night before. How he’d stood on the front porch drinking the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. How it had felt as the flesh of his cheek opened against the rock in the field where he fell. How Teresa was. How she had come to him. Silent, but there. Her eyes were the stars, her hair the black sky, her body the trees at the edge of the field, her arms the whiplike saplings that surrounded him.

He grabbed one of the saplings now with both hands and pulled on its wire stem with all his might, making a growling sound that spooked the horses, so they ran, stopping to watch him from a distance. He pulled so hard that he rolled over onto his belly with the effort, as if he were not pulling on the sapling, but it was pulling him. He let it go and it sprang back to its upright position, rooted in the frozen ground.

When he opened his eyes, a shard of glass seemed to cleave through his head. It was his life coming back to him. Beside him was a patch of vomit, congealed and almost frozen solid. Very slowly, he pushed himself up. When he made it to his knees he had to lean forward onto his hands and vomit again. Afterward, he sat back on his heels and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. He touched his face with his numb fingers, tracing the scab that had formed there.

At last he stood and staggered a few steps. The horses had begun to graze, but now they lifted their heads from the grass and stared at him
expectantly until he called their names, and immediately they came to him and pressed their noses into his hands, as if he were holding apples.

The three of them began to walk home, following the path that the horses had made; the path Bruce had no doubt followed the night before, though he could not remember it. When the barn came into view, Lady Mae and Beau trotted ahead and stood in their stalls, waiting to be fed. He gave them oats and then went to the hens to get the eggs, but found none.

When he walked in the house he saw that Joshua had not come home the night before. All the lights that Bruce had turned on were still on, and the radio played fiddle music so loudly he thought he would have to vomit again before he reached the stereo and turned it off. Now that he was inside he realized how cold he was. He began to build a fire in the wood stove. Joshua had slept over at his new girlfriend’s house, he assumed. Claire had gone back to Minneapolis the afternoon before—she had to go back to her job and, Bruce hoped, eventually school. Both she and Joshua were meant to graduate in June, Claire from college, Joshua from high school. In the course of their mother’s dying, both of them had stopped attending school. Teresa had not been aware of this, and Bruce, though dimly aware, hadn’t been able to muster up enough energy to be concerned. He’d needed Claire. What would he have done with her away at school? They would go back soon, he figured, and left it at that. They needed time to get over things, another reason for him to act soon on his plan to kill himself—he hadn’t forgotten his plan—so they could grieve and get on with it.

The kindling began to burn and the heat of the flames felt good on his face as he stooped near the open door of the stove. The gash in his cheek began to pulse. It was two days after the day he’d hoped to be dead. Last night he’d been willing to die, but now he realized that drinking and then half freezing himself to death was not how he wanted to do it. It lacked dignity, but more, it could be misconstrued as unintentional. He would do what he intended to do and nothing less. He had the rope all ready to go, tied into its knot and coiled in the trunk in the barn where they kept the tack.

But today was not the day to die, he decided. So far, each day had been like that. It was one thing and then another. The day after the funeral, which was originally to have been his last day on earth, Joshua’s truck broke down and he needed Bruce to help him fix it. There was a
part they’d ordered that wouldn’t come in for five days. Plus, he could not very well have hung himself while Teresa’s parents and brother were still there visiting. In the days after the funeral he’d done his best to be a good host, despite the circumstances. He took them to Flame Lake to visit the Ojibwe Museum, to Blue River to eat walleye at the Hunt Club. They’d had a horrible shock when they arrived at the airport in Duluth, what with Pepper waiting to greet them instead of Bruce and the kids.

“There’s still enough time to see the body,” Pepper had told them when they got off the plane. They stood in a corner of the airport near a sheet of windows with the sun beating brutally through. “The
body!
” Teresa’s mom had shrieked, then ran off not knowing where she was headed, bogged down by the huge purse she carried, and stopped eventually by a giant potted plant in her path.

Teresa’s parents and her brother had not wanted to see the body, unlike Bruce and Claire and Joshua, who protested angrily when told at last by a curly-haired nurse that they would “have to say their goodbyes.” They’d spent four hours in the hospital room after Teresa took her last breath, which all of them had missed. Claire and Joshua had been racing to Duluth after having spent hours trying to get Claire’s car unstuck from the snow and slush that it had become mired in on the ice in the middle of Lake Nakota. When Bruce had woken up beside Teresa he had gone to get a cup of coffee. It sat now, its half-and-half forming a skin across its wretched surface, in the mug that said
WYOMING
! on the windowsill of the big window in the room. Four hours was an unorthodox length of time to stay with a dead body at St. Benedict’s Hospital, but they had Pepper on their side, plus they had the excuse of Teresa’s parents arriving soon.

They did their best to be unobtrusive. After those first rounds of uproarious weeping, they muffled their cries by pressing their faces into pillows or one another or, most often, into the body of Teresa lying dead on the bed. She was still warm when Claire and Joshua arrived. They held on to her through her blankets, and then slowly the warmth receded, became only an island on her belly and then that cooled too and they touched her no longer.

When Bruce had entered the room with his coffee, he had not realized she was dead. Minutes before, he’d been in bed with her. Her eyes were open but seemed unchanged. He’d said a few words to her about
the weather, which was cold but sunny, March but still winter. The same snow that had fallen when, as far as anyone knew, Teresa didn’t have cancer still sat frozen into layers on the ground. He went to her then and took her hand, hot and swollen from all the needles attached to it, but then he looked at her and what he saw—the not thereness of her—made him fall hard and, without his being aware, from his feet onto his knees.

While they sat with her and waited for her parents and brother to arrive they cooperated with the nurses as best they could. Teresa had wanted to be an organ donor, but because of the cancer, her eyes were all they could use. Until they were surgically removed, they needed to be preserved, which, Pepper kindly explained, called for ice. They agreed to keep the bags of ice on Teresa’s eyes forty-five minutes of each hour, and Bruce agreed to be the one to keep the time. He took his watch off and set it on the bed near her hip to remind himself of the task.

Finally, the curly-headed nurse stepped in to tell them that Teresa’s parents and brother were waiting for them in the lobby and did not care to come up. After their initial resistance, Bruce and Claire and Joshua knew they had to go. Bruce and Joshua approached Teresa solemnly one by one, each of them bending to kiss her cold lips. Claire began sobbing hysterically all over again, even more loudly than she had when she’d first walked in and seen her mother dead. She pushed Bruce and Joshua violently away when they tried to comfort her, batting her arms at them. Then she quieted and told them without looking up that she wanted a few minutes alone with her mother.

Bruce stood silently with Joshua outside the closed door, and then together they walked to the end of the hallway, where there was a window from floor to ceiling. Joshua looked out over the streets of Duluth, and then beyond them, to the lake. Bruce looked at Joshua. He hadn’t seen him for days. In the brief minutes of each day that he and Claire had not been consumed by what was happening with Teresa, they had been consumed by the whereabouts of Joshua. He had left messages on the answering machine, he had left notes on the kitchen table, but he had not appeared. Over his absence Bruce had raged, Claire had wept, Teresa in her delirium had cried out his name:
Where is Joshua? Where is Joshua?
until, in the last days, she had intermittently believed him to be right there in the room. Bruce still didn’t know where Joshua had been and now he didn’t care. He was only glad that Claire had brought him here.
He knew that Joshua was also asking the question,
Where was I? Where was I when my mother died and where, because of me, was Claire?
He wanted to say to Joshua that it was okay, but something stopped him.
It’s okay
kept forming in his mouth, then turning to mist.

“Your mother, she thought you were with her all yesterday,” he said, which was fairly true—she’d hallucinated his presence the day before, as well as Claire’s, and a dog they used to have named Monty. “She believed you were right there sitting in the chair.”

Joshua turned his pink eyes to Bruce for a moment, then he shifted them wordlessly back out to the streets.

Bruce reached over and began to massage Joshua’s back, the way he’d done in countless attempts to ease Teresa’s pain.

“Oh,” Joshua said, leaning into Bruce’s hands. “That feels so good.”

When Bruce woke on the ninth day that Teresa no longer lived on the earth he knew that now was his chance. He could feel the quiet of the house around him; so quiet it was as if he weren’t inside of his house but rather lying again in the field where he’d woken the morning before. He opened his eyes but felt unable to move, the weight of his sorrow pinning him to the bed.

“Shadow,” he called in a high-pitched voice. “Kitty kitty. Kitty kitty.” He heard her feet land on the floor above him, in Claire’s room. After several moments she appeared in the doorway. “Come here,” he implored sweetly, though she did not move from her place by the door. He lay in bed gazing at her. She had known Teresa as long as he had. She had been on the bed sometimes when they’d made love, making a space for herself in the farthest corner as long as they didn’t cause too much commotion.

He closed his eyes and said out loud, “I’ll be dead soon.” And then he wept in several short yelps and fell back to sleep.

At noon he woke with Shadow’s weight on his chest.

He put his hands on her warm body and instantly she purred. Usually the weight to which he woke did not have a form. Usually it was a series of pictures too wonderful or terrible to bear. Images of Teresa either very happy or very sad, very healthy or very sick, each of them torturing him in their severity. Sometimes a question would occur to him with such ferocity that he felt his body grow unbelievably heavy, as if the weight of him in that instant would break the bed.
Why had he not quit
working immediately when they learned she had cancer? Why had he not spent every minute of every day and night with her from the moment he met her?
And then darker questions would come, questions that were not actually questions, but bullets from a gun that implicated him in her death. The doctors believed her cancer had started in her lungs.
Had it been the wood stove? Had it been the insulation he had scavenged from a job and used?
It could have been anything, the doctor had told them, uncurious when they’d asked. But anything was anything—it did not exclude Bruce. It encompassed him and all the things he’d made for her and touched and delivered to her for almost twelve years.