Torch (26 page)

R.J. had turned back by then, off to the ice house to get a shovel, which turned out to be of no use, and then he walked to the shore, to Bob Jewell’s, to ask him to come out with his tractor and a chain and pull Claire’s car out. Joshua had waited with Claire while R.J. was gone. They sat in the front seat and ran the heat and she told him in a maniacally calm voice that their mother was about to die. He reached over and put his hand on her shoulder and he could feel the way her body was as hard as a board.

“We’re going to get the car out and then we’re going to drive to Duluth and then we’re going to see her,” Claire said like a zombie. She said it over and over again, no matter what he said to her, no matter that he said he was sorry about not coming home or going to the hospital or
being at the ice house when she thought he was. When she was done repeating it they sat together in silence. He thought of his mother, of parts of her he had never thought about before, of her lungs and her brain, her heart and her hands. He thought of the parts of his mother lying on a bed he’d never seen in a room he’d never entered in a hospital in Duluth where he hoped he’d never have to visit.

“So how is she?” Joshua asked, after a long while.

“How is she?” Claire asked quietly. “
How. Is. She?
” she said, as if each word were a new discovery. “How
is
she?” she spat savagely. She turned her entire body to face him. She wore a hat that their mother had knitted, red, with a white star and a white pompom that wasn’t there anymore. She took the hat off and looked at it in her hands, then looked back up at Joshua, her eyes bloodshot and glassy and rabid. “Dying.
Dy
ing, okay? Do you understand that? She’s not ever coming home.”

“We’ve got to keep up hope,” he whispered.

“I hate you,” she whispered fiercely back, still looking directly into his eyes. “I’m going to hate you for the rest of my life for leaving me alone through all of this.” And then she sobbed, making horrible yipping sounds like a pack of coyotes after they’ve made a kill, and he cried too, the way he always did, seeping and silent.

After several minutes she reached over and put her hands on his cheeks and pulled his face to hers, and he reached up and held her face too.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Me too.”

“What are we going to do?”

“It’s going to be okay,” he said. “Mom’s going to get better.”

She let go of him and blotted her face with the hat and looked out her window. There was nothing in sight but the snow on the lake and the trees half a mile away on the shore. “Josh, Mom’s not getting better. You need to understand that.” She handed the hat to him and he pressed it to his face and wiped his tears away.

“But we have to keep the faith,” he said. “She’s not going to die. She wouldn’t do that. I know it for a fact.”

“You do?”

“Yes,” he said, believing that he did. That whatever he decided firmly to be true would be true. That their mother would not die, not now, or ever.

“Promise?” Claire asked, like a child, turning to him.

“I promise,” he said, then buried his face in the hat again.

John Rileen tapped his fist against the hood of Joshua’s truck and then went to sit in his car, parked in the corner of the lot. After a few minutes, Joshua walked over to John’s car and leaned in the window like they were talking, though in truth they were trading money and marijuana. Joshua had dozed off in his truck as he waited and had been startled awake by John, so the exchange had a dreamlike quality from which he didn’t entirely emerge until he was at Pete and Autumn’s house in Norway.

It was nearly three by the time he got back to Midden. He parked his truck in the alleyway that bordered the school’s property. He parked here at this same time almost every day, pulling in just as the yellow buses began to line up, so that kids could purchase whatever they wanted once class let out. A couple of days a week, one of the bus drivers ambled over to Joshua’s truck, under the guise of taking a stroll, and bought a bag. The alleyway bordered the football field and the baseball diamond and the narrow dirt path that circled around each of them, where the track team practiced. At 3:05, Joshua watched Suzy Keillor escorting the special-ed kids to their buses, as she did most days. Every time he saw her, he remembered that he hadn’t returned the pan she’d given him with the scalloped potatoes.

His cell phone chirped like a cricket: Claire.

“Hey.”

“How are you?” She sounded like she had a cold, though he knew without asking that she didn’t, that she’d been crying.

“Good.”

“I was thinking about how your birthday is coming up in a couple of weeks. Are you getting excited to be eighteen?”

“Not really,” he said. She remained silent, wanting him to say more.
Talk to me!
she’d recently shrieked. “I mean, I suppose it’ll be cool,” he said, “being an adult and everything.”

“Yeah,” she said remotely, as though he had said something profound, and then they were silent together for almost a full minute. Joshua watched the drops of water on his windshield turn to rain, making jagged streams down the glass.

“So, what’s new?” he asked at last. She didn’t answer, but he sensed that her silence was distracted and occupied. “What are you doing?”

“Sewing,” she said very carefully, as if at just that moment she were threading a needle, and then her attention shifted back to him. “I found these amazing buttons in Mom’s sewing cabinet. I don’t know where she got them—they’re sort of Asian-y. They have this kind of tarnished copper gold color and then there are these little engravings of temples. Anyway, I’m putting them on my jean jacket.”

“I thought you were coming up.”

“I am. I’m leaving as soon as I’m done. I just wanted to call and see if you’ll be home tomorrow.”

“I will,” he said. He watched Suzy Keillor run through the rain to the school.

“I’ll make dinner.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to,” she said sharply. “Won’t it be nice to have dinner?” Her voice trembled, as though she might burst into tears.

“I suppose,” he said. “Is David coming up?” Claire had not brought David home with her since their mother’s funeral. Joshua had never been very close to him, though he’d liked him well enough.

“No.”

“Are you guys getting along?”

“Yeah—kind of. I don’t really know anymore,” said Claire.

“What don’t you know?”

“I don’t know, ever since Mom died I’ve been different. I’ve been thinking all kinds of things. Like how monogamy can just be this crock of shit.”

“Why do you say that?” he asked, trying to remember what monogamy meant.

“Because it’s a system that’s set up to self-destruct!” she exclaimed, as if he’d accused her of something. He could tell that she’d set her sewing aside. More calmly she said, “I don’t expect you to understand. Not now that you’re on this whole new love fantasy spaceship with Lisa. But, Josh, it’s true. It’s all like a fairy tale and fairy tales are not real. And you know what’s wild? I never saw it—I mean I
thought
I saw it—but I never really saw it until Mom got sick. I was walking around just completely believing in these archaic, sexist, ridiculous notions about love and life and then Mom got sick and died and
boom—
the whole truth is revealed.”

“About what?” he asked.

“Everything, Josh.
Everything.
”

He didn’t know what to say. He barely understood what she was talking about, which was true about half the time that she went off on one of her new theories of life. But if he tried to ask her about it in a way that seemed even to remotely disagree, they’d get into a fight. Since their mother had died, he’d entered a phase of avoiding fights with his sister. He had been wrong that morning as they sat in her Cutlass on the frozen lake waiting for Bob Jewell to come with the tractor to get them out. Their mother had died. And she’d done it without waiting for them.
I’m sorry
, he’d said to Claire later. Sorry for being gone all those weeks, sorry for making it so Claire was not with their mother when she died. But whenever he spoke the word
sorry
in her direction, Claire held her hand up, and her breath became labored and heavy as if she would pass out that very moment if he said another word. Except for the first time, when she’d looked straight into his eyes and told him that sorry was not enough.

“So,” Claire said. “I was thinking—you could bring Lisa to dinner tomorrow.”

“Why?” School had let out and people began streaming out the doors on every side of the building.

“Because I want to meet her.”

“You already know her.”

“Yes, but not
as your girlfriend
. Plus I barely know her. I know who she is. It’s not like I’ve really ever talked to her.”

“She has to work tomorrow.” Lisa worked at the Red Owl, like her mother, mostly on weekends. He saw her now, walking straight across the muddy field, toward him. The rain had subsided to a light mist. When she saw that he was watching her, she waved. “I gotta go,” he said to Claire.

“No,” she crooned. “Talk to me longer.”

“I can’t.”

“I’m bored,” she said suddenly, then added, “and lonely.”

“Why?” he asked, taken aback. As long as he could remember his sister had asserted that she’d never been bored or lonely—too interested in the world to be bored, too independent to need the company of others.

“I don’t know,” she said, on the verge of tears. “Why do you think?” He could hear her breath in the phone, the way she wasn’t sewing buttons
anymore, but focused now entirely on their conversation.

“Because you’re boring?” he suggested, but she didn’t laugh, even though it was her own joke.
Only boring people get bored
. “I really gotta go.”

“So go,” said Claire darkly.

She hung up before he said goodbye, but he sat with the phone still pressed to his ear anyway, watching Lisa take the last few steps toward him, to stand beside his window, smiling at him without saying a word. She reached out and pressed her hand to the glass, as flat and elegant as a wet leaf. He placed his hand on the window too, lining it up so perfectly that, beneath his, hers disappeared.

When Lisa got in the truck he didn’t wait to see if anyone would come out to buy. He started the engine and they drove out of town, north, to Lisa’s trailer, where they made love quickly before Lisa’s mother came home from work. Afterward, Lisa got two Mountain Dews and a bag of barbeque-flavored chips from the kitchen and they devoured them in her room.

“How was school?” he asked, and his face flushed, realizing that the question seemed foreign coming from him—a question his mother used to ask him almost every day.

“Good.” Lisa was perched on the bed, Joshua on the floor beside it. “Oh, I handed in my final project for ‘Love, Life, and Work.’ ” She looked at him with an amused pout. She’d had to finish it without him, pretending they’d divorced. “I can’t believe it’s just two more weeks, Josh, and then we’re completely done. We’re free.”

“
You
are.”

“You’re
already
free,” she said, wiggling her toes with their painted pink nails.

“Yeah, but I’m not done. I’ll never be done.”

She leaned off the bed and put her hand in his hair. “But you’re getting your GED. That’s the same thing.”

They both turned, hearing Pam’s car pulling up in the driveway. Lisa went to close her bedroom door. They listened to the jingle of Pam’s keys as she tossed them into a wooden bowl on the coffee table. Joshua’s heart raced, remembering selling to Pam’s boyfriend earlier in the day, saying a silent prayer that he would never tell her.

“Leese!” Pam called.

“Yeah,” Lisa replied reluctantly.

“I’m home.” Pam came to Lisa’s bedroom and tapped on the door. “What’re you doing?”

“Studying,” she said in a shrill voice, and then scrambled for a book. “With Josh. Josh is here too.”

“Hello!” he yelled politely. Lisa made a gesture for him to look like he was studying too, so he grabbed what was closest to him, a copy of
Seventeen
, and began to page through it vigorously.

“Are you hungry?” Pam asked, still standing outside the door.

“We had a snack,” said Lisa.

Pam pushed the door open and looked in at them, and they both looked up and smiled at her. In Lisa’s tiny tin garbage can with Snoopy on the outside, the condom they’d used was wrapped up in a stream of toilet paper. “You staying for dinner?” Pam asked Joshua.

“I can’t.” He felt he should explain why he couldn’t stay, but his mind went blank when he was nervous. He had more deliveries to make. The messages from Vivian had been stacking up, unanswered.

“Next time,” said Pam. She turned and walked down the hallway, without bothering to close the door.

Lisa’s bare foot hung lazily off the side of the bed. Joshua reached out and held it and then very silently he lowered himself to the floor and kissed it. She laughed without making a sound and then jumped from the bed and shut her door without allowing the latch to so much as click and returned to Joshua and pulled him into her closet, where they wedged themselves in between the wicker hamper and the clothes that were hanging there and made love again, crouched in an impossible position, knocking the hamper over, coming silently.

Out in the kitchen Pam was frying pork chops, their sizzle and aroma filling the house.

As Joshua drove through town, he saw R.J. walking down Main Street, his hands in his pockets. He turned as Joshua slowed and pulled up next to him, and then R.J. got in and Joshua continued driving, out of town, to the Lookout. They didn’t get out of the truck when they arrived. They sat in the parking lot, in the spot behind the Dumpster, so no one inside the bar could see them waiting for Dave Huuta to pull up. Vivian had called and told Joshua that Dave would meet him there.

“What happened?” Joshua asked, gesturing towards R.J.’s face.

R.J. touched his cheek and traced his fingers along the scratch that went from his nose almost back to his ear, scabbed over now. “My fucking mom one night when she was trashed.”