Torch (41 page)

“But it’s cold there. It’ll be freezing, Kath.” He had the feeling that someone was pressing a boot against his chest.

“I can start a fire. I did it for years.” She came and put her arms around him. “This will be good for both of us. It will give us perspective on this whole journey.”

“What about the roads?” he pressed, though she only chuckled at him and walked from the room. He followed her into the kitchen, where she was loading her backpack, taking a container of yogurt and a banana, some rye crackers, and a few bags of Fertile Blend.

“Now, don’t forget to drink your tea tonight. And there’s a casserole in the oven. I set the timer for you.” She looked at him and laughed at the hurt expression on his face. “You’re being silly, hon,” she said, pushing her hand into his hair.

“It’s that I’ll miss you,” he said. This was the second time she had left him. She had done it back in September on the night of the equinox, and he had hated it then too.

“Love you.” She kissed him and began to walk out the door.

“And I wanted to talk to you about something too,” he said, to keep her home.

She turned abruptly with her backpack slung over her shoulder. “What?”

“Josh’s hearing is tomorrow.”

“
Tomorrow?
” she said with some surprise, though he had told her about it weeks before. She set her backpack on the kitchen table, still holding onto the straps. “What do you want to talk about?”

He shrugged. “Whether we should do anything.”

“Like what?”

He shrugged again, not wanting to mention that he could go and sit on the bench outside the judge’s chambers with Lisa and Claire, not
wanting Kathy to either encourage him to go or get moody and defensive because he had suggested it. He didn’t know which she would do and he didn’t want to know.

“I’ll hold him in my thoughts,” said Kathy, lifting her bag again. “I’ll burn some sage.”

After she left, he put his boots and coat on and sat out on the porch with the dogs. The rain had stopped by now. For several minutes he listened to the ice clattering and tinkling in the branches of the frozen trees and then he lit a cigarette. He smoked out here again, the way he used to do when Teresa was alive, though Kathy hadn’t asked him to. It seemed like the right thing to do, the civilized way to live, and it gave him an excuse to be off by himself, which he liked to do most nights. He didn’t like it this night, however, with Kathy off at her old house. His enjoyment of his solitude depended entirely on Kathy being thirty feet away, dozing in their bed, he realized now, feeling a swell of anger toward her rise inside of him, though he knew he didn’t have the right to be mad. Before they had married she’d warned him that this might happen, that from time to time she would need her space and he’d told her that he would need his too. It felt true then, but it was a lie. He didn’t need his space. His space was a box of grief, the place where Teresa lived now, and he wanted more than anything to keep it closed. When he was alone without Kathy he had too much time to think, too much silence to fill the void, and Teresa would come at him in the smallest, most penetrating ways.

Without wanting to, he remembered her now, remembered a particular meaningless day the autumn before when she had made batches and batches of zucchini bread and how, later, they’d driven around together, bringing a loaf to everyone they knew, bringing a loaf, even, to Kathy, who hadn’t been home. They’d left it on her porch, on top of a pile of neatly stacked wood. He could see it there now, feel the damp heft of it in his hands, which he shook to break the memory loose. He was grateful he had only his memory to keep Teresa around. Grateful that Claire and Joshua had packed up everything that had belonged to their mother and taken it away. When he’d walked into the house after they’d gone his body filled with a daffy joy. He was free, or so it seemed. He could start anew now, with Kathy and Kathy only.

But he hadn’t been freed entirely. On occasion something that had
been Teresa’s would emerge from the depths of the house: a dried-up pen that said
REST-A-WHILE VILLA
on its side, a leather bookmark embossed with her initials that Joshua had made in school, a tube of pink lipstick that she’d worn when she went to work or town. The sight of each of these things stopped him short, though he had to pretend otherwise if Kathy was in the room. It was like coming across a bear in the woods: you were supposed to stand still and remain calm, against every impulse. He couldn’t bring himself to throw Teresa’s things out. When he had the chance he secreted the things he’d found out to his truck, where he put them in the glove compartment and never looked at them again.

He went back inside the house after smoking two cigarettes and stood in the fluorescent light of the kitchen. The timer Kathy had set had gone off already. He turned the oven off and opened the door, the heat hitting his cold face like a fist, and removed the casserole. The top had baked to almost black, but he could see it hadn’t been ruined entirely. He set it on top of the stove to let it cool and got a beer from the refrigerator, not caring whether it would impede his sperm. He pulled his wallet from his pocket and began removing all of its contents. He and Teresa used to call it his office—his wallet—because Bruce kept it so packed full of important things. Bids and business receipts, notes about his customers. Months ago, he had put a tiny blue scrap of paper there that had Joshua’s cell phone number written on it. At last he found it and picked up the phone.

Joshua’s voice sounded alarmed, once he recognized who it was. Bruce had never called him before, though he’d meant to whenever, in his passes through his wallet, he’d seen the number.

“How you doing?” he asked Joshua.

“Not too bad.”

Bruce removed a tack from the corkboard near the phone, trying to think of what to say. This was possibly Joshua’s last night of freedom for a while, though Bruce could not convince himself to believe that was true. The judge would see how young he was and take pity, despite his crime. It’s what Bruce had thought all along, since the phone call from Claire back in August.

“Is everything all right with you?” Joshua asked tentatively.

“Yep.” He jabbed the sharp end of the tack into a callus on his thumb and didn’t feel a thing. “So I guess tomorrow’s the big day,” he
said, though Joshua knew that Bruce knew this for a fact. “It sure came up quick.”

“Yep,” said Joshua. There was a rustling sound, as if he were going from one room to another.

“I was thinking I’d come over with Claire, you know, but I got this job out at Doug Reed’s place, back by the Paradise Town Hall. They’re weekenders,” Bruce explained. He pulled his pack of cigarettes out and lit one up. “They got a big house that they just redid and I’m finishing up with the small stuff, some shelves and cabinets. I was going to say you could stop out there tomorrow morning on your way, in case I can’t make it to the courthouse after all. I’m going to have to play it by ear, to see how much I can get done.”

“I got plans in the morning,” said Joshua without any emotion in his voice and then he added, more gently, “with Lisa.”

“Of course you do, bud. I was just saying, if you had the time. I know your hearing’s not till the afternoon.”

“Twelve thirty,” said Joshua.

“Right,” Bruce said. He took another drag from his cigarette. “I told Claire you should bring some of your drawings to show the judge. The ones of cars and things,” he suggested. “It would help the judge see you’re a good guy. To sort of build your case.”

“Maybe,” said Joshua, though Bruce could tell he wasn’t even considering it.

“Well, good luck if I don’t end up seeing you.”

“Thanks,” Joshua said.

Bruce sat there long after Joshua had hung up, the silent phone pressed to his ear. He sat so long the telephone became a part of him, an extended plastic ear—warm and vacant, expressive and familiar. At first he had the sensation that he was on hold and simply waiting, that someone would come to him eventually on the other end of the line. And then, after several minutes, the notion that he was on hold left him and another feeling took its place, that he was about to either cry or punch the wall, or that he would do both in quick succession, but his fear of doing either roused him from his trance and he put the phone back on the receiver.

He went to the refrigerator and got another beer and then went to the stove and stared at the casserole and poked a finger into its center. It had cooled entirely now, but he wasn’t hungry anymore.

“Tanner,” he called. “Spy.”

They came clattering into the kitchen, running and then sliding on their nails when they reached him, loving him the way nobody else did, the way they always had.

“Dinner,” he said, and set the casserole down before them on the floor.

The road was a frozen river the next morning as Bruce drove down it, slow and steady, in the first gray light of day. When he turned into Doug Reed’s driveway he lost his concentration and his truck fishtailed and skidded into the mailbox mounted on a metal pole that didn’t budge. He shifted into reverse and backed away from it and crept up the driveway. His glove box had sprung open with the impact and he reached over to push it closed, though it wouldn’t go because something was jammed in its hinge. Teresa’s lipstick, he saw, and let it be.

Doug Reed’s house smelled like new carpet and glue, fresh paint and sawdust. There were slate floors and ten-foot windows that faced out over Lake Nakota, and a hot tub sunk into the floor. The kitchen was especially state of the art, with a special machine that could chill a bottle of wine in five minutes and a garbage disposal that could grind even the thickest bones. George Hanson had put in the garbage disposal the day before and, afterward, he and Bruce had stood around testing it out, pushing in kindling from the bucket near the fireplace and listening as it ground the wood to nothing in the depths of the sink. Bruce was the last man in, the one to finish up, installing the kitchen cabinets he’d made and building in bookshelves.

He walked through the house to the living room along the sheets of plastic that had been set down to protect the carpet and turned up the thermostat and then went into the kitchen. He poured coffee from his Thermos into the little cup that served as its cap. Through the huge windows, Lake Nakota was spread out before him, covered with a layer of gray ice. He could see the cross atop the church on the opposite shore, almost a mile away. He wondered what Kathy was doing now, if she was even awake yet. He hadn’t slept well without her. Their bed was like a ship that had become unmoored. He kept waking and remembering that he was alone and then it would take him some time to fall back asleep. He dreamed of Teresa, but he didn’t recall the dream and didn’t try to. Kathy always remembered her dreams and then wrote them down in a
little notebook she kept in the drawer in the bedside table. She would tell him about them each morning, while he showered and dressed and made his coffee, following him from room to room.

He poured another capful of coffee and drank it down like a shot, then opened the cabinet where he’d stashed his tools.

It was eight and then it was nine thirty. Bruce told the time by the radio as he worked, moving through his day the way he always did, listening to one show after another, to the national news and
Northland Beat
, to
Native Rhythms
and
A Woman’s Place
. At ten thirty he stood up and stretched his back, still holding his hammer. If he wanted to make it to Blue River by noon, he should leave now. The thought played in his mind lightly, like something skittering across the ice before falling out of sight. He would work another hour or two and meet them afterward, he decided. He’d take them all out for a big late lunch, Claire and Lisa and Joshua too, he allowed himself to assume.

But he didn’t do that. He worked past noon, when he normally stopped to eat his sandwich, and past twelve thirty, when Joshua would be meeting with the judge. When it was nearly two, he heard Teresa’s voice and he turned the radio up, though by then she wasn’t speaking anymore. She had said only a single sentence, the introduction to her old show, fading out as the broadcaster spoke over it. Bruce had heard the same thing twice yesterday. It was a teaser, an advertisement for a marathon of
Modern Pioneers
that the station had in the works. Bruce had received a letter from the station manager, Marilyn, the week before, explaining that they would be broadcasting the top ten listener favorites of Teresa’s show in January. There was a poll on the station’s Web site, Marilyn had written. She encouraged Bruce to visit it and cast a vote for his own favorite show. He didn’t have a favorite show. He loved them all. Loved the sound of his wife’s voice as it had come to him every Tuesday at three. He had listened to it again on Thursday evenings, if he happened to be working late, not caring that he had heard the show already. Sometimes on Tuesdays, after she asked the question at the end of the show, he would call in and tell her the answer, though she would never allow him to say it on the air, reserving that privilege for her less intimate fans. She would put him on hold and he would listen as she signed off—“Work hard. Do good. Be incredible. And come back next week for more of
Modern Pioneers
!”—and then she would come back on the line and ask him what he was doing. “Working hard,” he would tell her every time.
“Doing good. Being incredible.” Teresa had borrowed the lines from his mother, after having come across the card she had given him for his high school graduation in a box of his old things.

He turned the radio off and went out to his truck and took the two sandwiches he’d packed that morning from his insulated lunch bag. Usually, he ate inside, but today he sat in his truck, idling the engine and running the heat. When he had started it up, he thought he would start driving to Blue River, eating along the way, but then he realized it was too late for that. They’d be on their way back to Midden by now, knowing whatever they knew about Joshua’s fate.

He saw his open glove box and reached over to slam it shut with more force than he’d been able to that morning as he drove, hoping the tube of lipstick would be knocked out of the way, but it wasn’t. He picked it up and examined it for several moments. There was a crack along the plastic cap. He didn’t know whether it had always been there, or whether it had happened when he’d tried to close the glove compartment on it. He pulled the cap off and rotated the tube, and a pink triangular nub appeared. It struck him as deeply familiar, like a face he had known and studied without being aware of it. Its angular silhouette suggested to him not only Teresa’s mouth, but other, deeper, more intimate things about her that he couldn’t bring solidly to his mind, but rather that resided somewhere else inside him, present but unreachable.