Torch (42 page)

He held the lipstick to his nose and inhaled. It smelled chemical and slightly fruity, like Teresa used to smell in the last moment before she stepped out the door when she was going somewhere. He’d hated to kiss her when she’d had it on. He’d hated the taste and the fact that it would leave pink marks on his face. He traced a faint line of it on his hand now, as if testing the color, and then he drew another line and another, making each one darker, until he’d colored in half of his hand. The pink was softer there than it appeared in its solid form. It was the way it had been on Teresa’s lips—translucent and shimmering, the palest rose. He almost kissed it, like a teenager practicing how to make out, but then he looked away from his hand, to get ahold of himself, feeling ridiculous and driven, stupid and compelled. He didn’t cry, though he felt his sorrow roiling up from his gut. He didn’t cry at all anymore, or listen to Kenny G, or allow himself all the kinds of things he’d wallowed in during the spring before when he could scarcely get out of bed.

He got out of his truck and threw the lipstick as hard as he could
into the trees at the side of the house. It skated along the icy surface of the snow and then came to a stop and rolled back down the slope of the land, almost all the way back to him. He picked it up again, meaning to throw it farther away, but instead he turned back to his truck and reached into the glove box and pulled everything out—his insurance papers and owner’s manual, old napkins and receipts—until he found the other things that had belonged to Teresa, the leather bookmark and the Rest-A-While Villa pen. He carried them into Doug Reed’s house and went to the kitchen and pushed them down the sink and turned the garbage disposal on. Its grinding sound was not as loud as it had been yesterday, when he and George Hanson had shoved the sticks of wood down, and it did not go on as long.

He listened to it until it finished its job, and then he turned it off and stared at his hand, smeared with pink. He ran the water as hot as he could bear, attempting to scrub it off, but it had little effect. He went into the bathroom and pumped out soap that Doug Reed kept in a pretty blue bottle, lathering his hand with it, scraping the lipstick off with the blunt edges of his fingernails. He caught glimpses of himself in the mirror as he worked and then he stopped and looked closely. Without a thought, he punched his image. The mirror didn’t break, so he punched it again harder. It occurred to him that the mirror wasn’t glass, but rather some high-tech material that would never shatter, which made him want to wrench it from its screws and break it all the more. He grabbed one of Doug Reed’s towels and scoured his hand dry with it, until there was only the faintest pink shadow.

He heard the sound of a car engine outside and he went to the door and out onto the front porch, watching Claire park her Cutlass. He could see, even from this distance, she’d been crying. She got out without a coat on, her arms crossed in front of her chest to keep warm.

“Where were you?” she yelled, coming toward him, slipping a bit on the ice.

“How’d it go?” he asked, stepping off the porch.

“Where were you?” she screamed more loudly.

“Claire. I told you—”

“
No!
” she boomed, and came at him with an intensity that made him believe she might tackle him when she reached him, but instead she only clutched onto his arm, as if she needed help standing up. “Why weren’t you there?” she stammered. “Why weren’t you …” Her teeth began to
chatter so hard she couldn’t go on. This had happened once before, when she was twelve and she’d fallen through the ice of their pond, thigh deep in the water, though he knew this time it wasn’t from the cold. He almost laughed with the strangeness of it, the clownish clank of her jaw, but then she began to gasp for air. He grabbed the points of her elbows, but she pulled away and huddled into herself, trying to talk again, despite it all. “You … you … you,” she panted.

“Claire,” he said, pounding on her back, as if she were choking on something.

“You,” she panted again, and then made a terrible noise, an injured howl that dissolved into several more gasps in which it seemed she could not get a single bit of air.

“Breathe,” he said to her, and then he gently shook her. “Listen to me. Take a breath in.” Her eyes went to his, wary and feral, like those of an animal whose trust he would never win, but he could see that she was listening to him, so he went on. “Breathe out. Now in … and out.” He waited and watched her breathe. “In. Take another one in. And out.”

She stood up and turned away from him, calmed now, and put her hands over her face, her teeth still chattering lightly, her hands trembling.

“You lost your breath,” he said, not wanting her to be embarrassed. “Just don’t think about it. If you think about it, you’ll get all worked up again. That’s probably how you got started in the first place.”

She took her hands from her face. “Why weren’t you there?”

“I never said—”

“
Why weren’t you there?
” she demanded.

“I had to work, Claire. I—”

“Oh no, don’t say that. Don’t give me that crap, Bruce. Please, just don’t even …” A sob escaped her and she took another breath to gather herself and she spoke again, stronger now. “You don’t want to be our dad anymore.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know why—”

“You can’t even do the bare minimum, can you? You can’t even do that.” She looked at him, tears rising into her eyes.

“Yes, I can,” he said softly.

“
What?
”

“The bare minimum. That’s what I can do, Claire.” Once he spoke the words they exploded in his chest, so true he almost wept.

He pulled her to him and held her and stroked her cold hair, aching to make her happy. He wanted to promise her something, to say that things would go back to the way they were, or that they would be different than they had become, but he loved her too much to lie and needed her too little to make it true.

“Where’s Josh?” he whispered, after several minutes.

She pulled away, stumbling back a step, and looked up at him. Her eyes were blue and endless and scared. “In jail,” she said at last, her voice wavering. “He was sentenced to eighty-five days.”

The words entered Bruce like dull bullets, though nothing in his posture changed. He took Claire’s hand and held it, as if he were shaking it to say hello or goodbye. “You did what you could,” he said.

She nodded, still holding his hand.

“You did, Claire. You played every card. You did the same thing when your mom was sick. You were always there. You never let us down.”

He squeezed her hand and she squeezed his back and they repeated it a couple more times, as if they were speaking a secret silent language, a long-known code, and then they both let go. She was breathing normally now. He could see it like smoke in the cold air. Her breath, his. Thin ghosts that appeared then vanished, as if they were never there.

O
N SUNDAYS CLAIRE DROVE
to Blue River to visit him. She was not allowed to wear black, or at least not black
entirely
. Nor could she wear clothing that had writing on it, or was made of an even remotely translucent fabric, and most of all she could not wear clothing that failed to cover what the powers that be at the Coltrap County Correctional and Rehabilitation Center considered an adequate amount of skin. To illustrate the rule about the concealment of skin, a six-foot-tall drawing of the human form on a piece of white butcher paper was taped to the wall of what was called the “processing room,” its body inked in with black marker where the clothes of the visitors should be: from toes to collar bone, with a sleeve that extended down midway to the elbow, no matter what month of the year.

“
He
gets to wear all black,” joked Claire, referring to the butcher-paper person. She was not normally a jokester, but jail, Joshua realized, brought out the jokester in his sister. “He finds black very slimming,” she said in a mock snooty tone, and Joshua smiled without her seeing it, her voice echoing across the distance between them, out the long barred windows of the processing room, down the concrete tunnel of a hallway, and into the room where he sat waiting for her, his heart—he couldn’t help it—pounding with joy. She laughed alone at her own silliness and her laughter traveled to him as well. It seemed to reach him and then ricochet back to her and again return to him, like when they were kids and would stand on opposite ends of Midden’s ancient indoor swimming pool with the place all to themselves, yelling and laughing and hooting, daring each other to dive in.

When her laughter died down, he waited to hear the terrible buzz that meant the locks on the two heavy metal doors that separated him from her and from the rest of the world had been released. The silence,
he supposed, meant that she was busy carrying out some command: raising her arms in order to be frisked or removing all the items from her pockets and placing them into a plastic basket that would be taken away and later returned, or filling out the form that asked the five questions about her reason for visiting and her relationship to him, though every single person who had anything to do with the Coltrap County Correctional and Rehabilitation Center already knew that she was his sister, as did half the people in Coltrap County itself.

At last he heard the mechanical buzz and the scuffle of her shoes as she stepped into the hallway, and then her voice saying hello to Tommy Johnson, who had been waiting for her all this time, as he did every Sunday, on the other side of the locked doors. Tommy had first escorted Joshua from his cell to the visiting room, where he left him handcuffed to the table that was bolted in six places to the floor while he went to fetch Claire.

“How was your week?” she asked Tommy melodically.

“Pretty good,” he said. “How about yours?”

“
Good.
”

Claire and Tommy had been in the same grade, graduated high school together nearly five years before, and Joshua knew without seeing his sister’s face that it was flushed at the moment—flushed every Sunday at this very moment—in shame. Over being here. Over her
brother
being here, an inmate, and to at least some extent, under Tommy’s charge. “How
could
you?” she’d asked Joshua bitterly, time and time again, when he’d first been arrested, and then, after he’d half-attempted to explain, she’d interrupted him to hiss, “Thank God that Mom is dead.”

He knew, without seeing her, the way she would walk down the hall: straight-backed with a polite smile on her face, her arms crossed in front of her as if she were chilled, doing everything in her power to conceal her humiliation, to resist without seeming to resist the knowledge that for the duration of the visit she too was under Tommy’s charge.

“It’s been so cold,” she said. Their footsteps grew closer now, walking up the incline of the hall, where it became a long ramp that spilled out into what was officially considered the jail.

“It’s February,” said Tommy. “What do you expect?”

“Yes,” she agreed, laughing falsely. “You’re right—not much.”

Joshua sat staring at his hands and wrists, cuffed to the table, hearing her steps grow louder. Aside from the four barred windows that sat
high up near the ceiling at ground level, the room was subterranean, lit by fluorescent lights that gave his flesh a remotely green cast.

“Josh,” she gasped the moment she saw him, a little breathless but not crying—he was grateful—this time. It had taken her three Sundays to harden up. This was his seventh Sunday in jail; he had five more to go. She came toward him, her footsteps now muffled on the vast gray carpet of the room, and then waited as Tommy unlocked and removed his handcuffs.

Freed, he stood and hugged her and they held on to each other longer than he’d ever imagined he would hang on to his sister in all of his life. Each visit they were granted two hugs—one for hello, the other for goodbye—and there could not for any reason be an additional hug in between. Because of this, they both knew to drag out each hug for as long as they possibly could. Claire smelled to him like she always did, like her hair, or rather her shampoo and conditioner. He had not, in his life previous to jail, thought to note her scent, but now he registered it as if he’d gone years without the ability to smell. He let himself take it in, her familiar aroma of rosemary and mint with an undercurrent of cherry.

“So … hello!” she said once they’d sat down across the table from each other. She took his hand and held it in both of her own. Though they’d often gone far more than a week without seeing each other, now that he was in jail, a week seemed like ages.

“Hi,” he said, and their conversation spilled forth in the most ordinary way—how was work, how are you, and what else is new? But for those first several minutes of her arrival his heart continued to race as if she had come with the most important news. Each week he was allowed four half-hour visits. Lisa came twice—no one person could come more than twice in any given week—Claire once, and the last slot was available for whoever cared to come. Usually it was R.J. or Mardell or Leonard, though Bruce had come once. On occasion, it would be someone new entirely, someone who’d thought to come and see him, old friends from school. Each Monday a new week began and he would be granted four more visits, and only four, even if the week before one visit had gone unused. He carried the knowledge of his four visits with him, as if they existed not in the records kept on the computer system of the jail, but in his chest, on an imaginary card that felt as if it had been embedded there into which a hole would be punched each time someone who wanted to see him walked through the two locked doors.

Claire smiled. “So Lisa and I—we’re starting our class this afternoon.”

“I know,” he said. “She’s coming to see me afterward, so I’ll hear all about it.”

He noticed that Claire was wearing their mother’s mood ring, which they’d played with together for hours as kids, believing that it would tell them what the future held.

“She’s huge,” she said. “I mean, all of a sudden. It’s like she went from hardly looking pregnant to looking like she could pop.”