Torch (45 page)

When he finished crying, he got up and went to the little bathroom cubby and wiped his face and blew his nose into a wad of toilet paper. Vern sometimes turned then, though his breath never broke its long, deep sleeping rhythm. Joshua would lie back down on his cot and stare at the ceiling for a while longer. The jail always seemed, at this moment, quieter than it had been before, and also more open, as if there weren’t a series of barricades and bars and locked doors between him and the rest of the world, as if he could have stepped outside to take a look at the cold night sky if he’d cared to. From his cot he felt that he could feel the gentle presence of the entire town of Blue River that surrounded him: its every dim streetlight, its old brick school, its Burger King lit up like a circus on the town’s one low hill, and, more than anything, he could feel the river, the Mississippi. He could feel Midden, far off, to the north, and Flame Lake a paler star north farther still.

Often, as he lay there after crying and before sleep, he had the sensation that his mother was in his cell with him. In the weeks immediately after she’d died he had invented various tests for her to see if she was watching him. He had commanded her to turn on or off a light or make a chair move or the wind come through the curtain at a certain time. She had failed every one, but now he didn’t need her to pass any tests. Sometimes he simply allowed himself to believe that she was there, above him in the painted sun, watching him. Other times he closed his eyes and let
the breathing, sleeping person in the cot beside him be his mother, not Vern Milkkinen. To his surprise this was not so hard to do. The moment he allowed himself to hear the rhythm of his mother’s breath in that of Vern’s, she was there, in his every sigh and twitch. Twice he’d gone so far as to extend his arm midair into the center of the room. He imagined his mother reaching out from the opposite cot and taking his hand. He imagined all the things she would do and did, the things he hadn’t been grateful for when she was alive, the things he would say sorry for if he had one last chance and he could. But then Vern would move and an unmistakably masculine grunt would issue forth from his dry mouth, and as fast as she had appeared, Joshua’s mother would be gone.

“They did a marathon on the radio of your mom’s old shows,” Bruce told him the next time he came to visit—it was only the second time he’d come.

“They did?” asked Joshua, his voicing squeaking embarrassingly.

He nodded. “I caught some of it. They did a segment at the end where they interviewed various people at the station who knew your mom. Who she was, what she did, what she was like, and so forth.” He reached up and twirled the diamond stud in his ear. “A tribute, I suppose.”

A heat, a pressure, a vapor, rose like a hot hand behind Joshua’s face, making his eyes water, his cheeks grow warm, as if he’d had a glass of whiskey in one straight shot. “What did they say?”

Bruce sat thinking about it for a moment, the expression on his face quizzical, as if he were pondering something philosophical, utterly unrelated to him. “That she was a nice lady,” he said, scratching his arm. “That everyone enjoyed listening to her show.”

Joshua forced himself to cough, feeling the hand, the vapor that felt like whiskey but wasn’t rise again and press behind his face, wanting, with the cough, to force it down, for fear that he would burst into tears.
Fuck
, he thought over and over again,
motherfuck
, to get himself back in line. He shifted in his chair, wanting to be two people: to be the person who demanded,
Tell me what my mother was like
—he knew, of course, but still he
wanted to know
, to hear, and in particular to hear it from Bruce—and also to be the person who sat still and hard and calm as a statue in his chair, as if no part of him could be moved or reached or known.

He opted, on instinct, to be the latter. It was the easier person to be.
He willed himself to think of whatever he could that was not his mother, which, instantly, was Tiffany, and the way in group that afternoon she’d picked indifferently through the ends of her hair and then, suddenly, erotically, it seemed, looked up at him.

“I wonder how much time we got left,” asked Bruce after a while, patting his hands on the metal table.

“Twelve minutes,” Joshua said, staring at the clock behind Bruce’s head, in a voice as leaden as he could muster.

“Feel this,” said Lisa the following week, pulling Joshua’s hand toward her, pressing his palm onto the side of her round belly. He had to lean forward hard, trying not to actually rise from his chair. Anything that could be construed as standing during the visit—other than the hello and the goodbye—was strictly against the rules. She pressed her palm more firmly on top of his and together they waited until he felt a tap and then another one in quick succession.

“Cool,” said Joshua. It surprised him every time. Even with less than a month to go before the baby was due, he found it hard to honestly believe that inside of Lisa there was a baby.

“It’s been like that night and day lately,” she said, letting go of his hand. “I can hardly sleep anymore.”

“No?”

“Oh, I try. I lay there. When you’re home I’ll sleep better.”

“I don’t sleep well neither. But we only have a week to go.” He squeezed her hands. They were slightly puffy, like the rest of her except for her legs, which were as long and bony as they’d always been.

“So, Claire and I are making progress. This class is really good, Josh. I wish you could go. Today they taught us how to breathe.” She took a deep breath in and then exhaled it.

“To breathe deep?”

“Yeah—but it’s a special deep breath. Like this.” She demonstrated it again. “In through the nose, out through the mouth. You’ll have to remind me to do that when I’m in labor.”

“Okay.”

“Oh—and guess what? Next week we’re going to see a video of an actual birth.”

“That should be interesting.” He felt what he always felt when they were talking about the baby: that he had to smile and nod and say yes in
all the right places, the way he did when he was listening to charming stories of someone else’s child. Lisa was the opposite, in love with the baby already. She’d put her hands on her belly and talk to it, telling it how they were going to spoil it, and how cute it would be and that they were going to get it special things to wear, like a pair of red baby cowboy boots.

“Some people, when they see the video, get kind of afraid—that’s what the lady who does the class said—but other people get more excited.” She looked at him, her eyes fervent like they were whenever they spoke of the birth. “Are you afraid?”

“Of what?”

“Of the birth. Of everything going okay.”

“It’ll go okay.”

“It’s a big deal, you know.”

“I know.” He rubbed the tops of her forearms.

“Sometimes I don’t know if you know how big of a deal it is.”

“I do,” he said, tracing around several of the freckles on her arm with his finger. “It’s a very big deal. But we have to think positive.”

She stared at him for several moments, her brown eyes getting watery. “I could die, for your information,” she said, her voice wavering with tears. “I mean, people have. Lots of people.”

“But not anymore, Lees. That was back in the olden days.”

“That isn’t true,” she said passionately, her eyes cutting back to him. She wiped her face with her hands. “Okay, it isn’t
common
, but it happens. You never know, Josh. Childbirth is a very serious matter.”

“I know. But it doesn’t mean you’re going to die. Think of all the women who
don’t
die.” They sat in silence for several moments, until he asked, “Do you want me to rub your feet?”

She shook her head. Last time he saw her, she’d taken her shoes off and propped her feet up on the table so he could massage them.

“Try not to be afraid,” he said, wishing he could hug her.

The door opened and the other guard—Fred—popped his head in and, seeing Tommy was there, stepped aside to let Tiffany through the door. Lisa turned to see what was the commotion.

“Hi,” Tiffany called to Joshua meekly, the first time she’d ever addressed him directly.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” Lisa said, turning back to look curiously at Joshua. Sometimes
people had visitors at the same time and they had to share the community room, but he felt too self-conscious to explain that now that Tiffany was in the room. He considered, for an instant, introducing them, but immediately cast the idea aside.

She followed Tommy hesitantly across the room and sat at the far end of the table and waited while he chained her to it.

“So,” Joshua said quietly to Lisa, trying to act as if Tiffany’s presence had no effect on the two of them and their conversation. “What else?”

Tommy got the cardboard divider that sat in the corner of the room and propped it on the table, blocking Tiffany from their view. Paintings that Pat McCredy had forced them to do were tacked onto the divider. “Paint for me your inner child,” she’d commanded.

“What else?” asked Lisa, feeling self-conscious too, Joshua knew. Silently, he tried to purge all the lustful thoughts he’d had for Tiffany, as if Lisa might be able to read his mind. “Oh. My mom’s throwing me a baby shower next Sunday. It was supposed to be a surprise, but then I found out because Deb said something in front of me at work and then they just went ahead and told me. It’s going to be at Deb’s house.”

“I knew about it. Claire told me.” In his peripheral vision, he could see his inner child hanging from its tack—a page painted entirely black with an explosion of orange and red and yellow at its center. A fire in the back of a cave is what it was, though Pat McCredy insisted it was something else entirely: something vaginal, signifying his desire to go back to the womb.

“They’re doing a money tree, where everyone brings a card with money inside and hangs it on a tree and then we can buy what we want.”

“That’ll help,” he said, stroking her beautiful arms, all the way up to her elbows. Her skin was like nothing else on this earth to him. “I sure wish I could be there.”

She smiled at him, a light flickering in her eyes. “You couldn’t anyway, honey. No men are allowed.” She glanced at the divider, her eyes scanning the paintings without seeming to take them in—the blobs of color, the mad spirals and lopsided hearts, and the one that was blank almost entirely, aside from a nearly transparent daisy at its center. Tiffany’s, of course.

“Lisa,” he said, wanting to distract her so she wouldn’t focus in and ask which was his. Abruptly, she turned back to him. He sat silently for a moment, trying to think of what to say. “I hate it in here so much. I want to come home.”

“I know you do. I hate it too. But we only got one more week of this.”

“I was thinking I could put my name on the list at the oven factory,” he said, though the idea of working among the heat and toxic fumes filled him with dread. “It’s a good job. Good money.”

“It
is
, Josh. I think you should.”

“It might take a while before I can get in, but at least I can get my name on the list. It would be a positive step that I could take for our future,” he said, hearing, to his remorse, a glimmer of Pat McCredy in his voice, hoping that Tiffany was not hearing the same thing.

“A couple more minutes,” Tommy said to them, and Lisa shut her eyes, then opened them and smiled sadly at Joshua.

“What about me?” asked Tiffany from behind the cardboard divider.

Joshua picked up Lisa’s hand and pressed it to his lips, kissed it, then held it there. It was easier, at the end, if neither one of them said anything. They simply looked deeply into each other’s eyes, silently telling each other things. He told her the same things that he’d told her each visit, but now he felt that he meant it more than he ever had, compelled, he sadly realized, by the proximity of Tiffany, who now, suddenly, repulsed him.

“I’ll bring them to you when they come,” Tommy said sternly. “There ain’t nothing I can do.”

“I know it,” Tiffany said. “I just hope they didn’t have car trouble. My mom’s been having trouble with her car,” she said to no one, the chains clanking lightly against the table, unable to keep herself from gesturing with her hands as she spoke.

“Who’s coming?” asked Lisa, without taking her eyes off of Joshua, then she turned her head and stared at the divider.

It took Tiffany several moments to realize she was being spoken to.

“My kids,” she said at last. “And my mom.”

“How many do you have?” asked Lisa, still holding on to Joshua’s hand.

“Two. Two boys. They’re four and five.”

“How sweet. It’s nice they’re so close in age. They’ll always be friends.” She gave his hand a squeeze, then released it and stood. She liked to stand before Tommy came and told her it was time. Joshua stood too and went around the table for their goodbye hug.

They could see Tiffany now, over the divider. The sheet of her glorious
hair, the sharp jag of her nose, her tiny fierce eyes looking up at them, an expression on her face as if she were seeing Joshua for the first time.

“Lisa, this is Tiffany, by the way. Tiffany, this is Lisa,” said Joshua, putting his arm around her shoulders. “My fiancée.”

That night, even after his nightly cry, even after he’d stood and blown his nose, Joshua could not fall asleep. He lay listening to the silence of the jail and the underground hallway that wrapped around it for so long that he began to hear the sounds he’d never detected before: an unidentifiable ticking from the direction of the guard’s room, the hum of the soda machine that sat in the hallway beyond the reach of the inmates, and, most annoyingly of all, the in and out of Vern’s breath as he lay sleeping a few feet away.

The ticking from the guards’ room brought to mind a particular bird that appeared in Coltrap County every spring. Joshua could remember the precise call of the bird—
tick-tick-tick, click-click-click
—but he could not for the life of him remember what the bird was called. It was a special bird, rare. People from the Cities came up to see it, parking their cars on the side of the highway where it bordered the Midden bog, spending hours looking through their binoculars. His mother had done a radio show on the bird a few years back.