Torch (7 page)

The first time he saw Teresa she was mopping up a pool of tomato juice that had spilled from a rolling cart in the hallway. “Hello,” she said, and laughed lightly. The second time he saw her she was standing in the front door of the Rest-A-While Villa in the heat of summer holding a screwdriver, its handle, pale yellow, barely transparent, like honey gone hard. Later, he learned that she carried it with her wherever she went so she could open and close her car door by jamming it into the space where the handle had once been. “Hello,” she said for the second time. Her earrings were real feathers that fluttered up into her hair as she walked past. The third time he saw her they spent an unexpected hour in the Rest-A-While Villa parking lot together while he fixed the handle on her car door.

They fell in love then. Languidly, secretly, during the hours that
Claire and Joshua were in school. She hadn’t allowed him to meet them for months, and once they’d decided to live together—neither of them believed in marriage—they’d had a ceremony, a nonlegal wedding, which bound Bruce not only to Teresa but also to Claire and Joshua. The ceremony involved vows they’d written together and then the four of them each chose a lilac frond from the same bough and took turns letting it go in the Mississippi River to symbolize their bond as a family. Bruce Gunther to Teresa and Joshua and Claire Wood. That night Teresa had given Bruce a painting that she’d painted herself—
The Woods of Coltrap County
—three trees in the snow, one big, two smaller ones. It hung now on the wall at the foot of the bed, and he’d slept and woken to it every morning and night for the twelve years they’d been together.

He asked, “Do you want Karl to know? Should I call him when the time comes?”

“No,” she said, turning slightly toward him, but not enough to face him. “Not unless Josh and Claire want that. I don’t even know exactly where he lives anymore.”

He stroked her back with the tips of his fingers and then he remembered that she didn’t want to be touched and stopped, but left his hands near her on the bed. He felt a burning tightness in his center, down low, in rut and ache, wanting her, wanting to do everything to her, to push and pull and lick and hump and enter and suck and pinch and rub. He felt other ways at other times and he knew that she did too. Sometimes they’d had to almost will themselves to fuck, their bodies clacking together good-naturedly, as familiar and expected as water to the mouth. During those times, they got each other off expertly, lovingly, and kindly, but without urgency and without lust. Sometimes when she walked through the room naked he was no more moved by the sight of her than if the cat had sidled in, but now he felt the opposite: that he could make love to her again and again for days without stop.

“Josh is late,” she said.

“He’ll be along. Why don’t you get some sleep?”

“I will,” she said hoarsely, without moving.

He heard the rumble of a pickup making its way down their road, ice-glazed gravel and packed snow, with more snow coming on. He knew as it neared that it was neither Teresa nor Joshua, knew in fact that it was Kathy Tyson. He was mildly surprised when he heard her engine slow
and then saw her truck turn into the driveway. The dogs barked and he tried to quiet them to no avail, and he walked off the porch and into the yard to greet her. He’d known her all his life, without actually ever truly coming to know her in anything but a neighborly way. She’d graduated high school a few years behind him and joined her dad in his business, inseminating cows. She lived on their road, another mile and a half on, in a cabin midway down a long driveway that continued up a hill to her parents’ house, where she’d grown up.

“Afternoon,” she called happily, rolling her window down, but not getting out. He walked up to her door. “I didn’t expect to find anyone home this time of day.”

“I’m headed back out now. I just stopped home to get some tools.”

“The roads are icing up.” Her eyes were brown, the same color as her hair. “I wanted to bring some things by.” She handed Bruce an empty mason jar. “Thank Teresa again for the apple butter. And this came to me somehow.” She handed him an envelope.

“Thanks.” He looked at the envelope: nothing but junk mail, addressed to him in computer-generated cursive handwriting, a trick disguised as something real.

“You got any big weekend plans?” she asked.

“Not too much.”

She shifted her truck into reverse. “Tell Teresa hi for me.”

“You do the same with your folks,” he called out to her as she rolled backward into the turnaround. He opened the envelope and read the letter that tried to persuade him that he needed to replace all the windows of his house. He ripped it in half and put it into his pocket, where he found one of the eggs he’d placed there earlier, cooler now. The snow had already laid down a fresh two inches. He ran his glove over the trunk of Claire’s Cutlass, swishing the snow off of it, clearing it away for no actual reason, and then he stood staring at its maroon rump, the only color in sight.

He opened the back door of the car and got in and lay down on the seat, his knees bent, his feet crammed onto the floor. Snow covered the windows all around him, making the inside like a cocoon. The car had belonged to his parents, who’d died a few years ago, his father first, then his mother a couple months later. Bruce had given the car to Claire when she moved to Minneapolis to go to college. By the time his parents owned the car, Bruce had been living on his own, so he hadn’t ridden in
it all that much, but being inside of it made him feel as if he were in the presence of his mother and father again. His parents had died old, nearly eighty. Bruce was their only child, conceived late, after they’d given up hope. The car smelled good, the way all cars did to him, like his whole life pressed together in a room. A combination of metal and gas and bits of food and velour and vinyl and fake pine needles and plastic where people had been, where their hands had touched and touched again. There was a long rip in the fabric that covered the ceiling of the car, causing the whole thing to sag. He closed his eyes, and soon the dogs started up their ecstatic barking, hearing Teresa’s car approach. Bruce stayed in the back seat as she turned into the driveway and made her way up the hill. He kept his eyes closed and a list formed again, not of the work he had to do, or the money he had to make, but of what he and Teresa were going to do now, what they’d decided to say, and how.

The engine stopped and he heard them get out; none of them said a word, not even to the dogs. He was going to sit up and get out in a minute, but something held him there. He heard them walking through the snow, up onto the porch. It occurred to him that he could stay in the car. They would think he was in the barn. How long could he stay there before they went looking for him? His hands were numb from the cold. He sat up, slowly, and one of the eggs in his pocket rolled out onto the seat. He put it back into his pocket and got out of the car. When he shut the door all the snow that had clung to the windows fell off like a large curtain.

The outside light went on, and Teresa stepped out onto the porch without her coat on. “There you are,” she called to him, and stood waiting for him to come to her.

They hugged without looking at each other, and she held him for a very long time, then stepped back and said, “They know. I told them on the way home. I couldn’t wait.” He could see that she’d been crying. She looked down and then turned and went inside, and he followed her, straight into the living room without taking his boots off, where Joshua and Claire sat on opposite ends of the couch. Shadow was on Claire’s lap. She stroked her as if she were concentrating very hard on following precisely the same line each time, tears falling quietly down her face.

“Cancer means a lot of things these days,” said Teresa encouragingly, and sat down between them. “It can do different things. We don’t know what mine will do.”

Simultaneously Claire and Joshua began to weep, each of them scrambling to sit on the floor at Teresa’s feet, their heads pressed into her corduroy-covered knees. Bruce pursed his lips, to keep his mouth from quivering, but then his jaw began to tremble and he coughed into his hands. He gazed at the gold-colored towels that sat always on the arms of his stuffed chair, to cover the places where the fabric had worn away. He smoothed the towels down with his rough hands, straightening them back into place, and tried to make his mind go blank as Teresa continued to speak, her voice like a band playing a march, reciting the numbers, the dates, the seasons, the estimations and the speculations and the calculations, the Septembers, the Marches, and the maybe-not Mays.

At last she stopped talking and Bruce watched her stroke Claire and Joshua’s hair while they wept, stroking it in all the different ways that he had seen her stroke their hair over the years. Rubbing it like it was cloth, raking through it like it was leaves, then taking it in tiny tendrils and pulling delicately on it, as if she were playing the strings of a harp. His insides leapt and were still and then they leapt again as he thought of what to say but he said nothing. Pain washed through him in waves at seeing the sorrow of his children, and solace washed through him as well, for precisely the same reason.

“We’re going to get through this,” he said at last, his voice ghoulish and tinny, an echo from afar. Teresa looked at him gratefully, her eyes aflame and at the same time calm, as if she’d arrived at the scene of an accident and had come prepared to help. With their eyes they said things to one another, domestic and romantic, grandiose and mundane, but mostly they said, without any surprise,
Cancer. Cancer. It’s truly cancer now
. The realization crackled starkly between them across the room. Bruce felt as if he were seeing it—the word itself—and understanding it for the first time. Fraught with horror. And beauty now too, because it lived in her, like a fish that swam or a sapphire of coal that burned. “We’re going to get through this,” he repeated, suddenly giddy, believing it, that if cancer could be beautiful, she would live. “We
are
.”

“We are,” Teresa agreed quietly, stilling her hands.

And then she turned away from him, as if all alone in a room, and rested her head back against the ruined velvet of the couch.

PART II

The face of this love was quiet and feral. It was a ruthless act, but not a guilty one. A waterfall, a flood, is neither guilty nor not guilty. It simply drowns the people in its way.

—Mary Lee Settle,
Charley Bland

T
HE CLOCK
on Bruce’s side of the bed was relentless. Two twelve, its terrible little red face said. Teresa reached for the cold mug of peppermint tea on the shelf beside her, pushing herself up to sit, and took a big sip. She’d fallen asleep, but then woken from a dream about a mass of brown goop attaching itself inextricably to the front of her shirt.
Cancer
, she thought now. Her first dream of cancer.

“Bruce?” she said quietly, her voice a drop of water, not really wanting to wake him. His breath remained unaltered, so deep and sure. She set the mug of tea back on the shelf and then lay down, the side of her arm just barely grazing Bruce’s body under the covers. It was late Sunday night, actually the wee hours of Monday morning, the day on which she’d drive to Duluth for her first radiation treatment.

She closed her eyes and concentrated on relaxing her body, letting its weight sink into the bed, feeling how the blood moved through her, but then she opened her eyes, unable to feel anything. She felt that she was made of air and cold peppermint tea, her body a vessel that held only those two things. She stared at the shadows on the ceiling and remembered the other dreams she’d had: a cat in the median of a freeway that she had to rescue, and another in which she was dusting a gong. She realized that perhaps they were about cancer too, that, from now on, all of her dreams would be.

She would have to ask her brother, Tim. He believed that he knew everything about dreams—what it meant when something was pink, what it meant if you were on a train or a ship. Sometimes she agreed with his analysis, other times she thought it was a bunch of New Age crap. She seldom spoke to him anymore. As children they’d been fierce friends and as adults they had various things in common, but not much to say to each other about them. When they talked, they talked about their parents—Tim
lived near them, so he gave her updates—how their health was, what insulting thing they’d said about Laura, Tim’s girlfriend of twenty years. Tim and Laura owned a rock shop together. They dealt in crystals and agates, semiprecious stones, things Claire and Joshua had gone wild over when they were younger. She supposed Tim knew by now—his baby sister has cancer—thankfully, her parents had volunteered to tell him. Telling
them
had been all that Teresa could bear to do. Tim knew everything about what stones meant too, what curative powers they had. He would send her one by express mail, she knew. A rock to carry around in her purse or pocket or wear around her neck.

Teresa reached for the necklace that hung there now—a seashell on a leather string—and held it in the dark, a habit of hers when she was thinking. She hardly ever took the necklace off. Joshua and Claire had found the shell and given it to her the one time that they’d gone to the ocean. It was readymade for a necklace. Small and lovely, with a tiny hole bored through the top. They’d gone to Florida; somehow she’d scratched together the money. She tried now to recall how she’d gotten the money: her tax return. Usually she’d spent it on something more practical. Clothes for the kids or a new used junk heap of a car, but that year—the first year after she’d finally left their father—she wanted to take Claire and Joshua on a vacation, so she did. They rode a Greyhound bus for thirty-some hours from Minnesota to Florida, to the beach, to a forlorn-looking campground called Sea Scape, near the town of Port St. Joe. They set up the tent she’d borrowed from a friend. She’d borrowed everything—the sleeping bags and the Coleman stove, the flashlights and the tarp, even the enormous suitcase on wheels that she’d packed it all into. They stayed for almost a week, going to town only once to get more food, hitching a ride with an elderly couple who’d been camped near them in a ramshackle RV.