Torch (8 page)

At night they played Old Maid and Go Fish, sitting at the picnic table, holding the flashlights to see. Teresa had been twenty-four, Claire almost seven, Joshua, five. This was their first real vacation.

They spent the days on the beach. It was beautiful, desolate; almost always they had it to themselves. Strange sharp reeds grew where the sand ended, a kind of ocean swamp that kept people from building houses there. They walked the beach up and down, finding shells and chunks of glass that had been worn and polished by the sea. The kids did gymnastics, yelling for her to watch every time. Cartwheels, backbends,
tricks they’d practiced as a team, then performed. Each of them could do a complete back flip, somersaulting in the air from a standing position and then landing in that same position. “Do it again,” she’d say, amazed each time. But then, after a while, she commanded them to stop. They were doing it too much. Surely they would tire and falter and land on their heads and break their necks and die. She had a precise image in her mind of what her children would look like with broken necks. She clutched their shoulders and forbade them from jumping when not in her sight. They laughed at her, giggling and giggling. Her kids were always giggling, as if a pair of invisible hands were tickling them, and also they hopped, up and down, down and up—so much hopping and giggling she thought she would go insane at times.

When they ran ahead of her on the shore she walked intentionally slowly so that she could pretend for a while that she was a normal person, not a mother. That those children in the distance belonged to someone else. That she was a woman on the beach contemplating things, letting the day go, or greeting it with calm, thinking ahead or back, instead of the endless present tense in which she lived. Or thinking nothing at all, thinking,
I wonder if God exists?
And then the kids ran toward her giggling, hopping, shrieking, “Mom! Mom! Look what we found!”

Joshua offered her his palms full of wet sand, and he and Claire told her to dig into it, to get her surprise, and she found the shell with the hole bored naturally, perfectly through it. She would wear it around her neck for the rest of her life.

“Thank you,” she said, the tears rising in her eyes.

“What’s wrong?” they both asked, in a chorus, walking back to the campground.

“Nothing,” she answered, though she began to cry harder. “It’s that we’re so happy,” she said at last. She put her hands on their heads. The three of them had the same hair. Not blond, not brown, but something in between: the faded yellow of grass where an animal had slept.

On the way back to Minnesota they got off the bus in Memphis to visit her parents. When they arrived, tanned from Florida, tired from the ride, her parents were so overjoyed to see them that they all five grabbed onto one another in one big embrace. Her parents weren’t rich, but Claire and Joshua thought they were, running victoriously through the house, not used to such things. Cars without rust, walls without cracks, rooms with beds that no one slept in, things in the cupboard like bags of
Doritos and Chips Ahoy! cookies that hadn’t been immediately ripped open and consumed. Teresa had not grown up in Memphis, but this is where her father worked now. They had moved all over the country when Teresa was a child, following her father’s job selling a special kind of paint that held up when exposed to extreme heat. The last place she’d lived with her parents was in El Paso, when she was seventeen and pregnant, a few days out of high school.

Her parents had disapproved bitterly when she decided to continue with her pregnancy. They said she was going to be the worst kind of mother—a
teen
mom, a
single
mom—but then when she eloped with Karl they’d also disapproved of that, because Karl was a coal miner who’d dragged her off to Pennsylvania to live in a trailer. They disapproved when she left him the first time and the second time and the third and the fourth, because when you get married you stick it out no matter what; but they also disapproved when she went back because how could she continue to be married to such a loser of a man. They disapproved when she left him for real the fifth time and moved across the country to a remote town that didn’t even appear on the map, because how was she going to make it on her own, and then later, they disapproved when she met Bruce and committed herself to what they called a “hippie charade of a marriage.”

Against this backdrop, she lived her life. She hated her parents at times, loved them at other times. She talked to them each Sunday on the phone and often after they’d hung up she decided to never speak to them again, but then she would call the next Sunday. She was a slave to Sundays.

How are you? Good. How are you? Good. How are the kids? Great
.

Her mother would be on one phone, sitting on the aqua bedspread that covered her parents’ king-size bed, her father on the other phone, standing in the dining room with a grandfather clock ticking nearby.

Several times a year they sent her boxes of things they wanted to get rid of. Things they said they thought she could use. Old towels and impossible kitchen equipment that performed only one simple task: shredding cheese or mashing fruit. Or hideous swaths of fabric that it took Teresa several minutes to figure out were curtains—as opposed to other hideous swaths of fabric that she had first
thought
to be curtains, but turned out to be pants her mother had worn in the seventies. But every once in a while, in the midst of all the crap, there would be a shirt she
loved and wore and wore and wore. Her parents took out life insurance policies on Claire and Joshua, just enough to cover their funerals, but wouldn’t give Teresa a dime. Not at Christmas, not for her birthday. When she’d married Karl they told her that she was an adult now. When she left him, they said she had to weed the garden that she’d planted.

And she did. She weeded her garden. She had a million jobs. As a waitress, a nurse’s assistant, a factory worker, a janitor. Her million jobs were always doing one of these four things, but the place changed a million times. It turned out that Claire was smart, good in school, good at math and reading, good at tests, her mind like flypaper. She would go to college and be famous somehow. She would be rich and buy her mother a house in Tahiti, they said, without any of them being exactly sure where Tahiti was. She would be the first woman president of the United States.
Imagine that!
They did. She won a scholarship to the University of Minnesota. A full ride and off she went, majoring in political science, in dance, in Spanish, and in English, and then a combination of all four things.

Joshua was not as much of an overachiever, but kind and goodhearted, hardworking and honest. He’d had some trouble with his ears in first grade—couldn’t hear what the teacher was saying—so they put him in the front row. Teresa took him in for a procedure. Tubes. He was mildly dyslexic, wrote
gotfor
instead of forgot. He liked to imagine things, that they had a swimming pool or a pet giraffe named Jim. He excelled at drawing automobiles meticulously, beautifully in pencil, perfectly to scale. He knew everything about cars and trucks—the models, years, makes. Like Bruce, he was a Chevy man, and everything made by Ford sucked. He could fix cars too. His hands a gentle pair of tools taking things apart, then putting them back together again, better than before.

One Sunday on the phone her father said, “It’s a shame that the brains got wasted on Claire. If only one person in the family gets the brains, you hope they go to a boy. It’s just like with you and Tim, the brains got wasted on you.”

She set the receiver back into its cradle without a word, but quietly, not slamming it down. Who
were
these assholes? What had happened to them? Her childhood had been filled with a reasonable amount of joy. Barbecues and birthday parties, pushing a pin through a paper plate and holding it up to the sky in their backyard to see the solar eclipse.

She called the next Sunday and nobody mentioned the Sunday before.

Years passed. She was thirty, then thirty-five. Slowly, stingily, she forgave them without their knowing about it. She accepted the way things were—the way
they
were—and found that acceptance was not what she’d imagined it would be. It wasn’t a room she could lounge in, a field she could run through. It was small and scroungy, in constant need of repair. It was the exact size of the hole in the solar eclipse paper plate, a pin of light through which the entire sun could radiate, so bright it would blind you if you looked. She looked. And something astonishing happened: she loved them, felt loved by them, all the love traveling back and forth through that small shaft. She saw her parents in their most distilled form, being precisely who they’d always been. The people who sent her garbage in the mail. The people who made her cry each Sunday. The people who would gladly give their lives to save hers. The only people who would do that. Ever, ever. Her mom and dad.

She’d told them about her cancer the previous morning. It seemed better, somehow, for her to tell them in the morning. She’d allowed only a few tears to escape when she told Claire and Joshua, but when she’d heard the voices of her parents, she cried hard enough that it took her several minutes to get a single sentence out. “I … I … I have …”

Her father got calm and her mother got hysterical, the way they’d been for as long as Teresa could remember. Her mother pounded against something, on the bed frame or a table, Teresa could hear it over the phone. She claimed she was going to leave the house at once and get on a plane to fly to Minnesota. Teresa’s father emphasized that this was just the beginning, that cancer was easily cured these days, that she was young and she should not—that he would not—get too worried yet. By the time they hung up it had been decided that they would come in one month. That they would call Tim and tell him and ask him to come too and they would all be together again for the first time in ages. She hung up the phone feeling slightly giddy and sick to her stomach, the way she always did at the prospect of a visit from her parents.

In bed she lay awake, thinking about what she would feed them when they came. They were meat and potatoes people; she and Bruce and the kids were vegetarians. This always caused an uproar, even though when her parents visited she cooked them beef, chicken, pork—some kind of meat each night.

Bruce rolled onto his side and let out a small groan.

“Are you awake?” she asked, sitting up.

He didn’t answer and she sat silently watching him, pondering whether she had the energy to get out of bed to get herself something to drink. She stared at the painting of the trees that hung at the foot of the bed. She’d painted it herself. Three trees, winter trees, not a leaf among them. Bare and black and big as boys against a landscape of snow. One tree represented love, another truth, the other faith. She couldn’t remember which was which now, though when she’d painted it she’d gone to such pains, such excesses to paint those trees. Which way the branches should reach, how thick the trunks should be, making small imperfections to show where an animal might have come to scratch or chew the bark. She stared at the painting so long in the dark that she began to see strange things in it: the silhouettes of glum faces, a tall spindly boot, the backside of a man who carried a candle in a sconce.

“I can’t sleep,” she said loudly to Bruce.

He inhaled sharply and reached for her hand and held it under the covers.

“I had a dream and then I woke up thinking about it and now I can’t fall back asleep,” she said. She lay down again, nestling into him. “I dreamed there was this brown goop attaching itself to me. And then I dreamed of a woman I used to work for—Mrs. Turlington—I was her housekeeper. Not in the dream, in real life I was her housekeeper when I was a teenager. I would go after school. She had this gong that had supposedly belonged to some emperor at one point—some emperor in Japan. I had to dust it every day with a feather duster. And that’s what I dreamed—that I was dusting this gong.”

She was silent then, considering whether she should tell him the dream about the cat in the middle of the freeway.

“She fired me in the end. I can’t remember why. I moved away anyway. I got married.” She lay staring at the ceiling. “She gave me a ceramic rooster with a head that came off and had lotion inside.”

“For being fired?”

“For getting married.”

He patted her leg. “Let’s sleep. You need your rest. Tomorrow’s a big day.”

She closed her eyes, then opened them again, wild with anger about the rooster. “It’s ridiculous when I think about it. Why would she fire me
and then give me a rooster?” Her voice wavered and then she sat up and cried.

He tried to pat her back but she shook his hand away. She went to the bureau and took several tissues from the box and blew her nose. Her head was stuffed up from talking and crying and consoling everyone all weekend.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s okay. I’m just thinking all kinds of things right now.”

“That’s the past,” said Bruce, wide awake now. “That’s not what you should be thinking about.”

“I’m not thinking about it,” she said.

“You just had a dream.”

“I know.” She crouched down, feeling around in the dark for the socks she’d taken off before she went to bed. “Go back to sleep,” she said. She sat on the padded bench along the wall and pulled the socks on.

“I can’t sleep if you can’t sleep.”

“Yes, you can.” Through the window, she could make out Lady Mae and Beau standing close to each other just outside the entrance to their stalls, keeping each other warm.

When Bruce began to snore, she walked quietly out of the room. The house was dark, but it felt alive, the way houses did to her when no lights were on and she was the only one awake. Claire and Joshua were asleep upstairs. In the morning Claire would drive back to Minneapolis. Teresa felt that Claire’s departure would mark a new era in their lives: the era in which she actually had cancer. At the moment she felt almost nothing—that cancer could not be real because her body was not real. She felt numb and stuffed and fuzzy, weightless and yet weighted. As if her veins had been filled with wet feathers. She’d felt that way all weekend, hazy and deeply sad, yet laboring to reassure Joshua and Claire and Bruce that she was actually just fine.