Torch (15 page)

Claire picked up an envelope. “The people from the radio station sent you a card.”

“That’s nice.”

“Do you want me to read it to you?” she asked, tearing the envelope open.

“Maybe later.”

Claire stared at her mother as she slept or tried to sleep. The longer she watched her, the more foreign Teresa seemed to her, as if she hadn’t known her all her life. She’d felt the same peculiar dislocation years before, when it had been explained to her how babies were made. It wasn’t the facts that had confused her, not the mystery of sex or birth or creation, but the question of why. Why should there be people at all? Or fish or lions or rats? Now she felt a new wonder washing over her. If there were to be people and fish and lions and rats, then why should they die? And why, most of all, should her mother die? She stood up in order to shake the feeling off and walked softly across the room to the window and gazed out at the street below. She stood perfectly still and erect and was acutely aware of her stillness, her erectness. Grief had suddenly, inexplicably, improved her posture. It had also, more understandably, made her thin. She felt as though her body had become something brittle, like the branch of a tree or a broomstick.

She turned away from the window and picked up the card from her mother’s friends at the radio station. On the front there was a sepia-toned
photo of a woman sitting on the seat of a Conestoga wagon, pulled by a pair of oxen. Inside there was a constellation of messages, each saying practically the same thing:
Get well soon
. She propped the card on the sill of the window and walked out of the room past her mother asleep in the bed.

Claire had become familiar with the hospital’s hallways and rooms, the small places she could go for privacy or entertainment. The nurses smiled politely as she passed. Each day she went to the gift shop and lingered over shot glasses and key chains, smiling clocks and teddy bears. There was a bin of small toys and she became obsessed with one in particular, but wouldn’t buy it—a little plastic tray of letters on cubes that shifted to form words. Every word had to be four letters long. She stood in the gift store and played the game, spelling
wand, toss, pond, burn, bask, piss, fish
, and so it went, until the woman who worked there seemed annoyed and she set the game down and left. She would take the long corridors to the maternity ward, through several sets of doors, up an elevator, past cardiology and radiology and neurology, and over an indoor bridge that spanned the street below. The babies were tiny and not beautiful, but inspiring nonetheless. She watched them through a wide glass pane, not wanting them, but wanting desperately to hold them. They smelled good to her, even through the glass, like raw vegetables when they were still dirty.

“Are you an aunt?” everyone would ask her.

“No. Just visiting!” she’d say too jovially.

And then she would leave, taking a roundabout way through the day clinic, back through oncology, and into the hospice. There were only a few patients here besides her mother, another woman about her mother’s age and several old people. She caught glimpses of these people as she walked past their rooms and came to know them the way one knows the houses along a familiar street. The lady with the hole in her throat, the endlessly sleeping bald woman, the thrashing man who eventually had to be tied by all four limbs to his bed, the other man who beckoned and yelled, “Jeanie!” to everyone who passed, until finally one day Claire stopped.

“Jeanie?” he asked. His voice sounded young, but he was old. Old old, like most of the others—people who were so old nobody knew them anymore, or if they did, they came to visit only on Sundays.

“Yes,” Claire said. She stayed in the hallway, peering at him through his open door.

“Jeanie,” he said, relieved.

“Yes.”

“
Jeanie?
”

“Yes.” She twisted her hands into the wrists of her sweater.

“You ain’t Jeanie,” he said at last, gently, as if he were sorry to hurt Claire’s feelings. “I know my Jeanie and you ain’t her.”

A nurse appeared then, carrying a lunch tray, pushing into the door past Claire. “Is he hassling you?”

“No,” Claire said.

“Just ignore him,” the nurse said.

“Ah, Christ,” the man said and sat up in his bed, his feet dangling off, oddly bruised-looking, his toenails in need of a trim.

“You just gotta let it go in one ear and out the other,” the nurse said, and laughed uproariously.

There was a room at the end of the hall reserved for the relatives of the people who were patients in the hospice wing. On the door there was a painted wooden sign that said
FAMILY
room in puffy letters. Inside, the same artist had painted a giant rainbow on the wall, and at the end of it, a pot of gold and a fat elf doing a jig. There was also an orange couch, a refrigerator, a microwave oven, a coffee pot, and a water dispenser with one spout that was hot, the other cold.

Claire went there to drink herbal tea from a pointed paper cup and to read the bulletin board. There were signs advertising groups for people with AIDS, with chronic fatigue, for parents of premature babies or twins, for drug addicts and anorexics. She read these things each day, as if she’d never read them before. There was a television in the room, but she didn’t have the heart to turn it on. Usually she had the room all to herself. One day a man had walked in.

“Hello,” he said. “I’m Bill Ristow.”

“I’m Claire. Claire Wood.” She shook his hand with one hand and with the other held on to her empty paper cup. It was as pliant and soft and wet as the petal of a lily.

“My wife’s down in four-ninety. She’s got cancer.” He scratched his head with a pinkie finger. “You must be new here.”

“Kind of. We’ve been here—my mom’s been here—for two weeks. We didn’t know anything. I mean, about the cancer. She had this bad cold that wouldn’t go away. And then all of a sudden she had cancer everywhere.” She paused and glanced up at him. His eyes were hazel,
sunken. She smiled, stopped smiling, went on. “Anyway. It’s just been a little more than a month that we knew she had cancer and now there’s nothing they can do.” She stared at the absurdly rugged leather reinforcements on the toes of her shoes. She didn’t know what she would say or not say. She didn’t feel like she would cry. She had no control over either.

“Christ,” Bill said, and jingled the coins in his pocket. He was making coffee. The water fell one drop at a time into the pot. “Well, kiddo, I hate to say it, but in a way you’re lucky. It’s no vacation to drag it on. Nance and I—we’ve been doing the cancer dance for six years.”

He was older, but not old, her mother’s age. She thought he might have been a wrestler in high school, his body wide and dense, like a certain kind of boulder; his face too—primitive. He wasn’t good-looking. He wasn’t bad-looking. He took a mug that said
WYOMING!
from the cupboard and another one with a chain of vegetables holding hands and filled them both with coffee. He handed Claire
WYOMING
! without asking if she wanted it.

“You and me have a lot in common,” he said.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t drink coffee. She didn’t like coffee, but she held it anyway, the mug cradled in her hands. With pleasure.

In the afternoon she called David from the pay phone near the nurse’s station. She dialed his number
—their
number, though in the short time since she’d been gone, she’d suddenly felt as if she didn’t live there anymore. As she waited for him to pick up, she became aware of the fact that a woman was standing behind her. When she turned to look, the woman smiled and waved animatedly, as if she were standing far off instead of uncomfortably close.

“Hi,” Claire whispered, still holding the telephone receiver to her ear, the line ringing and ringing.

“I’d hoped to catch you,” the woman said, putting her hand out. “I’m Pepper Jones-Kachinsky. I’m the grief counselor here. I met your father … your stepdad … Bruce.”

“Oh,” Claire said, and hung up the phone. “Hello.”

Pepper stepped closer and took her hand, shook it, and didn’t let it go.

“How are you?” she asked. Her eyes were sad, glimmering. “You know, Claire, I want you to know—oh, it’s
terrible
about your mother—and
I want you to know that my door is always open if you ever want to talk about all that you’re experiencing. Twenty-four seven, as they say!”

“Thank you,” Claire said politely. She didn’t want to be consoled. She wanted one thing and one thing only—for her mother to live. “It’s just that I don’t know what good it will do.” Pepper kept her eyes locked on Claire’s face, still holding her hand. “I mean,” Claire stammered, “not that I couldn’t
talk
to you.”

“Oh, I would like that. I would like that very much,” Pepper said. She had two gray braids rolled into buns and pinned to the sides of her head.

“But I can’t. That’s the thing. I’m busy all day. Being with my mom.” Claire’s hand felt hot and damp. Infinitesimally, she tried to extricate it from Pepper’s grip.

“I don’t have a schedule. I’m at your beck and call. There’s no nine to five for me.” She put a finger to her lips, her crow’s feet crinkled in thought. “Let’s see. What about now? Why don’t we pop into my office this very minute?”

“Um,” Claire said, pointing to the phone. “Actually I was about to call someone …”

“Oh,” Pepper said, disappointed, as if she hadn’t noticed that Claire had been on the phone in the first place.

“But
maybe
,” Claire said. She didn’t want to hurt Pepper’s feelings. Perhaps, if no one went to talk to her, she would lose her job. “Briefly.”

“Fair enough!” Pepper exclaimed, and led the way to her office.

First they talked about Joshua. How he was never around. How he wouldn’t come to see Teresa at the hospital. How whenever Claire saw him he was high on marijuana. Pepper said this was called disassociation, Joshua’s version of coping. They sat on twin rocking chairs, wooden, with multicolored afghan blankets slung over the backs. Claire rocked steadily in her chair and then stopped.

“So what about you?” Claire asked shyly, when there seemed to be nothing more to talk about.

“Me?”

“Well … I mean how long have you worked here?”

Pepper said that she was an ex-nun, married now to a man named Keith, a nurse, whom she’d met on an Indian reservation in New Mexico. She told Claire how Keith had become addicted to gambling after his first wife left him. “Everyone has their own way of grieving,” she explained.
“And that was Keith’s way. Joshua has his way. You have your way. There is no right way. There is no wrong way. All ways lead to the mountaintop.”

“What mountaintop?”

Pepper didn’t answer. She leaned back and folded her hands on her lap and looked magnificently amazed, which is how, Claire had noticed, Pepper always looked. As if she held a giant ruby. As if cool rain were falling softly on her hot, grateful head.

Without warning, Claire began to cry. She simply inhaled and when she exhaled she was weeping—gulping and choking and bawling loudly. Embarrassed, she reached for a tissue from the table between them and blew her nose and then took another one. To gather herself, she concentrated on the row of cornhusk dolls that stood along the edge of Pepper’s desk and went up onto the sill of the window that looked out into the nurse’s station.

Finally Pepper said, “God is with you, and God is with your brother. God is with your stepfather, and God is with your mother. He is standing right next to each one of you and holding your hands whether you know it or not.”

“I don’t think so,” Claire squeaked. She was taking small puffing breaths, trying to get ahold of herself. “Maybe for you, but not for everyone.”

Pepper stayed looking like she did. Happy and holy and amazed and gazing directly into the eyes of whoever was looking at her, which made it impossible for Claire to look back at Pepper for any length of time. She took the afghan from the back of her chair and wrapped it around her shoulders even though she wasn’t cold.

“You don’t choose God. God chooses you,” Pepper said, and Claire began to cry again, but softly now, gushing silent tears. “You are chosen by God.
You
, Claire. I know in my heart that you are and that your mother is too.”

“Well,
I
don’t know it,” Claire said sharply from behind the tissue she held pressed to her nose. “I mean, I don’t feel his presence. I don’t even feel whether it’s actually a
him
. It could be a woman, you know. Did you ever think of that? Or it could not even be a
person
. And isn’t God supposed to
help
you or protect you or something? I don’t feel at all protected. And what use is God if you don’t feel
that?
” She cried in a few small gasps and then collected herself again and blew her nose. “It all just seems so
indirect
. And I need more than that.”

Pepper smiled kindly. “God is not a hotline,” she said. “You don’t get to just dial Him up. No. The problem is that you—oh, me as well, all of us, every last one of us—we expect happiness. God has a plan for each and every one of us and perhaps for you, perhaps right now for you, muffin, happiness is not in the plan. We are at the
mercy of the Divine
. Every last one of us!” She sat looking sadly at Claire and then crossed her legs and smoothed the fabric of her pants on the tops of her thighs. “Now look at that,” she said, “my shoe’s come untied,” and leaned forward to tie it.

Claire didn’t say a word. Her tears fell thicker and came down her face in hot streams and dripped off of her chin while Pepper sat quietly watching and then she sprang up out of her chair and bent to hold Claire.

“Oh, angel. Oh, sweet child. I know it’s hard. I
know
it is.” She held the sides of Claire’s face and then kissed her forehead and sat down on the floor and rubbed her ankles, then leaned back on her hands and told Claire about her life as a nun. Being called, knowing, knowing since she was ten that she wanted to be a nun, despite the disapproval of her parents. Her family owned a paper products manufacturing giant. They’d been the wealthiest family in Duluth for a century. Roads were named after them, ships, parks, and a museum that Claire had visited on a field trip in sixth grade. Pepper had given this all up and had been a nun for thirty-two years, from the ages of twenty-two until fifty-four. She lived in Chicago and then Green Bay. But most of the years she lived in El Salvador running a goat farm with three other American nuns and three Salvadoran nuns until one day a gang of men raided their house and kidnapped all of the nuns except for Pepper, who happened to be out back feeding the goats when the commotion started. She jumped into an oat bin and stayed there for two days, trying not to make a sound or think about water. Meanwhile, the other nuns had been taken away and gang-raped, tortured with a pair of scissors, several cigarettes, and an electric cattle prod, shot in the head, doused with gasoline, and set on fire.