Torch (20 page)

“Why are you here so late?” He gestured for her to sit on the vinyl couch and he sat in the chair across from her.

“I felt like coming down. I thought of you and I felt that I should come. That maybe you’d like to pray.” Immediately she closed her eyes and began, “Dear Lord …”

He bowed his head and lowered his eyes without closing them entirely and listened to her pray in a steady murmur while gazing at her shoes. Lavender Keds with clean white bumpers shaped like half-moons.
He didn’t believe in God and neither did Teresa. Or at least not the version of God that Pepper seemed to be promoting, but he didn’t have it in him to say no. Certainly praying couldn’t hurt, even if it did make him feel remotely like a hypocrite, and remotely like the boy he’d once been, who’d been made to go to church each Sunday, to confession every time he’d sinned. Pepper prayed for Teresa’s health and recovery, for her peaceful passage if health could not be restored, for Bruce’s strength in the face of this suffering, and for that of all the people who loved Teresa. She asked God to watch over “all the children of the world and most especially Claire and Josh” and followed that with a formal prayer, something rote and vaguely familiar to Bruce, and then she crossed herself and reached out with her eyes still crushed shut and clutched his knee.

“Amen,” he said and she whispered amen too, saying it fiercely, almost savagely, without taking her hand from his knee.

When a decent enough time had passed, he said, “I appreciate it—you coming in. But you don’t have to. Actually … I thought I should tell you that my own beliefs,” he glanced at Teresa, “our beliefs—I mean, in God—are not that firm. We were both raised Catholic, but we didn’t stick with it. We aren’t in any way religious. So prayer …” He didn’t know how to continue without offending. Out on the street far below, he could hear a car horn blare for several seconds and then stop. “Prayer,” he continued, “is not going to be of much use to us.”

Pepper didn’t say anything. She went to the small table in the room, where they’d propped all the get-well cards, and picked one up and read it. It had a sepia-toned photo of a Conestoga wagon on the front. He wanted to rip it from her wrinkled hands.

She looked at him abruptly and put the card down, careful to prop it precisely as it had been. “Would you like a doughnut?” she asked, glancing toward a long box that sat near her coat and purse. She walked over to it and carried it to him, hoisting it up so he could choose.

He wasn’t hungry, but he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so he took one—the first one his hand landed on, a glazed twist—and chewed it dispassionately as a beast in a field. When he was done he reached for his coffee, cold now, and took a swig. The coffee was strong and he intended to drink it all night. He didn’t want to sleep. Ever again.

“Thank you,” he said, setting his mug down. It said
WYOMING
! across the side; he’d taken it from the Family Room down the hall.

“They’re left over from my group that meets Monday nights.” She
sat on the couch again and gestured for him to join her, and he did. “Speaking of which, that’s something you should know, Bruce. For afterwards. We have a group, ‘The Loss of a Loved One and Other Life Changes.’ It’s a family group. It meets once a week. You can all come together. We find that it—” she interrupted herself, a look of realization overtaking her face. “You know, we just did something that you may be interested in. In fact, it’s something I’d very much like to share with you.”

She stood and went to her purse, knelt to rummage through it, smiling at its contents, searching in the dim light of the room in each of its pockets and sections. She had an incredibly fit body for a seventy-year-old. She wore jeans with an elastic waistband and a sports bra that gathered her breasts into one firm bundle. She seemed constantly on the verge of turning a cartwheel.

“Here it is,” she exclaimed. “Heavens, this purse. All the doggone things I cart around!” She stood and came toward him, holding what he could now see was a purple marker, and took the cap off. “It’s a little exercise we did. Bow your head,” she said, as if she was about to perform a party trick. She parted his hair with her free hand and before he could agree or disagree, she pressed the tip of the marker to his scalp.

“Now,” she said, stepping back, replacing the cap on the marker. “I want you to remember that dot when you’re feeling sad or lonely. You can’t wash it off. Once it’s there, it’s there for life. It’s a reminder that you’re a special person. That you’re a child of God, which means that you’re never alone, Bruce. Not for a minute. It means that you are a beloved man who lives in the light of God’s love, as we all do.”

“How are the animals?” Teresa asked suddenly, her voice clear as a spoon against a jar.

They turned to her, startled. Bruce rushed to the bed.

“The animals? Fine.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “Did you just wake up? They miss you—everyone does. The dogs are staying at Kathy Tyson’s now, until we can all be home.”

“Kathy Tyson?” She lifted her eyes to him. They appeared younger, bluer now because the rest of her had become so old.

“So they won’t be lonely. With us gone all the time they don’t have company.”

She smiled at him and her smile was like her eyes. The only two parts of her that were still that way.

“Would you like to pray?” Pepper asked from the foot of the bed, still holding the marker.

“Actually,” he said irritably, “we’d prefer if you’d—”

“Yes,” said Teresa, keeping her eyes on Bruce.

That night, despite the coffee, Bruce slept. Then woke. Then he flickered back to sleep and woke again, and again and again, as if a dumb but persistent hand attached to a stick was prodding him. At last he woke entirely, instantly, and sat up in his cot as if the hand had slapped him. He knew exactly where he was. Never in all of this did he forget where he was. The room was quiet, but recently so. The silence had a luxurious quality, as if in the wake of the terrible sound that had preceded it. Teresa was asleep, bathed in the gentle lights of the machines that were stationed around her head. He watched her face and then the noise came again—the noise he presumed had woken him in the first place—and he went toward it, a horrible high pitch from one of the machines. He pressed the flat buttons on the panel covered with numbers and indecipherable commands until the noise stopped. He stood staring at the display. Whatever he had done to silence the noise had caused the screen to rhythmically flash a series of zeros.

“You’re awake,” the nurse said as he glided into the room. His name was Eric. He carried a tray with a plate on it, covered by a dome-shaped lid. Teresa ate no matter what the time of day—or rather they tried to get her to eat, a thing that had become next to impossible. The evening before she’d allowed Bruce to spoon a sliver of a canned peach into her mouth and then chewed it obediently without seeming to taste it at all. The nurse set the tray down on the table beside Teresa’s bed and edged in next to Bruce and pressed several buttons on the panel and the zeros disappeared. “You were snoring like a baby when I came by here last.”

Bruce gazed at him dreamily, as if unable to comprehend what he was saying. His waking life had taken on the quality of dreams, his dream life, the quality of reality. “How’s your car running?” he asked after several moments.

“Fine,” Eric said. He was a chubby kid barely out of nursing school. Bruce had come to know and like him over the weeks of nights he’d spent at the hospital. Eric’s presence was undemanding and, most importantly, unconcerned. He hadn’t tried to talk Bruce into counseling,
hadn’t told him how sorry he was, or how there were people “there for him,” or that his wife dying so quickly was actually for the best because now she wouldn’t suffer. Eric scarcely acknowledged that Bruce was having any trouble at all. In fact, he’d burdened Bruce with his own problem—a car that wouldn’t start on occasion or made a knocking sound upon acceleration when it did. Twice Bruce had gone down to the parking lot with Eric on his breaks to investigate the trouble with the car.

“Has she woken up?”

“No.” Then, “Once. About ten thirty, but just briefly. Maybe five minutes.”

Eric took Teresa’s wrist to check her pulse, watching the clock.

Bruce sensed that it was snowing. He felt that he could hear it falling outside or maybe he could smell it. He went to the window, drew back the curtains, and looked out.

“How’s her pulse?” he asked, turning back to Eric.

“Good.”

“There are these doctors. They base everything on the pulse. How to cure diseases and so on.”

Eric nodded pleasantly and wrote on the clipboard that was kept in a bin bolted to the wall by the door.

“They’re Chinese. That’s the kind of thing my wife’s into. Alternative things. I was thinking maybe I’d look into it, to see if they could help.”

Eric began to change Teresa’s catheter bag. Bruce turned back to the window and stared out the opening in the curtains. He’d been right. It was snowing, though spring was only a few days away. The wee hours of March 17, perhaps an hour before sunrise. Teresa’s parents and brother would be arriving that afternoon—they’d planned the visit weeks before, not knowing how sick Teresa would become, how quickly.

“I mean, you never know. I figure it’s worth a shot.” He pushed his hands into his pockets. He was fully dressed, in jeans, shirt, boots. He’d slept that way for the past sixteen nights. He became aware once more of the purple dot on his head that Pepper had made. It felt wet, as if it would smear if he touched it. And also slightly weighted, as if he were balancing a book on his head. After Pepper had left that evening he’d gone into the bathroom and attempted, uselessly, to get a look at it in the mirror. Of course he couldn’t see it. But it was there. It would stay. He felt it bore into him, a bullet from a soft gun.

He smoothed a hand over his hair and turned to Eric. “I’m not going to work anymore. I’m staying right here until all of this gets resolved. The kids are coming too.” He thought about Claire and Joshua, driving to Duluth now, he hoped. He ached for them.

“So you’ll need two more cots?” Eric asked.

Bruce nodded.

“I’ll submit a request form before I leave.” He placed the clipboard back in its bin and then removed his gloves, peeling them off from the inside out so that no part that had touched Teresa would touch him, and then walked out the door.

Bruce opened the curtains, wanting the light to wake Teresa when it came, feeling already how fierce it would be, the morning sun cutting against the new snow. He sat down in the chair beside her and opened the drawer of her nightstand and took the phone book from it. He had no idea where to begin, so he turned first to
Chinese
, though he knew that was ridiculous. Then he turned to
Physicians
and flipped through the pages, overwhelmed by the long list. He sat thinking for several moments and then paged through the list of doctors, scanning each name for anyone that sounded Asian and found a Dr. Yu. It was five o’clock in the morning, but such things didn’t deter him anymore. He dialed the number. “I need a healer,” he was going to say. Just like that. Maybe the Chinese doctor would know. Maybe he had a friend who would come and check Teresa’s pulse. The phone rang and rang, so long that the ringing finally stopped and there was an almost-silence that contained almost-sounds—faint crackling, glimmers of voices and conversations on other lines. He put the phone down and sat gazing at Teresa, who, though silent, had opened her eyes.

He said her name, shaking her a little. She remained perfectly still.

“Wake up, baby,” he said, shaking her harder. He put his hand to her face and at the very last moment she blinked. Though her eyes were open, she was neither looking at him nor not looking at him. She reminded him of one of those old-fashioned dolls with movable eyelids that close when you tilt them back and open when you put them upright. His mother had had one named Holly that he was forbidden as a child to touch without supervision, though he’d rarely cared to touch her, so deeply she’d creeped him out. He took the pillows from his cot and shoved them behind Teresa’s back, propping her up, so now she was staring in the direction of her feet instead of the ceiling. Her lower jaw hung
slack, leaving her mouth slightly ajar. He pushed it closed, but when he let go it fell open again.

“The kids are coming,” he said. “Josh too—he was out ice fishing. And your parents and Tim, they’ll be here by three.”

If she would just make the smallest sound, the slightest motion, the most remote indication. Then he would be happy. All these days he’d been waiting for her to open her eyes and for her to keep them open, and yet now that she was doing that he wished she would close them. He placed his hand over her eyes, but they stayed open beneath it.

“You ready for breakfast?” He lifted the lid from the tray that Eric had brought in. A square of green Jell-O sat alone in a small bowl on a plate. He scooped some onto a spoon and held it to her mouth. “I made this for you, Ter. Open up. Honestly, it was so funny. I went for a walk and I ended up downstairs and then there was this kitchen and—”

She blinked.

“Here,” he said, and pushed the spoon into her mouth. “You’ve got to eat. If you don’t eat, how’re you going to get better?” Streaks of green liquid began to ooze from her mouth, dripping down her chin, but he wouldn’t look at her. He filled the spoon again and pushed another bite into her mouth, then turned to refill it again, but stopped himself and instead threw the spoon against the wall behind Teresa’s head with all of his strength. It ricocheted onto the wall at their side, then clanged to the hard floor beneath the bed.

After several minutes he took the cloth they kept nearby and wetted it in the sink and returned to clean her face with it, wiping the green stains from her chin and throat. He opened the tube of lip balm that sat on the table beside her bed and applied it to her slack lips.

“What do you want?” he asked, smoothing her eyebrows with his thumbs the way she liked.

She coughed once and her eyes fluttered shut, then opened again.