Torch (36 page)

“Yeah.” For the benefit of Claire and Bruce and whoever else bothered to inquire, Joshua had concocted a part-time job logging with Jim Swanson—which in truth he’d done for three days last spring.

“Well, I have the day off, in case you want to hang out.”

He didn’t want to hang out. The idea that he would see Heidi tomorrow was preposterous to him, but he didn’t have to pretend otherwise because his phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket and saw that it was Vivian and pressed a button so it went silent.

“Was that your girlfriend?” Heidi asked, and laughed. She hopped up to sit on the freezer and swung her feet out to him and hooked his thigh between her sneakers. Desire rippled instantly through him and he allowed himself to be dragged in between her legs. He rested his hands
on top of her thighs noncommittally, then moved them to her hips and held on. He could feel the points of her hipbones jutting through the brown pants of her uniform under his thumbs. She smelled like the DQ, like grease and slightly sour, slightly inviting milk.

“What are you doing?” he asked, though now he was the one doing the doing, running his hands up under her little shirt.

“What are
you
doing?” She smiled.

“What I’m not supposed to be doing,” he replied, kissing her throat.

“I thought you didn’t have a girlfriend.” She giggled.

He took her face and brought it to his, brought her mouth to his mouth without a moment’s hesitation, plunging in.

“Did you eat?” Lisa asked when she got into his truck. She’d been standing outside the Red Owl near the pop machines when he pulled up.

“What time is it?” he asked. “Were you waiting long?”

“Only a few minutes,” she said agreeably. “Actually Deb just pulled away when you came up.” She seemed more relaxed, more stable than she’d been in weeks. “It smells like weed in here,” she said, waving her hands in front of her face, though the windows were already rolled down.

He’d gotten high after he said goodbye to Heidi at the DQ, sitting in his parked truck, gathering himself to face Lisa. He kept a personal stash of marijuana in a little tackle box under the seat, pinching a good bit for himself each day from Vivian and Bender.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Okay,” she said, sliding in close to him, her legs straddling the clutch. “I did what Sarah said and ate every couple of hours so my stomach never got empty.”

He set his hand on her thigh and she reached over and did the same. His leg trembled slightly, and he tried to will it to go still, his heart racing. He took a deep breath and let it out. Only minutes before he’d been fucking Heidi, her legs wrapped around him, her rump pressed up against the freezer, and then he’d pulled away from her for a moment and turned her around. A bolt of lust and disgust quaked through him remembering it, and then a thought:
he would never do it again
.

“Were you busy tonight?” she asked. She put a hand in his sweaty hair.

“I had to drive all the way up to Norway and back and then I had to go all the way down to Sylvia Thorne’s place.”

“Sylvia Thorne?”

“Don’t you know her? She lives in Gunn.” He turned to her, loving her desperately, more than he’d ever loved her before, feeling crushed, almost panicked by the weight of his love. He wanted to take her home and make love to her without taking any pleasure for himself, to touch her with his fingers and mouth, to make her come the way he could from time to time, when he put all of his attention to the task and she was in the right state of mind.

“I know her,” she said. “I just don’t think of her as someone who’d be into drugs.” She sighed. “It seems like meth is taking over the whole town.”

“I wouldn’t say the
whole
town,” he said as evenly as he could. He squeezed her thigh. Sometimes they argued about what he did and why. They’d agreed that once the baby was born he would get what they called a “real job.”

“I can think of, like, ten people right now who are totally becoming tweakers.”

“Well, ten people isn’t the whole town,” he countered, though in truth he could think of dozens more. At times, he wished he’d never told Lisa about what he did for a living.

“What’s Claire’s middle name?” Lisa asked.

He had to think for a moment. “Rae. Why?”

“I’m thinking of names for the baby.”

Rae was his mother’s middle name too, he almost added. An image of her face came into his mind then, bony and stark and startled and lonely, the way it had been when he’d walked into her hospital room and seen her dead.

“What names do you like?” Lisa asked, turning to him, and then, abruptly, she turned all the way around, to see the lights of a police car blazing behind them.

Joshua saw it in the rearview mirror in the same instant and banged on the steering wheel.

“Do you have anything on you?” Lisa whispered as he slowed the truck.

“Quiet,” he said.

“Josh!”

“I said shut the fuck up,” he snapped. They stopped on the side of the road and waited for Greg Price to get out of his car and come to them.

“We meet again, Mr. Wood,” Greg said a few moments later. The beam of his flashlight hit their faces through the open window, a dagger of light, slicing them in two.

T
WO NIGHTS AFTER
Claire moved out, she drove past the apartment where she used to live with David. She’d left a candle there, propped in the window of what was once their bedroom, and as she passed by she could see it sat there still, precisely as she’d left it, a beeswax taper in a bottle, unlit and unmoved.

Her new house was a dilapidated mansion that was owned by a punk rocker and trust-fund baby named Andre Tisdale. He’d inherited the house from his grandmother. All the houses on the street were the same as Andre’s: grand old wrecked beauties that used to belong to the Minneapolis aristocracy back when the rich still wanted to live in this section of town. A few of the houses were in worse shape than Andre’s, their windows and doors boarded up with warning signs plastered over them; a few were in better shape, painted in surprising period colors to show off the intricacies of their architecture. One was hardly even a house anymore at all, since it had caught fire a few months before, though its charred remains hulked like a ship caught on a sand bar, presiding over the street.

From the outside, Claire’s room hung like an ear that had been attached to the third story of the house as an afterthought. Inside, it was cut off from the rest of the rooms that made up the third floor. Eons ago, it had been occupied by the maid, Andre had explained when he had shown her the place.
To a series of maids
, Claire thought at the time, but didn’t correct him. Even to her, from the distance of time, they all seemed to be one person: maid after maid after maid. The floor was warped and there was no door on the closet, but the room had its own bathroom and its own stairway that snaked through the hidden interior of the house like a laundry chute, leading to all the places that the maid would most often have needed to go: to the kitchen and the basement; to
the back door, where the garbage bin was kept. The stairway served now as something of a secret passageway and Claire was at a time in her life when a secret passageway was what she believed she needed more than anything. A place private and anonymous that made it possible for her to live the transient, borderless, wild animal life she believed she had to live now that her mother was dead and David was no longer her boyfriend and Bruce made only feeble attempts at being her father. She still had Joshua, and to him she clung even though she seldom saw him.

He came to Minneapolis to help her move. He’d never been to see her in Minneapolis before and she prepared for his visit the way she would an honored guest, though he would be there only for the afternoon and only to haul boxes from an empty apartment to an empty room. She bought Mountain Dew and pretzel rods and a tin of chocolate-covered caramels to send home with him as a thank you.

“Hello,” she called when he pulled up and parked on the street. She’d been waiting for him on the porch. It was the middle of August and they hadn’t seen each other since the Fourth of July, since before she bleached her hair the whitest possible shade of blond. As he approached, she watched the mild shock register on his face.

“What do you think?” she asked, reaching for her hair as he ascended the porch stairs.

“It kind of makes you look like a hooker,” Joshua said.

She punched his arm and a look of indignation spread over her face.

“And the rest of the getup doesn’t help.” He gestured to what she was wearing: a little beige top and a tiny pair of cut-off jean shorts slung low and wooden thongs that had a fake daisy between each toe. She’d kept out a T-shirt and sneakers that she would change into once they started to load the truck.

“I think it looks good,” she said archly.

“To go around in just a bra?” asked Joshua.

Claire glanced down at her chest. “It’s not a bra, so fuck off. It’s a shirt, for your information.”

“Well, it looks like a bra to me.”

“Well, it’s not.” She gave him a threatening look. “My God, Josh. It’s almost a hundred degrees outside. Do you expect me to wear a turtleneck?”

“Are you on crack?” he asked suddenly, humorlessly. “Or meth or coke or something?”

“What’s your problem today?” she asked, wounded. Their eyes met for the first time and she saw his expression shift as he realized he was wrong. She looked away. “I thought you’d be happy to see me.”

“I am,” he said, softening. “It’s that you seem different. Kind of city.”

Claire smiled and stretched her arms wide. “Here we are in the city, Josh. This is what people dress like here.” She turned abruptly toward the house and tugged on his arm, guiding him inside. “Can we please stop talking about what I look like?”

She led him past the boxes she’d packed and stacked up in the living room and into the kitchen, where she gave him a cold Mountain Dew.

“So what do you think?” she asked, looking around at the bare counters and cupboards. “I mean, I wish you’d have seen it before I had it all packed up, but—”

“It’s nice,” said Joshua. He cracked his can of pop open and stood holding it uncertainly.

Before he arrived, Claire had walked through each room, attempting to see it all through Joshua’s eyes, hoping he would think it was cool. She gestured toward his Mountain Dew. “I’d give you ice and a glass, but I already packed them up.”

“That’s okay.” He took a long sip as she watched him and then he held it out to her. “You want some?”

“No thanks,” she replied politely. In all of their lives they’d never met up intentionally or made plans with only each other. It felt strange and formal and grownup.

“So I suppose you’re wondering what happened.” Her voice echoed against the emptiness of the kitchen.

“With what?” he asked, and burped.

“With David.” She leaned against the counter and then hoisted herself up to sit on it. “I never told you why we broke up.”

“I thought you were just taking time apart,” he said, without sympathy.

“No. It’s over.”

He nodded.

“But I’m coping.” She took a deep breath. “Of course, I miss him sometimes, but I think it’s probably for the best.”

He nodded again.

“I was unfaithful,” she blurted. She hadn’t planned to tell him this,
but now she offered it up, wanting to force him to respond. “I had this—” she folded her hands on her lap and then released them “
—thing
with a guy in Duluth.”

Joshua kept his expression still and unreadable, as if he already knew everything she could possibly say, but then she saw his face flush pink. She wondered if he’d ever cheated on anyone and immediately decided he hadn’t.

“He’s older. He’s, like, almost forty.” She paused, to give Joshua time to react, but he didn’t. He only took another swig of his Mountain Dew. “And—I mean—it’s completely over now,” she said, though in truth she’d gone up to see Bill in Duluth three times over the summer, sailing past the exit to Midden on her way. “He’s not the reason that David and I broke up. Well, I suppose he’s
part
of the reason ultimately. Let’s put it this way: he didn’t
help
the cause. But I don’t know. It’s a lot of things. It’s complicated.” She was talking fast, wired from having consumed so much coffee in the past few days as she’d packed her apartment, leaving too much to the last minute. “Anyway, I haven’t seen him for a month—this guy, the old guy, Bill. It’s not like we’re in a relationship or anything.”

She stopped talking and looked at Joshua, regretting having asked him to come, regretting having involved him in her Minneapolis life—the life she considered her real, private life. It wasn’t until this instant, as he stood silently in her kitchen, that she realized she had concocted a fantasy of what it would be like to have her brother here. In it, he would talk and want to know everything; he would tell her things and make sounds of approval or curiosity as he listened. Instead, he was like always, secret and unattainable. Just as a part of her was to him, she thought now. Without their mother and Bruce to hold them together, they were not a family anymore, but siblings—a leaner, sparser thing. Just Claire and Joshua: two people wandering in the wilderness, each of them holding one end of a string.

“So how are you and Lisa doing?” she asked, pushing off of the counter, stumbling off of one of her shoes as she landed.

He shrugged.

“You’re getting rather serious, it seems.”

“Why do you say that?” He set his empty can on the counter, and Claire picked it up and put it in the recycling bin by the back door.

“Because you’ve been together for a while.”

“Not even six months.”

“Okay, Josh. No reason to get defensive. I was only saying—”

“It’ll be six months tomorrow,” he said, as if he felt guilty about having downplayed it a moment ago.

“Are you going to celebrate?” Claire asked.

“We’re going to Brainerd,” he said, and opened the refrigerator. Inside there were two more cans of Mountain Dew and the box of caramels she was going to give him. He closed it and turned to her. “But I’m too young to settle down.”