Torch (48 page)

“I told you I couldn’t get there until about six and then it’ll start getting dark. Plus, it’s raining. It’s supposed to be nice tomorrow.”

“Okay.” She sighed, and said goodbye to him.

Tomorrow she and Joshua would do what they’d planned to do with Bruce the summer before—plant flowers on Teresa’s grave, in the dirt where they’d spread her ashes. Claire had gone to the nursery in Blue River the day before, wandering around for an hour, trying to figure out what to buy. In the end she’d purchased two packets of seeds, each one a wildflower mix that would start blooming in a month and bloom all summer long, one flower after another taking its turn in the sun—bloodroot and daisies, yarrow and Indian paintbrush. She and Joshua hadn’t been out to their mother’s grave since the day they’d mixed her ashes into the dirt. She thought about walking out there now by herself, to have a conversation with her mother.
I’m sorry
, she’d say,
I’m sorry we never got around to planting your flowers until now
. Over the months, it had weighed heavily on her, the neglect, the disrespect, but she hadn’t found a way to come out before now, hadn’t been able to muster up the composure to mention to Bruce how badly she wanted to come over—not to the house, but to her mother’s grave. She wondered if Bruce ever went out there and if he did, what he said.

She turned back to the house, studying it more carefully now, picking things up to examine them and setting them back down precisely as they had been so that Kathy wouldn’t think she had been snooping. She walked upstairs, giving herself a tour. Her bedroom had been turned into an office and Joshua’s something of a storage space. There was a stationary bicycle and a tiny wooden rocking chair meant for a toddler and a dartboard hanging lopsided on the wall. Claire removed all the darts and then threw them one by one, never hitting a bull’s-eye. She went back
downstairs and pushed the door to Bruce and Kathy’s room open and peered inside from the doorway. A white dresser sat where her mother’s vanity had been and a cedar chest where there had once been a bench. She closed the door, feeling light and happy with herself, pleased with her capacity to see it plainly at last, to stare it frankly in the face without feeling much of anything.

At four it was late enough to feed the animals and she went outside.

“Hello, girls,” she cooed, the way her mother used to, herding the hens into their coop for the night, reaching into the straw to check for eggs, filling their troughs with fresh water and cracked corn. After she fed the horses, she got a brush and groomed them while they ate, and then followed them out to the pasture when they were done, brushing them for close to an hour, despite the light rain. Every few minutes she switched from Beau to Lady Mae so neither of them got jealous, moving with them as they searched out the new grass, pressing their mouths into the dirt to retrieve the tiniest blades. She’d spent a lot of time out here in the pasture during an era of her childhood—in the years after they’d moved in with Bruce and before she and Joshua became teenagers, resistant to everything their mother suggested. In the summer they would camp out without pitching a tent. They would make a fire and lay a tarp down and set their sleeping bags on top of it, the four of them sleeping lined up in a row, like logs. The horses would be with them all night, approaching at various hours to smell their hair or to push their noses into their sleeping hands. In the winter they would build snowmen and make snow angels in the deep places the horses didn’t walk. Or Bruce and Teresa would bury her and Joshua, covering them entirely, aside from the small domes of their faces, and then walk away, calling their names. Calling “Claire! Joshua!” Asking “Where have our children gone?” Saying “We’ve lost our babies!” And no matter that Claire knew that they were only joking, that it was all a game, something enormous would mount inside of her, an unbearable mix of anticipation and unease, delight and distress, and she would crash up out of her snow grave, with Joshua a moment behind her, crashing up too, and they would run after their mother and Bruce screaming and laughing, “We’re here! We’re here!”

She remembered this now, out with the horses, allowing every detail she could conjure into her mind, and yet also holding them at a distance. She’d become adept at this over the past months, learning how to keep
things at the same time as letting them go. She stopped brushing Beau and looked back at the house. It was getting toward evening now and her eyes caught on her car. She had left her headlights on, she saw now, having turned them on as she drove here in the rain.
She was not going to spend the night here
, she almost screamed as she sprinted to her car, bending to wend her way through the fence, as if the few seconds longer it would take to go through the gate would make a difference.

There was only a clicking sound when she turned the ignition. She pounded on the steering wheel and got out and slammed the door as hard as she could and stormed into the house.

She called Joshua, leaving him a message, and then stood near the phone for several moments, waiting for it to ring, though she knew that it was futile. It was too late for Joshua to agree to come down to jump her car, not when he was coming the very next morning anyway. She considered walking to Kathy’s parents’ house a couple of miles away, but she knew she wouldn’t do it. She could call Leonard and Mardell, but they’d be at the Lookout until at least ten.

She took her coat off and sat down at the kitchen table and almost burst into tears of rage over her own stupidity. She picked up
The Nickel Shopper
and distracted herself by reading the ads, all the while vowing that she would not spend the night here, despite the fact that another voice inside of her knew she would. After several minutes, she went to the refrigerator and opened it up. In the freezer there was a stack of frozen dinners in slender white boxes: chicken cacciatore and fettuccine Alfredo and a thing called “Southwest Fiesta.” She chose the chicken and removed it from its box and stabbed the sheet of plastic that covered it with a fork.

As she waited for it to cook in Kathy’s microwave, she thought of Bill Ristow. He used to eat food like this at the hospital for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Its very odor, as it cooked, reminded her of him. He would eat it standing up in the Family Room while his wife was dying down the hall, eating whatever she could manage. Eating canned peaches, Claire supposed, like her mother had on her good days, or one unbearable grape at a time. Eating Jell-O and hard candy just so she could claim to have eaten at all. She hadn’t seen Bill since August, and shortly after she’d moved back to Midden, their phone calls had tapered off and then ceased altogether. At Christmas he’d sent her a card.
Thinking of you, kiddo
, it said. She’d held it for a long time, reading those words
over and over again. How sweet they were to her, and simple and plain and true. How they seemed to contain both what they said and what they didn’t: how unlikely it was they’d ever speak again. She didn’t feel sad about it, didn’t any longer feel the blend of sorrow and inevitability she used to feel when she thought of Bill.

Her feelings for David were more complicated, though no longer fraught. They’d spoken on the phone a few times over the autumn and winter, talking like old friends, laughing about the things they used to laugh about, critiquing the things they used to critique together, in almost perfect agreement. He had a new girlfriend, a woman who lived in his apartment building. He told Claire tentative, considered facts about her. That her name was Elise. That she worked at a legal firm and liked to run. That he had taken up running too. Claire’s heart seemed to simultaneously speed up and slow down when he spoke of her, but later, thinking about it, she wished him well.

“What about you?” he’d asked her the last time they spoke.

“I’m on a sexual hiatus,” she said in a funny voice, to make a joke of it, though it was true. She was getting her mind and body clear of men, though from time to time she wavered. She allowed herself to flirt with a few of the guys she’d gone to high school with, when they came into the Lookout. She pondered pairings that, upon reflection, were patently absurd.

“Do you think R.J. would go out with me?” she’d asked Joshua one day when she visited him in jail. R.J. had always been around, all the years that Claire was growing up, spending the night at their house on the weekends, but she hadn’t truly noticed him until she moved back home and he’d stopped into the Lookout one day.

“Go out?” Joshua asked, aghast.

“Yeah.”

“Like on a
date?
”

She nodded.

“No fucking way, Claire. He’s my
friend
.”

“Well, I’m not proposing to
kill
him.” She laughed and held her hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay. Forget I said anything.”

“I will,” he said, disgusted. “He’s got a girlfriend who he’s whipped over anyway. You wouldn’t have a chance.”

After dinner, after Joshua called and they argued and finally agreed that it was silly for him to come out only to return again in the morning, she
made a bed for herself on one of Kathy’s loveseats. There were two facing each other. When she couldn’t get comfortable on the first one, she moved over to the second, but they were equally uncomfortable and neither of them was long enough for her legs. She pulled the blankets onto the floor and lay wide-awake, growing more despairing and miserable and exhausted and agitated with each passing hour. Somewhere in the depths of the night, she stood up and went to the window and looked out. It had stopped raining and the sky was clear and she could see the horses standing outside of their stalls in the light of the moon. She considered going out to sleep near them, bundled in a sleeping bag, but then she turned away and walked through the dark house.

She went to Bruce and Kathy’s room and switched the light on and stood staring at the bed. It was the same bed, the one that had been her mother’s too. It was the only bed in the house, the only place she could expect to get any actual sleep. She sat down on the edge and ran her hand along the unfamiliar quilt that covered it. On the nightstand beside her there was a statuette of a cow. She picked it up and examined it and put it down and opened the nightstand drawer. When she’d lived here, this had been Bruce’s side of the bed, and she could tell by the contents of the drawer that it still was. There was a jackknife his father had given him and a wallet in a transparent box that he had yet to use, his old high school class ring and three rolls of pennies. Way back in the depths of the drawer there was a cassette tape. She reached inside and pulled it out: Kenny G. She recognized it immediately as the cassette she’d stolen from Bill the first time she’d gone to his house, though she didn’t recall what she’d done with it afterward and didn’t have any idea how it had ended up here. She had assumed it was still with her, lost in the boxes out in the storage shed behind the Lookout that she hadn’t yet unpacked. She put the cassette into the stereo near the bed and reclined on top of the covers listening to it. The music struck her as corny and cloying and monotonous and after a few minutes she turned it off.

She remembered how she used to search the house on the weekends when she came home after her mother died. Remembered that hungry, insatiable urge she’d had to find what was missing without having any idea what it was she was looking for. She could let it be this, she thought. She could let it be this cassette and then she wouldn’t have to search anymore. Slowly, methodically, without sorrow or anger or fear, she took the cassette out and began to pull the tape from its spool inside the cartridge, unfurling the metallic ribbon onto her lap. As it gathered into a pile she
felt a kind of curiosity, a kind of childlike scrutiny that she’d had when she was picking a flower apart one petal at a time, waiting to know her fate, chanting
he loves me, he loves me not
. Only now she didn’t chant anything to herself. She just let it be what it was: benign destruction, a thing that was no more. When she was done she balled it into her hands and put it in the garbage and closed the lid.

“Rise and shine,” said Joshua in the morning, standing over her near the bed.

She startled awake and rubbed her face. “What time is it?”

“A little after nine,” he said, and left the room.

“I didn’t hear you,” she called to him.

“I know. It’s weird, isn’t it? No barking dogs.”

She could hear him opening the refrigerator and then closing it. She sat up and looked around. She’d fallen asleep finally, after crawling into Bruce and Kathy’s bed with her clothes still on. “Did you bring Iris?”

“Nah,” he said from the living room. “Lisa wanted to take her over to her mom’s.”

“I was hoping you’d bring her.” She got out of bed and pulled her sweater on and ran her fingers through her hair. She had let it fade back to its original color over the past few months. From the top of Kathy’s dresser she took an elastic band and used it to tie her hair back into a ponytail.

“You can see her tomorrow morning, if you want. We need someone to take her for about an hour.”

“Sure,” said Claire. She looked after Iris whenever she could—whenever Lisa and Joshua had to work at the same time. She loved Iris in a way that she’d loved only her brother, she came to realize, in the hours that she held her, gazing at her beautiful face, exploring her every toe and curve, her every wrinkle and bend, marveling over the excruciating softness of her skin, the exquisite bounty of her head as it reclined in the palm of her hand. She’d been there when Iris was born, though that hadn’t been the plan, and had watched her emerge from Lisa, wet and gray, two weeks and three days before her due date, four days before Joshua was released from jail. The powers that be at the jail had refused to let him out to see his child born, despite Claire’s pleadings, despite the pleadings of the counselor in jail, despite, even, the wishes of the guards, Tommy and Fred. An order from the judge or the warden was needed, and they were
both unavailable on the day Iris was born. As a consolation, Joshua had been allowed to wait in the room where he received his visitors, shackled to the table. Minutes after Iris was born, Claire ran down the stairs and into the hallway that became the tunnel that led to the jail. “It’s a girl!” she shouted from the processing room, knowing that Joshua could hear her. “It’s a girl?” he hollered back to her, exuberant and stunned.