AT FIVE IN THE MORNING Claire took a long bath. She closed her eyes and almost dozed off, then woke, confused, believing for an instant that she was in her apartment in Minneapolis. But she had been home, in Midden, for two weeks, shuttling back and forth to the hospital in Duluth to sit with her mother, trading off shifts with Bruce. He took the nights; Claire, the days. In the dark of each evening she’d return home exhausted, but then she would not be able to sleep. She would walk through the house turning on lamps in rooms she wasn’t using, and then walk through them again turning them off. She cuddled with the dogs; pulled with mock enthusiasm on the knotted ropes they’d offered her to play tug of war. She’d wish that Joshua would come home and talk to her, though on the couple of occasions he did come home, she wished he’d leave.
She got out of the tub and dressed by the light of the candle that burned from an old wine bottle on the edge of the tub. Several minutes before, she’d heard Bruce’s truck driving up the driveway, and then she heard him come into the house. Joshua was home too, still asleep. She switched the bright light on and watched herself in the mirror, solemnly brushing her wet hair. She thought of her mother, alone at the hospital, an unbearable thought. Usually Claire tried to be at the hospital by now, but this morning she had trouble making herself get out of the tub.
“How is she?” Claire asked when she walked into the kitchen.
“The same,” said Bruce.
It was dawn, but dark still. She opened the refrigerator and took out a carton of eggs. “As when? As yesterday?”
“As yesterday.” He sat at the table drinking coffee from the small metal cup that went with his Thermos.
She made scrambled eggs and toast and put it on two plates and set them on the table. Bruce made a sandwich with his and dug into it hungrily with big bites, his elbows resting on the table.
“So, when you mean the same as yesterday, how do you mean?” she asked, not touching her food. “Because actually she was fine when I left last night, though she’d had some rough patches during the day.”
Bruce set his sandwich down. He looked at her and his face got tight as though he were about to say something, but then he didn’t, and instead he reached over and rubbed Claire’s shoulder.
“She’s very tired,” he said after a while.
Yesterday Teresa had begun to say strange things, to see people who were not there, to insist the phone was ringing when it wasn’t. One of the doctors had asked Claire to go out into the hall with him so he could tell her “it didn’t look good.” She had gotten into an annoying conversation with him that centered around her trying to get him to define his terms. All of them. What did it mean? What did look mean? What did he mean by good? Teresa had been admitted into the hospice section of the hospital a couple of weeks ago not because she was dying, but because all of the beds in oncology were full, but now that there were beds available, the doctors had decided that there was no use in moving her.
Joshua came into the kitchen dressed, but hardly awake, his hair poking out in different directions. “Morning,” he said.
“There are eggs for you,” Claire said, gesturing toward the stove.
Joshua got himself a plate and scooped the eggs from the pan and sat down at the table.
“You can go with me today, Josh. Mom will like that.”
He slowly chewed his toast, which was covered with chokecherry jam that Teresa had made last fall. “I was gonna go and see Randy about that truck.”
“You can go and see Randy later,” Claire said. She looked at her brother steadily while he continued to eat. “Please,” she said. “Pretty please.” And then when he kept eating without saying he would go, she said viciously, “Some things are more important than trucks. Mom is more important than a truck.”
“I need a truck. I told you yesterday. I’ll go to be with Mom tomorrow.” He looked at her for several moments, trying to out-stare her. Her earrings were silver hands that turned, caught in her hair.
“Your mom would want to see you,” Bruce said lightly.
“Which is why I’m going tomorrow.”
Claire put a bite of eggs into her mouth, but had to force herself to swallow them, like a handful of soft pills. She was aware of the fact that though she was eating, she seemed like a person who was pretending to eat. She stood and scraped her plate into the dogs’ dishes. Spy and Tanner rumbled into the room and the eggs were gone in an instant.
“I’m going,” she called, putting her coat on.
“I’ll see you around eight tonight,” Bruce said.
“Yep.”
“I told you I couldn’t go today, so don’t be acting like this,” Joshua said.
“I’m not acting like anything,” said Claire. Sometimes she hated Joshua’s guts. She considered telling him this: I hate your guts. They had said it to each other before, when they were kids. She’d put her coat on in a huff, but now she pulled her boots on in a calmer fashion, as if to demonstrate that she wasn’t going to let him get to her.
“Your car been running okay?” asked Bruce.
“Yeah.” She walked to the door and opened it. “Bye,” she hollered back.
“The roads’ll be slick,” Bruce said.
“Tell Mom hi,” said Joshua as she shut the door.
It took ninety-five minutes to drive to Duluth in March. Claire had it timed. Seven minutes to the blacktop, thirteen to Midden, then an hour and fifteen minutes straight east to Duluth. Mostly she was the only one on the road. When a car drove by she waved to whoever it was and they waved back, and as she got closer to Duluth more and more cars passed her and fewer and fewer people waved until she was in the light morning traffic of downtown and she didn’t wave at anyone at all.
She parked her car near St. Benedict’s Hospital. When she approached the doors, they whooshed open with a hot gust of air. She passed the information kiosk, the flower shop, the coffee cart, and the gift store, and went straight to the elevators that took her four floors up to her mother’s room.
“You look pretty,” Teresa said when Claire walked into the room. “You look like Little Red Riding Hood.” Her eyes were open and clear. Now that her mother was on morphine, Claire never knew what to expect. Teresa could be in a near stupor and then shift back to her old self within an hour.
“I wore your coat.” Claire stood at the end of the bed and rubbed the tops of her mother’s feet. It was the only place she could get at freely, without the tangle of tubes and plastic bags of fluid and tall carts holding the machines that sat near her head.
“That was always my favorite,” Teresa said. “I wore it ice-skating when I was a teenager.”
Claire pushed her hands into the pockets of her mother’s old coat, red wool. The room was packed with flowers in vases and it smelled like them, black-eyed and exuberant, angular and bright.
“You wore it other times too. I remember you wearing it all the time.”
“I wear it to feed the chickens. And the horses. It’s my barn coat.”
“I know,” Claire said, afraid now, thinking that her mother was becoming delirious again, despite the fact that everything she said was true. Yesterday she’d sworn that someone named Peter had attempted to shave her legs. Claire sat down and took the coat off and picked up a book she’d been reading and removed a pressed leaf from the page where she’d left it to mark her place. She twirled the dry leaf by its stem and held it up. “What’s this?” she asked, to test her mother’s mind.
“A leaf.”
“Yeah, but what kind of leaf?”
Teresa took a deep breath and held it, as if she were doing yoga, and then she let it out slowly. “Aspen,” she said, looking at Claire and not the leaf. Her arms were utterly unmoving on the bed, her wrists swaddled in gauze to keep the IV lines secured. “Otherwise known as poplar.”
“Correct,” Claire said, although she did not know whether it was an aspen leaf or not, having never bothered to learn such things.
“Populus tremulus,” Teresa said in Latin, dragging the syllables out. On Modern Pioneers, she’d done a whole show about the botanical names of common northland trees and grasses. She’d quizzed Claire and Joshua and Bruce on several of them the week before the show. Claire tried to remember one now, to demonstrate to her mother that she’d been paying attention, but she couldn’t.
“Where’s Bruce?”
“He left a couple of hours ago, Mom. He has to go to work. Don’t you remember?”
“Oh,” she said. “Now I remember. I thought I dreamed it. Where’s Josh?”
“He said hi. He’ll be coming tomorrow.”
She began to straighten the objects that sat on the little table so she wouldn’t have to look at her mother. A tube of lip balm, a box of Kleenex, a cup of warm Gatorade. It had been two weeks since her mother had been admitted to the hospital and Joshua had not come to visit even once.
“I brought something for you,” she said after a while, searching through her backpack. She pulled out a lollipop made of honey and ginger that she’d bought at the health food store, and handed it to her mother.
Teresa hadn’t eaten for three days. The radiation treatments had started decomposing her stomach and she vomited pieces of it up into a yellow pan that was clipped to the side of her bed.
“Thank you,” Teresa said. She held the lollipop, shaking, and brought it slowly to her mouth. Large blisters had formed on her lips, burnt by the acid of her stomach. “Maybe this will make me feel better. Ginger is what you should have when you’re pregnant, by the way. It’s a natural cure for nausea.”
“I know.” And she did know—that, too, had been on Modern Pioneers. “So is peppermint,” she said and Teresa smiled in recognition. Claire pushed an IV stand back toward the wall so she could stand near her mother and stroke the top of her head. Her hair was sharp and dry like the weeds that grow flat along the cracks in rocks.
“Oh,” Teresa moaned. “Don’t touch me. It hurts. Everything hurts. You wouldn’t believe the pain.” She closed her eyes; held the lollipop. “Let’s sit and not say anything. That’s what I want more than anything. To be together and rest.”
Claire took the lollipop from her mother’s swollen fingers. She held it for a while and then began to eat it herself.
Teresa lay with her eyes closed. Her face was flushed, feverish-looking. At other times it was as pale as snow. Claire considered singing a lullaby, but she didn’t know more than a few words of one or two. Her mother hadn’t sung lullabies to her and Joshua that she could remember. She’d sung other songs, funny songs, songs with lyrics she made up as she went along. Or sad songs by Joan Baez or Emmylou Harris. Claire didn’t think her mother wanted to hear these songs now, so she stood at the foot of her bed and sucked the lollipop and listened to her breathe, waiting to hear the breath that meant that she was sleeping. When this breath finally came, Claire watched her mother’s face for signs of relief, which did not come. Her face had an expression of permanent tension. Claire could not discern whether this was a new thing, because of the cancer, or if that expression had been there all along, masked by the ordinary light of day. Teresa’s chin hung slack, making the flesh beneath it baggy, but her mouth was strangely alert, puckered, and faintly streaked with vomit. Claire thought of the TV commercials of starving children, how the flies gathered at the corners of their eyes, but the kids were too weak to swat them away. How unbearable it was to see that, more so than anything else, more so than all the other things, lack of food, lack of water, lack of love, which were so much worse.
She got a washcloth and wetted it and delicately wiped her mother’s face.
“Thank you, honey,” Teresa said, without opening her eyes, without moving or giving any other indication that she was awake. And then she said, “I was thinking about a lot of different things last night. Like that time that I locked myself in the bathroom.”
“What time?”
“You remember the time.” Teresa opened her eyes and looked at Claire.
“I don’t remember any time.”
“I was furious with you and Josh. You were about five. I don’t know what the two of you did. Probably a combination of things.”
She smiled at Claire. Her beauty, even then, was like a Chinese lantern hanging in an oak tree.
“It was just before I finally left your father. Anyway. Nobody tells you how it will be. I was so furious that I wanted to hurt you. I mean, do you physical harm. Well, I didn’t really, and I wouldn’t have, but right then and there I felt capable of it. They don’t tell you that when you become a mother—and nobody wants to talk about it—but everyone has a breaking point, even with children. Especially with children.” She laughed softly. “So. I went and shut myself into the bathroom to calm down.”
“That was probably good,” Claire said passively. She was sitting on the vinyl couch, the damp washcloth next to her.
“Oh, were you ever mad! Just seething. You couldn’t bear that I wouldn’t let you in. You hurled your body against the door with all your might. I thought you would hurt yourself. I thought you were going to break a bone. I had to come out so you wouldn’t.”
She kept a smile on her face, gazing at Claire for a long time. After a while she said, “Sometimes I would think crazy thoughts when you and Josh were babies. Things I wouldn’t do, things that would come into my head from out of nowhere.”
“Like what?”
“Like awful things. Like I would be chopping vegetables and I would think I could chop your heads off.”
“Mom!”
“I wasn’t going to do it, but the thought came into my mind. I think it’s natural. Nature’s way of helping me adjust to the responsibility.”
Claire laid the washcloth to dry on the wooden arm of the chair. She said, “When Shadow was a kitten and I would carry her around, I would get this feeling that I would drop her and it would freak me out until I set her down.”
“Yeah. It’s sort of like that. Not what you want to do, but what you could do.”
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.
“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.
Claire wiped her face with the balled-up tissue. She got the hiccups and listened hard. It was immensely helpful.
“So now you’re friends with the Bible thumper,” her mother said the next morning. And then, before Claire could answer, “To think it was me who raised you.”
“Pepper isn’t a Bible thumper. Anyway—who said we’re friends? I talked to her once. I wouldn’t call that friends.”
“I’m not going to say a word about it,” Teresa said. She tapped her feet together. “Far be it from me to tell you what to do. I always raised you to think for yourself. You want God, go take a walk in the woods. Read a book. Read Emily Dickinson! What are you reading these days? Don’t tell me it’s some religious blather.”
“Mom.”
Claire told Teresa about Pepper almost being murdered by a rightwing death squad, about the Navajo reservation, and about her new husband, Keith.
Teresa scratched her arm, softening. “It isn’t that I am against faith,” she said warily. “I’m against the thinking that says that humans are shameful and bad. I know all about that, thank you very much. Had it shoved down my throat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for eighteen years, but I kept you and Joshua from all that.”
“Why’d you have us baptized then?”
Teresa turned to Claire, alarmed, like an eagle with its feathers ruffed up.
“I was weakened by childbirth, for your information. I was in a maternal daze. It was what you did with babies then, smarty-pants. Plus, in case all that mumbo-jumbo about going to hell turns out to be true, you’ll have me to thank later. I was safeguarding you against eternal damnation.”
“Well, you can’t have it both ways, Mom.”
“Fine. I’m a terrible mother. I did everything wrong. Forgive me.”
“I’m not saying that. I’m saying that Pepper is not a Bible thumper.”
“Apparently not,” Teresa said grimly.
“What?”
“I said okay!”
Claire sat in the wide bay of the windowsill.
“What’s it doing out there?” asked Teresa.
“Snowing.”
They sat in silence for several minutes and then Claire said, “It’s nothing, Mom. I just talked to Pepper. I’m not going to be a Jesus freak now.”
“I know, honey.” Her voice lilted from the morphine in a way that Claire had come to recognize. “I don’t mean to argue. I understand you perfectly. You’re just exactly like me. A seeker.”
In slow increments, she turned her head toward Claire sitting in the window.
Once her mother had fallen asleep, Claire walked down the hallway, but differently now, self-consciously trolling, looking for Bill without allowing herself to believe that. She passed his wife’s room, keeping her gaze straight ahead and then after a while she heard her name being called.
“You want to grab some lunch?” Bill asked, coming toward her. His face was marked with creases on one side, as if he’d been lying down.
They walked to a place a couple of blocks from the hospital called the Lakeshore Lounge. The bar was dark, windowless, lit with dim yellow light bulbs and Leinenkugel beer signs. They ordered vodka and grapefruit juice and sat down in a booth. The only other person in the place was the bartender, an old lady with painted-on eyebrows who sat on a stool and watched television.
Bill told Claire that he’d grown up in Fargo and had joined the Navy and spent most of two years on a ship in the Middle East. He’d married his high school sweetheart, a woman named Janet, before he went into the Navy and by the time he’d returned Janet had a tattoo of a fire-breathing dragon on her ass and was running around with a man called Turner, who was the leader of a Manitoba motorcycle gang.
“Such is life,” he said, sipping tentatively from his drink. It meant something to him that they had the same kind of drink. Initially, he’d asked for beer. “Let me ask you this. You got a tattoo?”
Claire shook her head. Bill rolled his sleeve up and showed her the inside of his forearm: a cougar, ready to pounce.
“Take my advice and don’t. It’s a bad idea, especially for women.”
“I’ve thought about it. Maybe a chain of daisies.”
“Anyhoo,” he said. “After all that with Janet, I took my broken heart to Alaska to work in a salmon cannery. Now that’s good money. But that’s work. That’s not like what passes for work with some of these guys. These white shirt types. That’s where I met Nancy. She worked at the cannery too—women do it too—but that’s not where we got together. Where we got together is about five years later when I moved to Duluth to take a job—I schedule the ships that go in and out of the harbor—and I thought, Who the heck do you know in Duluth? And I had never forgotten about Nancy, you know. I met her and never forgot her and I knew she was from Duluth, so I looked in the phone book and thought, Why the heck not call her up? The rest, as they say, is history.”
Bill asked Claire where she lived, who her family was, whether she liked the Minnesota winters or not, if she’d ever been to California. He wanted to know what her favorite movie was, if she believed that life existed on other planets, if she ever wanted to have children.
“We were planning on kids, but then boom—Nancy has cancer.” He looked around the room. There was a row of video games across from them repeating a display of wrecking balls and exploding rockets, automobile crashes and little hooded men wielding axes. “So are we going to have lunch or not?” he asked.
“I’m not hungry anymore.”
“Me, neither,” he said. “You want another drink?”
“I don’t know,” Claire said. She could feel the one drink running pleasantly through her. She had the sensation that everything was going to be okay, that her mother was not as sick as she seemed, and if she was, Claire could accept that fact with calm and reason. “I could go either way. I’ll have one if you do.”
“I don’t need one,” Bill said, and they sat in silence together.
A woman with a rash on her face came into the bar with a bucket of flowers and asked them if they would like to buy some and they said no, but then Bill called her back and bought a bouquet after all. Red carnations with a tassel of leaves and baby’s breath. He set them beside him on the seat.
“It’s nice to talk to you, Claire.”
“Yeah.”
“There aren’t many people you can talk to. People in this situation, so to speak.”
“No.”
“Nobody wants to hear it. Oh, sure, they want to know what they can do for you and so forth. That’s nice. But no one really wants to hear about it.”
“No,” Claire said. She was sitting on her hands. She rocked forward every few moments to sip from her straw. “I know exactly what you mean about all that.” People had carved messages and names into the table. Tammy Z. it said in front of her, cunt.
Bill coughed into his fist, then asked, “You got a boyfriend in Minneapolis?”
Claire told him about David, about what he was studying in graduate school—a mix of political science and philosophy, literature and history, but none of those things solely.
“I know the kind of thing you’re talking about. The humanities,” Bill said, coughing some more. “You go to bars much?”
“No. Not too much. Actually, I just turned twenty-one a few weeks ago.”
“No kidding,” he said, and fished an ice cube out of his glass and tossed it in his mouth. “You seem older. I’d’ve guessed twenty-five. You strike me as a sophisticated lady. You’ve got a way that’s very grown-up.”
He had a small, firm belly and a thick bush of graying hair on his head. Tufts of hair sprang from his eyebrows and nostrils and the backs of his hands. His ears were red and burly and sat like small wings. He reminded Claire, not unkindly, of a baby elephant, in a lordly, farcical way.
Claire crossed her legs under the table. She rattled her ice. “We should be getting back. My mom is probably waking up now.”
“Well. It was nice to get away. Everyone’s got a right to that from time to time.” He raked his hands through his hair, as if he were waking from a nap.
Claire was acutely aware of his body across the table, of her own pressing luxuriously back against the ripped-up vinyl. “Where do you live?” she asked.
“Not far from here. About a mile.”
He set his hands on the table and knocked on it with his knuckles. She reached out and set her hands lightly on top of his. He stayed still for a moment, then turned his hands over and laced his fingers into hers.
“Shall we?” he asked, after a while.
“Yes,” she said. “We shall.”
Bill’s house was white, surrounded by a picket fence, and cloistered in a thicket of pines. It sat a few steps below the street, but above everything else—the buildings of downtown Duluth, the lake. Claire could see the roof of the hospital far off and she pointed it out to Bill. It was freezing. Claire was shaking but impervious to the cold.
“The snow is sparkling like diamonds,” she said, idiotically.
“Diamonds?” Bill smiled at her curiously.
“I mean, the ice crystals. They’re sparkling,” she said, and blushed. “I like the word sparkle, don’t you? It’s one of my favorite words. Sometimes I’ll just be attracted to a certain word for no reason at all, but that it sounds nice. Or it looks nice on the page.”
“I can see what you mean,” he said, guiding her onto the porch. “Sparkle has a ring.”
They stepped into the house. Claire felt slightly dizzy, but alert, not at all like she’d had a drink and no lunch in the middle of the day. She took her coat off, and her gloves. She wanted to take everything else off as soon as possible so she’d stop being nervous. She wore jeans and a shirt that exposed a sliver of her lower abdomen, despite the cold, and boots that echoed loudly against the wooden floors as she followed Bill from room to room, on a tour.
“It’s lovely,” she kept saying, and it was. Every room was painted beautifully, a different color, but none of the colors clashed. She reached for the earring that she usually wore in her nose—often she twisted it when she was nervous—but it wasn’t there. More and more, she’d been forgetting to put it in before leaving for the hospital. She held her little braid instead, pulling on one of the tiny bells as he showed her the cabinets that he’d built, the place where there had once been a wall that he and Nancy had knocked down to let more light into the dining room, the hardwood floors they’d sanded and refinished themselves.
In the bathroom, where Bill left her alone at last, there was a bowl of stiff rose petals on a narrow shelf and a photograph of Bill and Nancy—both of them completely bald—with their heads tilted toward one another. Claire washed her hands and face with a bar of green soap that smelled like aftershave and then went into the living room.
“You like Greg Brown?” Bill asked her, holding a record, blowing on it, putting it on the turntable.
“I love him,” Claire said.
“This is some of his older stuff,” he said, and the music began.
“You never see records anymore.”
“I collect them.” He opened a cabinet with several shelves of albums. “I’ve got all kinds of music—anything you could want. Country, rock, classical, bluegrass, you name it.”
“Me, too. I mean, that’s what I like. All kinds.” The skin of her face was tight from the soap. She sat down on a blue couch and instantly stood up again. “So … come here,” she said, smiling like a maniac.
He took her hair by the ends and pressed it to his nose and smelled it. He wound it around his fingers, pulling her toward him, and kissed her. His mouth was cool and shaking and strange, but nice, nicer to her than anything. She shoved her hands into the back pockets of his jeans and felt his ass.
“I’m glad I met you,” he said.
“Me too. Take this off,” she said impishly, tugging at his shirt. He gathered her wrists in his hands and pulled her into the bedroom. The walls were the same color as the comforter on his bed. Amber, with an edge of smoke.
“Now,” he said, unbuttoning her shirt. They laughed awkwardly, pawed at each other. He bent to kiss her breasts, biting her nipples tenderly, and then harder. They teetered, finally onto his bed.
“Do you have a condom?” he asked her.
“No.”
But they went ahead anyway. It seemed impossible that she would get pregnant, that anything at all could be transmitted or take root or live in them. She knew it. He knew it. This didn’t make sense, but they were right.
Claire watched Bill’s face while they fucked. It was haggard and tense, as if he were concentrating on something either very far or very near, as if he were attempting to remove a splinter or thread a needle or telepathically shatter a glass in France. He saw her watching him and then his face became animated again, wide-eyed and carnivorous, until it crumpled as if he were about to sob in agony, and he came.
“That was nice,” he said after a while, looking up at her, straddled over him. She rolled off of him and lay down beside him. A mobile of fat chefs dangled overhead, and farther, down near their feet, a birdcage without a bird. He turned onto his side and placed his hand delicately on her stomach. He found her birthmark and petted it and outlined it with his finger, as if he’d known her all of her life.
“Was that weird for you?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“What was it like?”
He stood up, jerked his jeans on. “Like a million bucks.”
“There’s a lady down the hall who’s a high school teacher,” Claire said to her mother, even though she appeared to be sleeping. She was standing by the window, looking out at the street below, from where she’d just come. There was a long silence, and then her mother’s low voice.
“What’s her name?”
Claire turned and went to stand by the bed, near her mother.
“Nancy Ristow.”
“Is she a visitor or a resident?” She smiled, a small glorious smile.
“Resident. She’s a history teacher.”
It was nearly four. Claire had had a panicked feeling when she and Bill had rushed back to the hospital, but when she’d entered her mother’s room, it was as if she’d never left.
“Ask her what she thinks happened to Amelia Earhart.”
“Who?”
“This teacher. Nancy.”
“Why?” Claire snapped.
“You said she teaches history, right? History interests me. I’d be curious to know if she has a theory, since she’s in the know. I always liked Amelia Earhart.” She opened her eyes and tried to push herself up to a sitting position against the pillows, the tubes swaying around her. “I think of her going off like that. Can you imagine? I mean, can you imagine? Having no idea what would happen? Imagine how brave she was. She was one of my personal heroes.”
“Is.”
“What?”
“Is, Mom. She is one of your personal heroes.”
“Yes,” she said. “Is.”
She sat looking carefully at Claire. “Where have you been?”
“Nowhere. You were sleeping. I walked around.”
She continued to look at Claire. Her face pale, drained, regal.
“What?”
“You’ve been somewhere.”
“I told you.”
“You’re different.”
That night, back at home, she called David.
“How are things?” he asked. “How’s your mom?”
“Hard. It’s … horrible.” She began to cry and he listened to her crying over the phone. She could hear music playing in the background. “She seems to be getting sicker. Every morning when I go in, it’s worse. I can see the difference. And Josh is still being an ass—he came home last night. I saw him this morning, but he squirmed out of coming to the hospital with me.”
“That sucks,” David said.
Claire sat at the kitchen table, pulling the phone to reach from the wall. She drew arrows and triangles and spiraling lines on the back of an envelope that had been sitting there. She hadn’t talked to David for two days, yet now she couldn’t think of what to say to him.
“You seem far away,” she said.
“I am,” he said, and laughed.
“No, I mean, actually far. Like Russia or something. I don’t even feel like I’m on the same planet with you.”
“We’re on the same planet,” he said irritably.
“Not just you and me, but me and everyone else. Like I’m on this other planet. Or in a dream, a nightmare. That’s what everyone always says, ‘It was like being in a nightmare,’ and that’s totally how it is. Like I’m going to wake up.”
“I’m here for you,” David said. The music had stopped and now she could hear a remote crackling on the line, a mysterious, celestial sound that made her feel even lonelier.
“Do you hear that?”
“What?”
“The phone. It’s making a sound. It’s creeping me out. Say something. Talk to me.”
“I love you,” he said.
She thought that she loved him too, but she didn’t have it in her to say it anymore, the way they’d always said it, every day, back and forth, a Ping-Pong of words. I love you. I love you too. Sometimes, she couldn’t help it, she wished that one of his parents were sick or dead or long gone from his life. It didn’t seem fair to her that he should have two loving parents, still married and madly in love with each other, perfectly alive and well, even though they were fifteen years older than her mother.
“I could read to you,” he said. That was something they did at night, one book at a time.
“Okay,” she said glumly. And he began. She found herself listening to his words in a way that she’d never listened to anything before: with all of her attention, and yet also forgetting each detail the moment it registered—who was married to whom, for how long, and why the characters were where they were. It didn’t matter. The story lulled her into something like a trance.
After they hung up, she walked into her mother and Bruce’s room and turned on all the lamps and lay down on the bed sideways, her feet hanging off. She wished her brother were here. She thought maybe he would come home in the middle of the night and then in the morning she could talk to him, convince him to come to the hospital with her. The phone rang and she waited for the answering machine and listened to her mother’s voice saying hello, please leave a message, and then the somber voice of their neighbor, Kathy Tyson, offering to look after the animals if they needed it. On impulse, Claire lunged for the phone, but by then Kathy had hung up. She’d had the idea that maybe Kathy could come over and have a cup of tea with her and distract her from her sorrow. They could talk about men and how few eligible ones there were in Midden, the way they had the year before, at Gail Nystrom’s wedding reception, when they’d been assigned to sit next to each other at the singles table because there were too few men to go boy-girl. Kathy had confided that she’d posted a listing on a Web site for singles who liked country living, that the very next day she was driving to Norway to meet a man who’d answered her ad.
Claire didn’t know her number and to look for it seemed too much of an effort, so she hung up the phone and stood. She realized that she was still wearing her mother’s wool coat, not having taken it off for the nearly two hours she’d been home. She pushed her hands into the pockets and instantly found the cassette tape she had put there earlier. She pulled it out and looked at it for the first time. Kenny G, it said. She’d taken it that day, from Bill’s house. She didn’t know why. It sat next to the tune box in his bedroom among a scattering of other cassettes that Bill and perhaps Nancy had been presumably listening to recently. Instinctually she’d reached for a cassette and shoved it into her pocket. She sat up now and opened the drawer of the small table beside the bed and tossed the cassette in and then shut the drawer.
She met Bill twice the next day. Once just after ten, and then again in the late afternoon. Both times they went to his house and had sex in almost precisely the manner they had the day before. They already had a ritual: afterward they would dress and sit in the kitchen, drinking warm apple cider and eating toast with peanut butter. They told each other stories about the lovers they’d had. Claire’s list was short, only four men long, Bill being the most interesting, the one least like her. Bill’s list was long and complicated, grouped mostly into categories, rather than individuals. He told her about losing his virginity with Janet in a closet where his mother stored cleaning supplies; about prostitutes he had slept with in various ports during his Navy years; a series of alcoholics in Alaska; and then Nancy. He told her about how they’d gone to Puerto Rico for their tenth wedding anniversary. They’d lolled in bed and made love and ate a bag of plums they’d bought on the street. In jest, Bill put one of these plums into Nancy’s vagina and it sucked itself up inside of her and they couldn’t get it out.
“Well, it came out eventually,” he said, laughing, rubbing his face, laughing again, laughing so hard that his eyes filled with tears.
Claire sat with him and smiled. She nibbled her toast.
“Now there’s something,” he said, finally getting ahold of himself, wiping his tears away. “There’s something you don’t do twice.”
She didn’t see him the next day at all. Her mother had become so ill that Claire hardly left the room.
“You’re interrupting me,” she’d said as soon as she saw Claire that morning, a new edge to her voice.
“What?”
“That’s what you do. You interrupt.” Teresa swung her head in Claire’s direction. Her eyes blue, beloved, uncomprehending as a buzzard.
“Mom.”
Bruce was still there, asleep in the cot, and he sat up, startled and confused.
“Why is she here?” Teresa demanded, banging on the rails of her bed so hard the yellow pan that was clipped onto it fell off.
Bruce reached out and stroked Teresa’s shoulder. “It’s Claire, Ter.”
“It’s me, Mom. What’s wrong?”
Teresa sat quietly for a while and then closed her eyes.
“Mom. It’s me, okay? Do you understand that?”
She opened her eyes, soft now, back to normal. “I understand that. It’s you. I’m glad.”
“Stay awake with me, Mom.”
“Okay,” Teresa said, then closed her eyes and slept. She slept all morning and into the afternoon, and Claire sat next to her bed, not reading or watching TV, not doing anything but watching her mother. She said the beginnings of prayers silently to herself but then petered out, not remembering how they went. “Our Lord, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name …” and “Now I lay me down to sleep …” When the afternoon sky began to darken Claire could not keep herself from it anymore. She shook her mother hard until she opened her eyes and kept them open.
“Hello,” she whispered.
“Hello,” her mother said back to her, as if she were hypnotized.
“I miss you.”
Teresa said nothing.
Claire held out her fingers; on one there was a mood ring that belonged to her mother. “What does it mean when it’s red?”
“That your hands are cold,” Teresa answered, then closed her eyes.
Claire shifted the ring. When she pressed on its little oval surface, it became a purplish green. “I’ve been going through things. Remember the macramé feather earrings you made?”
Teresa didn’t answer or open her eyes, but turned her head toward Claire.
“I found them. And also that skirt you made out of your jeans.”
“You can have them. Take whatever you want.”
“Okay,” she said, though she had already—taken what she wanted—a lion figurine, a shawl made of string. She’d felt compelled to search through her mother’s things since she’d been admitted to the hospital, like a child left home alone for the afternoon, not knowing what she’d find, but then knowing everything she did find, being shocked over and over again by the excavation of her mother’s life. The things she’d remembered and forgotten: garish beads that had fallen from necklaces, a square of lace, a photo of an old boyfriend of her mother’s named Killer. All these things she’d found and more, none of it mysterious, all of it astonishing in its familiarity, as if they had been embroidered onto her skin all along.
“Also, I found this.” She touched the pewter belt buckle she now wore. It was perfectly round, etched with an image of a woman with flowing hair who held a feather, a relic from her childhood. The buckle was attached to a braided leather belt that her mother had made herself.
“You can have it,” Teresa said, and then appeared to instantly fall asleep.
Claire stood, watching her mother, running her fingertips over the engraving on the buckle. Since her mother got cancer she’d become superstitious. She believed that everything she did was in direct relation to the survival of her mother, that wearing the belt would save her. As a child she’d believed that the pewter woman with the flowing hair who held a feather on the buckle was her mother. This made some sense on a practical level. Teresa’s hair had been flowing for a time. She’d worn necklaces, earrings, halter-tops made of feathers. But this isn’t why Claire believed it. She’d believed it because her mother was that omnipotent and omnipresent, her power over Claire absolute. She believed it again now, or perhaps she had believed it all along.
Her mother: Teresa Rae Wood. Anything she said would be true.
After several minutes Claire rose and silently walked to the Family Room to make a cup of tea. Bruce would return in an hour or two, perhaps Joshua would be with him. She let her fingers graze against the wall as she walked, as if to help her keep her balance. Her body felt weightless, like she was not walking but floating down the hall, a pretty ghost. She didn’t see Bill as she passed by Nancy’s room, its door closed, but she imagined Nancy behind that door, lying on her side, her thin hip a triangle, her blond frizzy hair matted into a flat nest at the back of her head. Claire thought of that plum. Imagined it warm inside Nancy, as if it were still there: a thing she would not release. Purple, red, and black. Sweet and soft and bruised.
The door to the Family Room was also closed, but she went inside. Bill was there, emptying his part of the refrigerator, clutching a paper bag.
“Hey,” he said dreamily.
“Hi,” she said, wiping her face with her hands. It was only six, but it felt like the middle of the night. Her life always was the middle of the night now.
“It happened,” Bill said, turning to her. “She died.”
Claire shut the door behind her and locked it. She felt shocked beyond words, as if death were an enormous surprise. She hugged Bill and the paper bag. “Oh my God. I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“It isn’t what I expected,” he said.
“What did you expect?”
He set the bag on the floor. “I’m not taking these. They’re those frozen dinners. You can have them if you want.”
“Okay,” Claire said gravely. Bill’s face was pale and puffy. He smelled like worn-out peppermint gum and French fries. She hugged him and cupped her hand around the back of his neck, and he pressed into it the way a baby who can’t hold his head up does.
“Look,” he said, almost inaudibly. “I feel that I should apologize.”
“For what?” She let go of him, took a step back.
“For what’s gone on with you and me.”
“There isn’t anything to be sorry about.”
“I feel that I behaved badly.”
“No.” She peered at him. “Nobody behaved badly.”
He took several deep breaths, panting almost, his hand on the counter. “I didn’t want to leave the room. They took her—her body—out after a couple of hours. People came to see her, to say goodbye. Her folks, her brothers, and a couple of her best friends. And then they took her away and I didn’t want to leave, you know. The room.”
“That’s understandable,” Claire said gently. She was holding herself, her arms crisscrossed around her waist. “I can see wanting that.”
He sobbed. He made small whimpering noises, and then he found a rhythm and his cries softened. Claire rubbed his shoulders. He let her do this for a while, and then he went to the sink and leaned deeply into it and rinsed his face and dried it with a hard paper towel from the dispenser.
“Anyway, you know something? I never cheated on Nancy up until now. That’s the God’s honest truth. Maybe you don’t know that, but thirteen years plus and I never cheated. I almost did once or twice, but I never followed through. That’s normal human temptation. That can happen in any marriage. But I didn’t do it. I honored the vows.” His voice quavered and he tried to breathe deeply again. “The vows meant something to me once upon a time.” He paused. “And don’t get me wrong. None of this is your fault. I hold you responsible not one iota. You are a beautiful girl. A top-notch young lady. I was the one married. It has nothing to do with you.”
The bag of frozen dinners shifted without either of them touching it.
“It didn’t take anything away from what you had with Nancy,” Claire said. “I never thought that.”
“No. Definitely not. My allegiance was always with her. No offense. I think you’re wonderful. You’re one very pretty girl. And smart too. Kind.” He clutched the edge of the counter. “And what am I when Nancy needs me most? I’m a pathetic old man.”
“You aren’t old.”
“Not old. But to you I am. I’m too old for you. I lost my morals.”
Claire stared at the floor. A spoon had fallen there, crusted with hair and what looked like bits of dried chocolate pudding.
“Plus, what was I doing gallivanting around and meanwhile she’s dying?”
“She was sleeping. She didn’t even know you were gone.”
“Oh, she knew. She knew.” He put his hand to his forehead and pressed hard.
“We weren’t gallivanting anywhere. We were at your house.”
He kept his hand pressed to his forehead. Claire bent to pick up the dirty spoon and set it soundlessly in the sink.
“Well,” he said. “I wish you the best. I’m hoping for a miracle for your mom.”
“Thank you.” She touched his hand on the counter and they looked at each other, their eyes as serious as animals. He took her hand and kissed it and then pulled her into him and held her hard against him. His breathing was heavy and she thought he’d started to cry again, but when she looked at him his eyes were calm and dry.
“Claire,” he said, but didn’t say anything more. His fingers began to slowly graze her throat, down over the top of her chest, over her breasts, barely touching her. He grabbed her face with both of his hands and kissed her fiercely and then stopped abruptly. “What am I doing?” he asked sadly, and then pulled her back to him and squeezed her hips, her ass, her thighs.
“Stop it then,” she said. She unbuckled his belt, unzipped his jeans, got down on her knees.
“This is completely wrong.”
“Stop me then,” she hissed. She took his cock in her mouth. She had the sensation that he was going to hit her; that he was going to smack the side of her head or yank her away from him by the hair. She also had the sensation that she wanted him to do this, though she had never wanted this from a man. She wanted something to be clear, right, and she wanted him to be the one who made it that way.
“Jesus,” he whispered, and leaned back against the wall and gripped onto it to keep him up.
She smelled his man smells, his cock smells: a sour salt, a sharp sub-aqueous mud. He came without a word and she sat back on her heels and swallowed hard. She touched the hairs on his thighs, kissed one knee.
He reached for the sides of her face. “Oh,” he moaned. “I can’t stand up.”
“Something about you sitting in that window reminds me of when you were little,” Teresa said to Claire as the sun rose through the windows. “Sometimes I see your face and I can see just exactly what you looked like when you were a baby and other times I can see what you’ll look like when you’re old. Do you know what I mean? Does that same thing happen to you?”
“Yeah. I know what you mean,” Claire said, turning from the window to her mother, grateful that she had spoken at such length. “Are you feeling better?” she asked. “We were scared. You hardly woke up all yesterday. You slept for like twenty hours straight. And then you were weird.”
“I needed my sleep,” Teresa said. “Where’s Bruce?”
“Getting coffee. It’s about six, Mom. In the morning.”
“Where’s Josh?”
“I don’t know,” she snapped, then caught herself and continued more gently, “He’ll be here in a little bit.” She got down from the windowsill and pulled a chair up next to her mother, coiling her way through the IV lines.
“Yes. Come sit with me,” Teresa said, her words slurred from the morphine. “That’s what I’m glad of. That you’re here with me. I’ll never forget you were here with me during the hardest time. And sitting the way you were in the window, it made me think of that, of all the things, of you and Joshua being little and now being grown-up.”
“We’re not grown-up.”
“Almost. You almost are.”
Claire tugged on a thread that dangled from the edge of the blanket that covered her mother; it caught, still attached.
“It was the same way when you used to sit in that window in Pennsylvania. Do you remember the window seat in the apartment in Pennsylvania?”
Claire shook her head.
Teresa smiled. “Oh, sure. You were too small then. You wouldn’t remember. But that was your spot. You liked to sit in that window seat and wait for the mail to come.” She paused, as if a wave of nausea were about to overtake her, but then continued. “You liked to see the mailman come and put the mail in the box and then you wanted to be the one to go and take it out. You had to be the one! You always liked to be involved with things, to be a helper, to be at the center.”
“I don’t remember,” she said, and leaned forward to rest her head on the bed, the top of her head pressing into her mother’s hip.
“Well, that’s how you were,” Teresa said happily. “It’s how you are.”
“How’s that?”
“The way I taught you to be. Good.”
Teresa lifted her hand from the bed. Softly, she stroked Claire’s hair.