EIGHT DAYS AFTER TERESA DIED, Bruce woke in a field.
He was still alive. It took him several moments to understand this, as he lay numb from the cold under the blue morning sky. The horses hovered over him, making chuffing sounds with their warm brown noses, and he listened to them without opening his eyes. For those moments he had no past, no life, no dead wife. He was no man in a no man’s land, and reality was a glimmering series of pictures in a dream that went back no farther than the night before. How he’d stood on the front porch drinking the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. How it had felt as the flesh of his cheek opened against the rock in the field where he fell. How Teresa was. How she had come to him. Silent, but there. Her eyes were the stars, her hair the black sky, her body the trees at the edge of the field, her arms the whiplike saplings that surrounded him.
He grabbed one of the saplings now with both hands and pulled on its wire stem with all his might, making a growling sound that spooked the horses, so they ran, stopping to watch him from a distance. He pulled so hard that he rolled over onto his belly with the effort, as if he were not pulling on the sapling, but it was pulling him. He let it go and it sprang back to its upright position, rooted in the frozen ground.
When he opened his eyes, a shard of glass seemed to cleave through his head. It was his life coming back to him. Beside him was a patch of vomit, congealed and almost frozen solid. Very slowly, he pushed himself up. When he made it to his knees he had to lean forward onto his hands and vomit again. Afterward, he sat back on his heels and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. He touched his face with his numb fingers, tracing the scab that had formed there.
At last he stood and staggered a few steps. The horses had begun to graze, but now they lifted their heads from the grass and stared at him expectantly until he called their names, and immediately they came to him and pressed their noses into his hands, as if he were holding apples.
The three of them began to walk home, following the path that the horses had made; the path Bruce had no doubt followed the night before, though he could not remember it. When the barn came into view, Lady Mae and Beau trotted ahead and stood in their stalls, waiting to be fed. He gave them oats and then went to the hens to get the eggs, but found none.
When he walked in the house he saw that Joshua had not come home the night before. All the lights that Bruce had turned on were still on, and the radio played fiddle music so loudly he thought he would have to vomit again before he reached the stereo and turned it off. Now that he was inside he realized how cold he was. He began to build a fire in the wood stove. Joshua had slept over at his new girlfriend’s house, he assumed. Claire had gone back to Minneapolis the afternoon before—she had to go back to her job and, Bruce hoped, eventually school. Both she and Joshua were meant to graduate in June, Claire from college, Joshua from high school. In the course of their mother’s dying, both of them had stopped attending school. Teresa had not been aware of this, and Bruce, though dimly aware, hadn’t been able to muster up enough energy to be concerned. He’d needed Claire. What would he have done with her away at school? They would go back soon, he figured, and left it at that. They needed time to get over things, another reason for him to act soon on his plan to kill himself—he hadn’t forgotten his plan—so they could grieve and get on with it.
The kindling began to burn and the heat of the flames felt good on his face as he stooped near the open door of the stove. The gash in his cheek began to pulse. It was two days after the day he’d hoped to be dead. Last night he’d been willing to die, but now he realized that drinking and then half freezing himself to death was not how he wanted to do it. It lacked dignity, but more, it could be misconstrued as unintentional. He would do what he intended to do and nothing less. He had the rope all ready to go, tied into its knot and coiled in the trunk in the barn where they kept the tack.
But today was not the day to die, he decided. So far, each day had been like that. It was one thing and then another. The day after the funeral, which was originally to have been his last day on earth, Joshua’s truck broke down and he needed Bruce to help him fix it. There was a part they’d ordered that wouldn’t come in for five days. Plus, he could not very well have hung himself while Teresa’s parents and brother were still there visiting. In the days after the funeral he’d done his best to be a good host, despite the circumstances. He took them to Flame Lake to visit the Ojibwe Museum, to Blue River to eat walleye at the Hunt Club. They’d had a horrible shock when they arrived at the airport in Duluth, what with Pepper waiting to greet them instead of Bruce and the kids.
“There’s still enough time to see the body,” Pepper had told them when they got off the plane. They stood in a corner of the airport near a sheet of windows with the sun beating brutally through. “The body!” Teresa’s mom had shrieked, then ran off not knowing where she was headed, bogged down by the huge purse she carried, and stopped eventually by a giant potted plant in her path.
Teresa’s parents and her brother had not wanted to see the body, unlike Bruce and Claire and Joshua, who protested angrily when told at last by a curly-haired nurse that they would “have to say their goodbyes.” They’d spent four hours in the hospital room after Teresa took her last breath, which all of them had missed. Claire and Joshua had been racing to Duluth after having spent hours trying to get Claire’s car unstuck from the snow and slush that it had become mired in on the ice in the middle of Lake Nakota. When Bruce had woken up beside Teresa he had gone to get a cup of coffee. It sat now, its half-and-half forming a skin across its wretched surface, in the mug that said WYOMING! on the windowsill of the big window in the room. Four hours was an unorthodox length of time to stay with a dead body at St. Benedict’s Hospital, but they had Pepper on their side, plus they had the excuse of Teresa’s parents arriving soon.
They did their best to be unobtrusive. After those first rounds of uproarious weeping, they muffled their cries by pressing their faces into pillows or one another or, most often, into the body of Teresa lying dead on the bed. She was still warm when Claire and Joshua arrived. They held on to her through her blankets, and then slowly the warmth receded, became only an island on her belly and then that cooled too and they touched her no longer.
When Bruce had entered the room with his coffee, he had not realized she was dead. Minutes before, he’d been in bed with her. Her eyes were open but seemed unchanged. He’d said a few words to her about the weather, which was cold but sunny, March but still winter. The same snow that had fallen when, as far as anyone knew, Teresa didn’t have cancer still sat frozen into layers on the ground. He went to her then and took her hand, hot and swollen from all the needles attached to it, but then he looked at her and what he saw—the not thereness of her—made him fall hard and, without his being aware, from his feet onto his knees.
While they sat with her and waited for her parents and brother to arrive they cooperated with the nurses as best they could. Teresa had wanted to be an organ donor, but because of the cancer, her eyes were all they could use. Until they were surgically removed, they needed to be preserved, which, Pepper kindly explained, called for ice. They agreed to keep the bags of ice on Teresa’s eyes forty-five minutes of each hour, and Bruce agreed to be the one to keep the time. He took his watch off and set it on the bed near her hip to remind himself of the task.
Finally, the curly-headed nurse stepped in to tell them that Teresa’s parents and brother were waiting for them in the lobby and did not care to come up. After their initial resistance, Bruce and Claire and Joshua knew they had to go. Bruce and Joshua approached Teresa solemnly one by one, each of them bending to kiss her cold lips. Claire began sobbing hysterically all over again, even more loudly than she had when she’d first walked in and seen her mother dead. She pushed Bruce and Joshua violently away when they tried to comfort her, batting her arms at them. Then she quieted and told them without looking up that she wanted a few minutes alone with her mother.
Bruce stood silently with Joshua outside the closed door, and then together they walked to the end of the hallway, where there was a window from floor to ceiling. Joshua looked out over the streets of Duluth, and then beyond them, to the lake. Bruce looked at Joshua. He hadn’t seen him for days. In the brief minutes of each day that he and Claire had not been consumed by what was happening with Teresa, they had been consumed by the whereabouts of Joshua. He had left messages on the answering machine, he had left notes on the kitchen table, but he had not appeared. Over his absence Bruce had raged, Claire had wept, Teresa in her delirium had cried out his name: Where is Joshua? Where is Joshua? until, in the last days, she had intermittently believed him to be right there in the room. Bruce still didn’t know where Joshua had been and now he didn’t care. He was only glad that Claire had brought him here. He knew that Joshua was also asking the question, Where was I? Where was I when my mother died and where, because of me, was Claire? He wanted to say to Joshua that it was okay, but something stopped him. It’s okay kept forming in his mouth, then turning to mist.
“Your mother, she thought you were with her all yesterday,” he said, which was fairly true—she’d hallucinated his presence the day before, as well as Claire’s, and a dog they used to have named Monty. “She believed you were right there sitting in the chair.”
Joshua turned his pink eyes to Bruce for a moment, then he shifted them wordlessly back out to the streets.
Bruce reached over and began to massage Joshua’s back, the way he’d done in countless attempts to ease Teresa’s pain.
“Oh,” Joshua said, leaning into Bruce’s hands. “That feels so good.”
When Bruce woke on the ninth day that Teresa no longer lived on the earth he knew that now was his chance. He could feel the quiet of the house around him; so quiet it was as if he weren’t inside of his house but rather lying again in the field where he’d woken the morning before. He opened his eyes but felt unable to move, the weight of his sorrow pinning him to the bed.
“Shadow,” he called in a high-pitched voice. “Kitty kitty. Kitty kitty.” He heard her feet land on the floor above him, in Claire’s room. After several moments she appeared in the doorway. “Come here,” he implored sweetly, though she did not move from her place by the door. He lay in bed gazing at her. She had known Teresa as long as he had. She had been on the bed sometimes when they’d made love, making a space for herself in the farthest corner as long as they didn’t cause too much commotion.
He closed his eyes and said out loud, “I’ll be dead soon.” And then he wept in several short yelps and fell back to sleep.
At noon he woke with Shadow’s weight on his chest.
He put his hands on her warm body and instantly she purred. Usually the weight to which he woke did not have a form. Usually it was a series of pictures too wonderful or terrible to bear. Images of Teresa either very happy or very sad, very healthy or very sick, each of them torturing him in their severity. Sometimes a question would occur to him with such ferocity that he felt his body grow unbelievably heavy, as if the weight of him in that instant would break the bed. Why had he not quit working immediately when they learned she had cancer? Why had he not spent every minute of every day and night with her from the moment he met her? And then darker questions would come, questions that were not actually questions, but bullets from a gun that implicated him in her death. The doctors believed her cancer had started in her lungs. Had it been the wood stove? Had it been the insulation he had scavenged from a job and used? It could have been anything, the doctor had told them, uncurious when they’d asked. But anything was anything—it did not exclude Bruce. It encompassed him and all the things he’d made for her and touched and delivered to her for almost twelve years.
He sat up and put his bare feet on the floor and then stood carefully, unsure of his legs, as if they’d recently been released from casts. He had a mission. Two missions. He was going to get the dogs from Kathy Tyson—she’d been taking care of them since days before Teresa died, and with the funeral and the comings and goings of so many people in their house, they had not yet picked them up—and then he was going to come home and kill himself.
He considered not going to get the dogs. It would make sense logistically, but he decided against it for two reasons. One, the dogs would be a comfort to Claire and Joshua and if he didn’t go get them now, there would be the next funeral to deal with and the dogs would remain at Kathy’s for at least another week. And two, he wanted to see them one last time.
First, he shaved. He had not shaved since the morning of the funeral and a shaggy beard was starting to grow in. He felt the least he could do if he was going to kill himself was to shave. He also dressed in a good shirt—not a flannel one like he normally wore, but in the white shirt with turquoise snaps that Teresa loved. When he wore it she would croon her rendition of a cowboy song, which she had likely made up herself, probably the moment she first saw him in that shirt. He tried to recall how the song went, but for the life of him he couldn’t. He would never hear it again, he realized, unless, of course, there was a heaven after all and then she would be there waiting for him and happy that he was wearing that shirt. She would be wearing her hospital gown with nothing on underneath, or perhaps she’d be wearing the blouse and skirt that Claire had picked out for her to wear in the casket, over her best underwear and bra, the outfit she’d worn also into the incinerator. Bruce allowed himself to wonder for a glimmer of a moment about the person who had loaded her into the incinerator. Whoever it was would have been the last person to lay eyes on her. But then he remembered that was not true. She had been burned in her casket, a state law, and the last person who saw her was Kurt Moyle, the owner of the funeral home, who stepped forward and reached up his hand and softly lowered the lid on her just as they sang the last line of “Amazing Grace.”
Like her death, Teresa’s funeral had not been the funeral Bruce had imagined seven weeks before when they had first learned of Teresa’s cancer and he’d allowed the movie version of her funeral to play in his mind. Bruce didn’t behave the way he’d thought he would. He didn’t take anyone’s hands in an attempt to either console or be consoled. He didn’t say anything about how his wife was in a better place now. What he did was try his best not to look at anyone. Looking at people made the strength in his legs disappear. He held on to chairs, walls, at one point even to Teresa’s coffin, to keep himself up. When he looked at her parents a phrase came instantly into his mind: stampeded by grief. Teresa and her parents, in her adult life, had not been terribly close. Still, at their daughter’s funeral they howled and pawed with their hands, mussing each other’s clothes. They were not howlers; never had he imagined that they would paw. Claire and Joshua were the opposite, moving from the chairs to their mother’s coffin, from her coffin to the drinking fountain, from the drinking fountain to the little stand where they’d put the book where people could sign their names. They seemed to both know to keep moving in this circuit, apart from each other, but in synchronicity, swooping like owls on a night hunt, wide-eyed and silent. When they passed Bruce their eyes lashed on to his like ropes for climbing that landed, dug in, then gripped and grew taut. He looked away from them as quickly as he could, though he was forced to appear to be looking at other people. Manners dictated that.
“I’m so sorry,” they said, each of them, over and over.
“Thank you,” he croaked. Those two words like the pits of plums he sucked the fruit from and then spit, sucked and then spit. He wondered if it were possible to add up all the people he’d thanked over the course of his entire life, whether that sum would be equal to the number of people he thanked on the one day that his wife’s body was to be sealed in a wooden box, shoved into an incinerator, and burned, at an extremely high temperature, to ashes.
• • •
Kathy Tyson expected him. He’d called the night before and she said he could come by at any time. It took him several minutes before he could speak to her because Spy and Tanner were so glad to see him, jumping up like they were trained not to do, almost knocking him over when he stooped down to their level.
At last he was able to move from the porch into the house, the dogs pushing in with him. Kathy’s house was a cabin, all one room, with a loft for her bed and a tiny bathroom just beyond the kitchen nook. Her parents’ house was hidden behind a stand of trees a few hundred yards farther up the driveway. Kathy’s grandparents had lived in the cabin years before, while they built the bigger house up the hill.
“How about a cup of coffee?” she asked, and poured some into a mug without waiting for him to answer. They sat down at the table. A stick of incense burned on the shelf behind her, a tendril of sweet smoke rising above her head.
“We’re very grateful to you for taking care of the dogs.”
“I don’t mind a bit,” she said, looking around for them. They lay near his feet under the table, both of them licking their private parts. “I’ll miss them. They’re good dogs.”
“They are good dogs,” Bruce said. A couple of weeks ago, Teresa had asked him to give Kathy a jar of jam that she had made, as a thank-you gift, but at the last minute Bruce left it on the kitchen table, feeling it was too valuable to give away, not for its contents so much as for Teresa’s writing scrawled across the label on the lid. Raspberry, June.
“What happened to your face?” she asked.
He pressed his fingertips to the scab on his cheek. “I slipped.”
She nodded. The bowl that sat between them on the table held a single tangerine.
“How’s work?” he asked. She was a cow inseminator like her father. He didn’t know whether cows were inseminated year-round or what she was doing home on a Wednesday at noon.
“Good,” she nodded. “We keep busy.” She stood up and refilled both of their mugs. She wore jeans and a purple shirt and a cluster of crystals and beads and stones around her throat and wrists and fingers. Once, Teresa had chatted with her about having her as a guest on Modern Pioneers to discuss the art of reading tarot, Bruce remembered now, though nothing had come of it. He had known Kathy all of his life, though, sitting here in her house, he realized he hardly knew her at all. They’d gone to school together, she four years behind him, and then when he bought his land they were neighbors, and they helped one another out in a neighborly way. He remembered that she played softball, not in high school, but now, for the Jake’s Tavern team.
“Spring’s on its way,” he said. “It’s already here, I guess.”
“Yep,” said Kathy. It had officially been spring for nearly a week. They both looked out the window at the snow, which was melting, the weather having warmed to the low forties.
“So that means you’ll start practicing soon.”
“Practicing?” she asked.
“Softball.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, blushing a little. A lock of her brown hair had come loose from her ponytail, softening her face. She pushed it behind her ear. “I don’t know if I’ll do it this year. It’s very time-consuming.”
“It keeps you busy,” he said.
“It’s not only practice and games, but I’m also the secretary.”
Bruce nodded. He wondered what the secretary of the softball team would have to do.
“You could play with us. We could certainly use some men. It seems like only the women in this town want to do anything. To join in.”
“I would want to play for Len’s Lookout,” he said sternly.
Her eyes flickered from her hands to his eyes and then back to her hands. “I can understand that,” she said, a little breathless.
“Len’s … what are they?”
“The Leopards.”
“Len’s Leopards,” he said quietly, ridiculously, without any intention of joining a softball team. Teresa had waited tables at Len’s Lookout. Everyone had loved her there. Leonard and Mardell, the customers from Midden and from the Cities. Mardell had taped Teresa’s obituary to the wall at the bar, along with a picture she’d taken of Teresa at the annual Christmas party. People had left flowers beneath it and notes and votive candles that burned until they burned out. He hadn’t been there to see it himself, but Mardell had called and told him about it, how the notes and flowers were piling on the floor and covering the pinball machine that sat nearby.
“It’s almost his name,” Kathy said.
“What?”
“Leopard. It’s almost Leonard. Only one letter is different.”
“Oh. I never thought of that.”
She reached back to her ponytail and draped it over her left shoulder. “It would be a way of honoring her perhaps.”
“Perhaps,” agreed Bruce, without committing himself. Now that they were on the subject, he hoped she would not say how sorry she was. She’d already said it at the funeral. He cleared his throat and then coughed hard, as if to free something caught in his lungs.
Her phone rang, but she did not answer it. When the machine clicked on, the person on the line hung up. “It’s my mom,” she explained. “She never leaves a message. That’s how I know to call.”
He gave her a small smile. It seemed that he should leave, but he didn’t want to. He didn’t feel happy, but he didn’t feel sad either. He felt a glorious sense of safety from the rest of his life in Kathy’s small house. It was not like the way he’d felt before Teresa got cancer, before he knew there was anything he needed to feel safe from. It was an entirely new sensation, and it filled him up like a drug.
“So I was thinking, I wanted to tell you, if you ever want to take a walk or talk on the phone or whatnot, I wanted you to know that I’m here. I mean, if you ever need an ear, I’m just right down the road.”
She got up to stoke the stove.
“I should go,” he said, standing. “But thank you again.”
“I enjoyed it, being of assistance.” She walked him to the door and then stood on the porch as he drove away with the dogs beside him in the cab.
He drove past his house and out to the highway, to Len’s Lookout, where he parked and shut the ignition off. He sat waiting, as if for Teresa to come out, as she’d done when he came to pick her up after her shift. It was just after one: several people were inside eating lunch, their cars and trucks were in the parking lot. He recognized almost all of them. He started the engine again and drove to Norway and back, a sixty-mile roundtrip that took him a couple of hours because he avoided the highway and took the long way, on mostly dirt roads, for no reason at all.
When he got home Joshua was there, and together they cooked up a pound of hamburger, pressing it into four patties. They covered the patties with ketchup and ate them without buns. When Teresa had died they had all abruptly, inexplicably, without having mentioned it, stopped being vegetarians. It was one of the first things that changed. As Bruce did the dishes, Lisa Boudreaux pulled up into the driveway and Joshua went out to greet her. Fifteen minutes later they walked into the house and Lisa handed Bruce a card.
“This is from my mom,” she explained almost inaudibly, without looking at him.
“Thank you,” he said. He could not think of who her mother was. Lisa he recognized from school functions over the years, and also Teresa’s funeral, though she had not spoken to him then, which meant she had not said she was sorry, a fact he now found himself strangely resenting.
“Would you like a burger?” he asked, though they’d eaten all the beef.
“We’re going upstairs,” Joshua said curtly. Teresa had not been a strict mother, but neither had she allowed her high school–age children to sleep with their romantic partners in her house. Bruce watched them walk up the stairs and didn’t see them for the rest of the day.
On the morning of the tenth day he woke from a dream in which he was murdering Teresa by beating her to death with his fists. He lay on his side, staring at the line of small yellow circular stains that a leak in the roof had made last year where the ceiling met the wall. He heard Joshua and Lisa in the kitchen. Almost immediately Lisa began to laugh, rather loudly, he thought, given the fact that she was in someone else’s house at nine o’clock in the morning and it was obvious that he was not up. Usually by nine Bruce would have been up for three and a half hours, but he’d been sleeping late since Teresa died. He was on a vacation from work—which would actually become permanent since he would soon be dead.
“Josh,” he hollered out from his bed three times before receiving a sullen, almost vicious, “What?” in return.
“Will you feed?”
Joshua said he would and then, without another word, the front door slammed shut. Bruce listened until he heard them drive away. Once the sounds of their engines faded, the house took on the quality of quiet he’d felt the morning before—that he was not in a house, but a field. He lay there in it, his eyes not shut but merely lowered as if to shield against the sun.
It came to him then: he was not going to be brave enough to kill himself.
It came whole and solid, like a fish that swam up to him, the same way it had when he’d decided the opposite. He wailed, and then wailed and wailed, so loudly that all the animals came and jumped up to be near him on the bed—Spy and Tanner and Shadow. The dogs licked his face and throat and arms and hands, as though he were a plate, and then a new sound emerged from him, one he’d never made before or witnessed anyone else making: a kind of whimpering and peeping and coughing and hooting all at once.
When he quieted he became aware of the fact that he was encased by animals, the dogs lying against him on either side, Shadow above him, pressed up against the top of his head. He was surprised that Shadow in particular had stayed so near, in the midst of such horrible noise. He reached up and stroked her with both hands, the tears dripping silently at last, off his face and into his ears and neck and hair.
He knew something else then. That in some way he already was dead, that his life was killing him, and worse, that he would not ever be able to kill his life.
Once he had heard a terrible story about a man in New York City who had slipped and fallen into the path of a train, but only half of this man’s body had been run over, the other half, his top half—either blessedly or not blessedly, depending on how you looked at it—had remained above, on the platform, conscious and fully alive. He could talk, he could listen, he could recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He could do everything but move from precisely where the train pinned him to the platform from the waist down. The rescue people came and soon it was determined that the man would die the moment they moved the train, but in the meanwhile he was kept alive by the train in its stillness, holding his organs together, his blood inside.
Bruce, in bed on the morning of day ten, remembered that man. He was that man.
An hour passed while he stared at the ceiling and did not move. When he sat up it was only to reach over to rummage around in the drawer of Teresa’s nightstand, looking for tissue to blow his nose, but he found a cassette tape instead. He lay back down with it in his hand and stared at it for several moments before he could make out that it was by Kenny G. He had never listened to Kenny G. He had never known Teresa to listen to Kenny G. He had no idea how the tape had found its way into the drawer on the side of their bed or why a grown man would call himself “G” instead of simply using his full last name. He leaned over and popped the tape into the player that sat on the shelf behind his head. When one side ended he switched it to the other side, and he did it again and again. He played it and played it, and it told him his whole life story, and hers. It pinned him beautifully, all day, to the bed, and though it made him weep, it also managed to shout down the other sounds that had pinned him to the bed before—the voice that hissed the questions that all began with why.
At four the phone rang. He assumed it would be Claire, who had called him three times that day already, leaving messages for him in her new sad voice. He picked it up, ready now to possibly drag himself out of bed.
“Bruce. It’s Kathy,” the voice said, then added, “Tyson.”
“Hi.” He reached over to click off Kenny G.
“How are you?”
“Fine,” he said, clearing his throat.
“I was wondering if you wanted dinner. I made chili. I could bring it over or you’re more than welcome to come here.”
“I can’t. But thank you. Claire’s coming home,” he lied. She wouldn’t be there in time for dinner. She wouldn’t be there until past ten.
“Oh,” she spoke quickly. “I meant that you could bring the kids too. If they would want to come.” She paused. “But it sounds like you’re all set.”
“I think Claire has something planned. She already bought the food.”
“Well, anyway, before dinner … I was thinking of taking a walk.”
He agreed to meet her at the stream, the midway point between his house and hers. He wasn’t so much interested in seeing Kathy as he was in getting out of his bed, and miraculously, the house. He walked the three quarters of a mile slowly, feeling strangely feverish and out of breath. He passed one cabin and then the other one—both stood empty most of the time, belonging to city people. No one lived between his house and Kathy’s, which he’d known all along, but hadn’t thought of specifically until today. When he saw her in the distance he waved, and Spy and Tanner lowered their tails, thinking Bruce was leaving them again.
“Greetings,” she called in response to his wave. She did not walk toward him, but instead gathered her poncho in more closely around herself, and stood waiting in the part of the road that covered the culvert through which the stream flowed, the official spot where they’d agreed to meet. When he was near enough to her, they shook hands awkwardly and walked to the edge of the road and looked at the water.
“So,” she asked, solemnly, as if out of respect. “How was your day?”
“My day?” he asked, surprised at what he would tell her. “Hard.”
When Bruce returned home Claire was sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee.
“There you are,” she said.
“You’re home early. Since when do you drink coffee?” he asked, pouring himself a cup.
“Since the hospital, I suppose. Where were you? I worried—your truck was here and I didn’t hear your chain saw. And I called you today. Did you get my messages?”
“I thought coffee made you sick.”
“It doesn’t anymore,” said Claire. “I lost my sensitivity and now I’m addicted.” Her hands gripped the cup, bony and hard-looking and pale. She seemed suddenly older to him than she was, and he realized that this had probably, recently, become true. In the course of Teresa’s dying and death, Claire had been less his daughter and more his comrade in arms. Together they had tended to Teresa, together they had searched for Joshua, together they had sat businesslike with Kurt Moyle and told him what they wanted—which casket, which flowers, which program, which songs. Alone, she wrote the thank-you cards, in one long day, signing all of their names.
“Did you ever meet that guy named Bill?” he asked.
“Bill?”
“At the hospital. He lost his wife.”
She stared at him for a few beats and then stood up. “No. Why?”
She got the coffee pot and refilled both their cups. He noticed her hand trembled as she poured.
“You’re still sensitive,” he said.
“What?” She set the pot down too hard.
“To the caffeine. It’s making you shake.”
“Oh,” she said, sitting down. She pushed her hands between her legs as though she were trying to warm them up.
“So, this Bill. I thought of him the other day. I only talked to him once or twice, but he seemed like a good guy. We had a lot in common. His wife was about your mom’s age and she died a couple of days before her—her room was a few rooms down from your mom’s. Anyway, I wondered how he was.”
Claire nodded coolly. “I’m sure it’s difficult for him just like it is for us.” She took a sip of her coffee and swallowed hard, like she was taking a pill. “Where were you?”
“I took a walk.”
She combed her hair with her fingers. It was longer than it had been for years and tinted a faint, unnatural red. She wore lipstick that was the same color as her new hair, the rest of her face bare.
“What happened to your braid?” he asked, noticing for the first time that it was gone. He’d teased her about it, but he’d always liked how the little bells tinkled when she moved. It had reminded him of a cat entering the room.
“I cut it off.” Her hand went to where the braid had once rested on her neck. “Did you work today?”
He shook his head. “But I will Monday. I figured it’s time. What else am I going to do? I’m broke.”
“I could loan you money.”
“No.”
“Well, if you need it, just ask. ’Cause I have it. My tips have been good.” She was now waiting tables full-time at the restaurant where she’d worked part-time before she dropped out of school, before her mother got sick.
“So, how are you doing?” Bruce asked.
“I’m hanging on,” she said, giving him a twisted little smile. “I can’t sleep much. I keep waking up with nightmares. And I still can’t eat anything yet.”
“What do you dream?”
She propped her chin on her hand, thinking of what to tell him, which dream. “I dream that I have to murder her,” she said. “That she forces me to do the most horrible things like beat her to death with a bat or tie her to a tree, pour gasoline on her, and light her on fire.”
“That’s probably normal. It’s your way of saying goodbye.”
“No, it’s not,” she snapped, and looked angrily at him. “I’m not saying goodbye, Bruce. I’m never going to say goodbye, so don’t say that, okay?”
“Okay,” he said gently. He put his hand on top of hers, but she pulled it away.
He looked at her for a long time, so long that he could see the effect of his gaze. How it opened her, softened her, broke her. Tears came into her eyes and dripped silently down her face. He reached out and with his thumbs he dabbed them away. He remembered how she used to gallop around with her arms swinging in front of her and whinnying, pretending she was a horse.
“How about you?” she asked. “What do you dream?”
Teresa’s face flashed into his mind, the dream face that had come to him that morning, in the moment before he punched her. How she cackled at him with her bloody mouth and demanded that he do it again, and how, helplessly, he did it. Again and again and again.
“So far,” he said to Claire, “nothing I can recall.”
On Monday morning he got into his truck and started it up and sat in it, letting it run for several minutes. He had a kitchen to remodel. The people who had contracted him to do it—a couple from the Cities—had been patient, waiting months past when he said he’d have the job done, knowing what he’d been through. He drove the twenty miles to their cabin without turning the radio on. When he shut his truck off in their driveway he sat staring at the cabin, a log A-frame. Finally he got out and took his tool belt with him. He made it as far as the porch and sat down. He took out a cigarette and smoked it. The day was gray, rainy, and there was a chill in the wind, a good day to be working inside. It was day thirteen without Teresa, and he realized that enough days had passed by now that he could document the time without her in weeks. He would say, My wife died two weeks ago to anyone who asked, though no one yet had. And then eventually he would have to say three, or possibly he would skip past three and jump ahead to months and then years, though years he could not imagine, not even one.
When he’d smoked his second cigarette he stood up and got into his truck and drove home and spent the afternoon in bed listening to Kenny G, which he also did the entire next day, not even attempting to work, managing only the briefest conversation with Joshua when he appeared. On the third day that Bruce stayed in bed and listened to Kenny G and cried until it got dark, Kathy Tyson called to see if he wanted to come over for dinner.
She served him what she called “Mexican quiche” with a salad that had tortilla chips poking decoratively out of its edges. She thought he was still a vegetarian.
“It looks delicious,” he said, standing near the table.
Kathy wore pants that had so much fabric he first thought they were a skirt. Her hair was held back by an enormous beaded barrette like the kind he’d seen for sale at the annual powwow on the reservation in Flame Lake. Every year Teresa broadcast a live edition of Modern Pioneers from there.
“Some wine?” she offered, struggling to get the cork out of the bottle. He took it from her and opened it, and then poured the wine into the glasses she held, feeling vaguely awkward. Usually he drank milk with his dinner, and when he drank alcohol he drank beer or the occasional rum and Coke.
“Here’s to you,” he said, raising his glass, and a surge of joy seized his heart. It had the same effect sorrow had had on him when it was sorrow he had not been used to—as if it had the power to stop him from breathing. It felt like it could, though it never did.
“No,” she said, “here’s to you.”
“Here’s to both of us,” Bruce said.
“To us,” she agreed, and they clinked their glasses. They each took a sip, and then Kathy looked at him gravely, expectantly, and set her glass down. “So. How was the weekend?”
They had bonded on Friday’s walk after he’d confided in her about crying in bed all day and lying to her about Claire being home in time to make dinner. Kathy had been kind to him, had listened and said things that made sense and then had given him a big hug when she said goodbye.
“The weekend was okay, but sad, of course,” Bruce said.
“Of course,” said Kathy. She was going around the room lighting candles, and then she went to the stereo and put a CD on. It wasn’t music so much as it was sound. Falling rain, chirping birds, pounding thunder, and the whoosh of what Bruce presumed was the ocean. The radio station played this kind of music each Sunday evening at ten, on a show called Audioscape. He and Teresa had mocked it whenever it came on.
“We were all together all weekend—even Josh stuck around. We made a plot for Teresa—for where we’re going to put the ashes, her grave, I suppose you can call it. We’re going to make this flower bed, where we’ll bury her ashes and then plant flowers and put her gravestone when we get it—it won’t come for a while, but we ordered it.” Kathy nodded, listening; she’d already consumed a third of her wine. Bruce noticed this and took a sip of his. “It’s nice to have the kids around, but then it’s also tough. They remind me of everything.”
“Of course they do! They’re your whole history with Teresa.” She squeezed his arm and then stroked it, the way Pepper Jones-Kachinsky used to do in an attempt to console him. It felt different when Kathy did it, though. It consoled him. “Claire and Joshua are a huge part of your past, Bruce. With them, there’s no escaping the reality of what’s happened. The three of you are going to have to find a new path in order to move forward.”
“I’m not saying it’s bad. I mean, I like having them around.”
“I know,” she said. “Of course you do.”
That night he drove home with a spot on his neck that felt like a burn. It was the place where Kathy had pressed her lips. It had not been an actual kiss. He had not, in return, kissed her on the neck. In fact, even his hug had kept her at bay. She had kissed him when they said goodbye, after she reached to give him a hug the way she had a few days before. Women had given him kisses such as this before, kissing hello, kissing goodbye, kissing him in this way hundreds of times right before Teresa’s eyes, but now, driving home from Kathy’s he felt that he had done something terribly wrong. He wiped the place where her kiss had landed, rubbing it until he felt he had rubbed it entirely away.
When he turned into his driveway, he saw that Joshua was home, almost every light on inside.
“Where were you?” he asked, sitting at the kitchen table, when Bruce walked in. Joshua, who himself was rarely home, was almost never accountable for his whereabouts.
“I went and had dinner.” In one hand he carried a pie that Kathy had baked for them. He set it down on the table.
“Where?”
He gestured in a southeastern direction, and then, seeing that would not be enough, said, “Over at the Tysons’.”
Joshua nodded. Bruce knew he thought the Tysons’—Kathy’s parents —not Kathy herself. Inexplicably, he allowed him to think that. “Because I made dinner,” Joshua said. “I made hot dogs and Tater Tots.”
“Thank you,” Bruce said, sitting down. He looked around. “Is Lisa here?”
“Nope.”
“Is everything okay? I mean, with you and Lisa?”
“Yep.”
“She seems nice.”
“I love her,” said Joshua with real emotion, his eyes flaring as they did on occasion, which allowed Bruce to glimpse the Joshua he used to know, instead of the one he saw most of the time now, who kept his eyes dim and impossibly private.
“Is that where you’ve been staying so much? At her mom’s house? She has that trailer, out past the dump, right?”
“But her mom’s hardly ever there. Her boyfriend’s John Rileen, and they stay over at his place most the time.”
Bruce remembered who Lisa’s mom was now. Short and plump with very blond hair, she worked back in the kitchen of the deli at the Red Owl. “Pam Simpson,” Bruce said. “That’s her mom.” Joshua nodded. Bruce had not yet opened the card that Lisa had given him. It sat on top of a pile of other unopened cards on Teresa’s old desk. “I didn’t really know her in school. She’s a few years older than me.”
“I know. She told me.”
“So you and Lisa—tonight you decided to take a break?”
“Not a break,” Joshua said, irritated. He held an empty bottle of Mountain Dew in front of him, pulling its label off in wet shreds. He so closely resembled his mother that, at times, Bruce had to look away.
“You just decided on a night apart,” he said.
Joshua’s eyes flared, then dimmed and became private again. “I wanted to hang out with you.”
It had been years since he had expressed an interest in spending time with either him or Teresa. “Well, I’m sorry I missed it.”
“You didn’t.”
“What?”
“You didn’t miss it,” Joshua said. “It’s only ten.”
“True.”
“You have something on your teeth.”
Bruce rubbed his front teeth with his finger and loosened a piece of black bean and swallowed it. “What would you like to do? We could play cards.”
Joshua sat thinking, as if considering whether he was in the mood for cards, then he said, bitterly, “Cards are boring.”
They sat together not doing or saying anything for ten minutes. Bruce got two beers from the refrigerator, wrenched the caps off, and handed one to Joshua. He got the tune box that had the Kenny G tape inside of it from his bedroom and plugged it in next to the toaster. When the tape started, Joshua looked at the stereo uncertainly, as if about to object—he was adamant about his music—but remained quiet.
Bruce shook two cigarettes from the pack he had in his shirt pocket, lit them both up, and handed one to Joshua, who took it without a look of surprise. Who was he to say the kid couldn’t smoke? Cancer, it seemed like lightning to him. It wouldn’t strike twice.
They went outside and stood on the top stair of the porch without their coats on, leaving the front door open so they could hear the music filtering out to them. After several minutes, the tape came to its end and clicked off, and they stood in the silence, looking at the sky.
“What are you going to do now?” asked Joshua.
“Now?”
“I mean, now that Mom’s dead. What are you going to do?”
Bruce almost said live. He almost confessed that his plan had been the opposite—that he had planned to die—but he stopped himself. He almost said, I’m going to do my best to have a happy life because that’s what your mother would have wanted. Or, Push on. As we all will do. He almost asked, What do you mean, what am I going to do? Do I have a choice in the matter? And he almost reached out and put his hand on Joshua’s shoulder and said, Suffer for a while, but then we’re going to be okay.
But he said none of those things. He wasn’t that man. Not in this instant. He was a man so alone that he could not speak. He remained silent for so long that the silence seemed to absorb the question entirely, so that it would have been stranger to answer than to leave it be. He heard the flapping of the plastic that covered the porch screens, where it had come loose from its staples. He found a loose edge and pulled the whole sheet off, popping the staples one by one. Joshua did the other side and then they balled the plastic up into a bundle and tossed it onto the porch so it wouldn’t blow away in the night.
Bruce picked up his bottle of beer and took the last swig. “Can you smell that?”
“That means it’s spring.”
It was the smell that came to Coltrap County about this time every year, when the ground remained frozen, but whatever lived above it had finally begun to thaw. The smell of old snow mixed with something alive but slightly rotten, like the stems of cut flowers left too long in a vase. A sudden wave of wind came up and hit their faces, so they smelled it even more. The wind was cold and it pushed into their collars and blew through the thin cotton of their shirts, but they didn’t move to protect themselves from it. They stood in place, still as statues, until they couldn’t take it anymore. Together, they shivered.