“I know you have a life,” Teresa said.
“I’m not a child anymore, you know.”
“You’re not a child, but you’re my child. You always will be. Both you and Josh.”
“That has nothing to do with what we’re talking about,” Claire said. She turned to Joshua behind her. “Did she tell you what was wrong?”
He stared at her for several moments and then clicked his CD player off.
“Did she tell you?” she asked him again.
“Are you pregnant, Mom?” Joshua asked, astonished.
“Claire! Stop, okay?” Teresa looked in the rearview mirror. “I’m not pregnant.” And then she said, her voice quiet, “I have some news. That’s all.”
“News?”
“What kind of news?” Joshua asked, but Teresa didn’t answer.
“Why are you torturing us like this?” Claire asked.
Their mother slowed the car and pulled to the side of the road and then put it in park but left the windshield wipers going.
Joshua asked, “Did something happen to Bruce?” He pushed his headphones off and let them hang around his neck.
“Bruce is fine.” She turned the ignition off and removed her gloves. “Everyone’s fine. It’s just …” She hesitated for several moments, then continued, as if talking not to them, but to herself. “It’s okay.”
“What’s okay?” Joshua asked savagely.
“Tell us!” demanded Claire, the tears rising in her eyes, more angry than sad, more frightened than angry. She believed that when her mother spoke again it would be like the moment in a fairy tale when a spell is broken and whatever had been horrible moments before was suddenly lifted and everyone was released from damnation.
But her mother didn’t speak. She put her hands on the steering wheel, as if she were going to start the car and drive away. The three of them gazed silently out the windshield for several moments, at the carcass of a dead raccoon, flattened on the road, fine tufts of its fur blowing in the wind.
“What is it, Mom?” Claire whispered gently, as if trying to persuade a child.
The engine began to tick—for several moments there was no other sound—and then it stopped ticking and, aside from the wind, it was silent altogether.
Teresa turned in her seat so she could see both of them and smiled. “My babies,” she crooned suddenly, and reached out to touch them.
Claire didn’t have time to think about it, what she did the moment she felt the weight of her mother’s hand. How she shifted, delicately, away.
4
THE SUN BEAT WARMLY against the sheets of plastic that covered the porch screens, and the flies, which had appeared to be dead that morning in the sills of the screens, stirred. They spun in mad circles on the backs of their wings, their legs black wires spindling frantically in the air, until some of them, by will or by luck, wrenched themselves at last upright. They beat themselves against the thick plastic until the dim January heat died behind the clouds and with it, them.
Bruce sat in the cold rocking chair on the porch and listened to the flies buzzing. It was all he could hear, that buzz, interrupted occasionally by the dogs, who scratched the door, wanting to be let in or out, from the house to the porch, from the porch to the yard, and then back again. But mostly they sat with him and snapped at the flies.
Bruce rolled a cigarette and then smoked it. He rolled another one and held it without lighting it. He wore a navy blue hat with earflaps that could be buttoned under his chin or on top of his head, but he’d not buttoned them at all, so they hung loosely over the sides of his face. He was a bony man, but strong, his limbs long and hard and pale as the bleached poles of a dock. His hair was blond and wispy and tied back always in a low ponytail that snaked thinly past his shoulders. He was freezing, but he didn’t want to go inside, so he stayed sitting in the wooden rocking chair and stared at his truck in the driveway.
He considered getting into it and driving back to the job, back to the cabin on Lake Nakota where he was renovating a bathroom for a couple from Minneapolis. He’d spent the morning there, tearing the room apart with his hammer and crowbar and his own hands, ripping the sink out and the tub and shower stall and linoleum from the floor. None of it wanted to come out, all of it almost brand-new. And now tomorrow he would begin to install the bathroom the couple wanted, composed of the old things they’d found in antique shops and specialty hardware stores: an enormous iron bathtub with silver clawed feet, a porcelain sink shaped like a tulip, and tiles for the floor that looked precisely like packed mud.
He could be laying those tiles now. He’d driven home after lunch, thinking he’d find Claire and Joshua there, thinking he’d spare Teresa the grief and go ahead and tell them the bad news, despite what he and Teresa had decided—to tell the kids together that evening after dinner—but when he’d arrived the house was empty and Joshua’s truck gone.
He stood and the dogs stood and they all went outside, where it had begun to snow. He turned his face up to the sky like a boy. All the times he’d gazed there, looking for things, finding things, knowing things and pointing them out to girls, or at other times to his father. The Milky Way and Pleiades, the Aurora Borealis and Orion. And all those times he’d felt he’d known the sky, yet now he felt that he knew nothing, or rather that he knew nothing except for what he felt, which was his body cold inside and out and the snowflakes tumbling softly onto his face. Wet fingerprints they were, no two the same, miracles that arrived and then melted.
It was too early to feed the horses, but he did it anyway. Then he fed the hens, huddled already into their beds of hay and shredded wool in the dark of the coop, their feathers brown against their beautiful bodies. He cooed to the first of them, cooed her name, though he could not be sure which name exactly was hers, never able to tell them apart. Teresa knew their names. She’d named them herself—Miss Pretty and Prudence Pinchpenny and Flowers McGillicutty and Mister Bojangles—though of course there was not a mister among them, her idea of a joke. He slid his hand under their rumps and found two warm eggs and put one in each pocket. He had to duck to keep from hitting his head on the ceiling of the coop. It was an A-frame hut that had once stood at the end of their long driveway so that Claire and Joshua had shelter while they waited for the school bus. Now that the kids had no use for it, he’d made it into a chicken coop—a thing that he did often and well, changing one thing to another, according to need. Changing station wagons into pickups, stumps into birdbaths, metal barrels into wood stoves.
He walked out the door of the coop, where the dogs waited for him. The snow, falling in earnest now, gathered on their shiny black backs and then wafted off when they moved. He trudged to the porch and lit the cigarette he hadn’t lit before, having carried it all this time pinched between his lips. He’d already prepared dinner and laid it all out in a baking pan and set it aside to go in the oven when it was time. He looked at his watch. It was three o’clock and moving toward dark already. His insides felt heavy, weighted with guilt about not being where he should be at this hour on a Friday afternoon. He closed his eyes and a list formed there of all the work he had to do. He and Teresa had agreed that despite everything they would continue to work. He would work. She would work.
“There’s nothing else we can do,” she’d said to him the night before as they lay together in bed, having gone there early, exhausted from their day in Duluth. She didn’t say it and neither did he, but they both knew why it was so very important that they had to work: money. She said, “We’ll work every minute of every day that we can.”
“Not you,” he said. “Me. Your job is to get better.”
She didn’t reply, but he could feel her mind ticking. On Monday she would start radiation treatments, but she could keep working. She’d been able to schedule her appointments late enough that she had time to work lunch and then drive the hour and a half to Duluth. Joshua would take her after school. He’d have to take a leave from his own job. These are the things they’d de
cided already, things they’d gone over, lying in bed after trying to make love but then not being able to go through with it because they were too sad. He had felt her going over it all as he held her hand beneath the covers and rubbed the soft side of her hip with the back of his hand. Even her hip had seemed to be thinking.
“Everything’s going to be okay.”
“I know,” she said, and rolled onto her side, facing away from him. He shifted onto his side too, and cupped her body into his. “Be careful,” she whispered sharply.
“I am.” He gently clutched the small mound of her stomach. She wore a bra and nothing else. She had to wear the bra to protect the bandage that was taped to her breast to cover the stitches she’d gotten that day, when she’d had a biopsy of a lump that the doctor had found. It turned out to be benign, unlike everything else. He kissed her shoulder, leaving saliva on her skin, and then he kissed it again where it was wet, where it had already gotten cold.
They were one person, he thought, not two.
“Don’t,” she said. She sat up on the edge of the bed, her back very pale in the light of the moon, accentuated by the black straps of her bra.
“I don’t want to go anywhere,” she said, after a long while, as if he’d asked. “I mean, Paris or Tahiti or anywhere. I thought you were supposed to want to go where you’d always dreamed of going when you found out you’re going to die.”
“You’re not going to die.” His words barely came out, as if he were saying them from the bottom of a canoe, a fucking liar. Her body shifted infinitesimally, icily, and he remembered the words that had been spoken to them earlier in the day. Ordinary, happy words that had become suddenly daggers of fire. A month, a year, perhaps by summer. He imagined her dying next month, in February, and then he pushed the idea immediately from his mind, scorched by it. He imagined her dying a year from now—a whole year, an entire blessed year—and it seemed so very far and it seemed that if he knew it were true, that she would live for one more year, he could bear it. More than that, he would do anything for it, give up everything he had. He thought, September. September at least. Another spring, another summer. He could live with September. September suddenly made his chest open with joy. And then he thought, there’s always a chance. What was the chance? Ten thousand to one? A hundred thousand to one? Whatever it was, it was there—the chance that she would live, go on living, and the cancer would languish and disappear and they would grow old and laugh about it or shudder when they remembered this awful winter of cancer, but they would also be thankful for it. How much it had taught them. How close it had brought them—Claire and Joshua and Bruce and Teresa. And they would understand how deeply they loved one another, how intricately bound they were to each other, how every conflict or division or thought in any such direction was nothing—petty folly—in the face of love, and not just their love for each other, but love in the world. Love for every man, woman, and beast, and even God, not just one God, but all gods, because now they knew the meaning of life because it—life!—had come so close to being taken from them.
Or the other option was that he would die before she did, no matter when she died. The knowledge that he could die tomorrow, that anyone could suddenly die at any moment of anything, seemed to him consoling, almost a complete relief. And then it came to him, what he would do when she died: die too. The thought was like a hand cool on his forehead.
“It’s funny, but I thought of Karl,” Teresa said, still sitting on the edge of the bed. “Whether he’ll try to get in touch with the kids. You know, afterwards.”
“How would he know?” asked Bruce.
“I don’t know. If somehow word got to him.”
Bruce didn’t like to think about Karl, Teresa’s ex-husband, Joshua and Claire’s so-called father—a man they’d seen only once since their parents had divorced. When Bruce first met Teresa he said he was going to drive to Texas and find Karl and kill him on her behalf, because when they’d been married he’d broken her nose. He’d broken other bones too, at other times over the course of their marriage, but the nose Karl had tried to make up to her by buying her a new one, which was the nose she had now, the only nose that Bruce could imagine on her. Her nose had a name: Princess Anne. She’d picked it out herself from a stand-up display with several rows of noses that had names printed beneath them like paint samples. She’d almost chosen one named Audrey or another called Surfer Girl. She told Bruce about her nose and the other noses when they were first falling in love, and he’d said she possessed the most beautiful nose on the earth, and she’d burst into tears. She’d been working at the Rest-A-While Villa then, making sure that the residents took their pills, cleaning out bedpans, changing and washing sheets, whatever needed to be done. Bruce’s Aunt Jenny had lived there. He’d visit her every couple of weeks, bringing her bottles of Orange Crush and the black licorice she liked, sitting with her in the community room to watch TV or play cards.
The first time he saw Teresa she was mopping up a pool of tomato juice that had spilled from a rolling cart in the hallway. “Hello,” she said, and laughed lightly. The second time he saw her she was standing in the front door of the Rest-A-While Villa in the heat of summer holding a screwdriver, its handle, pale yellow, barely transparent, like honey gone hard. Later, he learned that she carried it with her wherever she went so she could open and close her car door by jamming it into the space where the handle had once been. “Hello,” she said for the second time. Her earrings were real feathers that fluttered up into her hair as she walked past. The third time he saw her they spent an unexpected hour in the Rest-A-While Villa parking lot together while he fixed the handle on her car door.
They fell in love then. Languidly, secretly, during the hours that Claire and Joshua were in school. She hadn’t allowed him to meet them for months, and once they’d decided to live together—neither of them believed in marriage—they’d had a ceremony, a nonlegal wedding, which bound Bruce not only to Teresa but also to Claire and Joshua. The ceremony involved vows they’d written together and then the four of them each chose a lilac frond from the same bough and took turns letting it go in the Mississippi River to symbolize their bond as a family. Bruce Gunther to Teresa and Joshua and Claire Wood. That night Teresa had given Bruce a painting that she’d painted herself—The Woods of Coltrap County—three trees in the snow, one big, two smaller ones. It hung now on the wall at the foot of the bed, and he’d slept and woken to it every morning and night for the twelve years they’d been together.
He asked, “Do you want Karl to know? Should I call him when the time comes?”
“No,” she said, turning slightly toward him, but not enough to face him. “Not unless Josh and Claire want that. I don’t even know exactly where he lives anymore.”
He stroked her back with the tips of his fingers and then he remembered that she didn’t want to be touched and stopped, but left his hands near her on the bed. He felt a burning tightness in his center, down low, in rut and ache, wanting her, wanting to do everything to her, to push and pull and lick and hump and enter and suck and pinch and rub. He felt other ways at other times and he knew that she did too. Sometimes they’d had to almost will themselves to fuck, their bodies clacking together good-naturedly, as familiar and expected as water to the mouth. During those times, they got each other off expertly, lovingly, and kindly, but without urgency and without lust. Sometimes when she walked through the room naked he was no more moved by the sight of her than if the cat had sidled in, but now he felt the opposite: that he could make love to her again and again for days without stop.
“Josh is late,” she said.
“He’ll be along. Why don’t you get some sleep?”
“I will,” she said hoarsely, without moving.
He heard the rumble of a pickup making its way down their road, ice-glazed gravel and packed snow, with more snow coming on. He knew as it neared that it was neither Teresa nor Joshua, knew in fact that it was Kathy Tyson. He was mildly surprised when he heard her
engine slow and then saw her truck turn into the driveway. The dogs barked and he tried to quiet them to no avail, and he walked off the porch and into the yard to greet her. He’d known her all his life, without actually ever truly coming to know her in anything but a neighborly way. She’d graduated high school a few years behind him and joined her dad in his business, inseminating cows. She lived on their road, another mile and a half on, in a cabin midway down a long driveway that continued up a hill to her parents’ house, where she’d grown up.
“Afternoon,” she called happily, rolling her window down, but not getting out. He walked up to her door. “I didn’t expect to find anyone home this time of day.”
“I’m headed back out now. I just stopped home to get some tools.”
“The roads are icing up.” Her eyes were brown, the same color as her hair. “I wanted to bring some things by.” She handed Bruce an empty mason jar. “Thank Teresa again for the apple butter. And this came to me somehow.” She handed him an envelope.
“Thanks.” He looked at the envelope: nothing but junk mail, addressed to him in computer-generated cursive handwriting, a trick disguised as something real.
“You got any big weekend plans?” she asked.
“Not too much.”
She shifted her truck into reverse. “Tell Teresa hi for me.”
“You do the same with your folks,” he called out to her as she rolled backward into the turnaround. He opened the envelope and read the letter that tried to persuade him that he needed to replace all the windows of his house. He ripped it in half and put it into his pocket, where he found one of the eggs he’d placed there earlier, cooler now. The snow had already laid down a fresh two inches. He ran his glove over the trunk of Claire’s Cutlass, swishing the snow off of it, clearing it away for no actual reason, and then he stood staring at its maroon rump, the only color in sight.