Torch

I am grateful to Syracuse University, the Julia and David White Artists’ Colony, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Sacatar Foundation, and the Wurlitzer Foundation for the gift of time and financial support while I wrote this book.

A heartfelt thanks to all the people at Houghton Mifflin, whose hard work and passion helped bring this book into the world. I am especially indebted to my editor, Janet Silver, for her insight, brilliance, and kindness; to Meg Lemke, who guided me expertly along the way; and to Megan Wilson, publicist extraordinaire.

A deep bow to my agent and fairy godmother, Laurie Fox of the Linda Chester Literary Agency.

I couldn’t have written this book without the encouragement and love of my friends and teachers, too many to name here. Special thanks to Paulette Bates Alden, Christopher Boucher, Arielle Greenberg Bywater, Mary Caponegro, Arthur Flowers, Lisa Glatt, Corrine Glesne, Sarah Hart, Aimee Hurt, Tom Kilbane, Gretchen Legler, EJ Levy, Emillia Noordhoek, Dorothy Novick, Salvador Plascencia, Lee and John and Astia Roper-Batker, George Saunders, Anne Vande Creek, Bridgette Walsh, and Devon Wright.

I’m grateful to Karen Patch, Leif Nyland, and Glenn (Benny) Lambrecht for all those years together, and for being modern pioneers with me.

My deepest debt is to Brian Lindstrom, for everything and then some. For love and for life. For keeping the faith and carrying the torch.

PART I

Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it: it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.

—Charlotte Brontë,
Jane Eyre

S
HE ACHED
. As if her spine were a zipper and someone had come up behind her and unzipped it and pushed his hands into her organs and squeezed, as if they were butter or dough, or grapes to be smashed for wine. At other times it was something sharp like diamonds or shards of glass engraving her bones. Teresa explained these sensations to the doctor—the zipper, the grapes, the diamonds, and the glass—while he sat on his little stool with wheels and wrote in a notebook. He continued to write after she’d stopped speaking, his head cocked and still like a dog listening to a sound that was distinct, but far off. It was late afternoon, the end of a long day of tests, and he was the final doctor, the
real
doctor, the one who would tell her at last what was wrong.

Teresa held her earrings in the palm of one hand—dried violets pressed between tiny panes of glass—and put them on, still getting dressed after hours of going from one room to the next in a hospital gown. She examined her shirt for lint and cat hair, errant pieces of thread, and primly picked them off. She looked at Bruce, who looked out the window at a ship in the harbor, which cut elegantly, tranquilly along the surface of the lake, as if it weren’t January, as if it weren’t Minnesota, as if it weren’t ice.

At the moment she wasn’t in pain and she told the doctor this while he wrote. “There are long stretches of time that I feel perfectly fine,” she said, and laughed the way she did with strangers. She confessed that she wouldn’t be surprised if she were going mad or perhaps this was the beginning of menopause or maybe she had walking pneumonia. Walking pneumonia had been her latest theory, the one she liked best. The one that explained the cough, the ache. The one that could have made her spine into a zipper.

“I’d like to have one more glance,” the doctor said, looking up at
her as if he had risen from a trance. He was young. Younger.
Was he thirty?
she wondered. He instructed her to take her clothes off again and gave her a fresh gown to wear and then left the room.

She undressed slowly, tentatively at first, and then quickly, crouching, as if Bruce had never seen her naked. The sun shone into the room and made everything lilac.

“The light—it’s so pretty,” she said, and stepped up to sit on the examining table. A rosy slice of her abdomen peeped out from a gap in the gown, and she mended it shut with her hands. She was thirsty but not allowed a drop of water. Hungry, from having not eaten since the night before. “I’m starving.”

“That’s good,” said Bruce. “Appetite means that you’re healthy.” His face was red and dry and cracked-looking, as if he’d just come in from plowing the driveway, though he’d been with her all day, going from one section of the hospital to the next, reading what he could find in the waiting rooms. Reading
Reader’s Digest
and
Newsweek
and
Self
against his will but reading hungrily, avidly, from cover to cover. Throughout the day, in the small spaces of time in which she too had had to wait, he’d told her the stories. About an old woman who’d been bludgeoned to death by a boy she’d hired to build a doghouse. About a movie star who’d been forced by divorce to sell his boat. About a man in Kentucky who’d run a marathon in spite of the fact that he had only one foot, the other made of metal, a complicated, sturdy coil fitted into a shoe.

The doctor knocked, then burst in without waiting for an answer. He washed his hands and brought his little black instrument out, the one with the tiny light, and peered into her eyes, her ears, her mouth. She could smell the cinnamon gum he chewed and also the soap he’d used before he touched her. She kept herself from blinking while staring directly into the bullet of light, and then, when he asked, followed his pen expertly around the room using only her eyes.

“I’m not a sickly woman,” she declared.

Nobody agreed. Nobody disagreed. But Bruce came to stand behind her and rub her back.

His hands made a scraping sound against the fabric of the gown, so rough and thick they were, like tree bark. At night he cut the calluses off with a jackknife.

• • •

The doctor didn’t say cancer—at least she didn’t hear him say it. She heard him say oranges and peas and radishes and ovaries and lungs and liver. He said tumors were growing like wildfire along her spine.

“What about my brain?” she asked, dry-eyed.

He told her he’d opted not to check her brain because her ovaries and lungs and liver made her brain irrelevant. “Your breasts are fine,” he said, leaning against the sink.

She blushed to hear that.
Your breasts are fine
.

“Thank you,” she said, and leant forward a bit in her chair. Once, she’d walked six miles through the streets of Duluth in honor of women whose breasts
weren’t
fine and in return she’d received a pink T-shirt and a spaghetti dinner.

“What does this
mean
exactly?” Her voice was reasonable beyond reason. She became acutely aware of each muscle in her face. Some were paralyzed, others twitched. She pressed her cold hands against her cheeks.

“I don’t want to alarm you,” the doctor said, and then, very calmly, he stated that she could not expect to be alive in one year. He talked for a long time in simple terms, but she could not make out what he was saying. When she’d first met Bruce, she’d asked him to explain to her how, precisely, the engine of a car worked. She did this because she loved him and she wanted to demonstrate her love by taking an interest in his knowledge. He’d sketched the parts of an engine on a napkin and told her what fit together and what parts made other parts move and he also took several detours to explain what was likely to be happening when certain things went wrong and the whole while she had smiled and held her face in an expression of simulated intelligence and understanding, though by the end she’d learned absolutely nothing. This was like that.

She didn’t look at Bruce, couldn’t bring herself to. She heard a hiccup of a cry from his direction and then a long horrible cough.

“Thank you,” she said when the doctor was done talking. “I mean, for doing everything you can do.” And then she added weakly, “But. There’s one thing—are you sure? Because … actually … I don’t feel that sick.” She felt she’d know it if she had oranges growing in her; she’d known immediately both times that she’d been pregnant.

“That will come. I would expect extremely soon,” said the doctor. He had a dimpled chin, a baby face. “This is a rare situation—to find it so late in the game. Actually, the fact that we found it so late speaks to
your overall good health. Other than this, you’re in excellent shape.”

He hoisted himself up to sit on the counter, his legs dangling and swinging.

“Thank you,” she said again, reaching for her coat.

Carefully, wordlessly, they walked to the elevator, pushed its translucent button, and waited for it to arrive. When it did, they staggered onto it and saw, gratefully, that they were alone together at last.

“Teresa,” Bruce said, looking into her eyes. He smelled like the small things he’d eaten throughout the day, things she’d packed for him in her famously big straw bag. Tangerines and raisins.

She put the tips of her fingers very delicately on his face and then he grabbed her hard and held her against him. He touched her spine, one vertebra, and then another one, as if he were counting them, keeping track. She laced one hand into his belt loop at the back of his jeans and with the other hand she held a seashell that hung on a leather string around her neck. A gift from her kids. It changed color depending on how she moved, flashing and luminescent like a tropical fish in an aquarium, so thin she could crush it in an instant. She considered crushing it. Once, in a quiet rage, she’d squeezed an entire bottle of coconut-scented lotion onto the tops of her thighs, having been denied something as a teenager: a party, a record, a pair of boots. She thought of that now. She thought,
Of all the things to think of now
. She tried to think of nothing, but then she thought of cancer.
Cancer
, she said to herself.
Cancer, cancer, cancer
. The word chugged inside of her like a train starting to roll. And then she closed her eyes and it became something else, swerving away, a bead of mercury or a girl on roller skates.