CHAPTER 18
Still shaken by my conversation with Alex Helm, I went over to the Torstensen house at about ten to check on Anna before we were due at the mortuary for the dressing of the body. I knocked on the door and waited for an answer. It took several minutes and another knock before Anna Torstensen came to the door.
I was shocked by her appearance. To my eyes, she looked like she was the one who had died. Her skin seemed thin and papery over the bones of her skull, which stood out clearly in the yellow artificial light. Every movement seemed slow and deliberate and distant, as if she were a puppet of herself, and there was an absence in her eyes.
“I thought we could drive down to the mortuary together,” I said. She didn’t look like she could drive herself.
“Thank you,” said Anna. “I just—I think I need a few more minutes to prepare myself.”
“Have you had anything to eat today?” I asked.
She shook her head again.
“Let me make you some toast and then we’ll go,” I said. “All right?”
She stepped away from the door, and I led her into the kitchen. I looked through her cupboards, wishing there were some forbidden coffee to perk her up and settling for herbal tea. I warmed some bread in a pan, then spread it with butter and jam. I had to tell Anna to sit down.
“Eat this,” I said.
She took tiny bites, showing no reaction of either distaste or enjoyment. When she was finished, she stared down at the crumbs on her hand.
I brushed them off for her and handed her the herbal tea.
She took a sip and made a face, the first reaction I’d seen.
“Too hot?” I asked, taking it back and touching the mug myself. It didn’t seem too hot.
“Too sweet,” she said. That was a good sign, wasn’t it? After a long moment, she got up and poured herself a glass of tap water.
“Is there anything I can do for you now? Anything you can’t face doing?”
“Cheri Tate will be here tomorrow. She’s going to help me go through his clothes and send them to Goodwill. Or throw them out.” She said the words calmly, but afterwards, her eyes were shiny and wet.
“Well, I’m glad to hear that she has things under control.”
“She is very organized. She’s making sure the funeral luncheon will go smoothly, too.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, feeling again how useless the words were.
“I should have been ready, you know,” she said. She was standing up, and I pulled her down to sit next to me. We were still in the kitchen, on the hard chairs, but I couldn’t see how to move into the more comfortable couch in the living room now that she had started.
“I’m sure you never really can be,” I said.
“I keep feeling like there are things we didn’t finish. All these things that still had to be done.” Her hands flexed, dropped. “I know that he was seventy-three. I had so many years with him, more than most people have. More than he had with his first wife, certainly. But it still feels incomplete. It feels like I’ve been cheated.” There were spots of red on her cheeks.
Good, I thought. Be angry. Shout at God or at me or at anyone, if that helps you come back to life.
She began to talk in a nostalgic tone and I let her, though I was keeping an eye on the clock: 10:15. The funeral was at 2:00 P.M. We still had a little time.
Anna was saying, “We had a summer vacation planned this year, do you know that? All the years we’ve been married, and we had never taken a vacation in the summer. He was too attached to that garden. We only went on winter vacations, and those were only for a few days because of work and school schedules. We couldn’t afford to go very far away, so the weather was always an issue, as well.” She looked up at me, and I nodded encouragement. Better she talk about this than about the death.
“We were going to go to Mexico. A long drive down, so we could enjoy time together talking and listening to books on tape and music. I have lists of things that I wanted to get to. And then the hotel reservations and all the sites we were going to see. I wanted to try real Mexican food and see the ocean. I’ve never seen the ocean, do you know that?”
“No,” I said. Apparently, there was a lot about her life I didn’t know.
Her eyes flickered as if she were about to start weeping. But I sensed a grand effort and she went back to the brittle happiness pasted on top of her pain. “Tomas’s wife is expecting her first child, did you know that?”
“Really?” He had to be in his late thirties. That was late to start a family, at least in Utah. But he didn’t live in Utah, and sometimes it seemed like Mormons outside of Utah were part of an entirely different church.
“Yes. In late spring. Tobias was so excited when he heard it was a boy. He didn’t want them to name the child after him, but Tomas told me this morning that it’s what he and his wife want. What do I say to that? Now that Tobias is gone, do I tell them it’s all right? Even though I know it was what he wouldn’t have wanted?”
Again, I had the sense she was on the edge of losing control. Should I let her weep on my shoulder or should I encourage her to be strong? This was not the Anna Torstensen I had met at first. “They might have called the boy Tobias even if Tobias were still alive,” I said calmly. “He wouldn’t have had control over what name they chose.” When my sons started having children, I would have to deal with the same thing. Being a grandmother would be wonderful, but letting go might take work. And the more time I spent thinking about Kelly Helm, the more I thought it was going to be a lot of work.
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” said Anna, a faint smile peeking out for the first time since she’d opened the door to me. “Tobias had control over many things. He told you how things were, and gave his reasons for why no one could disagree with him. And no one did. He never raised his voice, just spoke rationally and clearly until the rest of us gave way.”
He had always been a quiet man, but I suppose I hadn’t seen what was underneath that quiet until now. “I feel lost without him,” said Anna. She met my eyes, and I saw the piercing clarity that had drawn me to her from the first. “But there is a part of me that is relieved. I hate that it’s true, but I feel like a burden has lifted.”
“There’s no reason to feel guilty about that,” I said, though she didn’t look guilty. “I think that is very common when someone dies after a long illness.”
“Yes, but shouldn’t I feel more sad about it? Shouldn’t I be crying and having fits because he is gone?” If she had, it would have surprised me, considering the kind of self-contained woman I had always seen her as. But was there something else she was saying to me? I thought of Carrie Helm and wondered if she would have been happy if Jared had died.
“Anna, did Tobias ever hurt you?” I blurted out.
Anna stood up suddenly, her hands fluttering. She was framed in the morning sun coming in the kitchen window behind her, and it made her look like she had a halo all around her. “No. Whatever makes you say that? How could you think that?”
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” I said. She wasn’t like Carrie Helm, I told myself. And Tobias had nothing in common with Jared Helm.
“When I said I felt relief he was gone, it wasn’t because of that. He would never have hit me. He wasn’t like that.” Anna sat back down, and I could hear her harsh breathing. I had upset her and I shouldn’t have done that, not today of all days.
“I know you loved him deeply,” I said neutrally.
“I loved him so much,” she echoed. “I wondered sometimes if he could ever really love me as much as I loved him. And at the end, when he talked about his first wife so often, I thought that was why. I was always second-best in his eyes. The one he lived with because she was dead.” She sounded ashamed.
We are never good enough for those we love, are we? Not in our own eyes. “Did he ever say that to you, Anna?”
“No! Of course he wouldn’t. He wasn’t cruel.” Her eyes darted toward mine, and then shifted away again.
“Tell me what you know about his first wife,” I said, before I realized that I was asking that more for my own sake than for hers. “Did he talk about her often?” But surely this wouldn’t hurt her. It might even help.
At last, her breathing seemed to slow down to normal. “She was very beautiful. Fragile, I think.” She gestured to the half-size china cupboard with its gold-filigreed teacups and plates in pastel colors. “I am much taller than she was.” She looked down at her feet. I realized they were rather large, a size ten or eleven, and her hands matched. Why had I not noticed that before? “Liam says she was like an old-fashioned movie star, so careful about her makeup, her hair, her clothes. I think she spent hours in the morning getting ready for the day, from the stories he tells about sitting and watching her at the bathroom mirror.” Anna wore no more makeup than I did, which was a rarity in Utah these days. Women of every age here wore makeup, even to the gym.
She shrugged. “I didn’t do that, and the boys seemed to like it. I was more rough and tumble with them. But it made me wonder—did Tobias marry me for their sake? Because he thought I would be good for them, and not because he loved me?” She tapped her feet on the floor.
“Even if he did marry you for their sake at first, he certainly loved you later,” I assured her.
“Was it only gratitude, though? You know, I fell in love with the boys the first time I saw them. It was the strangest thing. Before that moment, I had never thought of myself as the motherly sort. At that age, I’d given up having children of my own and I thought I’d reconciled myself to that. But as soon as I saw them, I felt a lurch inside my chest, and I thought I could never let them go.”
Kelly Helm, I thought. Oh, yes. That was how I felt, as well.
Her eyes seemed distant, but not in the unfocused way that had worried me before. “I touched Tomas’s little hands, and I felt as if his blood was my blood. And Liam, he tried to kick me at first when I held him up, but I lost hold of him and he slid right underneath me and started to cry. His father was going to shout at him, but I picked him up—his big eight-year-old body—and gave him a kiss on the cheek.” She held her hands to her chest as if little Liam was still nestled there. “He looked like a startled bird, unsure where his nest was. I wondered if he was going to be one of those boys who pretended he didn’t want to be cuddled or touched at all. But no, he snuggled right into me, his tears absorbed into my skin. I wanted them. No, it was more than that. I was part of them, and I didn’t know why it was true.”
“As if God had meant you to be there for them,” I said, and I knew I was not talking only about her.
“Yes,” said Anna fiercely.
“What was her name?” I asked, just wanting one more bit of information for myself. “Do you know?”
Anna looked at me, a little startled. “Oh. It was Helena. I thought you knew that.”
I shook my head. “No one ever mentioned it. It was like she was an ideal. Not a real person.” That part was true.
Anna nodded. “It felt like that to me sometimes, too. An impossible ideal. On a pedestal, and she died before she fell off of it.” She stood up and held up a finger. “Just a moment.”
She hurried up the stairs, and when she came back down, she was holding a wedding photo, of Tobias as a very young man and a strikingly beautiful woman at his side, very petite, with long, dark curls and fine features. She was wearing a knee-length wedding dress that hugged her curves and made her look even more like a doll next to tall Tobias. He was holding her in his arms and carrying her as if she weighed nothing.
“That is how they looked on their wedding day.” Anna seemed wistful; it wasn’t quite full-blown jealousy, but there was a trace of it.
“Did he keep this photograph of her up in your bedroom?” I asked. I was standing now, and I thought again of Jared Helm, and his reminders to Carrie that she wasn’t the woman he wanted her to be. Did this photograph serve the same purpose for Anna?
But she shook her head. “It was in his drawer. He didn’t want me to know it was there, I think. He never showed it to me. And he always put away his own clothes. But I found it one day, and I put it back right where it had been.”
So, it wasn’t the same. “Did he have other photos of her?” I asked.
Anna shook her head again. “There was a family album, but he must have gone through it. I never saw another photo of Helena in the house.”
That seemed odd. “What did he do with them?”
“I don’t know. I only know they were gone. The boys asked him about the photos once, but he said he didn’t remember what had happened to them. I think he did it for them, because it was easier for them not to be reminded of what they had lost.”
Or easier for him? I handed the photograph back.
“Did you ever have the feeling that Tobias felt guilty about his wife’s death?” I asked. The question felt wrong as I asked it, but I couldn’t suppress my curiosity.
But if Anna felt the same, she didn’t mention it. “Guilty? No, not really. He always spoke of her death as a terrible tragedy, but he didn’t blame himself, if that’s what you think. At least, I never heard him say anything that would make me think so until this last week.”
“And what did he say then?”
“It was only a passing comment. He said that he wished she had been able to see all of this, everything he had. It was a proud moment for him. He felt his life was full.”
I let go of my questions about Helena Torstensen with a soft sigh. I had already pushed too far there. I checked my watch. It was getting close to the time we needed to leave. “Where is Tobias to be buried, then?” I asked.
“At the Draper City Cemetery. He bought a double plot some years ago. I think it’s a little morbid, knowing there’s a place waiting for me.”
“I don’t think it’s morbid at all,” I said. I had my own plot waiting for me in the same cemetery, right next to Kurt’s. The baby had hardly taken up any space at all, and they had put her in Kurt’s plot. Why his and not mine? I never knew the answer to that, and at the time, I hadn’t been in any state to ask.
“Tobias said it was comforting, knowing where he would end up, and that I wouldn’t have to worry about the money. He had it all paid for in advance. My funeral, too, when that happens. He used to imagine us having a double funeral together, but obviously, that’s not the way it turned out.”
A double funeral? “But you’ve years left to live,” I said. She was only just past sixty. She could remarry, have a whole new life. Just because Tobias’s heart had given out didn’t mean Anna had to think of herself as nearly dead.
“I suppose so,” said Anna. “I don’t know what to do with the house, or the garden. I can’t bear the thought of turning it all back to lawn, but I can’t take care of it the way he did, either.”
Anna was staring at the door, but she wasn’t making a move to leave. Should I mention the time? No. She knew. Let her do this at her own pace. This was a difficult moment for her, becoming a widow.
I tried for something less sad. “He loved his tools and his garden, didn’t he?”
Anna let out a small laugh. “He did at that. He kept a brand new hammer by his bedside, do you know that? I used to wonder if he got up in the middle of the night and worked on projects inside the house, but the hammer was never used. It looked as new the day he died as when we were first married.”
“He had a hammer by the bed when you were married?” I said, feeling the hairs rise on the back of my scalp.
“The boys kept stuffed animals by their beds when they were younger. And Tobias had that hammer,” said Anna. “I used to think he needed it for the same comfort that they did.”
“Where is it now?”
“Still there, probably,” said Anna.
“You should put it back in the shed,” I said, the words sounding like they had been spoken by someone else. “With the other tools.”
“I will, eventually.”
I walked to the door, opened it and stepped outside. “Are you ready to go?” I asked, hearing the brusqueness in my voice.
She nodded and we drove toward the mortuary while I tried to convince myself that no man would have kept a hammer by his bed in order to make sure that he could kill his wife when he decided it was time for them to die together.