After their mother had gone upstairs, the familiar sound of her footsteps creaking overhead, the two sisters sat another minute or two, looking at each other in silence. Words never got you anywhere with Louisa, Michelle knew. There was no point complaining, or saying that Louisa had just spoiled a precious moment.
“What?” demanded Louisa.
“Nothing,” said Michelle, and she began to wash the dishes. You couldn’t fight with Louisa because you couldn’t ever win. Whatever their mother had wanted to confide in them would simply have to wait for another day.
Except there was no other day. The day for confidences never arrived. The very next morning Mrs. Johansson woke disoriented and achy, saying things that made no sense, and hospice increased her pain medication. She was groggy and out of it all afternoon, talking about foreign people and places they’d never before heard her mention. That night Alma fell asleep before dark, and she never again woke up fully.
The rate at which Alma Johansson’s condition deteriorated shocked even the doctors, and the hospice staff that came and went into the house on Ararat with no apparent schedule. Time slipped loose. The clock suddenly ran on twenty-four hours, with no clear distinction between day and night. There was no final goodbye for any of them, just a fast, steady slipping away. The hospice people moved the patient downstairs, into one of those steel-barred hospital beds.
Mrs. Johansson slept on and on, out of reach behind the bars. She began to look like a shell when the animal has left it behind. Her fair hair shone against the white pillow. She barely stirred, and the nurses had to move her periodically to make sure she didn’t get bedsores. Alma appeared to be sinking deeper under the weight of the thin cotton blankets. Michelle half expected to come by one morning and find her mother’s body lodged into the bottom of the mattress.
Alma Johansson returned to consciousness only once and briefly, on the very last day of her life. Michelle was the one sitting downstairs by her side, alone, as close to her mother as she could get with the metal bars of the hospital bed in the way between them. She sat quietly knitting a scarf for her teenaged daughter Sierra. From time to time she glanced at her mother, who continued her long uneasy rest. It was late in the year, midway into April—scarf and hat season was almost over in Worcester, though you never knew for sure, you might have snow flurries in May. Or you could have an unseasonable New England heat wave that would carry you straight on into summer, with no spring at all. But Michelle had found a nice, soft hand-dyed knitting yarn, in a pretty mix of purples and blues, and the sixteen-year-old Sierra exclaimed over it in a way she hardly ever got excited about anything these days—anything that wasn’t found on her phone or her computer.
Mrs. Johansson didn’t seem to be asleep exactly. Neither was she quite awake. Michelle thought of someone floating on her back in a swimming pool. She could almost picture blue water.
“Mom?” Michelle ventured. “Mom, are you there?” It seemed suddenly lonely there in the house.
Michelle laid down her knitting needles. She felt foolish, but she pushed on anyway. No one had prepared them for any of this. Not the doctor, not even the nice hospice staff. If she was talking to herself, so be it. “I love you, Mom,” Michelle said—something she’d hardly ever said aloud when her mother was alert and awake. The Johanssons, like most Worcester Swedes, were not a touchy-feely family. They didn’t talk about their affections. They didn’t make speeches.
“I love you very much,” Michelle said, “and I always will. I just want you to know that.”
Alma Johansson turned her head then and opened her eyes wide. She looked surprised. Before Michelle could read her mother’s expression, her eyes closed again, the eyelids coming down over the bright-blue gaze. Her mother was breathing raggedly, almost panting; she appeared to be in some kind of physical distress. The hospice people would probably not be arriving for another hour. Michelle didn’t know what she was supposed to do next. She didn’t know how to ease her mother’s discomfort. No one had given her any instructions. She was the helpless one, the baby of the family. Michelle scooched her chair forward six inches, lowered the metal bars on the hospital bed, leaned in, and wrapped her arms tightly around her mother. She laid her head down into the smell of the clean white linens as if hiding there, and folded her arms tightly around her mother like wings. Her mother’s breathing made a loose rattling sound. Michelle was afraid to look up—afraid to watch her mother struggling with real trouble or pain. So she simply hung on; as long as her mother had difficulty breathing, as long as her muscles were tense, Michelle held on as tight as she could. Finally, after what seemed like a very long time, she felt her mother relax, the harsh breathing stopped, and at last Michelle let go.
Alma Johansson slept the deep sleep of the dreamless. Michelle waited a few more minutes, but nothing else changed or moved. Every object in the room seemed fixed in its place—the cluster of old family photographs, furred around the edges with dust; a high pile of out-of-date newspapers; the many small china figurines; her mother’s collection of toothpick holders, some of them made of china, others of wood or plastic. Michelle wasn’t absolutely sure her mother was still breathing. The sunlight shone through her mother’s thin white curtains. After what seemed like a very long while, she heard the key turn in the front door lock, and the nice woman from hospice hung up her wool spring coat in the crowded hall closet, with a familiar scraping sound of metal on metal, the hanger squeaking across the pole. Only then was it clear that Alma was already gone.
CHAPTER TWO
When the lawyer’s office over in West Boylston called the family to arrange for the reading of the will a few days after the burial, they suggested that each of the daughters bring someone along to be there with them, a close friend or loved one.
“What for?” asked Louisa, but the secretary didn’t offer a satisfactory explanation. Michelle invited her husband, Joe, to accompany her, but Louisa said of her own husband, “Art’s not any good at this kind of thing. Besides, they’re just covering their own behinds. Maybe they’re scared we’ll make a scene in their office. Boo-hoo. Some people are just so ridiculously emotional.”
This dig was aimed at her, Michelle knew. And it was true—she had been carrying on tearfully, weeping and leaking like a sieve ever since the day her mother died. Michelle hadn’t cried this much since she was a little girl. Maybe not even then. She’d been feeling as off balance as if someone had shoved her from behind. She was not recognizably herself anymore, not without her mom.
She worried about what her daughter must think—Sierra, a type 1 diabetic, had enough on her plate. The way Michelle carried on, she feared she wasn’t setting a good example. She should act more grown-up. But somehow she couldn’t manage to pull herself together. It felt as if the very center of her being had fallen away. Michelle hadn’t grieved this way even when her father was killed—partly because of the shock of the accident, and because they’d all been so busy holding her mother together. No one could then afford the luxury of grief. Now she went to sleep sniffling damply into Joe’s warm shoulder and woke with tears already sliding from her eyelids. And the one person in the world that she needed most, the only one who could have comforted and understood her loss, was her own mother, nowhere to be found.
But Sierra, who at age sixteen had plunged into her hard-hearted cranky years, acted unusually gentle and sympathetic at this time. If she thought her mother was acting weird—a favorite word—she kept it to herself. She didn’t grouse about her math and social studies homework. She didn’t complain. She did her chores and monitored her own insulin pump without being hounded. Michelle saved the message on her cell phone voice mail where Sierra had called in tears to say she’d heard that Grandma had died. Michelle hardly ever heard that voice anymore—the openly emotional, loving one, the voice of a child. But Sierra had to be protected, too. She’d recently gone into a worrisome dark goth phase—wearing torn black leggings, heavy black eye makeup, listening to heavy-metal music lat
e into the night, her pretty golden-brown hair chopped short, dyed black, and slicked back stiff as a helmet.
“I won’t blubber,” Michelle assured Louisa. “And I won’t make a scene, either. I promise.” But the lawyer’s request, to bring someone else along to the law office, struck her as odd and worrisome. It was the kind of thing they told you to do at a hospital when the person you were coming to see had already died.
“Isn’t that unusual?” she asked her husband Joe, who was a lawyer himself. But Joe handled environmental issues almost exclusively. He didn’t deal with family law.
“I’m not sure,” said Joe. “All I know is, I’m happy to come to the office with you.” Joe was lucky. Both his father and his stepmother were alive and well. They still led busy lives. His father drove his own car, a blue-green Cadillac, though he was into his eighties. Joe belonged to a big, noisy, tight-knit Jewish family right there on the West Side, all of them within a few blocks of each other. They walked to the synagogue together. His father played twenty-seven, sometimes thirty-six holes at Tatnuck Country Club, most days in season. Any day when it wasn’t snowing or the greens weren’t frozen solid. Joe’s mother played mah-jongg and belonged to a book group at the JCC on Salisbury Street. Michelle realized with a jolt that she herself was now an orphan.
The April weather had turned nasty. Michelle woke to the sound of New England sleet striking the window, as if someone were throwing pebbles against the glass. It made her feel even more sick at heart to think of her mother alone out there under the bleak elements. Michelle wiped the tears away, put on some makeup to cover the evidence of her crying, and dressed in her winter clothes. Something sober, but not too funereal. She didn’t want to get Louisa started.
Michelle had called in for a half-day’s personal leave to attend the lawyer’s meeting; she was a part-time reading specialist in the Worcester Central elementary schools. She’d gone from full-time to part-time when Sierra was born, and somehow never made it all the way back into the classroom. She wasn’t even sure she’d like to teach full-time anymore. School just wasn’t much fun these days. It seemed to her that all the exhausted teachers did anymore was to fill out more forms and jump through administrative hoops and hand out standardized tests, even to the very littlest children. Even to kindergarteners, who were just getting adjusted to being away from home and learning to tie their shoes and use the bathroom by themselves. It used to be that the youngest elementary school children blithely colored pictures and played games and sang songs. Now it was grind, grind, grind, and Lord help the child who wasn’t reading whole books alone by first grade. And God help the teacher who hadn’t performed miracles to get them reading. Never mind if the child came to school hungry or sick or in torn, filthy clothes—or didn’t come to school at all. Somehow these days everything was always made out to be the teacher’s fault.
“Do I look all right?” Joe asked her, standing in the bedroom doorway. He wasn’t sporting his usual “go-to-meeting clothes,” as he called his everyday lawyer suits. Joe always went to work in elegant suits, with Brooks Brothers no-iron blue shirts, and solid or striped silk ties.
Today he was wearing baggy blue sweatpants and a long-sleeved polo shirt, a pair of sneakers and a baseball cap. At least the cap wasn’t on backward, Michelle thought. He looked much as he had when Michelle met him at college, a few more lines on his face, a touch of gray at the temples. He seemed so happy in that goofy outfit she couldn’t bring herself to tell him that no, of course he should not wear sweatpants. No man should ever wear sweatpants, she believed—any more than they should wear skimpy shorts, or a fanny pack. But there was that shy Joe smile, in a V shape.
“You look beautiful,” she declared, kissing him on the mouth.
“Bundle up. I’ll warm up the car,” he told her. After twenty years, Joe still lay on Michelle’s side of the bed to warm her sheets while she brushed her teeth. Her father had once called Joe Hiatt “the goodest man” he’d ever known. Joe volunteered at his West Side synagogue, coached a girls’ basketball team, gave large sums to charity, and performed a hundred other secret good deeds. He was the one who cheerfully showed up at 5:00 a.m. when an extra parent was needed, the sticky man running the cotton candy booth at the school dances. (After Sierra was diagnosed with diabetes, he had campaigned for healthy snacks, and now manned the deserted fresh fruits and vegetables station instead.) He was more than a lover, more than a friend, but the best of these as well. Michelle was lucky to have him, luckier than anyone could ever know—and then she felt guilty for calling herself lucky when her one and only mother lay dead under the blowing snow.
“Oh, give yourself a break,” she said aloud.
It was not old Mr. Enright, their parents’ lawyer of many years, who stepped out into the spacious West Boylston law office lobby to greet them, but his young son, Eddie. The office, right off of Prospect Street, now had one of those elegant, carved gold-rimmed hand-painted signs you saw all over Cape Cod. The lobby, once a musty, cramped dark and narrow space, was now open and sunlit, with clerestory windows and a crystal chandelier sparkling overhead.
It turned out that Mr. Enright Senior had retired two years earlier. Now it was his son’s practice, apparently. Little Eddie Enright! Louisa shook her head over him, disapprovingly, as if he’d shown up in short pants, while the young lawyer murmured his condolences, shaking each of their hands in turn, pausing a moment to hold their hands in both of his own. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” he told each sister, in a baritone voice that surprised them. The last time they’d known him he was a tiny kid, with a high, fluting voice and a weakness for jelly beans.
Michelle had babysat now and again for Eddie Enright back in high school. She remembered him clearly as a chubby little boy. Back then he’d been addicted to a cartoon program called Little Einsteins, and to reruns of the Power Rangers. She could picture him sitting cross-legged on the floor of his den, nibbling handfuls of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish and watching TV. Now she supposed he was in his early thirties. It made her feel ancient, at forty-one. He wore a plain thick gold band on his left hand—so young Eddie Enright was married—maybe with cartoon-watching children of his own.
He must not have been in practice long, however, because he looked hopelessly awkward and ill at ease with his new clients. His prematurely bald head was sweating so that it shone under the chandelier. His face had a sickly greenish-white cast.
“Relax!” Michelle was tempted to tell him. “Cheer up!” As Sierra would have said, Take a chill pill. Later Michelle was grateful she hadn’t said anything at all.
He led them down a long hallway. They silently pulled out their chairs in the stuffy conference room, under bright lights, and sat down around a smallish table. It looked like they were all assembled there to play cards, maybe a game of Pitch.
Their young lawyer sighed. “This is very difficult,” Eddie Enright began after a longish silence, staring down at his large folded hands.
“Well, the worst is over,” said Louisa brusquely. “Our mother didn’t suffer. I have clients coming at noon.” You had to know Louisa to know she wasn’t completely heartless. Far from it. She’d always been, if anything, too soft hearted for her own good. She was a mental-health counselor over at We Are U.S. of A. Her clients adored her.
“All right, then,” Eddie said, flustered. “Let’s get down to it. Most wills are relatively straightforward. Others are a bit more . . . complex.” He flipped open a manila folder and sighed at it. The greenish-white color in his face was back. Michelle was afraid he might be sick. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face and neck. “Whew. Let’s see, now.”
“We’re grown-ups. We’re not going to fall apart,” said Louisa. “Are we, Michelle?”
“No,” Michelle said meekly.
“So let’s get this show on the road,” said Louisa, drumming her fingers on the table.
“Your mother’s will falls somewhere in the middle,” said Eddie Enright methodically. Ha
d he always talked this slowly? “She has left you two ladies all of the monies and properties, her IRA account, and most of her annuities . . .”
“Most?” interrupted Louisa.
Eddie continued to stare down at the paperwork, picking up speed as he went along. “She’s also left you the house on Ararat Street, of course, with the proceeds of the sale, should you so choose, to be evenly divided between sisters. She seems to have left a few pieces of jewelry to Sierra—your daughter, I think?” he added, turning to Michelle.
Michelle nodded, her eyes filling with tears despite the dirty look Louisa was shooting her across the table. “Other than that, everything goes to you and your sister equally—with two small exceptions . . . There is one annuity otherwise designated. And the material contents of her home.” Eddie stopped, mopped the back of his neck, and shot Michelle an agonized look she recalled from when she would declare it was his bedtime.
He didn’t attempt to meet Louisa’s glare at all.
“The annuity and contents of the house have been left to a Michael T. Birch who when last known lived in Cornwall, England. He is your mother’s eldest child. In fact—her son.”
This news was received in stunned silence for a few seconds.
Then Louisa burst out. “That’s crazy! Our mother didn’t have a son.”
“I’m so very sorry,” said little Eddie Enright. “I know this must come as quite a shock.”
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