Indigo Hill: A Novel

by Liz Rosenberg

  “His name is Tom,” Michelle corrected her.

  “Who cares!”

  “Tom is our half brother,” said Michelle. “Our mother’s child. We share the same DNA. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “Yes,” said Louisa, pulling the vase toward her and admiring the cut flowers in spite of herself. There were fragrant star lilies hidden in among the long-stem roses, and sweet-smelling freesia. “It means Mom was lying to us all these years. What else did she leave out? Was she a bank robber, too? Maybe she was a gang member.”

  “Oh Louisa,” said Michelle. “Everyone makes mistakes when they’re young. Didn’t you? Ever?”

  Louisa ignored this. She was thinking about what Flick had said: Everybody has secrets. Fair enough. But not all secrets hurt people. Some secrets spared people’s feelings. That was a totally different thing.

  Michelle tried again. Maybe a more positive approach would work. “Aren’t you even a little glad that we have a brother somewhere out there in the world? Someone we never even knew about? It’s like a little piece of Mom is still alive out there. Isn’t that a good thing?”

  “No . . . Not to me,” said Louisa, turning the vase around slowly. “I don’t need a brother. But you never felt like we were enough.”

  “What do you mean?” said Michelle.

  “You spend half your holidays with Joe’s family. You’re always talking about how great they are. How warm they are.” Louisa kept tracing the ridges on the cut-glass vase. The angles caught every color of the light, in tiny rainbows. The vase looked expensive, too, but maybe it belonged to Michelle.

  “Well, they are,” said Michelle. “That doesn’t mean you’re not.”

  “Ha,” said Louisa gloomily. “We’ll see. Now that Mom’s gone. We’ll see how much time you spend with our family.”

  “You’re the one who never needed the family,” said Michelle. “You’ve always had your stupid Bridge gang. There must be thirty of you from the old neighborhood, still getting together all the time. You’re the one who still hangs out with your friends from kindergarten!”

  A silence fell between them.

  “So what exactly did you discuss with this—this person?” asked Louisa. She refused to call some stranger, a foreigner in fact, her brother. She had to draw the line somewhere.

  “Logistics, mostly.”

  “Such as?”

  “When he’s planning to come see the contents of the house, what he’s going to do while he’s here, things like that,” explained Michelle.

  Louisa kept turning the vase slowly around. It seemed infinite. One side revealed spikes of bright-blue delphiniums. Her favorites. “And . . . ?” she asked.

  “Well. He’d only just heard the news. He apologized for not coming to the funeral.”

  “Oh,” said Louisa. “A little late.”

  “I think he’s flying in to Boston, though. At some point soon.” Michelle tried to make her voice chipper, like she was conveying some piece of unexpected good news.

  Louisa didn’t go for it. “He’d better come really soon. We need to put Mom’s house on the market. This is the selling season, spring. We’re not just going to wait around for him forever.”

  Michelle kept tracing her figure eights on the table, not looking up. “I explained all that.”

  “So I guess you’re not going to help protect our legal interests after all,” said Louisa, stiffly. She reached over, took back the piece of paper that Art had worked on so hard, folded it into quarters, and shoved it into the depths of her pocketbook. She’d have a tough time explaining all of this to Art.

  “Tom said we could take anything we like from the house, Louie. We shouldn’t feel limited to three items, either. He was actually quite—” She wanted to say kind, but that wasn’t quite the right word, either. Kind implied someone warm and friendly. “Pleasant,” she finished.

  “Hmp,” said Louisa, as if being pleasant was a deep and fatal flaw.

  “Really,” said Michelle. “I think you’ll like him. If you give him a chance.”

  “I bet,” said Louisa.

  “I do think so. Really,” Michelle repeated hopelessly.

  Louisa folded her arms. All this time she’d been asking for a little support from her only living relative. And Michelle hadn’t even offered her a cup of coffee. Not that she needed or wanted the coffee. But still, her sister might have offered. Or put out some cheese and crackers, like she would have done for one of her regular friends. “So now he’s your best friend.”

  “I . . . No.” Michelle wanted to say, Louisa you’re my best friend, but it so obviously wasn’t true. Her husband Joe was her best friend. After that came everyone else. Even Sierra came after Joe. But if she thought about pure friendship, between grown women, her older sister Louisa would still have landed pretty far down on the list. “I was thinking his coming here might help us,” Michelle said instead.

  “Yeah, right,” said Louisa. She gave the vase another quarter turn. Hollyhocks, this time. Purple and pink. Could there be such a thing as too many flowers? This bouquet felt like somebody showing off, trying to prove a point. Big deal. So he spent a bundle on some expensive flowers. They’d all end up dead in the trash anyway.

  Michelle spoke softly but clearly. “Did you want to have to clean out Mom’s house yourself? It’s going to be a lot of hard work. Messy work. And sad. Now he’ll be responsible for getting rid of anything we don’t want.”

  “True,” said Louisa. The idea of this man having to pay for the movers cheered her up a little. And she was beginning to picture this large vase of flowers on her bedside table. No, in the living room where you could see it as soon as you walked in. No—the kitchen, where she spent the most time. It would be an enormous splash of color, a relief from all the beige and gray. But that was the trouble with cut flowers. They died quickly. They never lasted. That’s why Art never bought them, he’d once explained. It was like just throwing good money away.

  “Let me help Tom clean out the house,” said Michelle. “Please, Lou. You’ve done the lion’s share of the work for Mom this last year or two. You did the grocery shopping, and kept track of the bills. You drove her all over town. You’re the one who took her to that awful doctor’s appointment when she . . .” Michelle’s voice trailed off. “When she . . . found out. The bad news.” Michelle couldn’t help it. Her voice got all choked up.

  “Okay! Don’t cry,” said Louisa. It sounded more like an order than comforting, though she reached out and patted the hardwood table. “You had Sierra to look after. I have nobody.” Three smart taps. “Stop sniffling. Quit it. You can take care of the house if you want. It’s fine!”

  “Thank you, Louisa,” said Michelle. She felt so relieved she was almost giddy. She didn’t even know why. Maybe everything would turn out all right after all. She grabbed a tissue from the box on the table and blew her nose. Now she’d have an excuse to go in and out of the old house on Ararat, at least for another few months. It seemed like a reprieve. Michelle had always loved the way the old house felt. Even the way it smelled. She could have gone away somewhere to college, but she couldn’t bear to leave home, not even when she was eighteen. The bedrooms were tiny and filled to the brim, little more than walk-in closets. You could hardly turn around inside her mother’s house. But she’d grown up there, looking at those close walls, those white ceilings, dreaming her childhood dreams. Sometimes she felt lost inside this large house on Lenox Street.

  “Call Kim about the listing,” Louisa ordered. Kim was married to Paco, one of the Gang of Six—another survivor of the fire. Paco had dragged Flick out of the burning shack on Indigo Hill. His wife Kim was a real estate agent in Worcester, and a successful one. “She knows what she’s doing. She’ll sell it fast.”

  Michelle hesitated. This was a bit delicate. “Are you sure you don’t want to keep Mom’s place for yourself?” she asked.

  “What for?” said Louisa, surprised.

  Michelle just shrugged. Sh
e’d always hated that little box of a ranch that Louisa and Art lived in. It felt like a shoebox, an empty imitation of a real house. Of course she couldn’t say any of that aloud. She didn’t want to offend Louisa.

  Louisa narrowed her eyes at her sister. “I have a house,” said Louisa.

  “But all your friends still live in the old neighborhood.”

  “So?” said Louisa, staring at her. “What a weird idea.”

  Michelle shrugged. She couldn’t explain why it felt like a good plan. Maybe she was just being selfish, wanting to keep the house in the family.

  For just a minute, Louisa allowed herself to picture it. Moving back home to Ararat Street. The small bay window in front letting in all the southern light. The familiar backyard, sloping steeply uphill, the sky turning purplish-blue in summer, with the First Presbyterian Church spire in the distance. Everyone she knew living nearby. The two towering old chestnut trees in the backyard, which had somehow survived every blight and storm. The three straggly blueberry bushes by the back door putting out a handful of fruit. But Art would hate it there. He’d grown up in a dilapidated three-decker on the North Side, and couldn’t wait to get out of the old neighborhood.

  “No.—But thanks,” Louisa added grudgingly.

  The two sisters just stayed sitting for a minute or so, each lost in her own thoughts. They were so quiet they could hear the sound of the big chrome refrigerator humming.

  “So what do you think he was like?” Michelle asked at last. “Do you ever think about that?”

  Louisa scowled. “Tom? I have no idea. You’re the one who talked to him, not me.”

  “No,” said Michelle slowly. This was definitely dangerous territory and she wanted to be careful. “I didn’t mean Tom . . . I meant—our brother’s father.”

  “Who?” said Louisa blankly, then she flinched. “Oh,” she said. “Him.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  That was just like her sister Michelle, thought Louisa, to make you brood about something you couldn’t do a thing to fix. A fat lot of good it did. Her brother’s father, that was putting it politely. The guy who’d knocked her mother up. Apparently he hadn’t even stayed around for the birth. Now she couldn’t get it out of her head, the injustice of it all. Some jerk out there was probably still alive in the world. Some Englishman. She figured whoever he was, he’d been her mother’s first. At least she sure hoped he was the first. There were only so many surprises she could stand.

  Alma had always made it sound like their father, Eric Johansson, was the absolutely utterly only man in her life, if not in fact the only man in the known universe. So who was this other guy, anyway? Was he still around? Alive and well, and never thinking twice about the American girl he’d once knocked up. As usual, the man walked away scot-free. It just wasn’t fair. Louisa didn’t want to spend a minute thinking about him, and now here she was, grinding her teeth over it. And there was nothing she could do to change it, or make it better. Trust Michelle to introduce a subject like that.

  It was Saturday, but the Gang of Six (eight of them showed up that morning, in fact) had already met for breakfast. They’d chewed over the news of the will. Mostly Paco and Flick had made stupid jokes, but it still felt good to laugh. At least they could talk about it. The rest of the weekend yawned ahead of Louisa now, empty as a barn. It was too cold still to go outside and garden in the yard. Her hands would freeze in the cold earth. Art was holed up in his study as usual, with the door closed. The room wasn’t much bigger than an oversize closet, but he spent most of his time in there alone with his computer and portable TV set. Art Wandowski was a man of many independent hobbies. He built model airplanes. He collected and restored antique toy trains. He had a ham radio too, and he spent hours on the thing talking to strangers, all of them men, while she sat in the kitchen, eating her meals alone.

  Not that Louisa was complaining. Some married couples were joined at the hip like Siamese twins, and never even came up for air—she had never, ever wanted a marriage like that. Look at Michelle and Joe, practically cemented to one another. They jogged together every morning before work, wearing the same stupid-looking matching jogging outfits, belonged to the same book group and cooking club, and of course they both took Sierra to her endless rounds of doctor’s appointments. They even still had a “date night” once a week, and they’d been married for twenty years for Pete’s sake! What in the name of lemons did they dig up to talk about?

  Though, come to think of it, Louisa still met up with her old North Side friends twice a week. Sometimes more. They had occasional feasts at the Manor, and barbecues and picnics down by the reservoir. They met up at concerts downtown. She’d known those same friends for almost forty years and they never ran out of things to say. Still. It wasn’t the same as spending every waking and sleeping minute gazing into the same damn face. Louisa at least had some time and space to herself. And now here she was wasting it, squandering her precious free time, brooding about her mother’s distant past.

  Honestly, she’d never given her mother all that much thought. What was there to think about? Louisa loved both her parents. She’d had an okay childhood, all things considered. They weren’t well off, but they certainly never went hungry. They never lacked anything important. Her parents were always there if you needed them—Louisa just couldn’t remember ever needing them. She had always been independent. Her mom and dad had gone a little easier on Michelle, of course, given her fewer rules and later curfews, but that’s what usually happened with second children, Louisa figured. Plus Michelle had been a bit of a Goody Two-Shoes, the obedient type. Good at school, good at sports, good at pretty much everything, and classically pretty to boot, with that head of golden curls. Strangers loved Michelle, they were always giving her things: free hair ribbons, an extra slice of cake. Once a store clerk gave little Michelle a free watch while Louisa looked on, disbelieving. Nice, polite Michelle, playing happily with her collection of Barbie dolls. Humming to herself. She didn’t require much watching.

  The way that families often divide into teams or pairs, she, Louisa, had relied on her sensible dad, while Michelle ran to her mother with every scrap of news, every little heartache. Louisa knew her mother had loved her just the same as she loved Michelle. It wasn’t like her mom and dad played favorites. They just naturally fell into pairs, especially when they went on family vacations to Marblehead or Cape Cod. She and her dad would walk along the margin of the sea, skimming stones, gazing out east toward what her father always insisted was France, while Michelle and Alma sat on matching towels holding down the shore like bright twin paperweights.

  Neither parent was terribly demonstrative with their affections. That just came with being a Worcester Swede. They’d give you a hug if they hadn’t seen you for a while, but Louisa had colleagues at work who couldn’t get off the phone with a parent or leave their own house without saying I love you, I love you too. Louisa knew she was loved all the time she was growing up. But now that she thought about it, there wasn’t a lot more that she did know. She had heard the story of how her parents had met, of course; that was an old family favorite—at the Sloane’s annual company picnic one Fourth of July. They’d both gone after the same exact slice of watermelon at the same exact time.

  “He got the watermelon, but I got the best man in Worcester,” her mother used to say proudly. It became a family saying, whenever you got the best of a deal. He got the watermelon.

  Louisa didn’t know much about the years before her parents had met and married. She’d never been all that curious about them, either. Her parents were not especially interesting. Both her mom and her dad had lived dull, uneventful lives—or at least that was what Louisa had always grown up believing. Alma Johansson (née Larsson) was the youngest of five children, the last straggler of the family. All of her older siblings had predeceased her. Three had moved back to Sweden. Alma’s mother—her name had been Ingebolt—hung herself from a closet door when Alma was still in grammar school, leaving the father to
raise five children alone. They’d gone through some tough times financially. Sometimes food had even been scarce. The mother’s suicide was a taboo subject, and no one in the family ever talked about it. “She was sick,” they said, never spelling out if they meant physically or mentally. Her grandfather didn’t even keep a photo of his late wife in sight. He had never remarried.

  The little house on Ararat Street originally belonged to him, back when they called the whole area Swedish Hill. He’d moved in close to all his Swedish neighbors, first by himself, then with his youngest daughter, Alma, and her husband Eric. The old man later gave them the deed to the house, but he stayed on living there in a tiny upstairs bedroom till the day he died. Did they like living there, all squashed together? Louisa had no clue. They never discussed it. Louisa remembered her maternal grandfather only vaguely. She was still a kid when he passed away. He was a tough old bird, with a famous sense of humor. But since he told all his jokes in Swedish, Louisa never knew if he was really funny or not. Her grandfather threw back a shot of rye every day of his life at five o’clock, but she’d never seen him drunk. He’d practically existed on Swedish food: hardtack and Thuringer, or sometimes pickled herring. He ate little, as if food was an indulgence.

  Alma had always cooked your basic American fare—meatloaf, hamburgers, an occasional Sunday roast. She cooked the same four or five things in rotation, week after week. Boring. But the food was always filling. And she always made enough for leftovers. Their fridge was always full.

  As for Louisa’s father—he was quiet, neat, and precise. Louisa liked to think she took after him. Eric Johansson had excelled in mechanical drawing in high school, where he ran track, and won a few medals. He’d been a runner in the army—another experience he never spoke about. He had great handwriting, it looked like it had been printed by a machine. He had worked diligently, first for Sloane’s, then for the Worcester county waterworks.

  As far as what she knew about her mother—well, Alma had finished high school and then went off to live with family friends in Cornwall, England, in the fifties as a domestic helper—Alma’s one big chance to see the world. She’d been hideously homesick at first, but she hung on. If she was all that homesick, Louisa had always wondered, why didn’t she just come home? Now she knew. You didn’t come home pregnant, not in the 1950s. So she’d hung on and stayed away. Two years, Louisa thought. It was a long time, really, but it had always seemed like a blip on the screen of her mother’s life. Alma had spoken fondly about the British family she’d lived with, how they helped her get over “the rough patches.” Years later, she still went into ecstasies over English scones and clotted Cornish cream, about something called Stargazy pie, a pastry made with fish, which sounded disgusting to the rest of them.