Alma had never talked much about her time abroad. Louisa knew her mother had taken the train up to the city and visited the London museums and famous cathedrals, walking everywhere because the roar of the Underground scared her. She talked less about her time along the south coast, except that the smell of the sea followed her everywhere.
There was one yellowing snapshot of Alma Larsson (her maiden name), standing on a hill in Cornwall, her long hair blowing across her wind-chapped cheeks. She was tall, and she wore heels. Even in the black-and-white photo you could tell that her hair was blonde, her coat made of some bright color. She looked brave and adventurous. Louisa could picture that young woman getting herself into trouble. She must have been scared to death—alone and far from home—with a belly growing steadily larger. But her mother had never talked about any of that. Not a word. Never even hinted at it. She seldom spoke about her past in any way. That was her generation, Louisa thought. Her parents’ wild years took place in the domesticated fifties. They kept themselves and their feelings in the background, and took good care of their kids. But her mother, Louisa realized, hadn’t taken good care of all her kids, exactly. She’d had to leave her only son behind.
It would be like her mom to keep track of that absent child somehow. When Alma Johansson’s mind caught hold of something, it didn’t let go. Like a dog with a bone, her father used to say. She could worry a small thing to death while letting the big ones slide. She used to fret over the flower arrangements at church, but show up in the pew wearing her own cardigan inside out. She’d fuss over the folding of napkins, leaving the kitchen floor unswept. She’d lose sight of the forest not just for the trees, but for the sake of a single leaf. Yet no one had a softer heart. She was stubborn and quiet and dedicated whenever she had a cause. She’d kept a small mountain of greeting cards on hand in her tiny house on Ararat Street and she was always sending get-well notes and sympathy cards to friends and neighbors and fellow churchgoers and relatives. Some of those cards must have gone overseas to this missing brother, Louisa now realized.
But the idea that there had actually ever been another man in her mom’s life—well, Louisa’s mind just shied away from all that. There had never, ever been another man in her mother’s life. It simply wasn’t possible. Alma Johansson was a devoted wife and mother. She did not flirt. She didn’t even seem to notice other men. There had always been her father, simply Eric, the adored husband, Eric “the great love of my life,” Alma called him, as if it were part of his name.
But now, with a twist in her stomach, Louisa considered a new possibility. Maybe her mother called Eric “the great love of her life” precisely because he wasn’t the only love of her life, maybe not even the true one—simply the “great” love—the one that had lasted. Louisa knew that her parents had cared for one another. They didn’t have to sit around holding hands all the time to prove how much. If one of them ever got sick, the other one fluttered around, trying to be helpful. Eric Johansson had been unexpectedly struck and killed in his new car just one week before their forty-fifth wedding anniversary, and Alma grieved for him deeply and truly for the rest of her life. Louisa sometimes thought her mother had never stood completely erect again after her husband died. Which still begged the question of the other man. Was he British? Older? Richer? More adventurous? Had he swept the young Alma off her feet?
That was her little sister Michelle all over, to poke and prod, and open a wound. She never could let well enough alone. She had always badgered Louisa with her endless kid-sister questions. Why can’t I hang out at the bridge with your friends? What are you thinking, Louey? How about now? . . . A penny for your thoughts. Then a nickel, then a dime, and finally, pocketing the quarter, the teenage Louisa would say, “I’m thinking what a pain you are.”
Anyone would have guessed that Michelle would be the one to go into counseling or social work, not Louisa—though no one ever would have said Louisa should be an elementary school reading teacher. For one thing, she wasn’t a great reader. Louisa had no patience for anybody or anything outside of her workday. She was the kind of driver who leaned on her horn if the car ahead hesitated more than a split second at a traffic light that turned green. Even at the suicide corner at Kelley Square in downtown Worcester, she just blasted her horn and plowed on through. She hated the lines at the Price Chopper; half the time she checked herself out so she wouldn’t get some dim-witted cashier slowing her down. Louisa knew all that about herself. Yet she had infinite patience with her clientele, special-needs teenagers and young adults before they aged out of the system. If anyone had called one of her kids dim witted, she’d have jumped all over them. Michelle used to tell her, “You’re the softie in the family, Lou. And I’m the only one who knows it.”
Louisa dealt with manic-depressives and ADD cases, kids in wheelchairs, runaways, spectrum teenagers with varying degrees of autism, teen pregnancies, mentally delayed clients, and a few schizophrenics—and more and more these days, kids with something called Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Fifteen years ago, Louisa would have said that was just a made-up name for bad behavior. But she saw those clients day after day, week after week—and these young people had a genuine medical condition. They couldn’t do what you asked them to do, not to save their own lives. They could barely open the door and sit down in their chairs without making a stink. They simply couldn’t go along and get along. They were like the worst of the baddest bad-ass Bridge, Sign, and Wall gang she’d grown up with, on steroids.
Her gang had once burned down a shack by accident. These new kids would have done it on purpose. Then they would have bragged about it, online. Filmed and posted it. The world was going crazy—and this new revelation about her own family was just further proof that it was spinning out wilder and faster. Somewhere out there on the planet was Alma Johansson’s firstborn child—another thought that stung.
Louisa had always been the eldest child, their firstborn daughter, the sole responsible one. That was her role in the family. Okay, it wasn’t much to brag about, but it was her one claim to fame. She’d saved her money, pinching pennies while Michelle squandered hers trying to find out what Louisa was thinking. She, Louisa, broke the barriers: smoked the first cigarettes, drank the first hard liquor, took responsibility on the rare occasions when their mother went away.
And actually—come to think of it, hadn’t Alma once returned to England alone? Back when the girls were in elementary school? Had that really happened, or had Louisa only dreamed it? Hadn’t Louisa planned out all the menus and cooked some of the meals for a few days, maybe even for a full week? Because she was the firstborn child, the mature, responsible one. But now she suddenly wasn’t sure about anything. Suddenly she was relegated to the role of middle child. The trouble spot. She didn’t like that one bit. Or, even creepier, the possibility that her mother had once been in love with some unknown, unnamed Englishman. Maybe he was something even weirder and more foreign than that. Maybe he had been Greek, or Romanian.
“He was just some guy who took advantage,” declared Art, when Louisa brought the matter up. “Nothing more to say.”
Louisa was sure he was right—Art was always right about these things. He was the one who brought things back down to earth. Still, his answer made her feel deflated somehow. What had she been hoping for, anyway? A great, thrilling love story? Not likely.
Well, at least she could talk it over again at the next Gang of Six breakfast. They’d be jawing about this one for months. Even if they didn’t have any concrete ideas on how to change things, the gang always made her feel better about everything in general. In fact, they seldom told each other what to do. They didn’t even make suggestions, most of the time. But nothing in life seemed quite real till they’d chewed it over together.
Sure enough, that next Saturday morning, Paco was already ensconced at the corner table at Lou Roc’s, looking around. As usual, the place was hopping. Somebody always had to get to Lou Roc’s early, to nail a table down. Sometimes Paco�
�s wife Kim came along too, but mostly not. Saturday was a big workday for real estate agents Louisa and Art were there at the diner—Art grudgingly, because he had a load of yard work to do around the house, he said—and Flick would be late, of course. Flick always showed up late, and out of breath as if he’d run there instead of driving his flatbed truck. Jean-Marie had just texted to say she was stuck in traffic. Twice a day, every day, Worcester became a parking lot on wheels. From seven to nine in the morning. Then again, from three to five thirty, without fail. Even on the weekends. Louisa texted her back.
“I can’t believe you girls rely on those things,” said Paco, nodding at the phone.
“I can’t believe you don’t have a cell phone yet,” said Art. “You’re living in the Stone Age.”
“I don’t need or want one,” said Paco. “Don’t want some electronic device always ringing in my pocket.”
“Welcome to the twenty-first century,” Art said, but he said it good-naturedly. Art and Paco had been best friends since the third grade. They still went on hunting and fishing trips every fall and spring. Now and again, a ball game in Boston.
That left Skunk, who was sure to show up sooner or later. He’d been a wicked pisser as a kid; he’d finally settled down and worked for the post office for the past eighteen years. Hard to picture him trudging door to door, with a sack of mail over his shoulder. He’d once been captain of the football team, hell on wheels. They almost all had nicknames, silly ones that stuck. Skunk was short for Sikunski. Paco had loved Mexican food as a kid. Jean-Marie was always just plain Jean-Marie. Louisa was Louey or Lou, or to Flick, she could be Louisa May, after the famous Alcott author for whom she had been named. Alma Johansson had been a great reader, and she’d loved Little Women. She tried to share that love of her favorite books with her girls—without much success.
“It could have been worse,” Louisa would say. “I could have been named Pippi Longstocking.”
Skunk finally arrived, with a season’s worth of Tornadoes tickets to be divvied evenly among the gang. And then Flick sauntered through the door. “Anybody order for me?” he asked, looking straight at Louisa.
“What am I, your wife?” she said, a little more sharply than she’d intended. Flick rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Art looked uncomfortable. But, as usual, Paco turned it into a joke.
“You wish,” Paco said. “You both wish.” Then he turned to Art with a grin. “You all wish!” That made them laugh.
CHAPTER SIX
Tom Birch stood outside the United Airlines terminal in Logan International Airport, frowning out at the pouring rain. The rain seemed tropical and barbaric, as everything so far in the United States struck him as barbaric: American voices always seemed to be either barking or honking; people wore strange bright sloppy colors and none of them tucked in their shirts. None of them knew how to stand in line like a decent person. And then there was the waste everywhere you looked. Paper cups and paper plates and serviettes. Plastic bags by the handful. Plastic forks, spoons, even plastic knives. The entire country was apparently disposable.
Tom was accustomed to wet weather of course. Even wild thunderstorms. England was a rainy country and his southern corner of it along the shore was particularly damp and storm inclined. But in Cornwall the wind blew in moist veils, the rain pattered lightly and continuously. It didn’t sluice down in buckets like this, obscuring his vision of the terminal, and the oversize cars and caravans racing heedlessly through puddles. He stepped back from the curb as yet another passing gas-guzzling car soaked him, but it didn’t matter, he had worn sandals innocently expecting a warm summer’s day (he had checked the Boston temperatures daily for a week) and his feet were already awash. He pulled his waterproof khaki-colored fishing hat from a front zip on his backpack and jammed it on his head—not that it would do much good against this onslaught. But it was his favorite hat and he felt marginally better wearing it.
Irritably he checked his flip phone for a third time—still no message from anyone here in the States. He was used to checking for texts from Claudia; nowadays he had to force himself not to look, not to expect them. This trip had all been an enormous mistake, obviously; a waste of time and resources and Tom Birch—he never went by his given name, Michael, though the name was printed on his passport—hated waste more than anything in the world. He hated to give away even a single minute. There were urgent problems to be solved, both small and large. Global warming, for instance. While he stood there faffing about, every single minute another hundred and fifty acres of rainforest fell under a bulldozer, an area larger in size than the Vatican City. Seas were steadily rising, parasites spreading. The future was assured, he knew, and it definitely didn’t look good. Tom tapped his damp watch, and adjusted his backpack so the straps weren’t digging in so hard against his shoulder blades.
Where were this strange American woman and her husband? She had sounded so enthusiastic over the phone, so insistent that Tom stay on with them at their house. He should have known better than to have trusted that kind of wild heraldic hospitality from a complete stranger.
Now he was stranded in Boston, Massachusetts, in this “barbaric yawp” of a country, in the midst of a tropical downpour. He could barely see two meters in front of his face. The rain showed no sign of easing. Then Tom remembered he had put his phone on airplane mode upon takeoff and had accidentally left it there.
Hastily he made the adjustments, and immediately five or six texts flashed across his screen, along with numerous missed calls and voice-mail messages, all from the same +01 American phone number. He flushed with annoyance. He had no time to listen to all the voice mails, but he hastily texted the woman, Michelle. Apologies. Standing outside Terminal B, United. My error. T.
As if she’d been standing staring at the phone, three dots began to jiggle up and down and she replied, So happy! On our way!!! Xox Michelle.
He had never seen so many exclamation points in one place, nor had he ever been the recipient of x’s and o’s. It gave him the strange feeling that his phone was no longer entirely his own. He retreated toward the wall of the terminal where, if he wouldn’t have time to dry off, at least he wasn’t likely to get any wetter. He traced the sound of planes overhead, but there were no white contrails, no vortices of airflow visible. You could barely make out the sky at all, so blocked was it by cloud cover and crisscrossing telephone wires and ugly airport buildings. The rain had a pulsing rhythm all its own. Five minutes passed. Then ten. More acres of rain forest fell. Another text arrived. Help! Where are you? We can’t find you!!! What are you looking at?
He felt like typing back, I’m looking at the rain, you idiot. Instead he gave the terminal number. A white limo, long as an omnibus and emitting fumes, had pulled up and parked next to the NO PARKING sign, ignoring the sign with typical American arrogance. The oversize Cadillac appeared to be parked for the duration. The windows were blacked out, but a vibrating bass played so loudly within it made Tom’s heartbeat twitch in syncopation.
Again the three dots on his phone jiggled up and down, up and down, like tossing waves. This went on for a minute or two, but instead of the long treatise he expected the woman wrote simply, Oh!! Be right there!!!!
Tom began to shiver. He doubted he’d ever been this wet standing outside an actual shower in a bathroom. He had checked no baggage in order to save on time and expenses, and because he believed in the virtues of traveling light. He wished now he’d insisted on staying at a hotel. Then at least he could count on a good hot bath, maybe a cup of tea, and a few hours of peaceful anonymous silence in his long day. He felt the woman coming toward him from behind a minute or two before she spoke.
“Tom? Is it you?” asked a tremulous voice, and he turned to face an attractive blonde woman, just his height. If he’d expected some physical family resemblance, he detected none. Perhaps, if anything, the bright, almost electric shade of her blue eyes.
“Why, yes,” he said, and hadn’t had time to poke out his hand for a ha
ndshake when she enveloped him in a full-on embrace, taking in his soaking clothes and all, and then, to make things worse, actually rocked him back and forth in her arms as if he were an infant.
He broke free as soon as he decently could, and stepped back. A tall lean man stood waiting behind the blonde. At least he didn’t attempt any full-body contact, just put out one long hand saying, “Sorry it took so long.”
“We tried to meet you at the gate,” the woman explained breathlessly. “But the way security is these days, ever since 9/11 . . .” She shook her head. “Well, at least we’re together now. At last! Here.” She thrust something into his hand. “These are for you!”
It was a bunch of daisies. Of course. Claudia’s favorites. But these had been dyed or dipped, he supposed, and they were a frenzy of fluorescent colors: electric blue, shocking pink, barely flowers at all. They almost hurt his eyes. “Thanks,” he said. “Too kind.”
“We’re just so happy that you’re finally here,” said the woman. “Oh, I can’t believe this is really happening. I’m Michelle, of course.” Mercifully she didn’t say anything about being his long-lost sister. “—And this is Joe. Our daughter Sierra is in the car, plugged into something or other. Teenagers!”
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