Indigo Hill: A Novel

by Liz Rosenberg

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  This new person, Michelle, suddenly plunged into his life, was an eager and early riser. Back at home, in his own time zone, Tom rose early too. In fact he seldom slept past 5:00 a.m., the deep-blue moment when the shimmering margins of damp earth and sky began to blur, as if sending advance notification of a sun about to rise. Insects stirred, leaf stems quivered. The whole shivering world fairly vibrated with life. That was his favorite hour of the day, for thinking and for tracking.

  But here in the States Tom slept like the dead and woke unrefreshed. He had moved into one of those faceless, soulless American motels on the outskirts of Worcester at his first opportunity. There was nowhere to walk, and apparently nothing worth walking to. His mattress was thick and soft as a loaf of bread. Michelle and Joe had insisted he was no trouble at all, that he was a welcome guest—and even the girl Sierra protested against his going—but Tom could no sooner sleep in a house full of strangers than hang in a tree suspended inside a spider’s web. The motel was faceless, comfortingly anonymous, almost miraculously without character. Unattended, he’d have slept like the dead, hour after hour.

  He hadn’t yet needed a motel wake-up call; Michelle provided that service. Tom was still on Cornish time. He missed the salt tang of the sea. His long habit had been to rise at four or four thirty, when the world fell still, unprovoked even by light; the blurred hour, he had learned, when people in hospitals were most likely to turn over in their hospital beds and die. Things happened at the border places. Back at home, Tom would rise from the bed, careful not to disturb Claudia, and silently would tidy up the kitchen, and plump the kettle for Claudia, who wouldn’t wake till after seven. He had never used those first solitary, silent hours for business, it would have seemed to him a sacrilegious waste of time.

  Tom treated the early morning, he imagined, the way his Protestant ancestors used to preserve a Sabbath. In his case, it had nothing to do with prayer or churches. The solemn hour before dawn was silence and being open to that emptiness. It was for Tom a time for close and uninterrupted observation, not an opportunity to be taken lightly. He crept out into the dew-drenched furze like someone sneaking out to a lover. Birds ruffled their feathers and revealed themselves on the branches of trees. Clouds scaled the blue-gray sky and formed fantastical shapes. Leaves visibly uncurled, or trembled in a rain-bearing wind. Worms crowned through their beds of dirt, writhed and spun about and headed through the roots of grass. If you held still for even one full minute you could detect signs of life in all directions. Of course, most people found it unbearable to hold still for more than a few seconds.

  If Tom had been a believer, this hour would have been his religion. In the brief moments before dawn broke, the inky-blue world and all its mysteries lay half-open, like a blooming rose, and on close inspection revealed some of its secrets. Some, but never all. The mystery kept it fresh. Research was his avocation, how he made his living, but this, the tracking out of doors, was his real work.

  Tom was a tracker by instruction and inclination, as was his father, and his paternal grandfather and quite likely his great-great-great grandfather before, going all the way back till all his ancestors swung out of the trees and began walking without leaning on their knuckles, looking around. He was related to them not by blood and birth but by a shared curiosity. The exact right family had adopted him. He knew that his biological father had passed before he was born, a fallen soldier in a forgotten war; his biological mother, a strange American, sent birthday and holiday cards and occasional strange gifts that meant nothing to him. Other people were indifferent to this world, blind to it, and he could not comprehend such people at all.

  His was not a profession, but a calling; trackers were people who closely followed the trails of living things. For some, like his da, that meant tracking animals. For others, it might mean tracing the path of the wind, or watching to see what had broken the twigs off a rowan bush. “Evidence of things unseen,” the Bible said. But for Tom, it was the evidence of things unattended that drew him on. The great trick, perhaps the only trick, was to pay attention as if the world around you actually mattered.

  His father had always been better at stalking than at tracking, the difference being a question of what appealed to you most. His da was a nutter about animals. He and Claudia would have gotten along like twins, but his da was long gone. A stalker was only after the living presence—usually an animal of one kind or another, moving about. A tracker was someone who stood at the center of a mystery and tried to ferret out where all of the radial lines converged. The wind, the grass, the sleet, the winding river all connect at the root. But his father had loved only the animals. All animals had fascinated him equally, large or small, domestic or wild, without preference to reptile, amphibian, or mammal. His da was as interested in a field rat as in a diving winnard, and small hovering insects intrigued him as much as a fin whale speeding off the shore of Land’s End. He wasn’t so good with people. Likely that’s why his father drank, night after night; not a sloppy falling-down drunk, but stiff with it, the glass rigid in his hand. Then when daylight came, he had seemed sober as a judge.

  Tom was not really focused enough for stalking animals; his mind tended to wander. His paternal grandfather, however, now he was the past master at both stalking and tracking, and he had taught Tom everything he knew, and everything worth knowing. The old man recognized and could recreate every nuance of every birdcall; he could twist ordinary thin dogbane growing in a field into a rope strong enough to tow a car; the old man read the palest stars by daylight; he came and went as freely as one of the sea birds. His senses had never missed the smell of lightning, or a bent blade of grass. His grandfather was the kind of tracker who could slip in and out of sight while you stood there gawping at him. And if the old man wanted to sneak up on you, just to prove that you weren’t paying the proper attention, well, you didn’t stand a chance against him.

  None of Tom’s family had been avid hunters; they went out into the wild for the sake of being out. Simple enough. You either loved it or you didn’t. It wasn’t something you could teach someone to care about—so he counted himself lucky to have been adopted into this particular bunch. It could easily have been otherwise. Tom supposed the hunger for this kind of knowledge was something you were born with. Claudia had enjoyed a long ramble, but she had no patience for tracing the claw prints of a stick insect or measuring the movement of a falling wind.

  They’d had no children together, not for lack of trying. Perhaps Claudia had been sick for longer than either of them realized. So—no heirs. The knowledge and the skills Tom had spent his life acquiring would die with him. These days you didn’t find many fellow trackers, anyway. Tracking was old school and slow. Not for the trendy. Everywhere you took a step now into the fresh air, you encountered a mob of noisy outdoorsmen, elaborately outfitted and weighed down with expensive toys. They were all robust and poshly dressed in overpriced flannels and intent on improving their massively good health—hikers and joggers and yoga experts and the like.

  To track cost you nothing but time and energy, though it was hugely demanding of both, and that made it less interesting to the upwardly mobile. You went out into the fields, you looked around. You paid attention, that was all. Tracking required silence and focus, two things in short supply even in Tom’s quiet, out-of-the-way pocket of Cornwall. And here he was now, half a world away, stranded alone in a sea of tar and concrete.

  Tom hadn’t done any tracking in America, he’d barely gone out for a decent walk, whilst back in Cornwall he regularly covered between ten and fifteen kilometers a day. His best thoughts always came to him on his feet, moving. But here in America he had no thoughts. He holed up in his motel room, waiting supine for the next thing to overtake him. Gasping for air, the proverbial fish out of water, waiting for it to come clear why he had flown across the ocean in the first place. There he lay, destroying the hours, rumped up like a winnard.

  I am in mourning for my life,
Claudia teased him, in a thick Russian accent. Probably quoting Chekhov or Turgenev. Oh, she had been a grand reader. Tom never saw a single person reading a book in America, not even a used paperback or a tattered magazine. People were too fixated on their gadgets, staring into screens. Now Tom was becoming like them.

  It was his third wasted morning in Worcester and they were finally getting down to business—or so Michelle promised him. The first day of Tom’s arrival something had come up about the girl Sierra’s health—she had diabetes, Tom quickly learned, of a particularly troubling type. They’d needed to drive her to the doctor’s office to adjust her glucose levels after noticing that she had moderate to high ketones. Michelle spoke in these technical terms, as if Tom were a fellow medic and together they could solve whatever ailed the girl. Only Tom didn’t know what really ailed Sierra. Something more than the diabetes, certainly. He understood the rudimentary facts of blood sugar; he even knew the basic difference between slow and fast carbs, but he didn’t know what made this girl dress like a pauper, why she crept around the posh house in black rags, looking like death itself. He recognized the symptoms of despondence, but could not lay his finger on its cause.

  His second day in the States, Michelle had been called in to work at her school. She invited Tom along—“I’ll introduce you to everyone!” she announced. “They’re all dying to meet you. Really and truly. Especially the kids!”

  Tom was certain he had nothing to offer a roomful of eager schoolchildren; Claudia had been the one who had a way with kids. Once a complete stranger, a little toddler with black eyes, had run straight into her arms at a public park. These days Tom could not even reliably crank out a smile, so he stayed back at the motel, and caught up on office work on his laptop, took care of a few more of the endless ghastly details that accompany a death. Perhaps the red tape was set out deliberately to distract the bereaved, he mused. Because Claudia had been sick so long, and because they’d never married, scofflaws that they were, distrustful of legal contracts, the paperwork left behind was an especially gnarled tangle. He wished now that they’d married. But it also gave him comfort—even if it was a false comfort, Tom was grateful—that even now, months after Claudia’s death, he might continue to serve her in some small way.

  He still hoped to get into the city of Boston sometime and poke around in some of the famous public gardens and parks. Perhaps he would visit a museum or two. He had barely a passing interest in collecting this family inheritance. He’d done nothing to earn it. Nor did he lack for anything. The mystery, really, was why he had come to the States at all, when he might have spent the airfare on a trip to the Canary Islands, as his few mates had suggested back home. He wasn’t one to dwell on family connections. He always knew his biological mother existed somewhere out in the world and he knew his father had departed before he’d even been born. None of that had ever interested him. So what had pulled him across the ocean now, fifty years later? Morbid curiosity? A search for missing threads of his DNA? But he’d never wondered about his birth parents, he knew what had happened to them; he took it as a sign that he’d landed where he had. The right couple had adopted him. He’d known that from the start. He was in the right place, doing what he was meant to do. Or so he had felt for a long time. As long as he’d had Claudia it seemed he had everything he could possibly need. Now that too was over.

  If he had hoped to forget Claudia’s absence here in America, to put her frail ghost to rest, he had failed miserably. Even the motel wallpaper reminded him how she had liked yellow daisies. The pouring rain—it came in onslaughts again the second day—brought to mind long, open-mouthed kisses while he held her thin, soapy body in the shower, before the illness took away her ability to stand.

  Tom pulled the cheap motel blanket up over his head, like a child hiding from the bogeyman. Now the sound of the pouring rain mixed with the sound and scent of his own breathing.

  You couldn’t trick grief any more than you could outwit death, he knew. He might lie here under the slick motel coverlet forever, but the facts remained. His old life of comfort and joy was done. He did not expect ever to be happy again; he had had enough happiness to last several lifetimes. His job now and from here forward was simply to put one foot in front of the other. He must not fail to remain grateful for what he’d once had. A Cornish poet put it aptly:

  They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

  Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

  At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

  We will remember them.

  Tom’s cell phone rang and at the far end chirped the relentlessly cheery voice of the woman who believed she was his sister. “I’m here in the lobby,” Michelle said. She sounded excited. Then again, she nearly always sounded excited. About everything. “Are you ready to see Mom’s house?”

  Mom’s house. His own mum was alive, of course, still living in her cozy cottage in Cornwall, chatting it up with her friends, and doing her best to keep Tom from what she called “his heavy brooding.” She hadn’t brooded when his da had died—but then, there was no escaping the fact that his father’s death had come as something of a relief to them all.

  The house on Ararat Street, the catch-pit of his inheritance, delivered a bit of a shock in the flesh. It was far smaller than he’d imagined. It was a tiny box of a thing. Perhaps he’d been foxed into thinking all American houses were palatial. There were television shows that featured the insides of these supersize mansions, front and back staircases, game rooms the size of airplane hangars, channels dedicated to their upkeep and repair. His mum was addicted to watching these shows.

  This was a modest cottage on a busy street that, had it been transplanted someplace quiet and out of the way, would have fit well in his corner of Falmouth—not the posh upscale part of it, either. His mum would have called it “a hobbit house.” But Tom instinctively approved of any human being who could keep her ecological footprint this small. It was the first hint he’d had of some affinity to the woman who had passed away.

  Michelle fit her key into the lock and fumbled at its turning, pushing the door open, pausing to furtively wipe her eyes on her sleeve—Tom looked away, not to intrude on her emotion. The air smelled to him musty and acrid, like something locked up too long inside a box, but Michelle breathed in deeply. The smile she beamed on him was genuine.

  “Welcome,” she said, gesturing around—he wasn’t sure at what. To him the house smelled of recent sickness. It was uncomfortably crowded with objects and that made the small space feel even more claustrophobic. The heavy window curtains were drawn tight; indoors, it was more like dusk than day.

  “Lovely,” he said, “innit.”

  Michelle came a few steps farther inside and touched a china figurine, then the fringed beading of a table lamp. She switched on the light rather than opening the curtains. “Hard to imagine five of us crammed in here, but we loved it. Louisa slept in the attic.”

  “Were there five?” said Tom, doing the counting in his head. Was there yet another sibling still to meet? His heart sank at the thought.

  “My Swedish grandfather lived with us,” she said. “When we were small. I could barely understand a word he said. —You have a very interesting accent, yourself.”

  “Do I, yeah?” said Tom. He’d never thought about it.

  “You don’t sound like the British actors on TV,” she said. “I suppose most of them must live in London.”

  “I think most live in Hollywood by now,” he said drily.

  She poked one shoe toe into the carpet, making patterns. “Does anyone ever call you Michael?” she asked. By Michelle’s gesture, and the fact that she didn’t look up at him, he understood that the question might be more important that it seemed. “I just wondered.”

  As she spoke she removed her coat and gestured for his jacket. She hung them both on short wooden pegs. His eyes began to adjust to the gloom. Everything looked neat enough, and yet there were crumbs on the car
pet, and half-filled water glasses in the living room. Piles of newspapers. It felt as if someone were hiding there, still.

  Objects were arranged tightly in clusters of five and seven and eight. Most people arranged things in threes. The recent track of a wheeled bed had left its grooves in the pale carpet. A magnifying glass lay atop of a stack of dusty magazines. “My mum uses one of those,” he said without thinking.

  “Your—oh, of course,” Michelle said. “Your mother is still alive?”

  “Yes,” he said. “And to answer your question, no one calls me Michael—but some folks claim that Saint Michael is the patron saint of Cornwall.”

  “Really?” She rewarded him with a watery smile. “Is that right? Saint Michael?”

  “However,” Tom admitted, “Saint Piran gets all the local publicity. His first disciples were a badger, a fox, and a bear. Still, Saint Michael’s the more exciting saint, innit?”

  “Is he?” Michelle said. She began tidying up, carrying things away into another room, presumably into a kitchen as tiny as this room. Tom just stood there, not wanting to step any farther. He fought to get his bearings. Something about the house kept him uneasy. It was dark as a shaft with the drapes and blinds drawn.

  “Saint Michael led the fight against Satan and all,” he called after her. “He was an archangel. Big-time stuff.”

  “Yes I guess he was, wasn’t he?” Michelle came back into the room carrying an armful of folded dish towels. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m not very religious. And my husband is Jewish.”

  “Oh, I don’t believe in God,” said Tom. “If I did, I’d have to say he was a nasty bugger.”

  Michelle laughed, a short bark of surprise. Her eyes lit up when she laughed. “Well, don’t let Joe hear you say it. He’ll argue religion with you all day long. And Sierra—well, she’s at that age where she questions everything. And I do mean, everything!”