Indigo Hill: A Novel

by Liz Rosenberg

  Sunday was the next day of the week, as sudden as that. She wished the Saturday-morning breakfast out with her gang at Lou Roc’s could last all day. The clock on the restaurant wall seemed to be moving too fast. Maybe this was how it felt if you were a doomed inmate on death row. Maybe it was how you felt when you were nine months pregnant. Louisa didn’t know—she’d never been either condemned or pregnant. She’d lived a pretty uneventful life, all things considered. Less interesting than her own mother. She looked around at the other customers, and the waitresses jogging from table to table. It was pretty sad that she felt more at home in a Worcester diner than she did in her own living room, but that’s the way it was. She looked and looked her fill at Flick Bergstrom, sitting across from her in the booth till even Jean-Marie said, “Jeez, Louise. Paint a picture, it’ll last longer.”

  And then Louisa opened her eyes on Sunday, waking up alone in her bed, and the day was cool, for June, and overcast, and gray light filled the bedroom. Channel 5’s meteorologist Harvey Leonard was predicting thunderstorms for later, and then hot weather moving in. She trusted Harvey Leonard.

  Art had woken and started his day before her, as usual, and she heard the roar of the lawn mower out back, and closed her eyes, lying there holding perfectly still in her bed, willing herself to fall back asleep. If she just kept them closed then maybe she could just lie there in suspended animation and she wouldn’t have to say or do anything to rattle anybody’s chain. She could keep her life the way it was.

  But then the sun shook off the clouds, pulling them back like it was determined to lift the sheets off her sticky body, and she threw them off and padded barefoot into the living room in her cotton summer nightie, where she sat on the beige sofa with her hands folded in her lap waiting for Art to come inside from mowing the lawn. It took him forever to finish. He mowed in concentric rectangles, going back over his own tracks, careful not to miss any spots.

  He came in frowning and squinting against the darkness of the interior of the house. He was sweaty and she ran some cool tap water into a glass and handed it to him.

  He said, “You’re still in your nightgown”—disapprovingly.

  She said, “Sit down, Art. We need to talk.”

  He gulped down the water, wiping his chin on the back of his arm. “Jeez,” he said. “Can it wait till I shower, at least? I just finished mowing.”

  And because she was a coward, and she could buy herself another fifteen minutes of her old life she said, “Sure, go right ahead,” and sat there in the living room with her bare feet tucked under her, listening to the familiar sound of the water humming in the pipes, and after a few more minutes, Art humming along to the splattering of the shower. Something from an old Broadway musical. He had a nice singing voice, always did. Art liked musicals. The rest of the friends in their crowd, hard-rock lovers, teased him about his musical taste and Art would say, “I don’t give a rat’s ass what any of you bozos think,” but he’d be checking with Paco to make sure his best friend wasn’t making fun of him too. And you had to hand it to Paco—he never was. Something from a Broadway show. Wicked? Louisa wasn’t sure. She had always hated musicals. People bursting into song to tell you how they felt—and then dancing around, too, as if singing weren’t bad enough.

  Finally the sound of the shower stopped, and the glass door banged open and closed, and after a while she heard the monotonous buzz of Art’s electric razor, and then, as if reluctantly, her husband came back into the living room, clean shaven, and sank down heavily onto the brown recliner across from her, propping his big beige sneakers on the footrest. There wasn’t a single item in the living room that wasn’t either beige or brown, she noticed. When Louisa was a kid she had loved bright colors, so Alma had always bought her school dresses the colors of popsicles—lime green and lemon yellow and cherry red. Louisa hadn’t worn anything bright like that in years. Art didn’t look at her. It seemed like he was avoiding her gaze. Then again, when had he ever really looked at her?

  “Art,” she said, in her gentlest voice. “We really need to talk.”

  He didn’t take the bait. “What,” said Art, checking out the watch on his wrist. A glow-in-the-dark Timex that she’d given him one Christmas. “It’s Sunday.” Like he needed a watch to tell him what day it was.

  “God’s day of rest,” said Louisa. Why did she always sound so pissed off, she wondered. She didn’t even really feel angry anymore. Just tired.

  “Can’t it wait till tomorrow?” Art was looking fidgety. He was setting his eyes everywhere but on her, his gaze darting around. Or had he always done that, and she had just pretended not to notice? “I’ve got a load of things to do around the house.”

  “We should talk about what’s going on here,” she said. She pulled her nightgown tight over her legs, to cover her knees. She knew Art had never been crazy about her legs. Piano legs, he called them, though not in a mean way. “Between us, I mean,” she added.

  “Nothing’s going on between us,” said Art.

  “Yeah,” said Louisa. “That’s what I’m talking about.” She let out what felt like the first full breath of her adult life. It always got easier, she realized, once you started. Even jumping out of a tall building probably wasn’t so bad once your feet had left the sill. There might even be a feeling of exhilaration when your face first hit the air. Even if you were heading straight down.

  “Lou. Don’t be so—”

  “Nothing’s been going on for a long time,” Louisa said. “A very long time.”

  “Not this again,” groaned Art. He moved around in the recliner as if he were going to run off, but he stayed put, feet on the footrest, eyes on his feet. Worn sneakers, edged green with the newly mown grass. They both looked at his wide, stained sneakers.

  “No, look. It’s all right,” Louisa said. “We aren’t going to fight anymore. But—you know.” She held her hands out, helplessly. To prove she wasn’t armed and dangerous. “I can’t do this anymore.” Then, to be clear she added, “It’s just over.”

  Art looked at her blankly. “What’s over?”

  “All this,” she said. She hunched up her knees under the nightgown, and nodded her head around the drab room, hoping that her look encompassed all of it—the newly mown tidy little backyard, the study with the closed door, the garage, the bedroom, all of it. She wasn’t even sure she was going to miss any of it. “You know.” When he continued staring dumbly at her she said, “You know.”

  “Oh, quit being so dramatic,” said Art. He reached down to yank on the recliner lever, to launch himself into an upright position. “It’s Sunday. My one day to get things done around the house. I don’t have time for this. I’ve got a million things to do before the week begins all over again.”

  “Oh, honey,” she said. She went over and knelt down by the chair, blocking his way out. Art wouldn’t look at her. His lips were tightly pursed. He was gazing over her head, as if his real aim in life was to rise up out of the chair and get to that wall. He had put on so much weight these past years that his old, familiar childhood face was half-buried in layers of fat. There were bags under his eyes. He didn’t sleep well; he hadn’t slept well in years. Later on Louisa might feel a lot of other things—rage, regret, hopelessness—but right then all she could feel was pity. He might just as well have been one of her troubled teenage boy clients, trying to get by on the right medication. It was almost never as simple as that.

  “Hey,” she said, just to make Art turn his head and look at her. He did. His mouth was pouting like a sulky baby’s.

  “The week’s not going to begin again,” she said.

  “Who’s gonna stop it?” His pale-gray eyes looked frightened.

  “I am, honey.” He still looked bewildered, so Louisa shifted her weight, bouncing on her toes to keep from getting stiff. Her body was getting older. They had already started to grow old together. “I’m leaving,” she said.

  His eyes grew wider, frightened. “Where are you going? What are you talking
about? When are you coming back?”

  “I’m not coming back. Art. —Honey. Come on, now.” She put her hand on his arm, marveling at the softness of his flesh under her touch. He’d never been a tough guy, but when had he gotten so soft? She had no clue. “You know how it is. You know.”

  “Quit saying that. I don’t know anything!”

  She sighed and went over to the little coffee table drawer where she’d been hiding his catalogues all morning. They were catalogues of men’s underwear. Maybe a dozen catalogues, all alike. Handsome young men, tiny bikinis.

  “How much underwear does one man need?” she asked.

  He looked furious. “You went through my drawers?” he said. “That’s outrageous. It’s an invasion of privacy!”

  “That’s not the point,” she said. “The point is, this is who you are.” She pointed at the catalogues.

  He glanced back and forth between her and the stack of catalogues. “I don’t look like any of those guys,” he said. “As you perfectly well know.”

  “Art,” she said. “Regular guys don’t keep men’s underwear catalogues hidden in their drawers. You know that and I know that.”

  “This is an outrage,” Art said. He struggled to sit up, but his own weight pulled him back down. Red-faced, he tried to push himself upright.

  Louisa laid a hand on his arm, to keep him from running away. She kept her voice gentle. “Art, honey. You know who you are, and I know who you are. But it’s no way to live. Jesus H. Christ. You’ve tried. God knows, we’ve both tried.”

  To her horror, Art’s face crumpled up like a piece of paper. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her husband cry. Must have been the night of the fire, that long ago. She couldn’t even remember if he’d cried way back then. She pictured him standing looking lost on a snowy country road, helplessly waving goodbye. She put her arms around Art, for the first time in a long time, the teddy-bear softness around his middle, the way he always smelled sweet, like doughnuts and deodorant and soap. It was a familiar, comforting smell, even while his tears soaked her neck.

  “I’m sorry,” he sobbed. They hadn’t held each other like this in ages. Her go-to guy. Art. They didn’t talk, they just held each other. She knew she might be holding him for the very last time. It made her hang on tighter, but in the end it also helped her let go.

  CHAPTER TEN

  There was never any doubt in Louisa’s mind where she would head next: she’d only ever really had one true home, and that was the tiny house on Ararat Street. Michelle was the one who had first suggested it, back when they first discussed the will. Maybe her younger sister had planted the seed of all of this back then. Louisa had her mother’s house to run to, an escape route, and if that Englishman Tom was staying in one corner of it, well, Louisa could tolerate him for a few days. She’d lived with worse for a lot longer. Tom didn’t bother her anymore. He was okay, really. Sometimes she almost forgot he was there. When he walked he didn’t seem to make a sound. When he did speak, he sounded the way she imagined a badger or an otter might if they tried to talk—some kind of woodland creature warbling. He was thin and small and maybe balding, or just one of those men who shaved their heads early, it was hard to tell. She didn’t mind him. He had a long narrow face and prominent temple bones and the only thing remotely Johansson-like about him were those piercing blue eyes, so like her mother’s and sister’s. Louisa had narrow hazel eyes, just like her dad.

  She’d never given a damn about any of the stuff sitting inside her mother’s house. What did she want with a bunch of old teacups and doorstoppers? She’d split everything fifty-fifty with Art, of course—assuming he did the same for her. But she’d still have to buy out her sister’s interest in the house on Ararat. The house wasn’t worth much; people didn’t want to live on a busy road without any decent sidewalks. Even so it would be a stretch, financially, but Louisa could just about pull it off as long as she got a bank loan approved.

  She was all set to drive over to Michelle’s house, to sit down and knock out all the grisly details, and she knew her sister would do her best to make it easy for her, she always did, but her car didn’t drive her over to her sister’s swanky house on the West Side of Worcester. Big surprise there. Instead she headed to the top of Ararat Street, where the road began to straighten, the view she knew best. There was the familiar black river, shimmering in the June sun. Sometimes, even now, she felt like she could see the plumes of smoke still rising up from Indigo Hill.

  As children she and Michelle had chased fireflies through the long valley leading up to the slope, glass Mason jars clutched in their hands. Holes punched in the lid by her careful father. How many years did it take for the past to recede fully into the past? How many weeks and months had to drag by before you looked back over your shoulder and your own history wasn’t chasing you, breathing fire right on your tail? It seemed to her like she’d started running twenty-five years ago, and she hadn’t stopped yet. Some people claimed that every single minute of your life was still going on forever in some parallel universe somewhere else, and Louisa could believe it. She could practically feel it happening sometimes. They said this was what caused the feeling people called déjà vu. And if you really stored every single living memory deep inside your brain cells, the way the scientists had proven, then who was to say the universe didn’t do the same?

  Somewhere in her college notebooks from one of her long-forgotten college classes she’d scribbled down a quote from some German philosopher: “What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more.’” In your loneliest loneliness. That phrase slayed her.

  Louisa wrapped her arms around herself. It had gotten hotter since that morning but she felt cold. She didn’t get out of her car. Seemed like almost everything important in her life had happened in or around a steering wheel. Art Wandowski had proposed to her in the front seat of his Ford Escort. She’d ridden to the hospital the night of the fire sitting in the front seat of some stranger’s car. Now she gazed up the long slope of Indigo Hill. Had there really once been fields at the bottom, thick with green fireflies? Seemed like she was always chasing something.

  It started to rain. As usual. It was always raining or cloudy in Wormtown. Every damn season of the year. That was real; there was nothing otherworldly or déjà vu about that. Just ask Harvey Leonard, the meteorologist. Especially on Sundays. Nothing to do, nowhere to go, and nobody to do it with even if there had been something going on. She was sick and tired of the emptiness. She put the car back in drive and pulled in at the curb by the old Indigo Hill schoolyard, which was deserted as usual. The elementary school had been closed for years. Not to mention she took her own life in her hands every time she tried to park on Ararat Street, with no off-street parking and the cars whizzing by.

  Someday, she thought, somebody was going to find a better place to put that monument to those five teenagers who died on Indigo Hill, twenty, almost twenty-five years ago. It was a beautiful monument. But right now the place was overgrown in a tangle of brush, and no one she knew ever went near the schoolyard park—and it had become even more deserted now that the last adult-ed classes had stopped.

  Maybe to a stranger the monument was only a slab of stone with some hieroglyphic writing on it. Those names meant something to her. Each and every name. They stabbed her in the heart every single time. But to any ordinary passerby the memorial might have looked like an abandoned place, a reference to an obscure tragic historical event that most people had forgotten by now, or if they remembered at all, it was just for a second, eyes widening: Oh yeah! I remember that fire on Indigo Hill. By now there had been other tragedies, other fires. That was how it went with every event in history, she supposed—every battle, every catastrophe, every victory.

  For Louisa and the Bridge gang, that one explosion had just about wiped them out. She wondered
if they’d all still be such inseparable friends if not for that winter fire. Outsiders just didn’t get it. They couldn’t. Grief and loss drew people tight together in a club nobody ever wanted to join.

  Louisa and her friends, the survivors, they still got together week after week, year after year, and while they jabbered about the past all the time—who did what to whom, who got the snot beat out of them in the Kinneywoods back in the day—they almost never talked about the big, central event in their lives, the one that nearly ate out the heart of them, the fire. Paco had saved Flick’s life by dragging him out of the shack, pounding out the flames eating their way up Flick’s leather jacket. Art Wandowski and Louisa were lucky and had left the party early. Other kids had come and gone that night. In the end, there were still ten left behind inside the crowded little shack . . . Five survived. Five died. It was a terrible thing. But if they had lost track of each other, too, it would have felt like they had abandoned their dead friends to the fire. Then they’d have lost everything. All that suffering would have been for nothing.

  The blaze hadn’t happened all the way down here by the monument. It had happened maybe half a mile away, up the long hill. If she closed her eyes and pictured it she could still see it—in fact, if someone had blindfolded Louisa in the middle of the night and spun her around five times and steered her off in the wrong direction, like someone playing pin the tail on the donkey, still she believed she could have made her way back sightless over the hills and gullies, through the brambles, up the tear-shaped drumlin by the water tower toward where her friends had built the rickety shack burning in the woods.

  It had happened around Christmastime, in the bitter cold. Only December, but they were all of them already sick to death of winter. School was out for two weeks. The kids were done celebrating and opening presents—those who got any—and there was nothing fun left to do. A few of the Bridge gang boys had approached the Jesuit priests and asked if they could maybe use the church rec center to get together and play ping-pong inside someplace warm, but the brothers didn’t want a bunch of delinquents hanging around the altar, so they shooed them off. Later, somebody remembered a priest saying, Go take a hike in the woods.