Indigo Hill: A Novel Read online

  OTHER BOOKS BY LIZ ROSENBERG

  Novels

  The Laws of Gravity

  The Moonlight Palace

  Home Repair

  Beauty and Attention

  Biography

  House of Dreams: The Life of L. M. Montgomery

  Poetry

  Children of Paradise

  Demon Love

  The Lily Poems

  I Just Hope It’s Lethal (anthology, coeditor Deena November)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Liz Rosenberg

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503904064

  ISBN-10: 1503904067

  Cover design by PEPE nymi

  This book is dedicated to John Swenson and all his family and Worcester friends who generously shared their memory of events long past. In particular, I need to thank the indomitable Ray Slater and Phil Jakubosky for speaking with me at length and answering my many questions. Special thanks to the wonderful Mae Swenson, Dave Abare, Judi, Cate, Bev, Dave, and Jeff, the godfather.

  And sweet John, as you so often say, Thank you, thank you.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  AFTERWORD

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  Alma Johansson was the most upbeat dying person at UMass Memorial, in the run-down Bell Hill area of Worcester. She wasn’t happy to receive the grim diagnosis, of course, but she accepted the news calmly, with something like satisfaction, as her older daughter Louisa later remarked. After the doctor finished his long, careful explanations, when he’d offered his soft-spoken consolation and apologies—it was a shame they hadn’t caught this sooner, though pancreatic cancer was a tough one—Alma nodded and smiled.

  “I’m so glad I wasn’t being a baby,” she said. “I knew something was wrong.”

  Michelle and Louisa, her two grown daughters, were holding hands while this medical consultation took place, in a room barely large enough for all four chairs. They had not held hands since very early childhood, and seldom even then, as little girls. They were not so much holding hands now, as gripping each other’s palms, trying to find something solid to hang on to. As soon as the doctor had finished speaking, Louisa let go. Tears sprang to Michelle’s eyes—partly because of the terrible news, and partly from the pain of having her big sister pull away.

  Alma insisted on going out for breakfast afterward with her two daughters, so they drove to the Parkway Diner, close to the hospital, though she’d had no appetite for weeks. A few regulars sat parked behind coffee cups at the counter, reeking of beer at ten in the morning. Worcester grew alcoholics, Louisa’s husband Art once said, the way abandoned fields grew weeds. Mrs. Johansson and her daughters took one of the diner’s high-backed leather booths toward the back.

  Louisa had been relieved to get in her car alone and drive away from the hospital. Well, you never really just drove, in downtown Worcester. You crawled along, one in a series of cars trying to navigate potholes and death traps.

  The hospital sat on a hill. That was one building she was always glad to leave behind in her rearview mirror. She had always hated it. The hospital had changed considerably over the past almost thirty years—which had been the last time she’d spent any extended time at Memorial. But all the same, the place gave her a deep-down sick and queasy feeling. She couldn’t ever forget approaching those glass doors as a teenager, week after week, each time with the same feeling of dread, heading over to the Burn Unit only to be told again to go away and come back in a few days. Come back in a week, young lady. Come back in a month. She had begged rides, and had even (though her parents didn’t know about this part) hitchhiked from North Worcester just to stand in the same burn care lobby, arguing with the same soft-spoken nurses. Your friend isn’t ready quite yet, dear. He needs his rest. Next time, call us first. And now here she was back at Memorial again, this time for her own mother.

  It was a glum meal, in spite of Alma Johansson’s relentless good cheer. Her elder daughter Louisa poked angrily at her Patriot Breakfast, featured on the cover of the glossy menu, while Michelle, the golden-haired baby of the family, refused anything more substantial than a cup of hot tea. She sipped it slowly, tears gliding down her face one by one, a few tears slipping into her cup.

  “Remember the children’s story about tear-water tea?” Alma asked, leaning forward on her elbows. “From that nice illustrated book, Owl at Home. I wonder where I put that book . . . You girls just loved that story. Do you remember?”

  Michelle nodded, jabbing at her wet cheeks with a crumpled-up paper napkin.

  “You loved all stories,” Alma went on. “Oh, I wish I knew where I put that thing.”

  “Mom,” Louisa interrupted, poking viciously at her eggs with her fork. “Why won’t you at least try the chemo?”

  “Oh, no,” said Alma. “Not at my age. No indeed. I don’t see the point.”

  “But you’re only seventy-five! That’s not old anymore.”

  “Your father died at seventy,” Alma pointed out. Her eyes were bright blue and childlike.

  “We all know that, Mom,” Louisa said. She struggled to keep the irritation out of her voice, to restrain herself and stay calm. This was no time to get into an argument with her mother. Today, of all days, for Pete’s sake. “But Dad died in a car crash. That was totally different.”

  “The doctor didn’t seem to think chemo would do me much good.” There was that same quality in her mother’s voice again. Not exactly satisfaction, but something close, Louisa thought. As if she’d finally gotten a package in the mail for which she’d been waiting patiently a very long time.

  Her mom laid her fork slantwise across the top of her mostly untouched plate. She had barely nibbled at her buttered rye toast. She had lost weight. Her appetite had been off for weeks, she’d been complaining of stomachaches, and Alma Johansson had never been a complainer. Louisa noticed with a pang that her mother’s face looked sallow and slack, her high cheekbones yellowish instead of pink. How long had all this been going on? It was her job, as the eldest daughter, the responsible, sane one, to notice these things.

  “Girls,” their mother said briskly. “I’m sorry. I guess I just have a bad attitude. Your father, the great love of my life is gone, and I’m ready to join him. I wouldn’t have chosen this, but then, we don’t always get to choose.”

  “Oh, Mom,” said Michelle, sliding her hand forward across the table to grasp her mother’s hand.

  Alma squeezed back, and the two of them sat there hand in hand across the table but Alma studied her elder daughter, Louisa, who stubbornly refused to meet her eyes, glaring instead at run-down Shrewsbury Street out the
far window of the diner. Seemed like half the stores were empty these days. Soaped-up windows, sporting FOR RENT and FOR SALE signs.

  Her mother’s voice when she spoke was gentle. “I know you think I should try everything I can, Louisa. But I’m not a good candidate for surgery, and I hate the idea of chemo. Forgive me, girls. I want to die with my own hair.” She touched her hair with her free hand, the waves still more blonde than white. She’d always had soft, pretty hair. She’d always been an attractive woman. “I just want to play out the hand I’ve been dealt.”

  “I think you have a wonderful attitude!” Michelle blurted out.

  Louisa shot her sister a look. Another country heard from. “How’s that again, now?”

  “To be so accepting,” said Michelle in a shaky voice. “I don’t think it shows a bad attitude. I think Mom is—” And the tears came sliding down again. “—being very brave,” Michelle whispered.

  Louisa rolled her eyes.

  “Well,” her mother said. “I’m not afraid of death. That’s the truth. I know I’ll see your father again.” She opened her eyes wider for an instant, as if to demonstrate. Her throat seemed to grow longer, and thinner. “I believe we’ll find all our loved ones who have gone on long before us. My father and mother. My brother Oskar.” She opened her eyes again, and looked almost merry. “So many people I’m looking forward to seeing!” Michelle couldn’t help laughing along with her mother. Their high voices rang out. One or two nearby diners glanced over and smiled at the pair. Just another happy family reunion.

  Two chuckle-headed idiots, Louisa thought. She’d been all alone in this family, the lone kangaroo, ever since her sensible father had been killed in that car crash, seven years earlier. Maybe even longer. Louisa had always been the odd one out. Her father wouldn’t have argued with either of them about trying the chemo. He wouldn’t have insisted on doing the sane, responsible thing. He’d just have said, whatever your mother wants, tossing up his hands.

  “I know you’re disappointed,” Alma murmured apologetically.

  “Eh, well.” Louisa laid down her fork with a clatter. She glared at it as if the silverware itself were to blame. Sometimes an evil genie took over Louisa’s middle-aged body. She found herself acting like a teenager again. Having fits, sulking. Louisa threw her napkin onto her plate, done with the meal. She was too fat, anyway. Soft and out of shape. She and her husband Art, both. “It won’t be the first time I’ve been disappointed. And I don’t suppose it will be the last, either.”

  She felt, rather than saw, the look of agonized appeal that her younger sister shot her way. It was Michelle’s Please Be Nice look. Louisa ignored it, but ignoring it brought her smack up against her mother’s clear china-blue gaze, taking her in.

  “No,” her mother said gently. “I’m sure it won’t be, the last.”

  The end came sooner for Mrs. Johansson than anyone could have predicted. The outlook had been bleak from the start. Pancreatic cancer was a hard one to beat, and Alma’s disease was advanced by the time they found it. Dr. Welch talked to them about a matter of months, time enough to get all of Mrs. Johansson’s affairs in order, but in fact she lasted less than two weeks. Thirteen days from diagnosis to her death. Those few days passed by in a blur. It was a mercy, friends said; Alma had gone without pain or fear. Michelle was relieved her mother hadn’t suffered, but even so . . . it was a shock. Her mother was not the kind of person to rush into or out of anything.

  The sisters hadn’t had time for a proper goodbye. There were no formal gatherings. No farewell ceremonies. Theirs was a small family to begin with. Over time it had shrunk down still further. Louisa was childless, and Michelle had just the one daughter, Sierra, who was herself unwell, with type 1 juvenile diabetes. There wasn’t much extended family left, not in Worcester, not anywhere. The mother and her daughters hadn’t said the kinds of useful, profound things people say at such times—or what Michelle imagined people said, because she had no firsthand experience of long goodbyes. In retrospect, it became even more important, the fact that they’d never had those final heart-to-heart mother-and-daughter talks.

  They did come close to such a conversation, one morning shortly after the cancer diagnosis. The three women had gathered at Alma’s Formica kitchen table on Ararat Street in North Worcester, the house Alma had lived in for more than forty years. It was where the two sisters had grown up, played together under the kitchen table, argued as teenagers, and drifted away. Did everything momentous have to happen around a kitchen table? It seemed so to Michelle. At this same kitchen table, they had all heard about the friends who had died in that terrible accident up at Indigo Hill. Someone had tossed gasoline onto an open flame and the whole place had gone up like tinder. They had tried without success to console Louisa here, sitting rigid in her chair as if she’d been turned to stone. At this same spot at the table, looking out over these same place mats, Michelle had proudly announced her engagement to Joe Hiatt, more than a decade ago, showing off her diamond engagement ring. Her mom had sat in the same kitchen chair, at the same place, facing the window that opened onto Indigo Hill, year after year, doing the Telegram crossword puzzle, reading her mail, checking their homework, clipping coupons, passing the applesauce. She looked the same now as she always had, just slightly thinner, with her apron removed. She was neatly dressed in slacks and a polyester blouse printed over with tiny blue flowers.

  Mrs. Johansson always loved it when one or the other of her girls, as she still called them, stopped by for morning coffee. Alma Johansson, capable and adept in a hundred ways, had never yet managed to decode the intricate mysteries of a coffee maker. If one of “the girls” failed to come by and brew real coffee for her, she’d make the crystallized instant stuff out of a jar, with a spoonful of powdered dairy creamer. In truth, she never seemed to taste the difference. Still, the sisters took turns brewing her real coffee, several days a week. It was one of the few things Alma would allow them to do for her. All her life, Alma had been doing things for others. This time both sisters came together.

  “Now isn’t this nice,” Alma said, looking affectionately at her daughters. “All three of us here together again.” She sighed happily, smoothing her hand over the lace tablecloth.

  “What are you going to do today, Mom?” asked Michelle. She worried that with so little to keep her occupied, her mother might start fretting and brooding about what lay ahead.

  “Oh, well.” Her mother waved both hands slowly and vaguely over the table, as if casting a spell. “You know . . . the usual.”

  She would do what she’d been doing for the last seven years, ever since her husband had passed away. She’d putter around the house, finish as much as she could of the Worcester Telegram crossword puzzle; polish off whatever coffee was left in the pot, carry a few cookies upstairs, and watch old war movies and romances till two in the morning. What did Michelle expect her mother to do, Louisa wondered irritably. Take up astrophysics? Start tap-dancing?

  “I wish I had a little more time,” her mother said matter-of-factly. “I wanted to be there at Sierra’s wedding.”

  If she ever has a wedding, Michelle thought, an idea she brushed aside like a spider’s web. Of course her daughter would get married. She was a lovely, lovable girl. Sierra’s numbers were good these days. They were making strides with type 1 diabetes, improving the monitors and insulin pumps. And maybe even her mother would surprise them all . . .

  “And you,” her mother had said, turning to Louisa. “I still think you ought to have children.”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake,” said Louisa crabbily. “I’m forty-three years old. I’m almost menopausal.”

  “There’s always adoption,” her mother said, dropping her hands into her lap. “Lots of nice families adopt. Some of the very nicest. You’d see, Louisa, it would change your life. You were always such a happy baby, yourself.”

  Michelle laughed, out of sheer surprise, and Louisa snorted. Michelle was the happy child. She was the easygoing, gol
den-haired smiley one. Louisa had been born cranky. Everybody knew that.

  “Yes indeed,” their mother insisted. “I never saw a calmer or happier baby in all my life. And your toothless little smile was just radiant. Strangers used to remark on your good temper. They’d stop the carriage to make comments. You never fussed, not till you were a year old. Why do you think we had Michelle so soon after?”

  “I don’t know, Mom,” said Louisa. “I figured she was an antidote.”

  “Nonsense!” said Alma briskly. She brushed a few invisible crumbs from her tablecloth with her fingertips. “You were easy compared to most. A wonderful, happy baby. I’d like to see you acting that way again. Why, you used to giggle aloud in your sleep!”

  “Sure, Mom,” said Louisa, frowning.

  “You did!”

  “Whatever you say, Mom.”

  Alma Johansson sighed. She moved the salt and pepper shakers around, then swapped them back. Her sigh carried affection, resignation, regret, maybe just plain weariness. The blue veins bulged on the back of her hands and she looked down at them with apparent interest.

  “There are so many things I’d love to tell you girls, but, well—I just don’t know . . .” their mother said slowly. “It’s so hard to know where to begin . . .” She tapped her fingers on a place mat in front of her. Her fingers danced softly, as if to a song buried inside her head.

  “What kinds of things?” Michelle asked, intrigued, when out of nowhere her sister brusquely interrupted.

  “Never mind all that,” said Louisa.

  Her mother looked surprised and hurt. Then something else came down behind her large blue eyes, like the shutter on a camera. Something habitual, Michelle realized later. An instinctive gesture of retreat. In the blink of an eye, the instant happened, then it was over. Her mom smiled at her two grown daughters.

  “Go on upstairs and get some rest,” ordered Louisa. “We’ll talk another time. You look all tuckered out.”

  “Do I?” asked their mother mildly. She reached for another cookie. Mrs. Johansson had a terrible sweet tooth, even now that her appetite for real food was almost entirely gone. Every day in her house had always been Lördagsgodis—traditionally candy Saturday, for the Swedes. She’d kept bags of sweets secreted around the house. She even drove around with plastic bags of Tootsie Pops in the back of the car; rolls of Smarties in the glove compartment. Now she set two double-stuffed Oreos on a cracked flowered plate with a gold rim. The cracks didn’t matter, she had once explained to her daughters, if you were only eating cookies.