Indigo Hill: A Novel

by Liz Rosenberg

  It was exactly what Dr. Welch had said when he first broke the bad medical news to their mother. Stage IV pancreatic cancer. Louisa remembered it clearly, as if the memory had been engraved in her brain. Same exact words. The same mild, practiced tone of voice. I know this must come as quite a shock.

  “What are you talking about?” Louisa demanded. “There is no son. Our mother had two children. Both daughters.” She wagged a finger back and forth between herself and her sister Michelle. “Us. That’s it! We’re it.”

  “So terribly sorry,” said Eddie, shaking his head.

  “There must be some mistake.” Joe Hiatt spoke in his deep lawyerly everybody-let’s-calm-down voice. But his thick black eyebrows had shot so far up they’d disappeared beneath the brim of his baseball cap. Michelle might have laughed if it hadn’t all been so terrible.

  “There’s a good deal of legal documentation,” said Eddie. “A very thorough paper trail. Your mother was diligent. Birth certificate, notarized papers, the adoption papers for the family in Cornwall; they’re all here . . . Of course my father drew up the original will long ago. I even have a few photographs. Would you like to see a picture of your brother?” he asked no one in particular.

  “No!” shouted Louisa. “We don’t have a brother. Okay? This is our mother you’re talking about. Our dead mother!”

  “Calm down,” said Michelle in a faint voice. She could barely be heard. It felt as if the whole room were tilting. Things were out of whack. She, Michelle, was the emotional one, the baby. She was the one always being told to simmer down.

  “Why should I calm down! Don’t tell me to calm down!” yelled Louisa, waving her arms. “This is terrible! It’s incredible—and it’s horrible.”

  “Well, it’s a big surprise,” said Michelle soothingly, “but it’s not the end of the world.”

  Joe edged his chair a little closer to Eddie’s at the head of the table. He’d put on his reading glasses and was already going through the legal paperwork. He lifted up and studied a photograph.

  “Oh, yes it is!” said Louisa. Her voice sounded strangled. Louisa had the strangest expression on her face, like she was trying to work out a difficult math problem. Her eyebrows worked up and down. “It is too the end of the world!” Then she burst into tears.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Louisa parked her Chevy outside her own house, a neat, bland little gray ranch house at the edge of the nicer neighborhoods of the West Side of Worcester. On her street the homes were all crowded together, with tiny side yards and even smaller square backyards. The houses to her looked as if they were clinging by their fingernails to the vestiges of elegance from the nicer broader avenues on the West Side.

  She switched off the ignition at the curb. Her car ticked like a clock when she shut off the engine. But she didn’t go inside. She just couldn’t. She couldn’t face the blank emptiness of her own house. All those dull neutral colors Art insisted on, the muffling wall-to-wall beige carpeting. No windows open, not a single current of moving air. It would feel like entering a tunnel alone. The very idea of it made her feel short of breath. Michelle had tried to warn her off buying this house. “It’s so not you!” she cried. “Why would you live here?” Joe was rich, Michelle had no idea about money. Louisa and Art had scrimped and saved to be able to buy this. They were still working like dogs to pay it off. Sometimes Louisa wondered why they bothered. Art was off working at his office at Sloane’s Manufacturing in North Worcester. It was only five miles away, but it might as well have been five hundred miles.

  Everyone in the Johansson family, as far back as Louisa could remember, had worked at the Sloane’s Manufacturing company at some point or another, including her own mother and father and both of her grandfathers and great-grandfathers. She’d done a summer job of secretarial work at Sloane’s herself, the year she turned sixteen. Some of the jobs over there at Sloane’s were terrible; others were worse. One grandfather had worked in the rubber wheel and his clothes had always smelled of burning rubber; another had sweated out his labor in the infamous hot press. “The Heart of the Commonwealth,” as the city fathers and PR people liked to call it, Worcester was a city of machinists. Some would say it had been in a state of slow decline for the past fifty years. And 2008 had not been a good year for anyone. They’d been trying to fix up the downtown convention center for decades. Of course, Sloane’s hadn’t been the same place either, since the manufacturing company changed hands. A Dutch corporation had taken over a few years earlier—supposedly the white knight of corporate rescue, but it hadn’t quite turned out that way.

  Instead, they had issued in a series of heavy layoffs, some employees being fired for good reasons but most for no reason at all—and Art in Human Resources was the stooge who had to call in some diligent worker who’d labored at Sloane’s for twenty-five, thirty years, and ladle out the bad news and the severance package. Not a terribly generous package, either.

  Now that the housing market had taken such a heavy hit it seemed like the city of Worcester, their county, all of the Northeast, in fact the entire country was falling apart. No wonder Art was so down at the mouth these days. All he did was eat and worry. Nothing pleased him anymore, nothing made him happy. This latest news sure wouldn’t help.

  Louisa sat with her car keys balanced in her gloved palm, reviewing her outburst in the law office. She hadn’t carried on like that in twenty years—in such a passionate storm of tears. She hadn’t broken down sobbing when her beloved dog Mo died; hadn’t raged over the sudden deaths of her father or her mother. Life was full of nasty jolts and surprises. Louisa figured she should be used to that by now. She’d known it a long time. People disappointed you. They let you down, they went away or died. They seldom turned out the way you thought.

  But not, whispered the secret voice in her head, not your mother. Not Alma Johansson, the favorite mom among all her friends. Never the steady, even-tempered woman who had been the smiling center of strength and calm, the bastion of sameness all her whole life. Her mother at least could be counted on; Alma Johansson was rock solid—or so Louisa had always believed. Louisa wasn’t religious, it wasn’t a matter of faith. She didn’t go to church. Her people were not especially devout; they attended church at Christmas and Easter and that was enough. You almost didn’t need a religion when you had a mother like Alma around.

  Louisa studied the circle of keys resting in her hand as if they held the secret to some deep mystery. They sat shining and sharp edged and tangled in the center of her winter glove. She could drive the five miles to Sloane’s offices of course; Art would take a few minutes out of his harried day to talk to her. He might look exasperated, he might sigh and look at his watch, but he’d do it. They’d sit in one of those little gray rooms, on gray folding metal chairs, around a long metal table, with a half-open box of bad chain-store donuts . . . She could picture the fluorescent lights flickering and buzzing overhead.

  Art would be disappointed by this unexpected turn of events, possibly even shocked by the news. He had practically worshipped his mother-in-law Alma. He’d purse his lips, shake his head in dismay. No. No way. She just couldn’t do it. Louisa stuck the key into the ignition, and before she knew it she had parked her Chevy in the lot behind the hardware store belonging to her oldest school friend, Flick Bergstrom.

  The sight of the old familiar brick building made her breathing a little easier, the pain at the center of her chest less intense.

  Bells jingled overhead as she pushed through the door. Old-fashioned Christmas-type sleigh bells. A comforting, happy sound. She saw Flick standing toward the back of the store, tall and lanky behind the counter. As soon as Flick spotted Louisa’s stricken face, he scowled, plunked down the carton of saw blades he’d been pricing with a price gun, and barked, “Come outside.”

  Louisa and Flick had known each other close to forty years. They’d met back in kindergarten, at Indigo Hill School where both were drawn to the Quiet Corner, which strangely enough, had housed an
old record player. Even then, Flick was crazy about music. He grabbed a cap now, with BERGSTROM’S written in white against dark-blue cotton and jammed it down on his narrow head. It was midmorning in midspring but Flick still suffered bad scarring from the fire he’d been in as a teenager, and he couldn’t take any sun at all. Not even the weak watery New England sun in early April. That was why he’d moved back north from Georgia after his second divorce. “Come outside with me,” he said.

  Despite the terrible scarring—it ran like a broken river all over the right side of his face, down his neck, across his shoulder and who knew where else—Felix Bergstrom was still the handsomest man Louisa had ever known, in real life, outside of the movies or TV. He’d also been the handsomest teenager, and the cutest boy in her elementary school. When he stretched his long legs out in front of him, like he was doing now, settling himself into a shady corner on the back stoop of his store, your stomach could do swoops and dives just looking at his body settling into place, the smooth muscles pulling in his arms . . . if you were the kind of woman who experienced that type of swooping and diving, which emphatically Louisa was not.

  Louisa knew plenty of girls like that. She’d gone to school with a few too many of them; they were all over Worcester, middle aged but still giggling, hanging out in bars; flirting and putting on too much mascara, with their potbellies and stretch marks and all the rest of it. Put them around an unattached man like Flick and they acted like deer at a salt lick.

  Flick had never had to lift a finger to summon them, yet the females all came running. First Flick’s own mother, a single divorced mom, had doted on him, then his women teachers, and after that, one by one his female classmates fell into place. He’d never really known his father, who’d died young, keeling over suddenly behind the counter of Bergstrom’s hardware store. Heart attack. Flick’s given name was Felix, but a younger brother couldn’t pronounce it, so the nickname stuck. It suited him—suggested something quick as a lit match, something you couldn’t quite pin down. He and Louisa had been friends forever, they were in all likelihood still best friends now, but Louisa couldn’t say she ever knew for sure what Flick was thinking, or what decision he’d make next. The only thing you could be sure of was that he’d shrug and smile and make a bad one, given the choice.

  Louisa and Flick were part of the loyal Gang of Six that still met for breakfast every Saturday morning at the Kenmore Diner or at Lou Roc’s on Boylston Street—part of the sometimes considerably larger group graduated from Burncoat High that went out for dinner and Trivia Wednesday nights at Moynihan’s. Art showed up just for the breakfast some weekends, grudgingly, because he didn’t care for Trivia, and Art was exhausted in the evenings these days. He didn’t bother to hide it, either. His feet dragged. His shoulders stooped like a much older man. Art had never been terribly high energy to begin with.

  Louisa had known Art Wandowski almost as long as she’d known Flick. He’d been a chubby tagalong in the outer circle of their group of friends. Art grew up in a falling-down apartment house, what they called a three-decker on Andover Street. He was one of those kids you just naturally overlooked. Flick lived a few blocks farther away, on Brattle Street, in the old neighborhood. They’d all known each other for what felt like a lifetime. Greater Worcester was the City of Ten Colleges, and every one of Louisa’s group of friends had either skipped college or gone to one of the local ten. Louisa herself had attended Worcester State, and was an indifferent student. Her sister Michelle had gone to Holy Cross on a tennis scholarship. Flick had graduated from Assumption College, just barely scraping by. Those were Flick’s worst drinking days. Of course that was right after the fire, and it was a miracle he was still alive at all. He hadn’t even been expected to survive. Art on the other hand had skipped college entirely and gone straight to work.

  “What’s up?” said Flick, shifting around on the stoop to get comfortable. He was always in pain, because of the damage he’d sustained from the fire. He had suffered burns over something like 30 percent of his body. If he felt lousy, he hid it well. Flick was all arms and legs, with a long crooked nose and stormy blue eyes that changed color all the time and a sharp chin and you wouldn’t have thought the combination of those features would be appealing, but somehow it was. His voice had that raspy edge to it that some male singers had, a raggedness that always made them seem like they were at the edge of expressing some deep, desperate emotion. If so, with Flick it sure hadn’t happened yet. And Louisa wasn’t holding her breath. Folks from North Worcester played it pretty close to the vest.

  “You want coffee?” he asked. That was his solution to everything. Flick’s body must have been made up of three-quarters caffeine, the way the world was supposedly 70 percent water.

  Louisa shook her head.

  “Spill,” he said, nudging her leg with his bony knee. “If you feel like it.”

  Louisa told him about the surprise in her mother’s will. Flick didn’t appear shocked, though his mouth dropped open for a second when she told him about the unknown brother. Then his face went back to looking calm and thoughtful. Mostly his dark gray-blue eyes were busy searching her eyes, trying to figure out how Louisa felt and what tack to take.

  “Damn,” Flick said in his slow, scratchy voice. “It’s hard to wrap your brain around that. A son. Crap. I don’t know. I mean”—he pushed his baseball cap back and rubbed his head, then straightened the cap again, adjusting the brim to be sure the sun didn’t fall into his face—“we all have secrets, right? But that’s a big one.” He was speaking from firsthand experience. He’d been through it. Flick’s first wife had turned out to be a drug addict. Mostly heroin, sometimes speedballs. After twelve years of marriage. His wife had been hiding it, shooting up in the bathroom, in the closet, wearing long sleeves in summer. He’d had no idea. So Flick knew what he was talking about, when it came to secrets.

  “I don’t believe it, though,” said Louisa. “My mother? Seems like they’re making it up.”

  “Yeah but that’s exactly what I mean. I once dated a woman who had twenty cats. I didn’t have a clue. —Jesus. I must have no sense of smell.” He leaned forward. “—So. Louey-Lou. How you holding up?”

  Louisa told him about falling apart in her lawyer’s office, making a stinker of a scene, which made Flick chuckle. Then he reminded her of the time a bee flew through the window of their third-grade classroom and into her long hair and Louisa went running around the room, screaming like a maniac and flapping her arms, which she hadn’t remembered till that minute, and that made her laugh, which felt a hell of a lot better than bawling. Then Flick started in on all other kids in class, including Constantin Spanos, who everyone had called Sparrow, how Sparrow had caught the bee gently in his cupped hands and then walked the bee down two flights of stairs, and outside into the schoolyard, where he released it. He was Dr. Spanos now, a popular local GP.

  “You think anyone calls him Dr. Sparrow?” asked Louisa.

  “I hope not,” said Flick. “Ran into him at the Price Chopper a couple of weeks ago. He was looking good. His wife is still sick as shit.”

  Louisa flinched. Flick would say she was just a straitlaced Worcester Swede who still wore her skirts below her knees, but it wasn’t that. Curses sounded out of place in Flick’s mouth, like someone else was talking through him. Plenty of people in Wormtown were tough as hammers and talked like knuckle draggers—but not Flick. Louisa couldn’t begin to explain why it bothered her so much.

  Flick Bergstrom used to have a lousy reputation, years back. Dumber than mud, Flick would have said. Always getting into trouble. Then he’d add, bad choices make for interesting stories. He’d made plenty of bad choices so he had plenty of good stories. He’d raced dirt bikes and walked across the Wachusett Reservoir when the ice was razor thin. He was always wild and reckless. He took crazy chances. He’d drunk like a fish, dated the wrong girls, played in a loud garage band, committed a hundred foolish and illegal acts, and survived, just barely, that terrible Ind
igo Hill fire—but he wasn’t a thug, not a bad guy. Not even close. Louisa’s own breathing slowed, calmed down every time she was around Flick. Even her own husband didn’t have that effect on her.

  Suddenly Louisa felt like crying again, for no good reason. Stress, she guessed. Too much going on at work all of the time, case overload. She’d already canceled out her clients for the rest of the day, and Brandi, her office manager, would be pitching a fit. Social work was nothing more than a numbers game nowadays. You crammed in as many clients as you could. Instead of a front door, they should install a turnstile. With a slot to shove the money inside. Screw the clients, never mind the piles of paperwork. Just keep ’em coming.

  We Are U.S. of A. served Worcester women and children at risk. That was an ever-growing population. It was sad to see. First the center was called Handicapped Children; then when that name became politically incorrect they changed the name to Families Valued, and when people thought that sounded like an antiabortion clinic they got this new, even stupider name. The staff held contests to see who could come up with the best worst names. We R Us. We Are Useless.

  Rhonda, the WAUSA director, was not amused. She had about as much sense of humor as a bag of gravel. She and Brandi, the young pretty office manager, were what they called “besties.” They were always going out together shopping at fancy boutiques in Shrewsbury and Natick, or out to lunch. They even went on vacations together. The rest of the staff called them the Beasties. You had to laugh—or you’d never stop crying.

  Flick straightened and flexed his long fingers, to loosen them up. They looked more like a sensitive piano player’s hands than a guy who talked about “a shit show” and dropped the f-bomb fifty times a day. The fire had left his joints as stiff as an old man’s. He was on all kinds of pills and supplements. Flick had rheumatoid arthritis and he wasn’t even forty-five years old. Wet weather and cold just made things worse, and it had sleeted earlier that morning. Flick was always standing up in the middle of a Gang of Six meal and stretching his limbs, shaking himself like he was trying to climb out of his own skeleton.