“I’m still at that age,” admitted Tom. “Couple more blackberry seasons.”
“Probably a good thing—don’t you think?” Her voice was light, but her expression looked anxious. She often stood with her hands curled into fists. This was a woman, Tom realized, who never stopped worrying about her child for a single solitary moment. No wonder she had circles under her eyes. The eyes were as blue as field speedwell. “That is a good sign, isn’t it, that Sierra questions everything?”
“Hard to say.” He instantly regretted his words. The worry fell like a hammer on her. He should have lied. Michelle had that kind of pale complexion that showed every flicker of emotion. Like the sky over Saint Ives, shifting instant by instant.
“I suppose we should—get on.” He gestured toward the rest of the house.
She blushed. “Of course.” She set the folded dish towels down on a sagging old chair that still carried a faint imprint of its owner. He could picture the old woman sitting there, in the same spot, day after day. “Well, this is the living room, of course. Mother collected figurines . . .” Michelle walked to a glass-fronted cabinet filled with ugly gnomish figures.
“Yeah,” he said, barely glancing at it. Good Lord! Was he supposed to admire these daft objects? Surely she didn’t expect him to cart them back to England?
But Michelle led him out of the living room into a tiny galley kitchen that might have fit onto the back of a houseboat. “And this is the kitchen,” she said.
He nodded. Again, he was struck by the sheer number of individual objects in the room. At least sunlight poured in through the back door. There were knickknacks on every horizontal surface. Islands of salt and pepper shakers sat huddled together, as if held by elastic bands. If you thought you were going to run out of things, that you had this one last chance on earth to acquire objects, this was the place to come. Tom’s own seaside cottage in Cornwall was monastic by comparison. One pot, one kettle, two plates, bowls, and cups. He and Claudia had lived a simple, stripped-down, cloistered existence—a world to themselves. He recalled reading that Thoreau kept only three chairs in his cabin on Walden Pond: “One for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” One chair too many, in Tom’s opinion.
“Mom hardly cooked for herself anymore,” Michelle mused, leaning against a kitchen counter, her arms folded tightly across her stomach. Her forehead was still puckered, her thoughts likely far away. He should have said something reassuring about her girl Sierra, about teenagers in general. Not that he knew much about young people—or about anything else, for that matter.
How many salt shakers did one person need? Tom had counted a dozen sets already. Wonky cream pitchers sat huddled together at one end of the table like passengers on a crowded ship.
“But Mom made wonderful meals when we were young. On Saturday nights, she’d make a crown roast, and Sunday she’d put the leftovers through a metal grinder and make roast beef hash. Oh, I wonder whatever happened to that wonderful grinder . . .”
“If we can find it, you’re welcome to it,” said Tom.
She flinched as if he’d slapped her.
“Michelle,” he said, as gently as he could. Another woman’s name felt strange in his mouth. He rummaged around for the right words, the right degree of kindness. At the same time his brain was automatically collecting and storing information about the kitchen; the deeply worn, uneven path on the linoleum floor. He could picture the old woman making her crooked way, up and down and across these same rooms—hauling . . . what? The image that came to mind was of ants, bearing heavy loads of crumbs.
“Your mum meant well, naming me in her will as she did. It was kind. I didn’t come here to nip things. I just don’t need—things,” he finished lamely.
“Why did you come, then?” she asked. There were those clear blue wildflower eyes. Wide open. He’d seen them in the mirror, questioning himself in just this way. They both had children’s eyes, compared to most.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m muddled by it myself.” She still looked confused. He flapped one hand at her. “You have enough worries. I’m just here to help, yeah? That’s all. Let’s go up, have a look?”
He looked out at the hall, and something made him stop. His breath came short. What was there to be afraid of? His tracker’s instinct warned him to go on up ahead—but how could he preempt this woman’s right to lead? He was the stranger here. No question about that. Michelle picked up an empty teacup from the counter, looked inside it like someone reading tea leaves, then sighed and put it back down again and led the way up the steep, narrow stairs.
He breathed an audible sigh of relief when she opened the door to reveal the mother’s little bedroom. She snapped on an overhead light. For once his instincts had gone awry. Nothing fearful here. It looked like any other old woman’s bedroom—white coverlet over the single bed, with its tufts of pastel embroidered flowers, the head of the bed cluttered with small decorative pillows. Above, framed prints of birds. Dust, of course, in all the hard-to-reach places, and things left to lie where an elderly person’s poor eyesight no longer noticed—a paper handkerchief dropped like an autumn leaf beneath a bureau; a white pain-relief tablet that had rolled into a corner. There were books on the bedside table, chiefly novels, and one book on bird-watching.
“She was a great reader,” said Michelle, following his gaze.
“So am I,” he said. Again, he noticed the curious pattern of wear on the floor, almost a groove in the soft pine wood, and the image again came of ants moving back and forth along a preordained path. Ants carry one hundred times their own body weight, could shift the pads on their feet, and do it all hanging upside down if need be. The tracks here led elsewhere. “So there’s just this one bedroom, then?”
She shook her head. “There’s a bedroom in the attic. And the little guest room down the hall. But my mom never used the others, once we kids moved out.”
His heart sank. “Didna?” he said, reverting into Cornish dialect, as he always did when ill at ease. He moved instinctively toward the bedroom door, to block her way.
“Well, she never had any guests. Not overnight, I mean.” Michelle stopped and cocked her head at him in the doorway. She was wearing a bright-red cotton vest, and it made her look like a robin. She hopped forward a few steps, toward him. She stopped. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
Her forehead wrinkled a little. Did she think he suspected her of hiding valuables away? Again, out of nowhere he felt the sudden onrush of despair, like a foul wind: the impossibility of ever again being truly known.
“Didn’t you want to see the other rooms?” she asked.
“Not really,” Tom said. “Would you like some luncheon? You must be empty as a keg.”
“We just had breakfast.” She smiled at him indulgently, as if he were a willful child. “Let’s take a quick look.”
You’d have thought he smelled a tiger’s scat somewhere. The danger seemed to be coming from right overhead. He was surprised she didn’t look up at the ceiling herself, alarmed. All of his hard-won instincts warned him against going further. Giss on, he told himself.
As they stepped out of the bedroom, his eye went straight to the back of the hallway, the darkness that led to a second set of stairs. A nearly visible path was worn down that hall, ground into the flat carpet. Michelle stopped before they reached the end. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle as they walked toward it. Secrets. But she was opening the guest room door, and it, too, revealed nothing fearful. Two single beds, draped in girlish quilts, school pennants hanging on the walls. Sunlight streamed in through the uncurtained window. Compared to the rest of the house, this room was almost bare. Yet this didn’t make him feel any easier.
“Well done then,” he said.
She nodded. He nearly had her. She half turned to go. Then she narrowed her eyes, remembering. He’d overstepped himself, and reminded her of a place she might otherwise have forgotten.
<
br /> “We really should check out the attic, too,” she said.
“No need,” he said desperately.
“Don’t be silly.” She smiled. “It’s no trouble at all.”
Now he did keep himself in the lead. Did he think there was a madwoman hidden overhead? He smiled grimly to himself. He forced himself to walk quickly down the narrow hall. As he’d feared, the handle of the small door leading to the final set of stairs stuck a little, as if someone had been carefully closing and locking it shut, month after month, year after year.
“We might wait and come back another time,” Tom said. “No rush.” Once long ago he had tracked a bloody hare to its metal-toothed trap, where it lay still flopping, the life dying out of its eyes.
The wooden stairs creaked heavily under his feet, as if from too many years of bearing weight. The ceiling sloped toward his head, and he was not a tall man. Wave after wave of warning hit him. He stopped on the middle of the staircase, blocking the woman’s path.
“You scared?” Michelle said teasingly, touching his shoulder. When he turned his head she was smiling as if at a balky child. He could see just the type of schoolteacher she must be. She and Claudia would have got on like toads. Michelle’s students must surely love her, they would cluster around her for protection against a bitter world.
Tom’s own protective instinct kept him blocking her way forward. At the least, he would not let her be the first to step inside. The boards creaked again, as if a heavy object or objects lay nearby. He felt as he would have felt approaching a dead body. His grandfather too had suffered from second sight. “It’s a curse, not a gift,” the old man used to tell him.
“Louisa slept up here as a teenager,” Michelle said, as if to encourage him. “She liked being up on her own floor.”
“Hang on,” he said stepping in front of her, and ducking into the attic space.
The wreckage was bad enough to make him catch his breath. He felt rather than heard Michelle cry out with surprise as she followed close behind They could not even really both properly fit inside the attic. The small space was packed almost to the brim with things, an indoor garbage dump gone mad. It boiled and bubbled over with smashed and broken objects, with furnishings, papers, boxes, trash bags spilling over like foaming seas. If a human being had packed all of the random objects of their life into a closet every day, and kept on adding to the pile, cramming more objects, broken and whole, beneath and around the dusty mountains of accumulated junk, they might then at last have arrived at this—a cross between a doong cart and a temple holy to discarded household items.
Some of the piles reached all the way to the low attic beams. Much of it was simply trash. Tom’s gaze swept across to hillocks of yellowed newspapers and tattered magazines; towers of greeting cards; piles of dirty dishes, cans, Kleenex, boxes, packed greengrocer’s bags. There must have once been a bed in the room, for some of the articles were heaped horizontally as if they had been levitated: cascading heaps of paperback books; the broken household gods of statuettes and candlesticks, empty meal boxes, tins of tomatoes, rolls of paper and assorted stationer’s objects: notebooks, fat logs of many yellow pencils jumbled together with twine . . .
“I need to sit down,” said Michelle behind him in a faint voice. Clearly there was no room for sitting in this place, barely enough room to stand upright inside the space. It was hard to breathe. He nudged her back and down the stairs, leading her by the arm, till he had her safely back down on the second floor. There Michelle sank onto her heels in the hallway, shaking her head, steadying one hand on the wall. She kept staring at the floor in front of her, as if afraid to look up.
“I simply don’t understand this,” she said. “How is this possible? My mom was a very tidy person. She was a totally normal person. I swear.” Then she covered her mouth and started laughing, rocking back and forth, finally sitting down and folding her arms across her stomach. “Wow!” she said. “Holy cow!”
“People do this kind of thing often,” lied Tom.
Michelle turned her head to look at him, but it was a blind look. She covered her mouth again with her hand, still laughing. “I’m sorry,” she gasped. “Not funny!”
The attic had reminded him in some ways of a snowstorm—the way that snow swirls things into fantastical shapes and towers and Gothic turrets. Some of the tilting, jagged piles of junk defied any sense of gravity. In a way, it was admirable. It hadn’t happened in a day, or even a year. The chaos was immense. It was ingenious. This woman had to have been some kind of engineer to have managed it at all.
“It’s called a catch-pit, back home,” Tom said.
“You’ve seen rooms like that before, back home?” Michelle asked in a faint voice.
“Yeah sure,” he lied. In truth he’d seen anything like it only once. An old widow woman in his neighborhood had died, leaving behind a cottage filled entirely with old articles of clothing, most of it little more than mildewed rags. Yet she’d gone about the village day after day, as neat as any other Cornishwoman. Her vegetable gardens had been tidy models of production and order. She was a brilliant needlewoman. You could not explain the complex madness of the human brain.
“I don’t know what to say,” Michelle said. Her laughter had slowly dissolved into tears, as Tom knew it would. He raised his hands helplessly.
Michelle tried to wipe her tears away with her hands. “Oh dear,” she said. “My poor mother.”
An old nursery rhyme popped into Tom’s head unbidden, from his childhood.
Monday for danger,
Tuesday kiss a stranger,
Wednesday for a letter,
Thursday for something better,
Friday for . . .
He couldn’t remember the rest, but it ended with something about true love. His nursery teacher had led in the recitation of this and similar ditties. Here it was, a Tuesday. He leaned down and kissed this strange woman on the top of her head, as if she had really been his sister. She looked up gratefully.
“Thank you,” she sniffled. “I’ll be fine in a minute. I’m sorry. It’s just been such a shock.” She gestured helplessly. “The mess . . . All of it.”
Tom supposed that he himself, a come-by-chance child dropped out of nowhere, was a part of the mess. He had grown up knowing of his strange origins. This woman had known about none of it. The shock must be immense. Yet she had been unfailingly hospitable and kind. He let her collect herself. His own mind was a naturally ordered place. Now that he had seen the worst, the attic didn’t even really faze him. Another problem to be solved. Of course, she hadn’t been his mum.
His grandfather had once suggested that Tom think of each obstacle not as a problem but as a project. A challenge. He could put it all to rights in a few days. This sort of work suited him. There was nothing to wail about, certainly. In all the time he had known and loved Claudia, she had never shed a tear in front of him. Not at the first diagnosis of MS. Not later, when her body betrayed her, shifting the terms of the disease each time. For one full week she’d lost her sight entirely. Another time it was her sense of smell. Everything, she’d confessed to him laughing, smelled like carpet cleaner. Never once had he caught her weeping. Not even at the bitter end, when she’d had every possible reason to carry on.
The truth was, crying women irritated him. He had always had to struggle against his own disgust, an impulse to bolt.
“Chin up,” he said. “Could be worse. No corpses up there at any rate, no chopped-up body parts.”
Michelle forced out a laugh with a sob mixed in it. She wiped away tears with the fingers of both hands, smudging her makeup.
“I’ll bide till we get it sorted,” he said, if only because her tears were annoying him and he didn’t know what he was saying. He had to say something to get her to stop her crying. “People have their reasons. They always have their reasons. We’ll get it sorted out. It’s all right, innit?” He lapsed back into Cornish at moments like these.
“You’re being so in
credibly kind,” she said. She peered down the dark hall again. “Oh my God,” she added. “—I forgot about Louisa. We’ve got to get some of that mess cleared out before Louisa lays eyes on it. We have to. It would be the absolute last straw.”
Tom suspected that he had been the second-to-last straw. “Course we will,” he said soothingly. “We’ll get hold of a few skips—dumpsters—and before you know it this small house’ll be empty as a keg.”
She was sitting on the floor now, her chin resting on her knees, peering up at him, still sniffling. Her trousers must be getting all dusty. “Oh, a dumpster!” she said, lighting up. The strangest things made these people happy—or sad. “That’s a marvelous idea.”
“Easy.” He put out one hand and hauled her to her feet. Ah, he was a dirty liar. It would all be anything but easy. He’d have to change his plane ticket, let his mum and his clients know. Who could predict how much this latest bit would delay his returning home? No good deed ever went unpunished. And what would make an old woman keep hold of every scrap she’d ever laid hands on? She must have lost a good deal.
“We’ll buy a box of those city garbage bags,” said Michelle. “A case, even. We’ll rent a dumpster. And you’ll stay a little longer? Really? Your boss wouldn’t mind?” There were tears clinging to her eyelashes, like dew on the furze. The things up in the attic seemed to be leaning down toward him, as if waiting for his reply. He thought with longing of his little cot, his empty stretch of rocky shingle with nothing but the blowing sea wind fluting in long undulations across it.
“I’m my own boss,” he said. He hoped it didn’t sound as if he were bragging. The opposite, more like. He was a freelance consultant, a hired gun, jack-of-all-trades.
“And you’ll move out of that dreary motel, won’t you?” the woman said. Oh, she was a sly one. Crafty, was what she was. “There’s so much extra room at our house! We have three guest rooms. Sierra’s taken a shine to you somehow. She doesn’t like many people. You’ll stay with us.”
Indigo Hill: A Novel Page 9
