Justine had stowed Flora’s capes and blue fox fur, packed them away in plastic garbage bags. Pappa’s loden coat, his caps and hats were stowed in another bag. She had decided to give them away to charity but she changed her mind at the last minute and carried them into the basement. Just the thought of meeting a strange woman wearing Flora’s fur gave her a feeling of distaste, as if her stepmother’s eyes would be staring at her from the strange woman’s face. Nail her to the pavement, force her back.
Just off the hall was the blue room, which they had used as a dining room. Everything there was either blue or white, from the wall-to-wall carpet, to the silk draperies, the flowerboxes in the window with its Saint Pauls and its Browallias. The flowers had not survived her sojourn to that hot country. She had soaked them with water prior to her departure, and placed layers of brown cardboard over the dirt, but it hadn’t helped.
The bird didn’t suffer. She let him live in the attic and set him up with bowls of seeds and water and a whole basket of peeled apples. He was having a grand old time.
Even the pictures on the wall continued the blue and white theme: a winter landscape, sailboats, and a weaving from silk rags that took up an entire wall. Justine’s mamma had woven it long before Justine was born. It had always hung there, an extension of her being.
She only had a few fragments of memory about her mother. A rumbling rain, a covering under which they sat close together, old sour socks sticking to her toes.
The smell of fluffy flowers, something hot with honey.
Against his will, her father told her.
Her mother had been standing, cleaning the windows. It was the window that faced the water on the second floor and the day had strong sunshine and the strong call of seagulls. The wind was still, and the ice was still lying thick over the water, but it was beginning to thin out, and perhaps she was happy about that, and perhaps she was humming to herself in the sunshine, perhaps she was even planning to go out on the balcony after she was finished in order to sit with her face turned toward the sky. She had quickly taken to this Nordic ritual. She had come from Annecy, a little town in France near the Swiss border, and he had taken her from there, against her parents’ wishes, to be his bride.
It was a Thursday. He came home from work at seven minutes after four. She was lying on the floor, with her arms outstretched as if she had been crucified. He could see right away that there was nothing that could be done.
“How could you tell?” Justine asked. She was in a period where she had to know as much as possible about her mother, obsessing about her.
He couldn’t answer.
“Perhaps she was still alive. If you had called a doctor right away, maybe he could have saved her.”
“Don’t accuse me,” he said, with a wry twist at the corner of his mouth. “Once you’ve seen a dead person, you will know what I mean.”
First he had thought that she had fallen from the stepstool and broken something important, but the autopsy showed that an artery in the brain had burst, and her life had run out with it.
“Aneurysm!”
Pappa pronounced that word slowly and clearly every time during Justine’s youth whenever the subject came up.
Sometimes she worried that it could be inherited.
She asked about herself.
“Where was I, Pappa? What was I doing?”
He didn’t remember.
She was just three when it happened, three years old and a few months. How does a three-year-old react when her mother falls off a stepstool and dies?
She must have been somewhere in the house, she must have called and cried, she must have been terrified at her mother’s sudden change.
Sometimes she woke up from a dream that her forehead was aching as if after a long hard cry; she looked at herself in the mirror and saw her eyelids swollen and glassy.
Fragments of sinking, of mud and of flowers which never had any odor.
A pappa standing on the ice and screaming.
She saw pictures in the photo album of the woman who had been her mother. The strange face did not resonate with her. Thick hair combed back, curly on the sides. Justine did not look like her one bit. There was distance in the woman’s eyes, which did not match Justine’s memories.
A steep narrow staircase led up to the second floor. Up here is where her mother had stood to clean the windows. To the left was the bedroom, to the right the hall widened and created a living room with a view toward Lammbar Island and beyond Lake Malar. Bookcases covered the walls, but there wasn’t much furniture: a stereo, an oval glass table and two armchairs.
Those had been Pappa’s and Flora’s.
Many times Justine had been offered a great deal of money for the house. The real estate agents hassled her, stuffed their information into her mailbox, and even called her from time to time. One of them was especially pushy. His name was Jacob Hellstrand.
“You could get a few million for the place, Justine,” he chatted away, using her first name as if they had been close friends. “I have a client who wants to rebuild it. He’s always dreamed of that location.”
“Sorry, but I don’t really want to.”
“And why not? Think of what you could buy with that money! A single woman like yourself, you can’t just sit and rot out there in Hasselby. Buy yourself a condo in the city instead and live life!”
“You don’t know a thing about whether I am living life or not. Maybe I’m already living life.”
His laughter came through the handset.
“You’re right, of course. But admit it, Justine, admit that there’s something to what I’m telling you.”
She should have gotten angry, but she didn’t.
“Just let me know when you’ve decided. You have my cell phone number, right?”
“Of course.”
“It’s not easy for a single woman to take care of such a big house. All by yourself, that is.”
“If I decide to sell,” she said, “I’ll give you a call.”
She didn’t have a single thought of selling. She didn’t need any money either. Pappa left a great deal when he died. She would live well on that for a long time. In fact, as long as she lived.
And Flora wouldn’t ever be able to demand a single penny of it.
Chapter FOUR
The most difficult thing to endure was the smell. Flora remembered it from that summer long ago when she moonlighted at a hospital for mentally ill women. The mix of floor polish, unwashed hair, and flower water.
Now she smelled like that.
Despite what she had most feared, the nights weren’t all that bad. Rather, the night belonged to her. She could count on being left alone: no one tried to communicate with her, no question of her taking part in things.
The young women, and they were all young in relation to Flora, had impatience in their movements, as if to hurry the working day along and get it over with, so that they could hurry to the changing room, hang up their smocks and pants, and become private. Go home to their own things.
Of course there were caretakers during the night, but they weren’t all that bothersome. They came in like shadows and turned her during the night. She usually knew when they would be coming, and she was ready for them.
