Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  She crossed Landis Avenue, a bizarrely supersize main street, the width of a four-lane freeway at least. Iano had posed various entertaining theories, but the truth turned out to be mundane: Land Baron Landis had laid out a namesake street to match his ego. He might as well have paved the place in gold. He should see his dying little burg now, with its main drag so deserted Willa felt safe taking out her phone to check the time as she and her legally blind dog casually jaywalked.

  She wanted to call Iano with the new installment of their family disaster so he could share her sensation of drowning. But he would be on his way home by now, and Iano was a highly distractible driver. Really it was her mother she’d wanted to call right after the bad news, or in the middle of it, while Mr. Petrofaccio was blowing his nose. First thing in the morning, last thing at night, whenever a fight with Tig left her in pieces, it had been her mother who put Willa back together. When someone mattered like that, you didn’t lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living.

  Willa and Dixie passed a pawn shop, the welfare office, a Thai restaurant, and the Number One Chinese Market before heading south again. After five leafy residential blocks, at the corner of Eighth and Quince, Dixie finally elected to pee on the foot of a maple. Most of the houses on this block dated from about the same Victorian era, variously run-down, two for sale. And sure enough, she spotted two garage-like buildings in the backyards, identical in design, disguised by years of divergent use: one sheltered a Honda sedan; the other was an epic man cave covered with old license plates. She pressed her brain for a second to recall the word, then got it: stip. Stipulation houses. Quickie predecessors of the more carefully constructed mansions that were now coming due for collapse.

  Dixie waddled homeward and Willa followed, feeling the word shambles in her sternum. How could two hardworking people do everything right in life and arrive in their fifties essentially destitute? She felt angry at Iano for some infraction that wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny, she knew. His serial failures at job security? Not his fault. Plenty of academics spent their careers chasing tenure from city to town. They were a new class of educated nomads, raising kids with no real answer to the question of where they’d grown up. In provisional homes one after another, with parents who worked ridiculous hours, that’s where. Doing homework in a hallway outside a faculty meeting. Playing tag with the offspring of physicists and art historians on some dean’s lawn while the adults swigged cheap Chablis and exchanged companionable gripes about their department heads. Now, without complaint, Iano had taken a teaching position that was an insult to someone with his credentials. As the family’s sole surviving breadwinner, he should get a pass on the charge of being unfit to take a tough phone call while driving.

  It never mattered before. Having a mother to shore up Willa had always left Iano free to be the fun, sexy one who didn’t worry even about death or taxes, who brought her flowers picked from other peoples’ yards, who once threw her pain-inflicting shoes out the car window on the way to a formal reception at the provost’s. She couldn’t expect him to be a new kind of person now. She was the crisis handler, he was the evader. Marriages tended to harden like arteries, and she and Iano were more than thirty years into this one. This evening he would come in the door like a blast of warm weather, give her a kiss in the kitchen before changing out of his office clothes, and they’d have no chance to talk before dinner.

  So she would drop this bomb on everybody at once. They were all adults, entitled to share her concern about a house falling down on them. Old Nick with his oxygen tank and rabid contempt for the welfare state would be especially vulnerable to the challenges of homelessness. On the other hand, Tig might light a bonfire and dance in the yard as the bricks rained down. Willa had tried and failed to track her daughter’s moral path, but collapse of some permanent structure always seemed to be part of the territory.

  *

  Willa’s evening forecast evaporated as she was putting the spaghetti water on to boil. Iano had kissed her and disappeared into the bedroom, as predicted. But now he walked back into the kitchen looking stricken, carrying her phone. Answering her calls and texts was a habit she kept meaning to discuss, but this wasn’t the time. He held the thing as if it were scorching him.

  She recoiled. “What? Is it Zeke?”

  He nodded, unreadably.

  “Is he hurt? God, Iano. What?”

  Iano set the phone on the counter and Willa picked it up, shaking. “Hello?”

  “Mom, it’s me.”

  “Oh Jesus, Zeke, you’re okay. Is the baby okay?”

  Zeke was sobbing. Choked. A level of desperation she couldn’t associate with her levelheaded son. She waited without realizing she was holding her breath.

  “The baby’s fine,” he said finally. “It’s Helene.”

  “Oh no. Some problem from the C-section? It happens, honey. Did she have to go back to the hospital?”

  Iano was looking at her with mournful eyes, shaking his head. His face behind the dark, trimmed beard looked scarily pale, and his foreknowledge was disorienting. She turned her back on him and listened to her son’s silence, the gathering of his will.

  “Mom, Helene’s dead. She died.”

  “Jesus! How?”

  The beat of his silence lasted long enough for Willa to wonder if she’d been rude to ask. Her mind battered itself like a trapped bird.

  “She took pills,” he finally said. “She killed herself.”

  “You had pills around? With a baby in the house?”

  “He’s not up to childproof caps, Mom.”

  The scolding sobered Willa, put them on solid ground. “Have you called 911?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m just … I’m in shock. When did this happen?”

  “What time is it now? I got home around a quarter to six. She’s still here.”

  “Who is?”

  “Mom, Helene. She died in the bedroom. There’s a thing in her mouth. Ventilator. They tried to revive her even though it was hopeless I guess. They said they have to leave that thing in her until the coroner’s report. It’s kind of freaking me out, it pulls her face all out of shape and looks so painful. I guess that’s a stupid thing to worry about.”

  “So the EMTs came. Are they still there? What happens now?”

  “They left. They had another call that was, you know. Urgent. Now the coroner comes and then the mortuary, to take the body. The EMT gave me numbers to call.”

  “Oh, honey. Are you alone there in the apartment?”

  “I’m with Aldus.”

  God, she thought. Aldus. A few weeks in the world, now this.

  “I’m sitting on the couch,” Zeke said, seeming now to want to produce words. “He’s lying beside me, asleep. I guess it wore him out, waiting so long for … He was so hungry. And scared, I think. Jesus. How can he not ever know his mother? What does that do to a person?”

  “I guess we take this an hour at a time, and right now you shouldn’t be alone. As soon as we’re off the phone, call somebody. I don’t mean the coroner, I want you to have a friend there. Gosh, Helene’s poor parents. How long will it take them to get to Boston?”

  The sound he made startled her, an animal moan. The impossible task of calling them had not yet occurred to him.

  “Do you want me to talk to them?”

  “You’ve never met them. How would that feel, this, coming from a stranger?”

  “Okay, but please get somebody there to be with you. You’ll have to decide a lot of things. When Mama died I was shocked at all the practical stuff that has to happen immediately. Do you have any idea about … what she would want?”

  She listened to Zeke’s breathing as it caught in a sob, tried and caught again, like a halting engine. “We didn’t talk about that, Mom,” he managed. “When the subject of death came up, it was me telling her not to do it.”

  “What do you mean?” She turned around but Iano was gone. She stepped to the doorway and looked into the
dining room. Tig was playing backgammon with Nick so he wouldn’t throw a tantrum while he waited for dinner. They made an impossible pair facing off across the table: pixie Tig with her springy dreadlocks, hulking Nick with the oxygen tubes pressing his jowls in a permanent grimace.

  “This morning she seemed, just, normal,” Zeke was saying. “She took the baby for his checkup yesterday and was relieved he’s, you know. Fine. Gaining weight. Today she was going to take him out in the stroller. We joked about whether she needed an owner’s manual to drive it.”

  Willa was amazed at his coherence. People handled emergencies in many ways—she’d covered enough crime scenes to know—but they fell back on the habit of self. This reasonable, desperately sad man on the phone was the bare wood of her son beneath the bark. Willa saw her pasta water was boiling over. She clicked off the burner. “You said when death came up, it was you telling her not to do it. What does that mean, Zeke?”

  “I didn’t even kiss her goodbye, Mom. I mean, maybe I did, without knowing it. I can’t even remember. That’s so sad.”

  “Are you telling me she had threatened suicide?”

  “She should never have gone off the antidepressants. I shouldn’t have let her. Nobody should have asked her to do that.”

  “Don’t blame yourself. The drugs were not your call. There must have been risks to the baby. What was she taking?”

  “Paroxetine was the one they said she really needed to get away from. They tried her on Sarafem, I think, I don’t remember exactly. They okayed some things after the first trimester but nothing ever worked, once she’d gone cold turkey. She was, like, paralyzed with fear about doing the wrong thing. They have black box warnings on those drugs, Mom. How could she look in the mirror, pregnant, and take a medicine like that? A black box is like ‘Smoking gives you cancer,’ that extreme level of warning.”

  Willa felt the weight of Helene transgressions she should have forgiven. The pregnancy whining, the lethargy. “I’m sorry. This must have been so hard for you.”

  “It was harder for her. Obviously.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t tell her to stop taking her antidepressants.”

  “Maybe I expected too much from her. I do that, Mom, I feel like when things seem easy to me, they should be easy for other people. Maybe she felt guilty.”

  “I’m sure her doctors advised her. Knowing Helene, she was well informed.”

  “But what kind of choice did she have? You can’t imagine what she’s been through. Every day of the pregnancy was hell. She was obsessed with the idea that something was wrong, the baby was dead, or deformed. She memorized the possible side effects of SSRIs in pregnancy. Anencephaly, which is when the baby is born with no brain. Omphalocele, where the intestines protrude through a hole in the abdomen. The whole thing got to be like this monster. She just didn’t want it.”

  “What are you saying? Of course she wanted the baby.” Willa had assumed he hadn’t wanted it. Zeke, who at age one put his toys away, the improbable straight-arrow child sprung from the mess of his itinerant parents’ lives, would not gladly interrupt the order of his life’s events with the chaos of an unplanned baby. Willa didn’t even believe he’d neglected birth control. Boys will be boys, she’d heard, but she had only the one, and Zeke did the right thing every time. She and Iano had resisted lobbying for an abortion, but they saw this pregnancy as a duty imposed on their son, if not an ambush. Privately they’d worn out the tread on various speculations. None of their scenarios held a role for a Helene who just didn’t want the baby.

  She tried to picture Zeke in his apartment. “Oh, God. Did you … find her?”

  Tig appeared in the doorway, round eyed, looking painfully small in her baggy clothes, the corona of hair standing up around her head in a caricature of shock. She must have overheard some of this and was reading the rest in Willa’s face.

  Willa pointed at the package of pasta and jar of sauce and raised her eyebrows in a plea. With this daughter no wish was easily granted. Willa expected resistance as she stepped away from the stove, but Tig slid into the gap and began making dinner.

  “Yeah, I did,” Zeke said. “I got home from work and the baby was crying so hard he was choking. It freaked me out. I don’t know how long he’d been … I changed his diaper, warmed up a bottle, fed him. I thought she was asleep. She’s been sleeping so much, all these months. So I spent maybe an hour in the house like that, letting her sleep. Jesus, Mom. What if I’d gone in the bedroom sooner? What if I could have saved her?”

  “The baby had been crying awhile when you got home, so she was gone already. Don’t do that to yourself. Please, honey. You took care of your son.”

  The weight of these words hit Willa as she said them, a punch to the gut that must have produced a sound because Tig turned around, alarmed. It took effort for Willa to stay on her feet instead of sinking to the floor and pulling her knees to her chest as she cradled Zeke’s voice in her ear. Her dutiful, promising son would be taking care of a child now, every day, marooned in the loneliness of single parenthood. Anger at the dead Helene rose like acid in her throat. So useless.

  Tig stood watching her with the air of a fairy godmother, the wooden spoon tilting up from her fingers like a wand. Behind her the pot boiled. Willa closed her eyes and made herself speak calmly into the phone. “I can get there by morning.”

  *

  Sitting in a grand Boston church trying to quiet a howling infant, wearing a designer suit that belonged to the girl in the coffin: even Willa’s florid imagination hadn’t seen this coming. The tight cut of the jacket constricted her movements. Mr. Armani wouldn’t have had baby dandling in mind, not that any of this was his fault. Willa had thrown jeans into a duffel and headed out to rescue her son without giving a moment’s thought to funeral wear. That was four, maybe five days earlier; she’d lost track. Aldus had made no advances on sorting out night versus day, and she was operating on less sleep than she’d thought humanly possible. Getting dressed for the funeral was a task she undertook about thirty minutes before the event, and it sent her with some urgency into Helene’s closet. She found everything on wooden hangers, organized by color, and within that orderly place she glimpsed the bond between the dead girl and her son. But the stunner was Helene’s expensive taste. Checking labels quickly for size, Willa hyperventilated: Fendi, Versace, Ralph Lauren. A couple of suits were in her ballpark, thank goodness. Helene must have nudged up a size before going into the chic maternity business wear.

  Willa was so relieved to score something better than a T-shirt for the service, she hadn’t thought ahead to a chapel packed with Zeke and Helene’s friends. Now it dawned on her they might recognize this navy silk suit, last seen at some promotion party. Making her the creepy mother-in-law who didn’t even wait till Helene was in the grave to poach on her couture. She could see awfulness in the situation but felt it at a distance, walled off by exhaustion. Anyway, the suit was probably camouflaged by the pinstripes of spit-up trailing down the lapels.

  The baby’s howl caught in a series of gasps and went quiet, providing a moment of funereal balm before he shattered it again. His wail rose and fell like a siren above the muted organ music. For all Helene’s worries about pharmacological harm, she’d borne a son with a dandy set of pipes. And yet he felt insubstantial in Willa’s arms, pink as a baby mouse. Willa hadn’t consoled a newborn for decades and felt close to tears herself. Catching Zeke’s eye, she nodded toward the aisle, then got up and made her awkward way out, squeezing between the wooden pew back and people’s knees. Maybe it was sleep-deprived paranoia, but she felt disapproval in the stares. Or at least no gratitude for the gift of Helene’s DNA, right there in their midst. The well-dressed assembly struck her as a judgmental tribe, which she chalked up to Helene’s influence. Zeke’s friends had always been sweet, unpretentious boys who divided things fairly and let the terrible athletes play on their teams anyway. Admittedly, she was recalling in that moment his Cub Scout days. She might not really know w
ho Zeke had become in Boston, first as a student at Harvard Business and now striving as a young professional among some of the most famously competitive assholes on the planet.

  She paced at the back of the chapel eyeing the exits, wondering whether they should seek asylum in some basement fellowship hall or head out to the street. It was raining. Funeral guests kept turning around to verify that this child was still the source of all that noise. Willa stared back, brewing some umbrage. Wouldn’t it matter someday that the boy had attended his mother’s funeral? Producing this perfect child had been Helene’s final accomplishment and he was entitled to be there, as the only blood relative in the house. Other than Helene’s parents, who’d barely arrived from London in time for the service. Aldus was the name of Helene’s father, Willa had learned, but she wasn’t sure that justified keeping it in circulation. She perused the front row trying to recognize Helene’s carefully tinted mother from the back. Poor woman, to have lost a daughter.

  She shifted Aldus from one shoulder to the other and felt muted dismay at the amount of milk he’d brought up on the jacket. This might qualify as the worst-ever use of an Armani suit. But she had no better plans, beyond a Goodwill drop box. Maybe an email blast inviting Helene’s stick-thin, judgmental friends to drop by and pick up a souvenir. Either way it felt painful to give away a fortune in designer clothing, probably the couple’s largest material asset, when Zeke was taking on serious debt for this funeral.

  The officiating minister, a round-faced woman in owlish glasses, was crooning her way through a one-size-fits-all prayer. It was pretty obvious this minister hadn’t known Helene. Willa wondered whether Zeke had even told her it was a suicide. The Anglican church was Zeke’s best guess at what Helene’s parents would want, though they hadn’t been present to organize or pay for any of it. He’d had to lay out credit cards in those first dizzying hours, and the cost of having Helene embalmed was mortifying. Willa drew no pleasure from the pun. The parents’ one expressed wish had been to see their daughter, for closure, so he’d shouldered the cost of an open casket.