Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Willa had barely spoken with them, mostly to apologize for Iano’s absence, emphasizing the brand-new job and disabled father, downplaying their inability to afford a quick fly-in. At a glance she read these parents as distant, and not just geographically. Helene had spent her childhood in boarding schools. They were British, so that arrangement was probably more normal than it seemed to Willa. She knew she would have to guard against stereotyping, and try not to read Helene’s whole life backward as a reel of emotional injuries spooling toward suicide. Brain chemistry, Zeke kept saying, and Willa understood. At the end of her run at the magazine she’d been the science and health editor; she had a professional grasp of disease. Helene had been a whole person like anyone else—the woman with whom Zeke had fallen in love—except when her brain salts began to precipitate their potent horrors. There but for the grace of serotonin go the rest of us.

  Aldus finally crash-landed into sleep and went still in her arms, hiccuping but otherwise relaxed. Willa stroked his crazy hair. He had more than an infant’s normal share, jet black like Helene’s, standing up from his head as if in horror at this life he’d landed in. His translucent eyelids and pursed lips aroused protectiveness and amplified Willa’s sorrow for her tall, handsome, devastated son, who was now walking toward the pulpit to read the eulogy. She’d warned against this, telling him it would be hard to hold it together in front of a crowd, harder than any presentation he’d ever given. And that was before Zeke told her what he planned to read: the suicide note. Willa had lost it then, there had been some yelling for which she now felt terrible. They were exhausted. When he’d handed it over and made Willa read it, she couldn’t stop the tears.

  Zeke was right, of course. The poor girl must have labored for months over this articulate essay, a final accounting of her gratitude for Zeke’s love, their three years together, and her hopes for their child. For eulogy purposes they’d had only to edit out the fatal caveat: Helene’s belief that her best gift to her partner and son was the removal of her poisonous self from their lives.

  *

  Willa had stopped wondering if things could get worse, and now sat in her son’s bedroom going through his girlfriend’s nightstand, throwing out little bottles labeled “O Play” and “Love Lube.” She felt abstractly relieved that they’d enjoyed a sex life despite everything—pregnancy, depression, drugs with well-known damping effects on libido. This task felt as surreal as everything else she’d done since speeding up I-95 to Boston, with sleeping in the bed of the freshly deceased as a starting point. At whatever early-morning hour she’d arrived, Zeke had given Willa the bed and slept on the couch by the bassinet. With daylight gaining traction around her she’d lain awake on the very spot where Helene had ended her life, until she finally had to get up and creep to the living room like some Victorian-novel ghost, staring at the child in the bassinet and the wrecked young father on the sofa. She longed to slip with them into unconsciousness. Anything to avoid going back to that haunted bedroom. She couldn’t ask which side of the bed had been Helene’s but hadn’t stopped wondering, either, until just now when she finished boxing up the clothes and started on the nightstands.

  Postfuneral, postburial, post-whatever they called the gathering her friends had gamely organized at Helene’s law firm, the suffocating truth was descending: many lives were over. Zeke and his child would persist on some utterly unplanned path, starting with eviction from this apartment Zeke couldn’t afford on his own. The lease was in Helene’s name, so he could walk away without legal recourse. Willa was dubious: in her experience, landlords always won. But Zeke explained it was one advantage of their being unmarried. For another, Helene’s serious credit card debt would not become his problem. Also, her Mercedes and its staggering monthly payments zipped right back to the dealer.

  Their marital status hadn’t initially mattered to Iano and Willa, tradition-agnostic baby boomers that they were. Cohabitation was normal. But once the pregnancy seemed here to stay, Iano thought his chivalrous son would insist on marrying the mother of his child. Iano was wrong: these kids found marriage uninteresting in legal or sentimental terms. Helene was an attorney, Zeke explained, who didn’t need a boilerplate contract written by the state of Massachusetts to govern her personal life. Chivalry wasn’t dead, it’s just that men didn’t own all the horses anymore, and women of Helene’s ilk didn’t need that kind of rescue. Here in Zeke’s private sphere, Willa was getting the picture.

  She felt at a loss to console him as he waded through his swamp of grief, hour by hour, while she watched from the outside. But she wouldn’t be anywhere else, and couldn’t remember the last time they’d spent more than an hour together, just the two of them. On family visits the sibling bickering and Iano’s ebullience used up all the oxygen. These quiet days in his apartment were different. Willa could not have borne the admission that she preferred her son to her daughter, but there was no question which one she’d found easier to love. Easily born, easily reared, he’d grown into a temperament so similar to hers, Willa lost track of the boundaries between them. People remarked on his resemblance to his father, and superficially it was true: he had the height and shoulders, the trustworthy wide-set eyes. “Molded in the image of his papa,” the Greek relatives gushed each time they saw Zeke, and Willa wouldn’t argue—she loved the mold. The shape of her husband in a doorway could still bump her heart. But Zeke’s ash-blond coloring was all Willa’s, and so was everything inside: a handsome Greek mold filled with the pale Saxon stuff of a duty-bound maternal line.

  Tig was the opposite, small and fine boned like Willa, the same high eyebrows and pointed chin, but with dark eyes peering out from an interior that boiled with her father’s energy. They’d called her “Antsy” from infancy because Antigone fit better on a birth certificate than on an actual child—no surprise to Willa. The nickname was exactly right; the girl had ants in her pants. In high school she’d fought her way back to Antigone but her friends collapsed it to Tigger, then just Tig. No one called her Antigone now except occasionally Iano, the responsible party, still trying to make good on it.

  Willa missed Iano badly but hadn’t called home since the day of the funeral. There was too much to tell and Iano seemed almost willfully resistant to getting it. He was looking for some Greek-tragic vindication, still airing his thoughts about the pregnancy having been a bad idea, while here was Aldus installed in the living room, bassinet and changing table flanking the TV. Well beyond the idea stage.

  She finished the nightstand and moved on without pause. The bathroom held a confounding array of skin-rejuvenating products for a beautiful girl in her twenties. Willa dumped it all into trash bags after wondering briefly if it would be awful to keep some of the expensive night creams. She tried not to read prescription bottles as she tossed those as well. Zeke was in the second bedroom where Helene had set up her study, pending the need for a nursery. It was still a study, despite the accomplished birth. Helene had done nothing to implement a transition, no pastel colors or mobiles, these happy things mothers do to lure babies into the world. In an apartment suffused with mourning, Willa found this non-nursery the most unbearable place, but only because she knew about normal motherhood. It’s nearly always women who lead men into babyland, urging them to get serious about names and nursery themes. Zeke couldn’t know what he’d missed.

  He was in there now pulling together files to return to Helene’s employer, which at least seemed less personal than razors and hairbrushes. Willa kept asking him not to take on any task that felt too hard, but really, what part of this was not too hard? He retained the instincts of the charming young man he was, moving quickly to take heavy objects from Willa, opening the car door for Helene’s mother. But sleepwalking through all of it. When the baby cried, Zeke seemed relieved to wade out of the Helene morass and go meet simpler demands. The only happiness in this apartment came from direct contact with infant skin, so Willa made herself stand back and let Zeke do most of the feeding and changing. She watched her s
on becoming a father, cradling a tiny life in his large hands, searching the rosebud face at close range, but she couldn’t guess whether he was falling in love, thunderstruck, as she’d been by her firstborn. The workings of love might be damaged, in a beginning overshadowed by despair. Zeke might end up blaming the child for his loss. The pregnancy had killed Helene; this was a fact. Willa spent hours trying not to speak of these things. It was hard enough to bring up necessary subjects such as where Zeke was going to live.

  She took a break between bathroom drawers and stood in the doorway watching him move file boxes into the hall, lining them up like boxcars. He knelt beside a box of books and tucked its four cardboard flaps into one another.

  “I can take care of Aldus this afternoon if you want to go look at apartments.”

  He glanced up with an expression that confused her. Fear, she would have said.

  “Or I could go,” she added quickly. “I don’t know quite what you want, what part of town you can afford. But if you head me in the right direction I can do some recon.”

  He sat on the floor and exhaled, resting his forearms on his knees. “I can’t afford an apartment, Mom. Not in any part of Boston. I was thinking I might move in with Michael and Sharon, but they just texted me. I guess a baby is kind of a game changer.”

  “Moving in with your friends?” Willa was dumbfounded. He wasn’t some gap-year kid who could set up life on a buddy’s couch. He was a father.

  “They didn’t exactly say it’s because of Aldus. But I’m sure his performance at the funeral was a reality check. I knew it was a lot to ask.”

  Willa took a moment to process this, including her part in it, her failure to keep Aldus quiet. Were these people previously unaware that babies cry? “Your roommate from grad school?” she asked carefully. “You were thinking of living with him again?”

  “Right, the Michael I’m planning the start-up with. Of Zeke, Mike, and Jake. Michael’s married now, I told you that. They bought a house in Southie so they’ve got a lot of room. Well, an extra room. We’ve been thinking we could operate the business out of that space until we can take on the overhead of an office.”

  “So you asked if he would take on the overhead of you and Aldus.”

  Zeke looked miserable. Any rejection hurts, but this was beyond the pale. She hated this smug couple hoarding their childless serenity. Also Helene, and her shortsighted doctors, and everyone else involved in the outrageous reversal of fortune that had left her son begging his friends for shelter. “You two need your own place,” she said calmly. “You’re a family now. We’ll find something you can afford.”

  “Mom, we won’t. I have no income.”

  “You’re working full time.”

  “Technically it’s an internship.”

  “But you’re doing so much. You’re probably working harder and getting more commissions than anybody in that office.”

  “Yeah, but it’s still an internship. Usually if you turn out to be golden, they’ll put you on salary after six months or so.”

  “That sounds like peonage. You’re already golden. They should pay you something. A stipend for an internship isn’t unheard of.”

  “They offered that, but it wasn’t worth it. The minute I go on payroll I have to start paying back my student loans. We just can’t afford that right now. Helene and I decided we’d be better off just on her income, for now.”

  “All right, but your situation has changed. Couldn’t you renegotiate?”

  “I still have the student loans.”

  Willa hadn’t pressed for details on his debt and dreaded doing so now. Iano had cosigned when he was a minor, but it was a point of pride with Zeke that he’d handled his own finances since his first year at Stanford. She nodded slowly. “How much?”

  He shrugged. “Over a hundred. Around a hundred and ten thousand.”

  “Jesus, Zeke. I didn’t know it was like that. You worked all the way through.”

  “Yeah, for minimum wage. My income barely covered my books.”

  Willa couldn’t imagine starting adulthood so indentured. She’d gone to state schools on scholarships. “We should never have let you take that on.”

  “You didn’t want me to. Remember how hard you tried to talk me out of Stanford? But Dad said go for it, and I just … I wanted it so bad.”

  Willa did remember, painfully. The house divided, Achilles heel of their parenting. “I didn’t want you not to go to Stanford. I just thought maybe in another year you could get a better ride. That you could transfer in, or something.”

  “I know. I could have taken the deal with Dad’s tuition exchange like Tig did, and gone to some dinky hippie school.”

  “Ivins isn’t that dinky, it’s a good college. Hippie, I’ll grant you. But tuition exchange was the right way to go for Tig. Given her track record on following through. You’re different, you finish things. Iano says they never put students in a hole so deep they can’t dig out. We didn’t worry too much.”

  He looked at her, his eyes the indefinite blue of ocean. When she was young, Willa had told her mother everything: the amount of her first paycheck, the day of her first missed period. Was it normal now for parents to operate in the dark? She never knew what was fair to ask. Clearly, Zeke was shamed by his financial straits.

  “Obviously, we should have worried.”

  He shrugged. “That’s the fix I’m in. If they salaried me right now at entry level at Sanderson, I’d end up in the negative numbers.”

  “I see.” She leaned on the door frame feeling physical loss as her assumptions fell through the floor. He’d done everything by the book. They all had. Willa and Iano had raised two children, the successful one and the complicated one. That was their story, for as long as she could remember. For how many years had it been untrue?

  “Was there … Did Helene have a pension through her employer?”

  “I wouldn’t be entitled to it. We’re not married.”

  “Oh, right. Not her social security either. The baby might be due some benefits.”

  Zeke seemed startled by the notion of his son as a legal person. Willa thought survivor benefits were probably a long shot; Helene was a resident alien, fresh out of law school. She might not have been around quite long enough to get in the game. “I’m sorry to be thinking about practical things right now, honey, but …”

  “Yeah. I’m up shit creek. With a baby on board.”

  “I’m sorry. What about life insurance? You’d be her beneficiary, married or not.”

  His look darkened. “Suicide, Mom. Nobody pays you to do that.”

  “Oh. I guess I knew that. But isn’t that discrimination? It seems so …”

  “Punitive?”

  “I was going to say ignorant. Helene died of depression. A medical condition caused by pregnancy and an OB-GYN who cared more about the baby than the mother.”

  “You could argue that, but I’m sure the insurance company has a nice team of lawyers to back them up.”

  Willa was floored. “What are you going to do?”

  He looked away from her, and in that turn of his head she saw every defeat in his life: the barely missed first place at all-state track; that blond girl who reneged on their prom date. The AP exam he bombed because he had a vomiting flu. His defeats were so rare she could just about count them, or at least the ones she knew about. He took them hard, for lack of practice. Zeke was very good at everything except disappointment.

  “Do you have day care lined up, at least? I assume she was going back to work.”

  Zeke gave Willa a strange pleading look she couldn’t understand. Then he stood and walked down the hallway into the kitchen. She closed up another one of the boxes, counted to ten because she could think of absolutely nothing else to do, and then followed him. He was staring into the open refrigerator.

  “I know this is hard to talk about. I can stay here awhile to help. I’ll go with you to the pediatrician’s appointment next week. But at some point we have to ma
ke a plan.”

  “I’m not asking you to do this for me, Mom.”

  “I know. Nevertheless.”

  He slammed the refrigerator. “I must have said that a hundred times. To Helene. ‘We have to make a plan.’ I guess I sounded like you do now. So this is how she felt.”

  “It wasn’t an outlandish request to have made. When one is having a baby.”

  “I suggested we go look at places. Day cares. I asked her to look into maternity leave if that’s what she wanted to do. But she had to want something.”

  Willa recognized the same anger she’d been harboring for days, toward Helene. They would have to take turns keeping the lid on that. The child would need to love his mother, and it was all on them, forever. “She wasn’t thinking right. We know that now.”

  “What we know now is that she was planning this all along.”

  “That can’t be. She loved you. Stop blaming yourself, you did everything right.”

  “You keep saying that, Mom. Sometimes doing everything right gets you a big fucking nothing! Did that ever occur to you?”

  His raised voice caused her to lower her own. “I keep saying it because it’s true. She loved you, Zeke. You were good to her. She wouldn’t have plotted something like this. I mean yes, her death I guess, but not the fallout. She didn’t do it to wreck your life.”

  “Nevertheless,” he said.

  The repetition of Willa’s word could have been Zeke mocking her, but probably not. The two of them often opened their mouths and spoke the same words, even at the same moment. “Here’s a proposal,” she said. “You could come live with us for a while so we can help out. Just until you get things figured out.”