“You looked up the meaning of ‘Aldus’? On what, some name-your-baby website?”
“When they first told us about the name. After the ultrasound, when they found out it was a boy. Remember?”
“I remember thinking: they have six more months, they will come to their senses.”
They were quiet for a while, sobered by the memory of a living Helene and happy Zeke calling them with the news about their boy. That was the day Willa and Iano had stopped resisting and embraced it as real. Him as real. Their grandchild. After the phone call they’d gone to the attic together—in those days they had a house with an attic above it, solid ground underneath—to look at the beautiful antique crib they’d dragged through every move of their marriage, even after their kids had outgrown it. It was handmade of sturdy walnut by someone in her father’s West Virginia family whose only remaining scion was Willa. Against every practical instinct she’d refused to let that crib go to strangers on eBay. Now it would go to Boston, they’d said happily. To a new scion.
“Our little guy from the collapsing house,” Willa said. “Well done, Helene. I’m going to have to call that foreshadowing.”
“It was her father’s name. We could give her the benefit of the doubt.”
“I know. But still.” The woodland was thinning out and Willa could hear pounding surf somewhere off to their left. “‘Dusty’ I can live with. It’s sweet.”
“The house falls and the dust settles.”
“Let us pray.” She thought of her mother’s long-standing promise that Tig would one day settle. Settle down, settle out, settle the debts. Did anyone ever?
The path ahead of them divided: more forest lay ahead, and off to their right a boardwalk led over an inland swamp with a sign that offered the promising “Gossamer Meadow.” Without hesitation they chose the boardwalk. Willa both loved and mistrusted the sense of walking on water, which felt like getting away with something illegal, even if the water itself was black and stagnant. The elevated path vibrated slightly with their steps. It took them into a wide-open country with a watery floor and a crop of dense, sticklike reeds where no channels looked wide enough for swan passage, although Willa heard clucking sounds. Eventually she caught sight of little duck-like creatures spiriting almost invisibly through the thickets.
They stopped to admire a shrub with giant white flowers growing straight up from the water. Iano leaned over the railing to break off a branch and present it to Willa. The droopy flowers looked like they were made of wet toilet paper, and when she touched a petal it also felt like that. Some word between frangible and slimy.
“Ick. But thank you.” She wiped her hand on her jeans.
“Uh-oh,” he said, looking down the boardwalk to a spot some fifty yards ahead where it ended abruptly.
They kept walking, unable to resist the precipice. “It’s like we’re walking the plank,” Willa said, amazed by the effusive spider-webbing of yellow caution tape at the terminus they hadn’t spotted earlier, now so plainly visible.
“We aren’t technically obligated to follow through,” he pointed out.
They arrived at a dead end festooned with so many barriers and legal warnings, a person would need some kind of death wish to get through it. Bright yellow laminated signs explained this was damage from Hurricane Sandy, that the Park Service presently had no budget for repairs, and that this portion of the reserve was now closed to visitors. Iano and Willa stood gazing past the barricade at a splintery line of vestigial boardwalk rising intermittently above the reeds. It must have gone on like that for miles.
When they turned around Willa found herself in tears. Iano put his arm around her shoulder, carefully matching her shorter stride. “Ela, matakia, don’t be sad. Ten minutes ago we didn’t even know about the Gossamer Meadow. Now you can’t live without it.”
Willa said nothing. Matakia meant “little eyes,” probably a step above moro on the endearment chain. She tossed away the flower branch and wiped her cheeks with her shirt sleeve, and then her nose, despite the multitude of tissues and wipes in the diaper bag on her shoulder. She wondered why she’d carried all this ridiculous baggage. As if a diaper emergency unattended would be the end of the world.
“What is gossamer, anyway?” Iano asked. His instincts were good; words were Willa’s most reliable distraction.
“Flimsy. Now you see it, now you don’t.”
“Okay, so now we don’t.” He stroked her cheek.
“I’m sorry. I know you hate this. But you might just have to let me be sad, okay?”
“Okay. But for what?”
She shrugged, looking away. “I don’t know. Damn Hurricane Sandy and the damn Park Service budget cuts. We can’t afford to stop doing the shit that’s screwing up the weather, and can’t afford to pick up the pieces after we do our shit.”
Iano nodded. “This is what in my field we call a conundrum.”
“This is what in my field we call assfucked.”
“Speaking as a journalist?”
“Speaking as the unemployed.”
She looked at Dusty, still wide awake, and wondered at what point in her tenure as his guardian she would have to stop saying words like assfucked. She’d managed it before, when Zeke and Tig were small. But her frustrations were so much smaller then.
“What if Tig is right?” she asked.
“When is Tig ever right? About what.”
“That the problem is actually the world running out of the stuff we need. That capitalism can only survive on permanent expansion but the well eventually runs dry.”
“Nothing is ever that simple, moro. First of all, well in the sense you’re using it is just a metaphor.”
Willa didn’t know what else to say. Her heartbreak was for something well beyond the Gossamer Meadow. The fact that taking all the right turns had led her family to the wrong place, moneyless and a few storms away from homelessness. Also, the fact that she couldn’t legitimately feel this sorry for herself while carrying a Gucci diaper bag. Probably made by Asian children more moneyless and homeless than herself. If metaphorical thinking wasn’t useful here, she was rooked for other options.
They reached the spot where the path had forked and this time took the other one. In minutes they came out of the trees into bright sunshine and the view of a long lake divided from the Atlantic by a dam of white dunes. The path widened and Iano walked beside her again, heartily taking her arm in his as if they were college kids or revolutionary extras in Les Misérables. Willa watched Dusty’s little round head bobbing gently against Iano’s chest. His eyes darted up and down, taking in sky, trees, movement. Willa remembered reading that infant vision was limited to close range, but he seemed to know he was outdoors. Or at any rate, someplace a lot bigger than usual.
“We’ve hardly taken him outside,” she said. “Actually, have we ever?”
“I don’t know. Tig takes him for walks in that Rolls-Royce of a stroller. She and that neighbor kid take him to the cemetery a lot. Which is weird, if you ask me.”
“True, but that probably doesn’t feel like outdoors to him. That stroller is like a rolling baby pod. Also the young man has a name and it is Jorge. Apparently he’s good with babies, thanks to the nieces and nephews. I’ve noticed his two older sisters seem to run a tight ship over there.”
Iano made no reply. With Tig and romance there was no parent handbook, but she and Jorge had been spending a lot of time together. Willa wasn’t sure whether Iano opposed this union or hadn’t noticed it.
“He seems like a nice kid,” Iano finally said without conviction.
“I’ve never seen the baby this happy. Look at him.”
Iano looked down, pulling in his chin to regard the face pressed against his sternum. “You’re right. I’m a baby happiness machine.”
Willa laughed. “That’s probably what he’s needed all this time, to be pressed up against somebody’s warm body and taken outdoors. It might not be you in particular.”
Iano made an exa
ggerated pout.
“The pediatrician said he might cry a lot when we put him down. She said a lot of stuff about trauma and attachment issues, but I was kind of shell-shocked and it didn’t really register at the time. Now that I think about it, Zeke hardly ever picks him up.”
“Zeke is not any kind of a happiness machine,” Iano pointed out.
“I’m not blaming Zeke. It’s all of us. We have that fancy-schmancy car seat with the detachable baby bucket so you go from home to car to stroller and naps to feeding without ever touching your baby.”
“Willa. Fancy-schmancy?”
“I know. That sounded exactly like Nick. You need to get me out of the house more, I’m getting infected with Nickness.”
“Gamo to.” Meaning, “fuck it.”
“Gamo to,” she replied.
“Putana thalassa pou se gamoun ta psaria.” Meaning, “whore ocean where all the fish fuck each other.” A family favorite. In her early days among the Tavoularises she’d actually looked that one up, refusing to believe such an expression could belong to a common parlance. Oh, youth.
Iano put an arm around her waist and pulled her close, intuiting that the mention of Nick might bring on a panic attack. They were both trying not to think about him. For several days running he had refused to get out of bed. Tig was giving him all his insulin shots now, and changing the bandages on his legs, and Willa hadn’t even asked the bathroom question. This morning he’d yelled for Tig but she’d already left for work, and when Willa showed up instead he’d gotten pretty belligerent. She didn’t need to fuss over him like a damn baby, et cetera. She and Iano had nearly canceled their plans, but he insisted they should take the brat and go. Leave him alone. Nick’s version of kindness.
He would probably be fine. Tig was coming home and would check on him at some point midday, between her shifts. Or maybe she’d only worked through lunch and was doing something else that afternoon, Willa wasn’t sure. She’d been volunteering at the school formerly known as “For the Feebleminded” on Saturday after noons, digging up a giant garden with the kids. They were part of a big group of volunteers and inmates, including Jorge’s resident cousin, who collectively called themselves the Feebleminders. Willa wasn’t mistaken, Tig had told her this. Their garden project was called Feeble Field. Who could begin to interpret these kids’ moral language, with the wires of political correctness, outrage, and irony carefully crossed so as to keep out anyone too old to grasp Lady Gaga.
“Tell me about your lady scientist,” Iano said. “Mary Trick.”
“Treat!” She punched his shoulder. “So she’s mine now?”
“If she made famous discoveries in our house, I think we can parlay that into a decent fortune.”
Willa smiled. Iano was trying to walk her back from a panic attack, but in present circumstances one ledge backed up against another. She didn’t want to think about grant writing or house rescue any more than she wanted to think about Nick.
“How much fortune do we need to raise, exactly?” she asked. “According to your pal Pete. Just so I know the ballpark I’m shooting for.”
Iano blew out a long breath. “An acre or so of tin roofing, a ton of cement foundation, new brickwork on walls and chimneys, a lot of new framing inside, plus sheet rock, et cetera. That’s not even counting labor.”
“Maybe I don’t want to hear the numbers.” Willa had the familiar sensation of losing ground. “It doesn’t seem fair. Mary wrote about it as just this cozy little abode.”
“This is a new century, moro. For modern happiness, forty acres and a mule won’t touch it. We need four hundred acres and a Triple Crown winner. And you will get us there, because you’re superwoman.”
“No I’m not. Sorry to crap on your Lady Scientist museum, but I’m not even a hundred percent sure Mary’s house is our house.”
Dusty had finally eased into sleep. He was a stunner, this child, with loads of black hair they’d attributed to Helene. She’d been the rare kind of beauty with blue eyes, creamy skin, and jet-black hair. But Dusty was starting to get pigment, his eyes headed toward brown and the skin no longer translucent. Looking like a Tavoularis. And starting to achieve some predictability: he would wake up hungry around the time they got back to the car. Willa would open a convenient one-pack of formula and heat the bottle in the handy device that plugged into the car charger, and all would be right with Dusty’s world. That much future she could handle at the moment.
They stopped in the trail, arrested by the sight of thousands of birds overhead. The flock moved like an aurora spreading across the sky, abruptly contracting into a dense oval and then flinging out again. Maybe they were unnerved by the storm clouds building in the west. Willa couldn’t take her eyes from the mass of birds, a billowing scrimmage that slowly achieved the shape of a dark funnel cloud with a tail reaching toward the ground. The tail dropped lower, lower, and then touched a shrubby tree at the edge of the lake. In seconds the whole cloud seemed to get sucked into the tree. All birds vanished.
“Whoa,” she said. “What just happened?”
They stared at the trembling foliage. A tree of leaves that were actually birds.
“I think they’re swallows. They used to come down our chimney and my mother would get hysterical. It’s some old-country curse, having birds in the house.”
“Really. Don’t I remember she had a parakeet?”
“Mikis, sure. Mikis was not a bird. According to my mother.”
Willa nodded. “I see how she managed to live with your father.”
They stood for a long time, hypnotized by the trembling bush. It must have been a bird ritual, the drumming up of collective will to take the blind leap of faith, forsaking all safety to fly across an ocean to the southern hemisphere. How could they trust something so unknown, and for how many years had they done it, Willa wondered: A thousand? Ten thousand? While humans altered everything on the face of their world, these birds kept believing in a map that never changed.
“She had a thing for birds,” Willa said. “My Mary Treat. I’m reading one of her books, Home Studies in Nature.”
“The tiny man let you bring home one of her books?”
“No, I found it online. Illustrations and all. The writing is so sweet, Iano, it just kills me. She had relationships with the birds and insects in her backyard. She’s like this Disney princess scientist, talking to the creatures and letting them in the house.”
Iano crossed himself. Willa smiled.
“I don’t think she brought the birds in the house. But other things. Spiders, actually. Tower-building tarantulas. She kept them in big glass jars in her living room.”
“Sweetheart, this is not helping our entrance fees.”
“I know. I think she was a little eccentric, even for then. But she sounds so blooming happy. In her writing, I mean.”
“This is when, eighteen seventies you said?”
Willa nodded. The storm in the distance was building pretty ominously. Willa could feel a change in the density of the air as they stood mesmerized by the bush of birds, waiting for something to happen. She took a few cautious steps closer, pulling Iano with her. They paused, then approached a little more. Eventually they stood close enough to see individual birds hopping all around manically inside the bush like electrons confined in their orbits. Like Jiffy Pop. It was a wonder of the bird world.
“Sounds like you’re getting infatuated with your Mary.”
“What’s not to love? A happy naturalist in a leafy utopia founded on science and ambition and plenty of everything to go around. If I weren’t infatuated, I’d be jealous. As far as I can tell, she got to make a good living writing stories about birds and spiders.”
“You mean as characters?”
“No. Strike the Disney princess. She was a real scientist. But into domestic things, bird nests and spider towers. How they learned to build them, what forces affected their survival. Evolution was a new idea, so I guess nature wasn’t just a cabinet of curiosities any
more. It was a machine, and everybody was keen to know what made it tick.”
“She made a living from professional publications? I’m jealous. We have to pay the journals a page fee to publish us.”
“Believe it or not, she wrote for popular magazines, Harper’s and The Atlantic. Can you imagine? Submitting a story about the catbirds in my backyard to The Atlantic? People were so … precious back then. Less worldly, I guess.”
“Or more interested in catbirds.”
“Or more interested in catbirds.”
“So all this will go into your historic preservation grant?”
She turned to look at him. “Okay, here’s why I adore you. We have no idea if she lived in our house. I’m going back Monday to see what I can find. Meanwhile you’ve got the British National Trust putting new tin on our roof and the museum ready to open.”
“And here’s why I adore you—” he said, interrupted by a siren-loud blast from Willa’s phone. Thousands of birds burst from their tree skyward like a house going up in smoke. Dusty woke and howled.
“Jesus!” Willa said, digging through the diaper bag for the phone. The thing must have had two dozen exterior pockets. The ringtone was ear splitting; she’d set it on max the previous night so the alarm would wake her out of her Ambien fog for the baby’s feedings. She finally found her phone, in the pocket labeled with a phone icon.
“It’s not a number I recognize. Should I answer it anyway?”
“No,” Iano said firmly. “Probably a junk call. Who would be calling that you don’t know?”
“Nobody.” She turned the phone to silent and watched the connection end. Immediately it vibrated with a text coming in.
“Oh, it’s Tig,” she said, watching words materialize. “Using Jorge’s phone, or somebody’s.” She went quiet, and held the phone up for Iano to read:
Mom come home. Taking Papu to ER. Bad storm, they’re saying Shelter In Place.
8
Shelter in Place
They took the train to Batsto and stepped down into a hive of coveralled workers coming or going from their shifts: mill, glassworks, foundry. Mary cut a straight path through gangs of men who rubbed their hands together and expelled quick frosty breaths, turning to look as she passed. Thatcher felt vaguely traitorous, to whose side he couldn’t have said. He walked behind Mary, thread to her needle, seeing what they saw: the slab of wooden plant press under her arm, the folds of indigo skirt swinging below the short black coat. Little Selma trotting alongside like a spaniel.
Unsheltered Page 17
