Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  She found them several blocks behind, trying to change the tank in his portable oxygen system, stymied. Iano brightened. “Willa! Thank God, we’re saved.”

  She was alarmed to see the dial on zero. She’d stuck an extra tank into the mesh basket on the wheelchair without expecting they’d need it. But Nick had been on his portable throughout their Christmas dinner outdoors, and now this extended outing. It was going to be a two-cartridge night—possibly the biggest splurge of their holiday. Her hands trembled as she turned the valves to swap out the cartridges. What kind of world left the critically ill in the hands of amateurs feeling their way in the dark?

  “I was so afraid,” Iano said. “He tried to tell me how to do it but I couldn’t read anything on those little gauges. I was afraid of shutting him off.”

  “It’s not your fault. I should have thought about it earlier.”

  “Pop, how about it? I almost killed you, but you’re going to survive.”

  Willa’s heart pounded, mostly for Iano, who’d been minutes from watching his father asphyxiate in the stupid glow of Christmas lights. That beautiful, buoyant soul would have carried the damage. Whereas Nick seemed indifferent to the narrow escape. Scowling, mute, with a lap blanket covering his disfigured limbs, he stared off down the dark street, pointedly not looking at Willa. Since coming home from rehab he’d hardly spoken to anyone. They could have welcomed the respite, but Nick’s silence felt as eerily wrong as the warm December weather. Minus the bluster, Nick was a husk.

  “What is it, moro? Don’t worry. We would have figured it out.”

  “You would have,” she lied.

  He stared at her face. “You want me to take Dusty for a while?”

  She shook her head, tight lipped, warning him off, because words might unstop the flood of emotion she’d kept pressed in her throat for hours. It was just too embarrassing to walk around sobbing at a festival of Christmas lights. Fake cheer it would have to be. She linked arms with Iano to help push Nick’s wheelchair over the uneven pavement, and tried to reconstruct the brief glow she’d felt when they first arrived—the sense of having stepped into some exotic time and place where people went outside at night and walked around together enjoying the neighborhood. But the crowd was thinning out. And Iano wasn’t giving her a pass on the fake cheer.

  “Tell me. It’s Christmas, and you’ve been sad all day.”

  “No. It was a good day.”

  “Don’t tell me this, moro. You’ve been sad for a hundred years.”

  “That’s not exactly kind,” she said, laughing, and then her eyes and nose began pouring like a faucet, and she had no tissues. She kept such things along with car keys and wallet in the pockets of her coat, which she’d left at home that night. Using an old navy peacoat for a purse worked well for people who left the house only to go to the grocery or walk the dog. Willa’s throat constricted around some noise it wanted to make.

  “Moraki mou. What am I going to do with you?” Iano pulled her head against his shoulder, which made their progress awkward, but they kept walking.

  “I don’t know. Trade me in.”

  In their odd formation they made their way down the block surrounded by the ebb-tide energy of a party winding down. She spotted Tig and Zeke. Iano waved them over. “What happened to all your friends?”

  “They ditched us,” Zeke said. “We’re boring.”

  “They didn’t want to be seen with a running-dog hedge fund investor.”

  “Sorry for helping the economy. I guess your friends don’t need jobs.”

  “Oh right, your richie riches are making jobs happen in Vineland.”

  “Ela,” Iano said. “Enough.”

  “I’m asking. Do they spend their millions on things that create jobs?”

  “In this country? Not really. There’s only so many goods one person can buy.”

  Iano stopped so abruptly his silent cargo in the wheelchair pitched forward. “Will you two stop? You’re giving your mother a nervous breakdown.”

  “That’s not true,” Willa protested.

  “Okay, never mind. We love watching our children rip each other to pieces.”

  “Where did your friends go?” Willa asked.

  “They decided to drive around. But we wanted to be with our dear darling family.” Tig peered closely at Willa’s face. “Are we giving you a nervous breakdown?”

  “No! I’m fine.”

  “In this century it’s known as depression,” Zeke said, sounding territorial.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Willa said, sounding pathetic even to herself.

  “But we had such a perfect Christmas!” Tig insisted, sounding twelve.

  “I know, honey. Maybe it’s just … not what I pictured for us at this point in life.”

  “Your mother misses Virginia.”

  “No!” Willa looked at Iano, surprised. “That’s not it. I never minded us moving around. I just thought we’d end up settled somewhere. In a house with, you know …”

  “A roof and walls?” Zeke asked, in a jocular way, but Willa felt stung. A half hour earlier it had been home enough for his son.

  “I thought,” she said, “eventually, we’d get to stop worrying and retire in some kind of reasonable comfort. You two would come visit us. With grandkids. From places where you had your own houses and jobs.”

  “Uh-oh,” Tig said. “Mom’s having a visitation from the Ghost of Capitalist Fantasies Past.”

  Willa bristled. “I don’t think I’m asking for too much.”

  “Nobody thinks they’re asking for too much,” Tig bristled back.

  “Fine, then, Tig. Why are we walking around here in fantasy land? This is a travesty. A lot of poor people pretending they have money to waste on holly fucking jolly and electricity. Why is everybody pretending?”

  “Good question, Mom,” she said, winning in three words, as Tig did.

  Willa decided she was done with motherhood for the night, if not the remainder of her allotted years. Somehow they’d made a complete circuit and were approaching the Heisborn yard again. The baby doll in the manger was such a realistic replica Willa had briefly been fooled—alarmed, actually—the first time around. Under scrutiny she saw it was handcuffed with a zip tie to its wooden bed, a precaution against thievery, she presumed. Such realism would come at a price.

  “Let me just say,” Zeke said, “I’m not the one still parking my ass at home with the parents.”

  “Let me just say, I’m not the one that abandoned my child.”

  “Tig, honestly,” Willa said.

  Tig ignored her. “You never answer me. Where does it go? All this fabulous responsible money you’re investing.”

  “All over the world. Microloans, helping people grow their businesses, that kind of thing. And for every transaction, a little bit for Zeke, Mike, and Jake.” Willa watched his discreet little victory dance and understood this was Zeke “going to ground.”

  “The three musketeers rape the planet. Go team.”

  “Grow or die, that’s just the law of our economy, Tiggo. You can’t get around it. It’s like Darwin’s law of survival of the fittest.”

  “Except your law is invented and natural laws aren’t. What you can’t get around is there’s no more room to grow.”

  “Do you remember,” Iano asked, “when you were little and I used to stop the car and put you both out in the grass by the side of the road?”

  Willa linked arms with Iano and gently turned him away from the fight. “Remind me why we didn’t drive off and leave them?”

  Iano only now noticed the lifelike doll in the nativity scene. “Christ, look at that. We could have bought ourselves a couple of those.”

  “I suppose in AD zero,” Willa mused, “the pediatricians of Bethlehem were saying back-is-best, like they are now.”

  Iano nodded. “Thank goodness. Think how all the crèches would look if the babies were lying ass-up in the manger.”

  The offspring were escalating to a decibel
level that was drawing some notice. “So it’s survival of whoever rips the food out of somebody else’s mouth. That’s one heck of a mean old world. Extra bad for midgets. That’s what you want?”

  “Want want want!” Tig shouted. “That’s the only force in your equation. So you have to be a whore, licking the balls of the Wall Street bull.”

  Nick’s shoulders heaved in a gurgling chuckle: his first sign of life in hours.

  “Oh. He is born!” Willa said. It struck her as revelations often do, after no one cares anymore about solving the puzzle. HEISBORN was He Is Born, badly executed. The letters were too big to fit across the yard with proper spacing between the words.

  “What the hell,” Zeke said. “Mom’s gone all Jesusy on us.”

  “Trust me, I haven’t.”

  At last the family went quiet. Tig gave her another probing look. “Did you see the alien invasion one, Mom?” she asked. “It’s in the next block down.”

  “Think I missed the alien invasion.”

  Willa thought she must have imagined the compassion in that look, but Tig startled her by grabbing her by the hand. “Come on. It’s my favorite, you have to see it before we go home.” Tig seemed so young, a little girl tugging her mother toward something she needed to share. She didn’t drop Willa’s hand until they stood looking at the display, a busy installation of little goggle-eyed creatures and spaceships covering the lawn, like some madcap sci-fi Grandma Moses. It took Willa a moment to understand that everything was made from plastic bottles. Bleach bottles, soda bottles, all cut apart and cleverly reassembled into personae with bottle-cap eyes and bulging, jointed limbs. No two were alike. Willa spotted a one-horned, one-eyed flying purple people eater. The cultural reference suggested a creator of a certain age.

  “Take me to your laundry,” Tig said.

  “That’s pretty cool,” Willa agreed. “Did it win any prize?”

  “Nah. Of course it wouldn’t. There aren’t any lights.”

  Willa hadn’t noticed until she pointed it out, the display had no lights. The recycled plastic visitors to planet Earth were taking advantage of recycled light, basking in the electric glow of neighbors on all sides.

  *

  Crying jags and sleep problems were to be expected, the pediatrician explained, as part of the grieving process. Willa recalled staring at the doctor, and was embarrassed in retrospect. He meant the baby, not her. But maybe it was that simple: in a life of loss, people tossed and turned. They cried. Dr. Patel had been patient with their long list of questions at Dusty’s six-month checkup, promising Willa and Tig he was out of the worry zone: eating well, gaining weight, hitting his developmental milestones, ready to try out solid foods. They could relax. Dusty wasn’t likely to die on them in the night.

  Nick was.

  “This is why we have families,” Willa explained in the darkness of Nick’s room. “So we never have to go a single day without worrying ourselves sick.”

  The oxygen compressor hissed and hissed, waves against a shore.

  “I used to have this dream when I was little,” Tig said dreamily. Tig who was still, who would always be, little. “About trying to carry water. I was supposed to get it from here to over there, or something bad would happen. You or Dad or somebody might die. I didn’t have a bucket or anything, just my arms. I kept scooping up water like a bundle of sticks, and of course it would all just run out.”

  Willa nodded. “That’s what life will feel like when you have children.”

  The two of them sat watching Nick sleep, propped nearly upright in his fancy bed, chin jutting forward. His body always leaned like this, reaching for something even in his sleep. The nurses had called it “air hunger.” An instinct. The body remembers to survive, even when the mind signs off.

  “I do,” Tig said.

  “You do what?”

  “Have a child. Dusty.”

  “Of course. You’ll always have Dusty. He’s your nephew.”

  “Mom. Are you not seeing? Or just pretending, because Zeke’s the golden child.”

  “Oh, honey. Don’t do this.”

  Tig reached down to the floor to pick up her knitting. Since Dusty’s birth she’d made him a series of jackets, larger as he grew, all based on the same pattern: a single oddly shaped piece with corners and angles. When she finished she would fold it, stitch up the shoulder seams, and voilà, a baby kimono. She’d also knitted rafts of hats and booties, but the origami jackets amazed Willa every time. This one had bold stripes, orange and blue if she remembered right. It was too dark in the room to see color.

  Mother and daughter curled together in the recliner they all called the Big-Ass Chair, constructed for people of that particular make. It was an old thing, brown corduroy, beyond huge. Tig could lie in it sideways. Willa hadn’t seen a piece of furniture like it before or known such things existed, but she’d seen the asses of course, so it stood to reason. The recliner had belonged to one of Sondra’s clients, now in hospice, and the family wanted the furniture gone. Jorge brought it over in a friend’s truck with a bevy of guys to carry it in, after learning someone had to be in there every night keeping watch over Nick. The cannula often fell off his face, or he slumped into the wrong position and lapsed into choking gasps that alerted the watcher to reposition the cannula or the patient.

  Usually one person did the duty alone; usually it was Iano. But Zeke’s arrival had shaken things around. To head off his awkward, unaffordable proposal of going to a hotel, Willa suggested he share the living room mattress with Iano for the few days he planned to stay. She and Tig would take the chair. It was seductively comfy, now that they’d spent enough Febreze on it to dismiss the faint scent of urine, so Willa didn’t mind being there. Or hadn’t, until Tig went cold on her. As she could have foreseen.

  Willa tried stroking her head, and surprisingly Tig let her. She’d never explored her daughter’s locs and now found their texture both softer and firmer than she expected. Each one grew from its own little square plot on Tig’s scalp, within a grid of perfectly even partings. To spend a night like this, inches from her daughter’s skull and everything it held inside, was a tender agony Willa could have explained to no one but her mother.

  “Zeke is no more golden than you are,” she tried. “You connect with your children differently but love them the same. I know you never believe me. But it’s true.”

  “I’m too old for you to tell me stuff like that, Mom.”

  “Apparently you’re not.”

  “I’m not asking you to love me. I’m saying I love Dusty and I want to keep him.”

  “Sweetheart. This is not a ‘can we keep him’ situation. He’s not a puppy.”

  Tig turned to look at her, dark eyes glinting in darkness. Willa had an uneasy feeling she could keep no secrets from those eyes, including the papers she and Zeke would soon be taking to a notary.

  “I know what you’re saying about Zeke,” Willa conceded. “I don’t think he ever bonded properly with the baby. He was so depressed.”

  “He can have his reasons. I’m not trying to make this about Zeke.”

  “But he’s coming back to himself now. He’s a lot better than he was.”

  “And he didn’t bond with his child. He wants to be in Boston and make money and hang with his friends.”

  “He wants to make money to help keep a roof over our heads.”

  “Our heads. Yours, mine, the baby he ditched.”

  “It’s not abandonment, striking out for a paycheck so you can send money back to the family. Young men have been doing that since the beginning of time. He’s the only one of us with very good prospects right now, so I appreciate the effort.”

  “Prospects,” Tig said, making it sound like a disease.

  “You two will never approve of each other. I can’t help you with that.”

  “Mom. You’re not even listening. I’m telling you what he would tell you if he had the guts. The life he wants doesn’t have any place in it for a baby.”

/>   “I thought that too, at first. Having this baby out of the blue seemed pretty out of character for a guy who does everything by the book. I hate to say it, but I thought Helene trapped him into it. But it’s not true. He really wanted the baby. He convinced me.”

  Tig inhaled, a show of patience. “He wanted the baby,” she said. “Past tense. He was so gone for her, Mom. Helene was the first girlfriend of his life that he thought was actually too good for him. He was terrified of losing her. The baby was a mistake, of course. But he talked her into keeping it, thinking it would make her stick around.”

  Willa was stunned by this story. “You don’t think Helene wanted the baby?”

  “She wanted zip. Obvi.”

  “And Zeke thought the baby would, what, keep her attached to life?”

  “He trapped her, Mom. If we’re going to discuss entrapment.”

  “She could have ended the pregnancy. She certainly had a mind of her own.” And a Mercedes and a closet full of Gucci that Willa didn’t mention.

  Tig shrugged. “Maybe she didn’t exactly have her own mind at that point. And Zeke is persuasive. All I know is, he didn’t think she would ever check out on a baby. And that way he’d get to keep his wonderful Helene.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I have eyes and ears, and a brain.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Mom, you can’t be objective about your own kids. You say that yourself, you can’t see our flaws.”