Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Willa understood Tig was being charitable in using the plural. “Helene loved Zeke. I just can’t believe she didn’t.”

  “Oh, I’m sure she thought Zeke was smoking dreamy. The ladies always do. And she was messed up in the head. You just said, depressed people can’t bond properly. So Helene …” Tig shook her head. “The theater went all dark and she didn’t see any reason to keep showing up to play her bit.”

  The explanation of suicide impressed Willa with its economy. “Zeke thought he could fix her. I’m sure you’re right about that. I see more than you think. Your brother almost always gets what he wants, he’s had a charmed life. Up to now. That could lead a person to believe he could fix unfixable things.”

  “But it all fell apart. And now he’s stuck with this serious byproduct of his major mistake. Why would he want to raise Dusty?”

  “Because he always does the right thing? You can’t argue with that, surely.”

  “And you would hold him to that. Make your son keep living forever in this house that’s already fallen down. Even if it makes him miserable.”

  “I want him to be happy. That’s all I want for both of you. That’s why we’re taking care of Dusty. We’ve talked it over, more than you realize, and I’ve told him I’m willing to do that. Until he gets situated.”

  “Situated. Like with a nanny? That’s how this goes down?”

  “Dusty is not yours to take on, honey. It’s too much, at your stage in life.”

  “It’s not too much at your stage in life?”

  “I’m handling it, I think.”

  Tig held up her knitting and counted stitches with her fingers as if reading a document in Braille. She would finish this little jacket tonight. The last one had little buttons shaped like dogs, salvaged from an old sweater of Zeke’s she found in a keepsake box. Willa had thought it a sweet gesture, but now she wondered if Tig had been trying to bait her brother back to his own DNA, like tossing a piece of the missing person’s clothing to a bloodhound. Trying to reconnect the pieces of her shattered family.

  Finally Tig spoke. “When Dusty turns twenty-one, you and Dad will be eighty.”

  “Not eighty.” Christ almighty. Not quite, but close enough. “I can’t really think that far ahead right now.”

  “You’re the one always yelling at me to think ahead.”

  “Yelling. Really Tig?”

  “Scolding. Helpfully informing.”

  “I’m sorry it feels that way. I’m just a plan-ahead type of person, I guess. A leopard can’t change its spots.”

  Tig said nothing to that, broodily clicking her needles to the end of a row, turning the piece around, and clicking her way back across.

  “I’m not mad at you, Mom,” she said finally, and it sounded perfectly true. “The crazy thing is, nobody in this family but me is actually thinking ahead.”

  “I do think about Dusty’s future. Believe me.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure you do. While Rome burns around you. Just like you were thinking of Zeke and me the whole time we were growing up. Sorry, but you know?”

  “No, I don’t. I’m Emperor Nero now?”

  “No.” Tig sounded reluctant to get into it.

  “Seriously, I want to know the charges. How was I not thinking of you?”

  Tig exhaled. “Okay. You and Dad were always just worker bees to this quest for a bigger, better-paid life. Moving from this college to that college, new town, new house, starting over in school every time I started feeling happy with my friends.”

  “That’s completely unfair! If we were looking to be rich, forget academia. The quest was tenure. We didn’t have a choice about moving. We were looking for security.”

  “And too bad, if everything I cared about got thrown out the windows as you drove down the road.”

  “We did what people in our position had to do, trying to make a good life. I guess I can’t expect you to understand that. I’m sorry your childhood was so terrible.”

  “But at least you’ve finally got that wonderful life you worked so hard for.” Tig turned the sweater upside down and began another row.

  Willa’s ears roared. How could she go on letting this child turn a knife in her heart? She needed to care a lot less, starting now. “Well, lucky for Dusty, it looks like I’m permanently unemployed. So I can’t sacrifice him on my climb up the career ladder.”

  Tig didn’t look at her. “I’m not even really talking about Dusty. I’m saying you prepped for the wrong future. It’s not just you. Everybody your age is, like, crouching inside this box made out of what they already believe. You think it’s a fallout shelter or something but it’s a piece of shit box, Mom. It’s cardboard, drowning in the rain, going all floppy. And you’re saying, ‘This is all there is, it will hold up fine. This box will keep me safe!’”

  “I guess I don’t have any idea what you mean.”

  “That’s my point.”

  The three-word win. Willa pulled a sigh from her depths. Having run out of words, and apparently condemned to reside in a wet cardboard box, she watched Tig finish another row of knitting and turn it again. She thought of old-fashioned typewriters, that physical way of working one’s way across a page, and envied the steady, incremental mode of accomplishment. It embarrassed her that her daughter had the practical skills of the family, in reverse of normal expectation. After Willa had bought Dusty’s first baby food, Tig pointed out that those little jars cost twenty times the price of their contents, not to mention the additives, then proceeded to make batches of applesauce and mashed vegetables she froze in ice cube trays, easily thawed for his meals. Willa would be damned if she would admit it, but they needed to keep the girl around. She knew how to do all the things Willa’s generation of females had skipped in favor of Having It All.

  “I did try. As a parent. I put you kids first in every way I had in my power, which admittedly wasn’t much. You have to give me that, or I’m kicking you out of the Big-Ass Chair.” Willa was 100 percent serious.

  Tig grinned. “We fight, Mom. That’s just us. Sorry I was mean.”

  With the caution she would use to approach a fox curled in her lap, she stroked Tig’s hair. Again, surprisingly, Tig let her.

  “Remember those knock-down, drag-outs we used to have over getting your hair brushed out? Every morning before school. My God.”

  “Dad called it the Hundred Years War of Hair.”

  “We didn’t last that long.”

  “No. You gave in and let me go all ’fro in middle school.”

  “The Brillo years. Sorry. Not your best look, you have to admit.”

  “Nope. That’s why I locked it up. Now I’m done with the hair wars forever.”

  “I wasn’t the right mother for hair like yours. In my family we’re all fine and flaxy, so brushing was all I knew. This I wouldn’t have thought of in a million years.” Willa traced a finger over the neat square grid of partings. “How do you even do it?”

  “You mean, get it started? Step one, move a thousand miles away from your mom and her jank hairbrush.”

  Willa laughed. “But somebody had to help you with this. Parting it into all the little sections. It’s so tidy and perfect, like a little garden.”

  Tig didn’t speak for a long time. Nick snored softly in time with his oxygen pump, the reason for their being there, but easy to forget. With his hearing aids out, no thunder on earth could wake him. The clock by his bed blinked a declaration of midnight, as it had been doing for days. When the electricity flickered off, even briefly, every clock in the house went back to an immutable starting point. Thanks to moisture in the walls and badly outdated wiring, this was happening so often they’d stopped resetting the clocks.

  Suddenly Willa had the strange notion Tig was crying. She pulled her head gently to her shoulder and kept her hand there, cradling the side of her face. Feeling dampness.

  “Tigger, sweetie. What is it?”

  “Nothing, just. Remembering stuff.”

  “You’ve nev
er, ever talked about Cuba. Did somebody hurt you?”

  “No. The opposite. They loved me. So, so much.”

  “Who did?”

  “Toto’s family.”

  A thoughtful silence. “I’m going to guess that’s not a family of dogs.”

  Willa felt the subtlest shift in Tig’s facial muscles. A smile. “Aristóteles. His family calls him Toto.”

  “You dated an Aristotle? Jesus, that sounds like a Tavoularis fantasy.”

  “Yeah, I thought of that. Dad would have approved on a first-name basis. Would you believe I met other Antigones? Cubans are so literate, it’s madness. Down the block from our house was the Dulcinea bakery.”

  “Dulcinea, as in Don Quixote.”

  “Yep. The manager’s name was Cervantes Garcia. His daughters were Thalia, Erato, and Terpsichore. He said he was hoping for nine girls so he could get all the muses in his house.”

  “Wow. That’s not what I picture when I think of Cuba.”

  “What do you picture? Cars with fins?”

  Willa thought about it. “Honestly? For a few years I just thought of it as the island that ate my daughter. A black hole. I guess I was hurt that you disappeared, and then turned up again with no explanation.”

  “What would you like explained?”

  “I don’t know. Where you lived, what you did. Why you stayed.”

  After a long moment of quiet: “I lived in the city of Trinidad. It looked like a birthday cake.”

  “That sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale.”

  “It was. Kind of.”

  “Why do they read so much? Because of no TV?”

  “They have TV. They can get American soap operas, the BBC news, anything. It’s called ‘the paquete.’ You go down to the newsstand every week and load whatever you want onto a thumb drive. For, like, two dollars.”

  “Oh.” Willa felt an instinctive concern for the copyright violations.

  “They read because they’re educated. Everybody can go to college. Farmers, mechanics, anybody, because it’s totally free. All the way up to a PhD, everything’s covered including room and board. Books, shampoo, tampons, the works. As long as you want to keep studying, you get to stay in school.”

  Willa thought of Zeke’s debts and their collateral damage, the mercenary life he was pressed to live under their weight. But there had to be a catch. Cubans must pay for their free ride in other ways, no jobs after graduation, something, because fairy tales aren’t real. These arguments rose to her tongue and then stopped, as Willa recalled Tig’s jubilance on Jorge’s shoulders that evening and the descent into hell with her brother. How this family rained on her every parade. It was no way to get the story.

  “Tell me. How does a city look like a birthday cake?”

  Tig considered this, clearly surprised to be asked. “More like cupcakes, actually. All in a row, blue, pink, yellow, white, all these little houses with icing-colored stucco facades and lacy grilles in the windows. Little narrow cobblestone streets, all running uphill to the Plaza Mayor and the cathedral. The city is five hundred years old and they’ve kept it perfect.”

  Willa considered her next question. She wondered what perfect meant, who decided, and how anyone kept it that way. Certainly she wondered how an oppositional temperament like Tig’s fit into a society that wasn’t known for tolerating dissent, but that question would have to wait. It had been a few years since Willa was this nervous about blowing an interview. “How did you meet Toto?”

  “Hitchhiking. He was going to this little town called Bayamo on the eastern end of the island. I said, ‘Bayamo is good, you can leave me off there.’ So, I didn’t know this but it’s a nine-hour drive to Bayamo. We stopped for lunch. Stopped to pee in the bushes, separate bushes of course. Stopped at this secret beach, because he wanted me to see it. By the time we got to Bayamo we were … friends.”

  “He’d fallen for you. Because you are so smoking dreamy.”

  “Mom. In the guy universe, half of them think I’m a smart-mouthed little freak.”

  “Thank goodness. Because honestly, who has time for all the guys in the universe?”

  Tig chuckled a belly-deep little stutter of a laugh that sounded just like Dusty’s, and Willa registered with a small shock their shared DNA. His next-of-kin after Zeke, exactly as related as Willa.

  “What was your new friend looking for at the end of this long drive?”

  “He went to see his friend. A doctor. She’d just graduated from med school and the government sends you someplace to work for two years. After that you go where you want. The top kids in the class go out to run clinics in the smallest villages. It’s the same kind of building wherever, the doctor lives upstairs and the clinic is downstairs, and medical stuff is all free, you probably knew that.”

  “Wait. The achievers get sent to the boonies? That sounds like punishment.”

  “No. Think about it. If you live farther from a hospital you want the best doctor in your town. Somebody that can handle diagnostics, emergencies, stuff like that.”

  “I can see that from the patient’s point of view. But still. Wouldn’t med students blow their GPA on purpose so they won’t have to go to the gulag?”

  Tig exhaled. “It’s a huge honor. That’s all I can tell you. Not all people are selfish. And not every small town is the gulag. You can believe it or not believe it.”

  Willa edged back from the precipice. “Tell me about Toto.”

  “Just, like, the sweetest person you can imagine? He has four older sisters, I think that’s why. They taught him how to give compliments, to listen and not just talk. But he’s also the family brain. Two degrees, medicinal chemistry and engineering.”

  “So he’s what, a professor?”

  “A lecturer, part time, like Dad. But he makes more money as a mechanic. The family runs a business repairing cars.”

  “And that’s how you learned. They put you to work.”

  “They put me to work.”

  “You lived with the Toto family?”

  “Yep. They all thought I was adorbs. His sisters, his mom and dad. So clever, so cute, chiquita Antigoñita. They basically adopted me.”

  Willa ached with jealousy. “We all think you’re adorbs.”

  Tig emitted a curt, soundless laugh.

  “But it sounds like you and Toto were not exactly brother and sister.”

  “You mean, did he administer cruel and unusual punishment? No, he didn’t act like my brother.”

  “I guess I’m asking …”

  “I know what you’re asking. Did we have sex? Yes, Mother. Did we use protection? Yes, Mother.”

  “Tig, have a heart. I’m trying to ask what you meant to each other.”

  “I don’t know. The world?”

  “Okay. I get that.”

  “We had our own little place. It was tiny. Technically it was a shed. But we made it nice. I’ve lived in worse, to tell you the truth.”

  “Like right now?”

  “Maybe. Kind of. I mean, this house is bigger and has its own plumbing but it’s not exactly cozy.”

  “Wait. Sitting with your mom in a giant recliner isn’t cozy?”

  Tig went quiet. Willa tried to be patient, but nothing more seemed forthcoming.

  “If you don’t want to answer this, you don’t have to. Why did you come back?”

  Tig shrugged. “Things fell apart.”

  “I’m sorry, honey. I’m glad you’re here, I have to say that. But I’m not glad for whatever made you leave him. It must have hurt a lot.”

  Tig sighed deeply, and her breath shuddered in a way Willa remembered from her childhood. Usually in the aftermath of tears.

  “You don’t have to talk about it. But it only keeps hurting when you don’t.”

  “And sometimes also when you do.”

  “Yes. Sometimes also when you do. I assume your visa situation was complicated. Which is not your fault.”

  “Yeah, I wasn’t legal. Don’t tell Zeke or
Dad. The Cuban government didn’t mind me being there, the hitch is with all the US restrictions. I had to go in through Mexico, and every ninety days I had to fly back to Cancún and reenter on a tourist visa. Or I was supposed to. It got, you know, just hard. I didn’t want to get the family in trouble.”

  “Of course. But it must have broken everybody’s heart. For you to have to leave for stupid legal reasons.”

  Tig nodded her head slowly, for a long time. Trying to feel convinced of something, it seemed. Finally she spoke. “So, there was another reason. The friend in Bayamo he was going to see, the doctor? Was Toto’s wife.”

  “His wife. Oh, honey.”

  “I know. Stupid, stupid me. He told me, at the time. He never lied about being married. I hung out for the weekend in Bayamo, and he invited me to ride back with him to Trinidad, and meet his family. And one thing just led to another.”

  “As they say.”

  “Don’t judge me, Mom.”

  “I’m not. I guess I’m mad at him. And this family, everybody who led you on.”

  “They all liked me better than her. Than Lucia, that was her name. Is her name. It wasn’t just Toto who regretted the marriage. All his sisters and his mom said they knew it was a mistake, Toto getting married so young. They were nineteen or something. Then university, grad school, med school. They grew up to be really different people.”

  “That happens. I’m sure they have such a thing as divorce in Cuba.”

  “Oh God, yes. Nobody gets very hung up on marriage.”

  “So.”

  “So okay. This is hard to talk about. So, why would he drive all that way to Bayamo once a month, when gas is crazy expensive and everything?”

  “Because he still loved her, maybe?”

  “No. To see his kids.”

  “Oh.”

  “Two kids. A boy and a girl.”

  “She had children? As a medical student?”

  “That’s not a problem, the day care situation in Cuba is like, utopian. The point is, Toto’s their dad. I fell for a married father of small children. Can you believe it?”

  “Oh, gosh. I see. When her two years were up in the little town in the boonies, he and Lucia were going to have to work things out. Probably move to the same town and make some kind of parenting arrangement.”