Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

  “Oh, that’s bad,” Iano remarked in an offhand way, as if watching a fumble by a sports team he followed only casually.

  “What does that mean, yield falling below zero?”

  “Investors in Japan are now paying for the privilege of lending the government money.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “It’s a bet. Like everything else.”

  Taken by people with cash coming out of their ears, was Willa’s bet. She thought of Zeke’s billionaires swapping around ludicrous excesses that had no bearing on their actual lives. Zeke’s deal through the Harvard mentor had fallen through, but the scent of blood was keeping his team on the trail. Iano defended the morality of their venture—a lot of it seemed to be about microloans, women in India getting self-determined in small businesses and such. Success wasn’t out of the question, in Iano’s view. But Willa noticed he wasn’t organizing their family life around the coming of Zeke’s lifeboat.

  The financial report was interrupted by news of the primary, with exit polls suggesting a sizable lead for the man who’d insulted every minority and threatened murder on Fifth Avenue. The Bullhorn. Willa moved quickly to change the channel.

  “Welcome to the Granite State,” Iano said. “We have rocks in our heads!”

  “I think of New Englanders as the salt of the earth. You know?”

  “White salt.”

  “True. Not a lot of pepper up there.”

  It was the hour when news could not be escaped. On the public station, after a musical punctuation between stories, a doctor from the CDC was called in to explain the connection between global warming and the spread of mosquito-borne diseases in the United States. Zika test kits were being sent to Florida that week, while Ohio and Pennsylvania had reported their first cases.

  “Those damn mosquitoes are here already?” Iano asked.

  “Not yet. I think it’s just people who’ve been traveling in the South.”

  Iano seemed entirely reassured by this, while Willa imagined taking a fun beach vacation and bringing home the souvenir of a brain-damaged baby. The expert doctor was thanked for his terrible news and the regular report resumed: The Supreme Court had put the EPA’s carbon rule on hold, siding with industry groups that wanted to do as they pleased while fighting a legal battle against regulation. Shares had dropped in several solar power companies as they fell short of their installation goals.

  Iano, meanwhile, faced the windshield as if it were a firing squad, and Willa waited for whatever he wasn’t saying. He was driving a car with nearly 200,000 miles on it and no warranty, but that was never going to be a Iano kind of worry.

  “What is it?” she finally asked. “I’m going to save our shambles, okay?”

  “I know this.”

  “I actually didn’t believe it before. I was just faking confidence to make us all feel better. But this new guy who really did live in our house is a historical celebrity.”

  “Mary wasn’t?”

  “She was, but she didn’t live in our house. Her house is gone. Our house belonged to the illustrious Thatcher Greenwood. It needs to be a national monument or something.”

  Iano made no comment on that prospect.

  “I’ve downloaded the registry application. Most of it is pretty straightforward. I have to track down an expert in historical construction to come and put a date on the house. Chris is helping me find the right person.”

  “I’m sure he will succeed.”

  She stared. “So what is it? You’ve been stewing on something all day.”

  He shrugged. “Nothing.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” The catalog of possibilities ticked through her head, cancer and infidelity included.

  He looked at her, a little desperate. “It’s not terrible.”

  “Then what?”

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said. My lack of ambition.”

  “Iano! That’s not what I said.”

  “Fire in the belly, absence thereof.”

  “Sweetheart, if you’re happy, I’m happy. I just wanted to be sure.”

  “So I talked to the dean yesterday. About contract renewal in the fall.”

  Her stomach clenched. “How’s it look?”

  “He said I’m good. They might even raise my course load. Not a lot, the money is pretty much what it’s going to be.”

  “But it’s going to be. For another year.”

  “Longer than that. The institution is no longer granting tenure, so nobody’s moving up. But enrollment is pretty stable. He said the foreseeable future. I can count on staying where I am until, you know. As long as I want.”

  “Until Social Security kicks in and you can retire. That’s really good news, Iano. You’re secure.”

  He glanced at her, checking for sincerity, finding it in place. He smiled. “Securely anchored at the bottom. I am a barnacle.”

  “My beautiful barnacle,” she said. It could have been a Greek endearment.

  She gazed out the window at this Jersey she would never fully accept, made of a soil so sandy and pale that plowed fields looked ghostly, and unpaved roads tended toward sand traps. The flatness was stultifying. She wouldn’t say this aloud because in light of other worries it seemed self-indulgent, but Willa missed mountains. Missed them hard, with the psychic equivalent of a toothache. She’d never known a place this flat in her whole vagabond life. She’d leaped on her scholarship from West Virginia to Colorado, then tied her fortunes to Iano’s and bounced pinballwise up and down the Rocky Mountain states, then finally back to the Blue Ridge. And then the collapse.

  They passed a field where two horses stood staring at their own long shadows in the dusky light, and she wondered what else they did for fun. She puzzled over a horde of dark shapes stalking in unison across a meadow, bent on getting somewhere. Wild turkeys. She thought about Dixie, who seemed every day less inclined to keep living. Dixie, who loved Willa with the force of a religion, the rescue dog she adopted the year they moved to Virginia and named to celebrate never having to move from the warm, green South again. As it turned out, they’d had to put Dixie on dog Prozac to pull off the departure, and even this struck Willa as a sign of profound loyalty. She tried to formulate some small hope for her dog that wouldn’t be too selfish. Not that Dixie would outlast Nick; that seemed immoral on all counts. Though she suspected it had run through everyone’s thoughts.

  That Dixie would live long enough to smell green grass again. She settled on that. The radio had turned without her notice to the New Hampshire primary. She snapped awake. With most of the votes counted, the Bullhorn had blown it out of the water.

  “I don’t believe this,” she said.

  “It’s only one primary.”

  “But still, it’s surreal. That the electorate could validate such a mean, grabby, self-aggrandizing man. At any level.”

  “Pop will be happy, anyway. Until the guy crashes and burns. But Tig will be chewing up the furniture.”

  “She won’t.”

  Iano raised his eyebrows, suggesting doubt.

  “Have you talked to her, Iano? Not that she’s a fan, but she totally has this guy’s number. He’s exactly what she expects of her elders at this historical moment. He’s legitimizing personal greed as the principal religion of our country.”

  “Not the first prophet in that line.”

  “No, but this one’s apparently kind of a savant, incapable of pretending there’s any shame in it. He’s put the pride back in avarice.”

  “If that’s what we’ve led Tig to expect of her elders, we should all drive ourselves off a bridge.”

  She gave him a careful look, but Iano didn’t have a suicidal bone in his body. “I’m just telling you. She says today’s problems can’t be solved by today’s people, we just keep shoring up our bankruptcy with the only tools we know. Making up more and more complicated stories about how we haven’t failed.”

  “She thinks she could do better?”

  Willa blew out some air. �
�She thinks we’re overdrawn at the bank, at the level of our species, but we don’t want to hear it. So if it’s not this exact prophet of self-indulgence we’re looking to for reassurance, it will be some other liar who’s good at distracting us from the truth. Because of the times we’re in.”

  “That’s preposterous.”

  “Tell me.”

  The broadcast moved on to less preposterous news: a clothing company suing a department store for copying its famous plaid. The Coca-Cola Company fighting a legal battle to register a trademark on the word Zero. And also, surprisingly, restructuring itself to help offset the impact of weak sales abroad.

  “What, foreigners aren’t buying Coke anymore?” Willa asked. “The nerve.”

  “Sure they are. ‘Weak sales’ only means the sales didn’t grow in the last quarter. In the trade world, standing still means you’re falling backward.”

  “Huh,” Willa mused. “What if they’ve already tracked down every person in every desert and tundra on earth who wants to buy a Coke?”

  “There you’ll have it,” he said cheerfully. “The end of the world as we know it.”

  *

  They were two blocks from home when a text came in from Jorge, relaying apologies from Tig because she hadn’t had time to make dinner. They should pick up something if they were hungry. “Hands full here.”

  They could hear the dissonant thunder of profanity before they opened the front door. “Sundowning” this was called, according to the hospice nurse who came three times a week to bathe, debride wounds, and chart the declining vitals. Apparently it was common for people in Nick’s condition to rage on a daily schedule against the dying of the light. The nurse, Jane, who came only mornings, warned that their loved one might start saying things very much out of character, which they shouldn’t take personally. She didn’t know anger was Nick’s character, now present in only two versions: silent or loud.

  Willa and Iano arrived at an awkward moment and lingered in the doorway to his room while Tig and Jorge finished changing Nick’s adult diaper. They worked together efficiently through the steps of the procedure: unfasten the tabs and fold it down, roll the man on his side, slip out and replace the old with the new, clean, and roll him back. The nurse had taught them the rolling trick, which also worked for changing the sheet underneath him without lifting him from the bed. They’d learned how to crush morphine tablets and administer them with a dropper under the tongue to a person who couldn’t fully awaken or swallow. In a lifetime of professional curiosity Willa had never thought to wonder about such things.

  “Thanks, guys. I feel guilty for taking the day off,” she said.

  Jorge touched two fingers to his forehead. “No problem. You needed it.”

  “Is Dusty down for the night?”

  “Hopefully.” Tig gathered up soiled paper products and stuffed them into a lidded pail. “We gave him a bottle and got him down, like, half an hour ago, wouldn’t you say?”

  Jorge nodded. His recent shave was growing out so his head looked gorgeously upholstered in black velour. He seemed a little dressed up, wearing a colorful print shirt unbuttoned over the standard sleeveless T. She wondered if they’d made other plans that had been spoiled by the delinquent, tardy parents. They both disappeared to the bathroom to wash up and disinfect themselves postskirmish.

  Iano stood leaning against the doorway. He hadn’t spoken since they entered the house. Willa felt anguish for all of them: a father, son, and granddaughter trapped in this excruciating intimacy. Even worse for Jorge, the innocent bystander drafted into service. He didn’t have to be there but there he was, feigning good-natured little spars as he dodged angry swats from the big, clumsy paw. During the diaper change Willa could have sworn she heard Nick call him “the goddamn spic,” and Jorge looked only faintly exasperated, as if at an elder for using outmoded slang. As in fact he probably was.

  “How is neither one of you at work tonight?” Willa thought to ask when they came back. Tig and Jorge rarely had an evening off together.

  “Restaurant’s closed, Mom.”

  “On Tuesday? I thought only Sunday and Monday.”

  “They’ve cut back to weekends only. Winter schedule, I told you that. From New Year’s till Valentine’s Day people always decide they’re never going to spend money again. Or eat.”

  “Then they get over it,” Jorge added.

  “Dad, watch it! Don’t sit,” Tig warned. Iano picked up an open syringe from the Big-Ass Chair, where he’d been about to collapse.

  “Sorry for that,” Jorge said, taking the needle from Iano and working it point-first into a clear plastic waste container that was bristling already with needles inside. “Tig just gave him his insulin right before the …” He tilted his head toward the bed, tactfully not naming the other procedure. Jorge had a permanently well-groomed look Willa attributed to the smooth hairline above the heavy brows, crossing his forehead as if drawn there with a ruler. Willa’s kin were all widow’s-peaky, as were her progeny.

  “That needle container looks full,” she said. “I’ll ask Jane for a new one. If she brings it we don’t have to pay for it, for some reason.” Willa remained mystified by the specific benefactions of Medicaid, to which Nick still had no idea he was beholden. They always held their breath when he ranted to Jane about welfare scammers.

  Tig frowned at the container. “I hate that. Throwing away syringes every day.”

  “It’s okay, honey.”

  “Yeah, Mom, except it’s not. They’re piling up somewhere. They don’t just vanish when they leave this house in a hazardous waste container.”

  “I know. I guess some things don’t make sense to recycle.”

  “Needles can be sterilized and reused. It is actually possible to do that.”

  Willa was in no position to argue with Tig, who did the most undoable things. Changing diapers, dressing the weeping wounds on his gangrenous extremities. “Tell me a story, Papu,” she coaxed now as she rolled layers of compression bandages around his swollen legs, wrapping him like a mummy from the bottom up.

  “Don’t give me skatá, Tell me a story Papu. Changing the subject. I said I want to go tomorrow. You’re taking me.”

  “Where do you want to go, Pop?” Iano brightened at the prospect of an outing.

  From Nick’s mumbled Greek response Willa caught one word that led to a disquieting guess. He confirmed it by saying, “Graveyard.”

  “I told you we can go tomorrow morning,” Tig said patiently, “if you’re feeling good enough to get in your wheelchair. If not, it’ll have to wait for another day.”

  “Why do you want to go to the cemetery, Pop?”

  “Whya hell you think a dying old malákas goes to the cemetery?”

  Into the consequent silence Tig dropped this explanation: “To choose a gravesite.”

  A spasm of eye contact made the rounds: Iano to Willa; Willa to Tig, with a small shake of her head to convey That’s not happening; Tig to Jorge with a little lift of the eyebrows that said I told you.

  “We’ll have to look into that, Pop,” Iano said, unhelpfully. If they qualified for funeral assistance through Medicaid it might get them a pine box, but not a plot in Vineland’s fancy cemetery. The family was still in arrears on Helene’s funeral debt; Willa ignored that one on the grounds that Zeke should long since have broached this with Helene’s parents, and in the meantime no one was going to repossess Helene. But the difficult Nick conversation had been undertaken by Iano and his sisters. Decisions had been made. It would fall to Willa to share these with Tig after they’d gotten Nick doped down for the night.

  Everyone watched Willa perform the ritual of the morphine: crushing, diluting, meting out, as somber and elaborate as a tea ceremony. She handled the heavy narcotics because she didn’t want Iano or Tig to feel responsible if something went wrong. Nick accepted the dropper under his tongue with the same heartbreaking eagerness as Dusty taking his bottle. Willa returned the morphine to its hiding place (as advi
sed by Jane, in case of a break-in) behind a framed family photo on the shelf. Iano volunteered to stay with Nick. Tig went to check on the baby. Willa migrated with Jorge to the kitchen.

  “You two haven’t eaten either. I’ll make us something,” Willa said, staring into the woeful interior of her refrigerator: ketchup, mayo, a half block of cheddar. A leftover mash-up of something that would have been Dusty’s dinner. A hand of speckled plantains someone had stuck in the fridge to rescue their lost youth. Because of the iffy electricity they weren’t stockpiling a lot of perishables, but this was grim. She considered grilled cheese, then saw the lone heel of bread on the counter in its rumpled condom-like wrapper. She’d used up the loaf on sandwiches that morning.

  “Something from nothing, looks like,” she said. “Sorry, the cupboard’s bare. I meant to get to the grocery today but I guess we played hooky instead.”

  What she’d done instead was turn over Iano’s last paycheck in full to ACE and Visa, and go on counting on Tig for the rations that always turned up in their kitchen. Willa had noticed she was working less, but missed that the restaurant had all but closed. She stood with her block of cheddar in hand, ambushed by memories of the government cheese she’d subsisted on through her college years.

  “I’ve got this,” Jorge said, running water into a saucepan and lighting a burner on the camping stove. She admired his optimism.

  “You shouldn’t have to cook on your day off.”

  He smiled. “On my day off I can make what I want, and eat it.” He handed her a grater and a plate and made himself at home, rooting around in the cupboards to find sugar and a bag of cornmeal. He adjusted the burner expertly, as if any normal household might have a twenty-year-old camp stove seated atop a defunct kitchen range. Willa didn’t mind him taking over the situation. She was a little in awe of this tall, self-possessed young man with the velveteen head.

  “Thanks for helping out with Nick,” she said. “I mean, thanks doesn’t touch it.”

  He lifted a shoulder, seeming a little defensive. “I’m not going to let Tig do that alone.”

  “No, but still. It’s ugly stuff. A lot of guys would find something better to do.”