Unsheltered

by Barbara Kingsolver

Genres: Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

2016 Vineland: Meet Willa Knox, a woman who stands braced against the vicissitudes of her shattered life and family — and the crumbling house that contains her.

1871 Vineland: Thatcher Greenwood, the new science teacher, is a fervent advocate of the work of Charles Darwin, and he is keen to communicate his ideas to his students. But those in power in Thatcher's small town have no desire for a new world order. Thatcher and his teachings are not welcome.

Both Willa and Thatcher resist the prevailing logic. Both are asked to pay a high price for their courage.

A testament to the power and goodness of human spirit, Unsheltered explores the foundations we build, crossing time and place to give us all a little more hope in those around us, and a little more faith in ourselves.

Release date: October 15, 2019

Publisher: Harper

Print pages: 496

Sample

1

Falling House

The simplest thing would be to tear it down,” the man said. “The house is a shambles.”

She took this news as a blood-rush to the ears: a roar of peasant ancestors with rocks in their fists, facing the evictor. But this man was a contractor. Willa had called him here and she could send him away. She waited out her panic while he stood looking at her shambles, appearing to nurse some satisfaction from his diagnosis. She picked out words.

“It’s not a living thing. You don’t just pronounce it dead. Anything that goes wrong with a structure can be replaced with another structure. Am I right?”

“Correct. What I am saying is that the structure needing to be replaced is all of it. I’m sorry. Your foundation is nonexistent.”

Again the roar on her eardrums. She stared at the man’s black coveralls, netted with cobwebs he’d collected in the crawl space. Petrofaccio was his name. Pete. “How could a house this old have a nonexistent foundation?”

“Not the entire house. You see where they put on this addition? Those walls have nothing substantial to rest on. And the addition entails your kitchen, your bathrooms, everything you basically need in a functional house.”

Includes, she thought. Entails is the wrong word.

One of the neighbor kids slid out his back door. His glance hit Willa and bounced off quickly as he cut through the maze of cars in his yard and headed out to the alley. He and his brother worked on the vehicles mostly at night, sliding tools back and forth under portable utility lights. Their quiet banter and intermittent Spanish expletives of frustration or success drifted through Willa’s bedroom windows as the night music of a new town. She had no hard feelings toward the vehicle boneyard, or these handsome boys and their friends, who all wore athletic shorts and plastic bath shoes as if life began in a locker room. The wrong here was a death sentence falling on her house while that one stood by, nonchalant, with its swaybacked roofline and vinyl siding peeling off in leprous shreds. Willa’s house was brick. Not straw or sticks, not a thing to get blown away in a puff.

The silence had extended beyond her turn to speak. Mr. Petrofaccio courteously examined the two mammoth trees that shaded this yard and half the block. Willa had admired the pair of giants out her kitchen window and assumed they were as old as the house, but hadn’t credited them with a better life expectancy.

“I have no idea why someone would do that,” he finally offered. “Put up an addition with no foundation. No reputable contractor would do that.”

It did seem to be sitting directly on the ground, now that she looked, with the bottom courses of bricks relaxing out of rank into wobbly rows. A carapace of rusted tin roofing stretched over the gabled third floor and the two-story addition cobbled on the back, apparently in haste. Two tall chimneys leaned in opposite directions. Cracks zigzagged lightningwise down the brick walls. How had she not seen all this? Willa was the one who raised her anxiety shield against every family medical checkup or late-night ring of the phone, expecting the worst so life couldn’t blindside them. But she’d looked up contractors that morning with no real foreboding. Probably assuming her family had already used up its quota of misfortune.

“I can’t hire you to tear down my house and start over.” Willa ran her hands through her hair at the temples, and felt idiotic. Both-hands-on-the-temples was a nervous habit she’d been trying to break for about twenty years, since her kids told her it made her look like The Scream. She shoved her fists into the pockets of her khaki shorts. “We were thinking we’d fix it up, sell it, and get something closer to Philadelphia. We don’t need this much room. Nobody needs this much room.”

On the moral side of things, Mr. Petrofaccio gave no opinion.

“But you’re saying we would have to repair it first to put it on the market. And I’ve noticed about every fourth house in this town has a For Sale sign. They’re all in better shape than this one, is that what you’re telling me?”

“Twenty five percent, that would be a high estimate. Ten percent is about right.”

“And are they selling?”

“They are not.”

“So that’s also a reason not to tear down the house.” She realized her logic in this moment was not watertight. “Okay, you know what? The main thing is we live here. We’ve got my husband’s disabled father with us right now. And our daughter.”

“Also a baby in the picture, am I right? I saw baby items, a crib and all. When I was inspecting the ruptures in the ductwork on the third floor.”

Her jaw dropped, a little.

“Sorry,” he said. “I had to get behind the crib to look at the ductwork. You said you are looking to downsize, so I just wondered. Seems like a lot of family.”

She didn’t respond. Pete extracted a handkerchief from his pocket, mopped his face, blew his nose, and put it away. He must have been braising inside those coveralls.

“That is a blessed event, ma’am,” he suggested. “A baby.”

“Thank you. It’s my son’s child, just born. We’re driving up to Boston this weekend to meet the baby and bring them the crib.”

Pete nodded thoughtfully. “Due respect, ma’am, people usually ask for an inspection before they purchase a house.”

“We didn’t buy it!” She wrestled her tone into neutral. “We inherited. We were in Virginia wondering what to do with some old mansion in New Jersey after my aunt died, and then out of the blue my husband got a job offer from Chancel. A half-hour commute, that’s too good to be true, right?”

“Your husband is a professor up there?” Pete’s nostrils flared, sniffing for money maybe, engaging the common misconception that academics have it.

“On a one-year contract that may not be renewed,” she said, taking care of that. “My aunt had this place rented for quite a while. She was in a facility out in Ocean City.”

“Sorry for your loss.”

“It’s been a year, all right. She and my mother died a week apart, same kind of rare cancer, and they were twins. Seventy-nine.”

“Now that is something. Sad, I mean, but that is like a magazine story. Some of that crazy crap they make up and nobody believes.”

She let out an unhappy laugh. “I’m a magazine editor.”

“Oh yeah? Newsweek, National Geographic, like that?”

“Yeah, like that. Glossy, award winning. Mine went broke.”

Pete clucked his tongue. “You hate to hear it.”

“Sorry to keep you standing out here. Can I offer you some iced tea?”

“Thanks, no. Gotta go check a termite damage on Elmer.”

“Right.” Despite her wish to forget everything he’d told her, Willa found his accent intriguing. Before this move she’d dreaded having to listen to New Jerseyans walking out the doo-ah, driving to the shoo-ah, but South Jersey was full of linguistic surprises. This Pete was the homegrown deal, part long-voweled Philly lowball, part Pennsylvania Amish or something. She watched him scrutinize the garage on the property line: two stories, antique glass windows, thick pelt of English ivy. “You think that building goes with this house?” she asked. “The deed isn’t very clear.”

“That is not yours. That would be the stip house to the property next door.”

“The stip house.”

“Yes ma’am. When they sold these lots back in the day, they had stipulations. Improve the property in one year’s time, show intent to reside, plant trees, and all like that. Folks put up these structures while they got it together to build their real house.”

“Really.”

“You look around this town you’ll see a few, all built on the same plan. Trusses like a barn, fast and cheap. Some guy was doing well in the stip house business I figure.”

“What era are we talking about?”

“Landis,” he replied. “You don’t know about Landis?”

“He’s what, some real estate developer?”

“A king more like, back in the day. This is just a bunch of wild wilderness when he buys it, right? Thirty thousand acres and nobody but Indians and runaway slaves. So he makes this big plan to get people to come. Heaven-on-earth kind of thing.”

“One of those utopian communities? You’re kidding me.”

“I am not. Farms like a picture book. You notice the streets are Plum Peach Apple and all like that? Almond?” He pronounced it owl-mond. She also noted his resistance to contractions, and the recurrent back inna day. She wished for her pocket tape recorder.

“Yeah, I noticed. My daughter goes out to walk the dog and comes home wanting a snack.”

Pete laughed. “Sounds like some healthy kid. All my girls want are those Sour Patch things and the diet pop. I am gonna tell you, it drives the wife crazy.”

Willa had no intention of trying to explain Tig. “So he named it Vineland thinking people would swarm around like fruit flies?”

“Captain Landis was all about the fruit, is what I know. And who knows how to grow grapes but the Italians? So he starts up his own newspaper in the Italian language for attracting the right element. The Petrofaccios came from Palermo, Italy. My nonnie kept a scrapbook of that stuff.”

Willa smiled. “Landis was a wino.”

“No ma’am, that is the crazy thing, there was no drinking alcohol in Vineland whatsoever. That was a very significant rule, back in the day.”

Willa saw holes in this story but still might look into it for a feature: Nineteenth-Century Utopias Gone to Hell. “You’re sure the garage is theirs? Not that I need it.” She laughed. “Unless you think we’ll need a new place to live.”

Unnervingly, he didn’t laugh. “It’s theirs. I can tell by the angle and the setback.”

She assumed the neighbors didn’t know this, or it would be crammed with collateral debris from their garden of broken cars. Pete gave their peeling ranch house a once-over. “Original structure came and went. That is a shame. Those originals were some beautiful old girls in their day. Like yours.”

“Except for her weak foundation. The ruin of many a girl, I guess.”

Pete looked at her, evidently finding this unsuitable material for a joke.

“If it’s such a shame to lose them, shouldn’t ours be saved? Isn’t there grant money for this kind of thing? Historic preservation?”

He shrugged. “Our fair city has got real empty pockets at this moment in time.”

“They must have been loaded at some point. It sounds like this place was built on an immigrant work ethic and old money coming out of the woodwork.”

“Money,” Mr. Petrofaccio said, staring over the dead Fords and Chevys at two girls pushing babies in strollers down the gravel alley, conversing in a musical Asian language. “Where does it all go?”

Willa had been asking the same question. In her family, in her profession and her husband’s, in strained European economies and the whole damned world, where is the cash that once there was? Her husband had a PhD in global politics, her son was an economist, and neither of them seemed all that interested in this mystery that plagued her. Not as it specifically applied.

“That would be the thing here, government money,” Pete offered. “Because no ordinary residential person is going to have what it takes here. There is a time for propping things up, and then there is past time.”

Willa exhaled. “Okay. This isn’t the straightforward consultation I expected. I think you’re saying if we don’t choose to demolish our home, our only other options would be stopgap measures, and none of them looks very good. I guess we’d better schedule another meeting when my husband can be here.”

“Right.” Pete offered her a business card and a condolent handshake. She already knew her gregarious husband would collect this man as a pal. All their married life she’d watched Iano swap phone numbers with plumbers and oil changers, the born Facebook friender, long before Facebook.

“We’ll call you about the next step after I break the bad news. But I’ll warn you, my husband is also going to give you a bunch of reasons why we can’t tear down the house. And they’re not all the same as mine. Between us we can filibuster you.”

Mr. Petrofaccio nodded. “All due respect? I hear that kind of thing all the time. It does not ever get the house fixed.”

*

Willa spent a restless hour walking around the empty third floor trying to choose a room for her office. After a month in the house she’d gotten things decently organized downstairs but had made no inroads on the top story except for the room she’d nominated as an attic. Alongside the antique crib she’d stashed the usual junk, holiday decorations, underemployed sports equipment, plus boxes of the kids’ keepsakes stretching from preschool finger paintings to Tig’s wacked-out science fair posters and Zeke’s high school yearbooks signed by all the girls who’d found him 2 cute 2 b 4gotten.

Willa now recalled the contractor’s reason for stepping behind the stuff: To inspect ruptured ductwork? Christ. It sounded like an aneurism. What shook her was his cheerful demeanor as he delivered the awful prognosis. Exactly like her mother’s last oncologist.

To steer out of a tailspin she staked her claim on the room that looked down on the automotive neighbors. A view to avoid, some might say, but the leafy afternoon light through the giant beech was gorgeous. And the hardwood floor was in pretty good shape except for the scarred, grayish path that ran the circuit of the four connected third-floor rooms. She remembered Zeke and Tig and one of their now-dead dogs chasing each other through a circular floor plan like this in one of their homes. Which one? Boulder, she thought, recalling mountains out the kitchen window. Hills to which she’d craved to flee, stuck at home with two preschoolers while Iano laboriously blew his first shot at tenure.

These top-floor rooms heated up like a furnace. All the windows in the house reached from floor to ceiling, and most so far had proved unopenable. She leveled a couple of kicks at a frame before giving up, then sat on the floor and unpacked a box of her books into categorical piles. Then angrily repacked them. Nesting was ludicrous, given the doomed state of the nest. She closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall, feeling the rhythmic thrum of Nick’s oxygen compressor on the first floor. Lest she ever relax into solitude, the miasma of her father-in-law and his life support suffused the household. She wished Iano were home. Classes didn’t begin for several weeks but already he had pressing duties galore at his new office.

The word office plucked a pang of nostalgia in her chest. Given her age and profession—midfifties, journalist—she might never again have a working life with colleagues, office gossip, and a regular incentive to get out of sweatpants. The remainder of her productive life revoked overnight felt like an amputation. In her last years at the magazine she was telecommuting more than not, but still the regular drives to the main office on the outskirts of DC had consumed so much life force she’d started envying her friends who were going freelance. Of this envy Willa was cured in no time flat. Now she understood an office had made her official. Her whole career was thrown into doubt retroactively. Did a professional wake up one day with no profession? For sanity’s sake she needed to send out some freelance proposals, and step one was to claim a room of her own. Now even that simple project was tainted with calamity.

She lay on the floor and stared at the concentric brown stains on the ceiling. Iano had proposed they paint over the stain and forget it, because he was Iano. Willa had felt that if timbers up there were leaking their dark fluids, the trouble must run deep enough to warrant calling a contractor. Some tin would need patching, maybe they’d find rot in the roof beams. But the whole house a shambles? The shock settled on Willa as a personal failure. As if she’d invited the disaster by failing to see it coming.

She forced herself up and went downstairs, rousing Dixie from her nap on the front hall rug, clipping on her leash and urging her out the door for a walk. Dixie, with the help of expensive doggie Prozac, had conquered a lifelong terror of car travel and coped with the move from Virginia, but now wanted to spend her remaining days sleeping off the dismay. Willa saw the merits of that program.

“Easy does it,” she coached, wondering what Dixie’s old eyes were making of these Vineland sidewalks that were broken everywhere, heaved up by the bunions of giant old trees. Every street offered a similar view of oak and maple trunks lined up like columns of the Parthenon. The contractor’s utopia story made sense insofar as these trees suggested some thorough city planning over a century ago. She passed in front of the neighbor’s house with its generous corner lot fully planted in autos, then turned south on Sixth and made tedious progress as Dixie inspected every tree trunk. The dog was finicky about emptying her bladder but eager to sniff out the local news, seeming to think it differed from yesterday’s. Like the elderly Vinelanders Willa saw in diner booths poring over the town’s weekly, as if something might have happened here since the last issue.

She crossed Landis Avenue, a bizarrely supersize main street, the width of a four-lane freeway at least. Iano had posed various entertaining theories, but the truth turned out to be mundane: Land Baron Landis had laid out a namesake street to match his ego. He might as well have paved the place in gold. He should see his dying little burg now, with its main drag so deserted Willa felt safe taking out her phone to check the time as she and her legally blind dog casually jaywalked.

She wanted to call Iano with the new installment of their family disaster so he could share her sensation of drowning. But he would be on his way home by now, and Iano was a highly distractible driver. Really it was her mother she’d wanted to call right after the bad news, or in the middle of it, while Mr. Petrofaccio was blowing his nose. First thing in the morning, last thing at night, whenever a fight with Tig left her in pieces, it had been her mother who put Willa back together. When someone mattered like that, you didn’t lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living.

Willa and Dixie passed a pawn shop, the welfare office, a Thai restaurant, and the Number One Chinese Market before heading south again. After five leafy residential blocks, at the corner of Eighth and Quince, Dixie finally elected to pee on the foot of a maple. Most of the houses on this block dated from about the same Victorian era, variously run-down, two for sale. And sure enough, she spotted two garage-like buildings in the backyards, identical in design, disguised by years of divergent use: one sheltered a Honda sedan; the other was an epic man cave covered with old license plates. She pressed her brain for a second to recall the word, then got it: stip. Stipulation houses. Quickie predecessors of the more carefully constructed mansions that were now coming due for collapse.

Dixie waddled homeward and Willa followed, feeling the word shambles in her sternum. How could two hardworking people do everything right in life and arrive in their fifties essentially destitute? She felt angry at Iano for some infraction that wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny, she knew. His serial failures at job security? Not his fault. Plenty of academics spent their careers chasing tenure from city to town. They were a new class of educated nomads, raising kids with no real answer to the question of where they’d grown up. In provisional homes one after another, with parents who worked ridiculous hours, that’s where. Doing homework in a hallway outside a faculty meeting. Playing tag with the offspring of physicists and art historians on some dean’s lawn while the adults swigged cheap Chablis and exchanged companionable gripes about their department heads. Now, without complaint, Iano had taken a teaching position that was an insult to someone with his credentials. As the family’s sole surviving breadwinner, he should get a pass on the charge of being unfit to take a tough phone call while driving.

It never mattered before. Having a mother to shore up Willa had always left Iano free to be the fun, sexy one who didn’t worry even about death or taxes, who brought her flowers picked from other peoples’ yards, who once threw her pain-inflicting shoes out the car window on the way to a formal reception at the provost’s. She couldn’t expect him to be a new kind of person now. She was the crisis handler, he was the evader. Marriages tended to harden like arteries, and she and Iano were more than thirty years into this one. This evening he would come in the door like a blast of warm weather, give her a kiss in the kitchen before changing out of his office clothes, and they’d have no chance to talk before dinner.

So she would drop this bomb on everybody at once. They were all adults, entitled to share her concern about a house falling down on them. Old Nick with his oxygen tank and rabid contempt for the welfare state would be especially vulnerable to the challenges of homelessness. On the other hand, Tig might light a bonfire and dance in the yard as the bricks rained down. Willa had tried and failed to track her daughter’s moral path, but collapse of some permanent structure always seemed to be part of the territory.

*

Willa’s evening forecast evaporated as she was putting the spaghetti water on to boil. Iano had kissed her and disappeared into the bedroom, as predicted. But now he walked back into the kitchen looking stricken, carrying her phone. Answering her calls and texts was a habit she kept meaning to discuss, but this wasn’t the time. He held the thing as if it were scorching him.

She recoiled. “What? Is it Zeke?”

He nodded, unreadably.

“Is he hurt? God, Iano. What?”

Iano set the phone on the counter and Willa picked it up, shaking. “Hello?”

“Mom, it’s me.”

“Oh Jesus, Zeke, you’re okay. Is the baby okay?”

Zeke was sobbing. Choked. A level of desperation she couldn’t associate with her levelheaded son. She waited without realizing she was holding her breath.

“The baby’s fine,” he said finally. “It’s Helene.”

“Oh no. Some problem from the C-section? It happens, honey. Did she have to go back to the hospital?”

Iano was looking at her with mournful eyes, shaking his head. His face behind the dark, trimmed beard looked scarily pale, and his foreknowledge was disorienting. She turned her back on him and listened to her son’s silence, the gathering of his will.

“Mom, Helene’s dead. She died.”

“Jesus! How?”

The beat of his silence lasted long enough for Willa to wonder if she’d been rude to ask. Her mind battered itself like a trapped bird.

“She took pills,” he finally said. “She killed herself.”

“You had pills around? With a baby in the house?”

“He’s not up to childproof caps, Mom.”

The scolding sobered Willa, put them on solid ground. “Have you called 911?”

“Of course.”

“I’m sorry, I’m just … I’m in shock. When did this happen?”

“What time is it now? I got home around a quarter to six. She’s still here.”

“Who is?”

“Mom, Helene. She died in the bedroom. There’s a thing in her mouth. Ventilator. They tried to revive her even though it was hopeless I guess. They said they have to leave that thing in her until the coroner’s report. It’s kind of freaking me out, it pulls her face all out of shape and looks so painful. I guess that’s a stupid thing to worry about.”

“So the EMTs came. Are they still there? What happens now?”

“They left. They had another call that was, you know. Urgent. Now the coroner comes and then the mortuary, to take the body. The EMT gave me numbers to call.”

“Oh, honey. Are you alone there in the apartment?”

“I’m with Aldus.”

God, she thought. Aldus. A few weeks in the world, now this.

“I’m sitting on the couch,” Zeke said, seeming now to want to produce words. “He’s lying beside me, asleep. I guess it wore him out, waiting so long for … He was so hungry. And scared, I think. Jesus. How can he not ever know his mother? What does that do to a person?”

“I guess we take this an hour at a time, and right now you shouldn’t be alone. As soon as we’re off the phone, call somebody. I don’t mean the coroner, I want you to have a friend there. Gosh, Helene’s poor parents. How long will it take them to get to Boston?”

The sound he made startled her, an animal moan. The impossible task of calling them had not yet occurred to him.

“Do you want me to talk to them?”

“You’ve never met them. How would that feel, this, coming from a stranger?”

“Okay, but please get somebody there to be with you. You’ll have to decide a lot of things. When Mama died I was shocked at all the practical stuff that has to happen immediately. Do you have any idea about … what she would want?”

She listened to Zeke’s breathing as it caught in a sob, tried and caught again, like a halting engine. “We didn’t talk about that, Mom,” he managed. “When the subject of death came up, it was me telling her not to do it.”

“What do you mean?” She turned around but Iano was gone. She stepped to the doorway and looked into the dining room. Tig was playing backgammon with Nick so he wouldn’t throw a tantrum while he waited for dinner. They made an impossible pair facing off across the table: pixie Tig with her springy dreadlocks, hulking Nick with the oxygen tubes pressing his jowls in a permanent grimace.

“This morning she seemed, just, normal,” Zeke was saying. “She took the baby for his checkup yesterday and was relieved he’s, you know. Fine. Gaining weight. Today she was going to take him out in the stroller. We joked about whether she needed an owner’s manual to drive it.”

Willa was amazed at his coherence. People handled emergencies in many ways—she’d covered enough crime scenes to know—but they fell back on the habit of self. This reasonable, desperately sad man on the phone was the bare wood of her son beneath the bark. Willa saw her pasta water was boiling over. She clicked off the burner. “You said when death came up, it was you telling her not to do it. What does that mean, Zeke?”

“I didn’t even kiss her goodbye, Mom. I mean, maybe I did, without knowing it. I can’t even remember. That’s so sad.”

“Are you telling me she had threatened suicide?”

“She should never have gone off the antidepressants. I shouldn’t have let her. Nobody should have asked her to do that.”

“Don’t blame yourself. The drugs were not your call. There must have been risks to the baby. What was she taking?”

“Paroxetine was the one they said she really needed to get away from. They tried her on Sarafem, I think, I don’t remember exactly. They okayed some things after the first trimester but nothing ever worked, once she’d gone cold turkey. She was, like, paralyzed with fear about doing the wrong thing. They have black box warnings on those drugs, Mom. How could she look in the mirror, pregnant, and take a medicine like that? A black box is like ‘Smoking gives you cancer,’ that extreme level of warning.”

Willa felt the weight of Helene transgressions she should have forgiven. The pregnancy whining, the lethargy. “I’m sorry. This must have been so hard for you.”

“It was harder for her. Obviously.”

“I’m sure you didn’t tell her to stop taking her antidepressants.”

“Maybe I expected too much from her. I do that, Mom, I feel like when things seem easy to me, they should be easy for other people. Maybe she felt guilty.”

“I’m sure her doctors advised her. Knowing Helene, she was well informed.”

“But what kind of choice did she have? You can’t imagine what she’s been through. Every day of the pregnancy was hell. She was obsessed with the idea that something was wrong, the baby was dead, or deformed. She memorized the possible side effects of SSRIs in pregnancy. Anencephaly, which is when the baby is born with no brain. Omphalocele, where the intestines protrude through a hole in the abdomen. The whole thing got to be like this monster. She just didn’t want it.”

“What are you saying? Of course she wanted the baby.” Willa had assumed he hadn’t wanted it. Zeke, who at age one put his toys away, the improbable straight-arrow child sprung from the mess of his itinerant parents’ lives, would not gladly interrupt the order of his life’s events with the chaos of an unplanned baby. Willa didn’t even believe he’d neglected birth control. Boys will be boys, she’d heard, but she had only the one, and Zeke did the right thing every time. She and Iano had resisted lobbying for an abortion, but they saw this pregnancy as a duty imposed on their son, if not an ambush. Privately they’d worn out the tread on various speculations. None of their scenarios held a role for a Helene who just didn’t want the baby.

She tried to picture Zeke in his apartment. “Oh, God. Did you … find her?”

Tig appeared in the doorway, round eyed, looking painfully small in her baggy clothes, the corona of hair standing up around her head in a caricature of shock. She must have overheard some of this and was reading the rest in Willa’s face.

Willa pointed at the package of pasta and jar of sauce and raised her eyebrows in a plea. With this daughter no wish was easily granted. Willa expected resistance as she stepped away from the stove, but Tig slid into the gap and began making dinner.

“Yeah, I did,” Zeke said. “I got home from work and the baby was crying so hard he was choking. It freaked me out. I don’t know how long he’d been … I changed his diaper, warmed up a bottle, fed him. I thought she was asleep. She’s been sleeping so much, all these months. So I spent maybe an hour in the house like that, letting her sleep. Jesus, Mom. What if I’d gone in the bedroom sooner? What if I could have saved her?”

“The baby had been crying awhile when you got home, so she was gone already. Don’t do that to yourself. Please, honey. You took care of your son.”

The weight of these words hit Willa as she said them, a punch to the gut that must have produced a sound because Tig turned around, alarmed. It took effort for Willa to stay on her feet instead of sinking to the floor and pulling her knees to her chest as she cradled Zeke’s voice in her ear. Her dutiful, promising son would be taking care of a child now, every day, marooned in the loneliness of single parenthood. Anger at the dead Helene rose like acid in her throat. So useless.

Tig stood watching her with the air of a fairy godmother, the wooden spoon tilting up from her fingers like a wand. Behind her the pot boiled. Willa closed her eyes and made herself speak calmly into the phone. “I can get there by morning.”

*

Sitting in a grand Boston church trying to quiet a howling infant, wearing a designer suit that belonged to the girl in the coffin: even Willa’s florid imagination hadn’t seen this coming. The tight cut of the jacket constricted her movements. Mr. Armani wouldn’t have had baby dandling in mind, not that any of this was his fault. Willa had thrown jeans into a duffel and headed out to rescue her son without giving a moment’s thought to funeral wear. That was four, maybe five days earlier; she’d lost track. Aldus had made no advances on sorting out night versus day, and she was operating on less sleep than she’d thought humanly possible. Getting dressed for the funeral was a task she undertook about thirty minutes before the event, and it sent her with some urgency into Helene’s closet. She found everything on wooden hangers, organized by color, and within that orderly place she glimpsed the bond between the dead girl and her son. But the stunner was Helene’s expensive taste. Checking labels quickly for size, Willa hyperventilated: Fendi, Versace, Ralph Lauren. A couple of suits were in her ballpark, thank goodness. Helene must have nudged up a size before going into the chic maternity business wear.

Willa was so relieved to score something better than a T-shirt for the service, she hadn’t thought ahead to a chapel packed with Zeke and Helene’s friends. Now it dawned on her they might recognize this navy silk suit, last seen at some promotion party. Making her the creepy mother-in-law who didn’t even wait till Helene was in the grave to poach on her couture. She could see awfulness in the situation but felt it at a distance, walled off by exhaustion. Anyway, the suit was probably camouflaged by the pinstripes of spit-up trailing down the lapels.

The baby’s howl caught in a series of gasps and went quiet, providing a moment of funereal balm before he shattered it again. His wail rose and fell like a siren above the muted organ music. For all Helene’s worries about pharmacological harm, she’d borne a son with a dandy set of pipes. And yet he felt insubstantial in Willa’s arms, pink as a baby mouse. Willa hadn’t consoled a newborn for decades and felt close to tears herself. Catching Zeke’s eye, she nodded toward the aisle, then got up and made her awkward way out, squeezing between the wooden pew back and people’s knees. Maybe it was sleep-deprived paranoia, but she felt disapproval in the stares. Or at least no gratitude for the gift of Helene’s DNA, right there in their midst. The well-dressed assembly struck her as a judgmental tribe, which she chalked up to Helene’s influence. Zeke’s friends had always been sweet, unpretentious boys who divided things fairly and let the terrible athletes play on their teams anyway. Admittedly, she was recalling in that moment his Cub Scout days. She might not really know who Zeke had become in Boston, first as a student at Harvard Business and now striving as a young professional among some of the most famously competitive assholes on the planet.

She paced at the back of the chapel eyeing the exits, wondering whether they should seek asylum in some basement fellowship hall or head out to the street. It was raining. Funeral guests kept turning around to verify that this child was still the source of all that noise. Willa stared back, brewing some umbrage. Wouldn’t it matter someday that the boy had attended his mother’s funeral? Producing this perfect child had been Helene’s final accomplishment and he was entitled to be there, as the only blood relative in the house. Other than Helene’s parents, who’d barely arrived from London in time for the service. Aldus was the name of Helene’s father, Willa had learned, but she wasn’t sure that justified keeping it in circulation. She perused the front row trying to recognize Helene’s carefully tinted mother from the back. Poor woman, to have lost a daughter.

She shifted Aldus from one shoulder to the other and felt muted dismay at the amount of milk he’d brought up on the jacket. This might qualify as the worst-ever use of an Armani suit. But she had no better plans, beyond a Goodwill drop box. Maybe an email blast inviting Helene’s stick-thin, judgmental friends to drop by and pick up a souvenir. Either way it felt painful to give away a fortune in designer clothing, probably the couple’s largest material asset, when Zeke was taking on serious debt for this funeral.

The officiating minister, a round-faced woman in owlish glasses, was crooning her way through a one-size-fits-all prayer. It was pretty obvious this minister hadn’t known Helene. Willa wondered whether Zeke had even told her it was a suicide. The Anglican church was Zeke’s best guess at what Helene’s parents would want, though they hadn’t been present to organize or pay for any of it. He’d had to lay out credit cards in those first dizzying hours, and the cost of having Helene embalmed was mortifying. Willa drew no pleasure from the pun. The parents’ one expressed wish had been to see their daughter, for closure, so he’d shouldered the cost of an open casket.

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. ...