Unsheltered Read online

  Unsheltered

  A NOVEL

  Barbara Kingsolver

  For Lily Hopp Kingsolver

  After the final no there comes a yes

  And on that yes the future world depends.

  —WALLACE STEVENS,

  “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard”

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1 Falling House

  2 Beginners

  3 Investigators

  4 Scylla and Charybdis

  5 Striking Out

  6 Strange Companions

  7 The Cake

  8 Shelter in Place

  9 The Front of the Line

  10 Gift of the Magi

  11 Revelations

  12 Treasure Chest of Time

  13 Mr. Occam’s Razor

  14 End of Days

  15 Unexpected Reserves

  16 Blue Sky

  17 The Downfall

  18 Survival

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  Unsheltered

  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.”
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  “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 rema
inder 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.