Shelter in Place
My husband’s sister calls at mealtimes. Paul leaves the table and takes the call in the study, even if we’ve just sat down to dinner. At one time I would have waited for him—ten minutes or an hour, however long it took Tara to outline the parameters of her latest calamity. Tonight I keep eating. The risotto, which I just spent forty minutes stirring, isn’t good cold.
“You don’t have to answer it,” I told him only once.
Paul said, “Yes, I do.”
Once she called from a Motel 6 in Spokane, on a stranger’s cell phone, to say that she was hungry and had no money. Paul googled a local pizzeria and had a large pie delivered to her hotel room. He didn’t hear from her again for six months. Then, as now, calling her was impossible. She has never in anyone’s memory had a working phone.
For years her whereabouts were uncertain. She surfaced briefly in North Dakota, where her boyfriend—there’s always a boyfriend—worked on a drill rig in the Bakken Shale. Like all Tara’s relationships, that one ended badly. Police were called, restraining orders filed. She and the boyfriend took turns in the county lockup. When Tara’s turn was over, Paul bought her a bus ticket back to Washington.
When I’ve finished eating, I cover his plate with aluminum foil. Through the closed door of the study I hear snippets of conversation.
Slow down, slow down. What the hell happened?
I can’t right now. This weekend, maybe.
I’ll see what I can do.
At mealtimes, always. I don’t take it personally. Tara is oblivious to dates, times, schedules. There’s nothing left in her life—a job, her children, a car payment or electric bill—to remind her of the passage of time.
She’s thirty-three now—twelve years younger than Paul, in kindergarten when he graduated high school. His childhood wasn’t easy, but hers was harder. She was thirteen when their mother died and their father married—quickly—a woman Tara hated. She ran away, quit high school, got pregnant, got pregnant again. Paul learned of these events secondhand, through the family grapevine. By then he’d moved across the country to Boston, for grad school. Later he found a job there and eventually met me.
Tara’s last known address was a friend’s mother’s trailer, somewhere out on the Peninsula. The friend, Amber, had been locked up on a possession charge, so her mother offered Tara the couch in exchange for babysitting Amber’s kids. It took her a surprisingly long time to figure out that Tara wasn’t a reliable babysitter, a reliable anything. Tara’s own kids—two boys, twelve and fourteen—lived with their grandmothers in Idaho and Utah. She hasn’t seen them in four years.
I’ve just finished washing the dishes when Paul comes out of the study. “They’re kicking her out of rehab,” he says.
I turn off the faucet. “Why? What happened?”
“The state will only pay for thirty days. After Friday, she’s on her own.”
A year ago, these calls were less frequent. A year ago, we still lived in Boston, three thousand miles away. We moved here for Paul’s new job, running a bicycle-advocacy group in Seattle. He often has a new job directing some worthy nonprofit; a small, scrappy organization working to end racist policing or housing instability or the pollution of streams. These jobs have several things in common: long hours, tiny salaries, and a burning sense of mission. Paul starts each one in a burst of hopefulness and leaves in irritable despair. When we first met, ten years ago, I didn’t understand that I’d caught him on the upswing: he was about to start a new job that would fix everything that was wrong in his life. It didn’t and neither have any of the jobs he’s had since.
The bike job was going to be different. The chance to move back to Seattle was, to Paul, irresistible. He’d gone to college there, escaped his troubled family, lost his virginity. On two separate occasions, he’d heard Nirvana play live. In Seattle he’d found like-minded friends: creative, idealistic kids who painted murals and organized vegetarian potlucks and picked up litter from public parks. It was a gentler place than Boston, he told me, kinder and more optimistic.
In Boston he was often miserable. He blamed the harsh winters, the crumbling roads, the crazy, aggressive drivers. “This city is going to kill me,” he often said, which was possibly true. Biking to work in rush hour traffic, he’d had several narrow escapes. Once, after an MBTA bus nearly creamed him, he rode up beside it at a stoplight and banged its window with his fist. When the glass cracked he rode away at top speed, horrified at what he’d done.
Seattle isn’t what I expected. Despite the constant rain, the landscape is stunning—the steep hills and lush green spaces, the lazy ferries crisscrossing Puget Sound. Paul was right: the streets are calm and orderly. At every intersection, pedestrians huddle under umbrellas waiting for the walk signal, even when there are no cars in sight.
Everything is new here. Lookalike office towers spring up weekly. Construction cranes hover at the skyline like mighty prehistoric birds. The new buildings are tasteful, but the uniformity is depressing. If you grew up in Boston, Seattle looks like a city built from a kit.
We looked at a few apartments, but the rents were twice what we’d paid back east. “We can’t afford to live here,” I said. Apparently, it was a common problem: beneath the I-5 overpass was a vast encampment of tents and makeshift shelters, more homeless people than I’d ever seen in one place. It was a West Coast thing, Paul said, a byproduct of the temperate climate. Unlike a Boston winter, the weather in Seattle couldn’t kill you.
We expanded our search and found, finally, this snug little house on the island. Each morning Paul rides his bike onto the ferry. Thirty minutes later, he rides off the boat into downtown.
We’d been living here for a couple of months when Tara called from a gas station in Tacoma. She was getting high again, sleeping in a stranger’s car. Paul called in sick and spent half a day on the phone. He learned that there was exactly one available bed in the entire state of Washington, at a detox center in Yakima. Tara had twenty-four hours to claim it. Paul avoids driving on principle, but that night he borrowed my car and spent many rainy hours cruising the streets of Tacoma, showing homeless people a photo of his sister.
When the phone rang I was sound asleep.
“I’ve got her,” Paul said.
“How is she?”
A pause on the line, the rhythmic thud of windshield wipers. Paul said, “You don’t want to know.”
He took her to the detox center in Yakima, a low brick bunker behind a VA hospital. Then he drove out to the Peninsula to pick up her clothes, which she’d stuffed into garbage bags and stashed beneath Amber’s mother’s trailer. When Paul found the trailer park, Amber’s mother screamed at him to get off her property. The bags were gone, she said. She’d given them to someone named Bull.
The rest of the story—the hours spent locating Bull—isn’t important. The point is that Tara’s clothes, when Paul finally recovered them, were sodden and reeking. Bull had kept the trash bags in the trunk of his Pontiac Sunbird, which sat immobile at the edge of the trailer park, and the trunk had leaked. Paul salvaged what he could and brought them back to our house, where I washed them three times—with Tide, with white vinegar, and again with Tide.
Paul watched me, frowning. “You’re using hot water?”
Washington isn’t a small state. I figured out later that his journey that night—our house to Tacoma to Yakima, out to the Peninsula and back to our house—was 560 miles, two months’ worth of bicycle commutes.
Each morning after Paul leaves for work, I put on my slicker and take a walk in the rain. The island is half covered with forest—the tallest trees I’ve ever seen, slim conifers that grow close together and block out the sky. Even when the drizzle stops, the trees keep raining. Their trunks are coated with emerald-colored moss. With my binoculars I’ve seen deer, coyotes, and once, a bald eagle, but human sightings are rare. The island empties out each morning, half its population crowding onto the ferry. Those who remain are children, retirees, and a large number of rich, athletic wives. I see them out running in their expensive sports gear, or shopping at the organic market where I buy a salad for my dinner. Paul rarely gets home before ten.
“It won’t be like this forever,” he tells me. “It’s a staffing issue. I just need to hire a few good people.”
I don’t point out that I’ve heard this before, that there’s always a staffing issue—at the Housing Coalition, at Streamwatch. Reminding him would be neither constructive nor kind.
It’s lonely here. I spend most of my day at the kitchen table—I’m a technical translator—so it’s not like I’m going to meet anyone at work. The local paper runs a weekly listing of community activities. So far I’ve joined a meditation circle, watched youth soccer, and canvassed for local Democratic candidates. The meditators seemed nicer than the soccer moms or the Democrats, but since we weren’t allowed to talk, it’s hard to know for sure.
I tried to join a group that reads to the blind, but there were too many volunteers and not enough blind people.
“Right now we have two clients,” said the woman who answered the phone. “If they wanted to, they could have someone reading to them twenty-four hours a day.”
The Emergency Preparedness Network meets the first Tuesday of the month in the basement of the public library. The islanders arrive in pairs, shaking water from their ponchos. The rubber soles of their hiking boots squeak on the tiled floor.
It’s an older crowd, or maybe it isn’t. In the PNW, it’s hard to tell. I’ve encountered a startling number of gray-haired women with baby faces and nose rings, speaking in millennial uptalk. A few of them are here tonight; I recognize them from the coffee place, the bookstore, and Island Mercantile, a quaint boutique, faux-rustic, that sells Scandinavian garden tools and grain-free pet food and thirty-dollar wool socks. Nobody recognizes me, or maybe they all do. Either way, the reaction would be the same: the brief social smile, the corners of the mouth lifting for an instant. I see you. I am a polite and well-behaved person. Now go away.
I take a seat in the back row, behind the knitting woman. Her hair, fuzzy from the humidity, spills over the back of her chair. Over her turtleneck she wears a long wooly vest, her own creation. I recognize the color, a deep forest green. At the last meeting I sat beside her and watched her progress, the knitted material pooling in her lap like some fast-growing moss. I wonder if she has a special interest in natural disasters, or if, like me, she found the group by accident. Last month I was killing time at the library, studying announcements on a bulletin board, when a man noticed me. He was tall and slightly stooped, dressed in jeans and a fleece jacket.
“You look lost,” he said kindly, and for no good reason I felt my eyes tearing. Yes, I thought. I am completely lost.
“The meeting is in the basement,” he said. “Downstairs and to the left.”
Tonight’s speaker is a researcher from the US Geological Survey, a young Asian guy in rimless eyeglasses, introduced only as Greg. He’s spent the last two years in a computer lab, doing simulations of earthquakes.
On the screen behind him flashes a map of the Pacific Northwest. Greg points out the Cascadia subduction zone, where the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate is slipping beneath North America. The fault line—from Mendocino, California to Vancouver Island—is seven hundred miles long. According to the geologic record, Cascadia earthquakes happen, on average, every 243 years. The next Cascadia earthquake is now seventy-six years overdue.
The knitting woman’s needles click industriously.
The earthquake will arrive without warning. It will begin with a compressional wave, a high-frequency sound that only dogs can hear. According to Greg’s models, there will be thirty thousand landslides in the city of Seattle. Fifteen percent of its land will liquefy.
“Any questions?” Greg asks.
There are no questions.
The earthquake, it turns out, will be just the beginning. Ten to thirty minutes later, the tsunami will hit—a wall of ocean water seven hundred miles long, rushing toward the Pacific coast. By the time it makes landfall, the wave will be twenty to one hundred feet tall, the worst natural disaster in the history of the continent. Two hundred and forty thousand square miles of the PNW will be affected. Thirteen thousand people will die instantly. The other deaths will take longer.
Greg explains this matter-of-factly, as though it’s common knowledge. As, apparently, it is: all around me, heads are nodding.
A man in the front row raises his hand. “Well, okay. What can we do?”
Greg talks about Shake Alerts, an early warning system used by the BART trains in San Francisco. Earthquakes begin with a P wave, he explains, racing silently along the fault line. A seismic station can detect the P wave minutes before the shaking starts.
“Do we have a system like that up here?” the man asks.
“Not yet,” Greg says.
The meeting runs late. It’s nearly ten o’clock when I pull into our driveway. When I kill the motor I see a strobe light in my rearview mirror, the flickering headlamp of Paul’s bicycle.
He pulls in behind me, scattering gravel. “Hey,” he calls, breathless. He looks flushed, exhilarated from his soggy ride. Rain drips from his helmet and down his face like tears of irrepressible joy.
This is when I love him the most.
The first time I saw him, he was riding a bicycle. I climbed up out of the T station into blinding sunlight, and Paul was a flash of silver crossing Copley Square. From the beginning, he hid nothing. He was entirely himself.
His first Christmas gift to me was a rickety old tandem he got into riding shape, though it broke down every time we rode it. I bought him a pair of snowshoes he would never use. Later our gifts were better calibrated—his favorite sweater, a book of poetry I still cherish—but those first attempts were the purest. We chose gifts for the person we wished the other to be.
Knowing this solves nothing. Last week, in a gift shop near the ferry terminal, I saw a bumper sticker with a woodcut graphic of a bicycle. THIS MACHINE CAN SAVE THE WORLD.
In Seattle a bumper sticker costs twenty dollars. I was standing in line at the cash register, ready to buy it for Paul, when it occurred to me that he doesn’t have a bumper. There isn’t a single surface on his bicycle where a bumper sticker could stick.
The days are getting shorter. On the internet I read about light boxes and vitamin D supplements. By 3:00 p.m. the sun dips below the tree line, the long dark night setting in.
The rain continues. The weather in Seattle can’t kill you, unless it drives you to suicide.
Then, on a Friday morning in early December, a freakish thing happens: without warning, the sky clears completely. I take the ferry into the city and stand on the outer deck to feel sunshine on my face. The deck is empty except for two guys, younger than me, in the local uniform of gray wool sneakers and three-hundred-dollar hoodies.
One speaks with a British accent. “They call it self-actualizer parenting. It means he just does whatever he wants, no matter what we say.”
“My daughter was like that,” says the other guy, American. “She would stare you in the eye and just piss her pants.”
The downtown sidewalks are crowded, the entire population of Seattle out for a stroll. Everyone seems drunk or stoned—smiling at strangers, recklessly making eye contact. Climbing First Hill, I witness a near-accident: a dazed pedestrian crossing against the light, staring heavenward; a loud squeal as the driver of a Tesla slams its brakes. Both men look stunned, disoriented—two confused Seattleites, blinded by the sun.
On Christmas morning the highways are empty. Paul and I set out at first light. Our destination is a small town on the Oregon coast, three hundred miles away, where Tara is staying at a sober living facility called Hope House. Paul tried to find something closer but came up empty. “At least she’s off the street,” he said.
I don’t mind the drive. Even from the highway, the landscape is beautiful. Roadside signs point out campgrounds, scenic overlooks, hiking and biking trails. This shouldn’t make me think of Ted Bundy, the serial killer who trawled for victims in Washington state parks. I was a teenager when Bundy got famous, the first time in my life when I ever gave a thought to the Pacific Northwest. I pictured a place full of brave, independent young women adventurously recreating, climbing and rowing and sleeping outdoors on purpose, an idea I found exotic. I didn’t know women like that. The women I knew were mostly like my mother, who planned her entire week around her weekly wash and set.
We cross the Oregon border and exit the highway. Google Maps sends us to a narrow dead-end street, just off a busy boulevard lined with strip malls. Number 14 is a low rancher, half hidden by overgrown shrubs. The house is tiny; it seems impossible that ten sober women can live there. We’re convinced, at first, that we’ve got the wrong house.
“What a dump,” Paul says. He’d done his best to land her a better placement—her own bedroom in a smaller, nicer place called Promise House. Tara had done her part; in the interview she’d charmed the caseworker, who recommended her enthusiastically. The deal fell through at the last minute, when it came out that she had an open warrant for failing to appear in court—it’s a long story. Hope House didn’t care about the open warrant. They’d take anyone.
As we get out of the car, the front door opens. “Wally!” Tara calls. It’s her special name for him—Pauly-Wally or just Wally. “Welcome to Hopeless House!”
Paul hugs her tightly. She gained some weight in detox, which isn’t entirely good news, but she does look healthier. She wears flannel pajama bottoms and a pink sweatshirt. There’s a red Christmas bow stuck to the side of her head.
“Kristin!” She gives me a hug and shoos me through the doorway. “Let me give you the tour.” Paul can’t join us, house rules: only women are allowed inside.
The place is cramped and dark—low ceilings, wood paneling, brown shag carpeting. The vinyl blinds are pulled to the sills. In the living room are three lumpy couches; down the hallway, four tiny bedrooms, each the size of a gas-station restroom. The basement has been converted to three more bedrooms, windowless cubes with cement floors and cinder block walls. Tara, at the moment, sleeps on one of the couches. “Vanessa is leaving next week,” she tells me. “Then I’ll get my own room.”
She shows me the built-in cabinet in the hallway, the single drawer where she stores her possessions—a backpack and grimy sneakers, the jeans and t-shirts Paul salvaged from Bull’s trunk. We took them to her in rehab, along with some new things—socks, underwear, a pair of flip-flops. All of it crammed, now, into this drawer at Hope House.
I wait in the front hallway while Tara puts on makeup in the bathroom. Affixed to the back of the door is a map of the town, divided into sections. TSUNAMI EVACUATION MAP. I switch on an overhead light to study it.
After the earthquake, DO NOT WAIT for an official warning. Leave immediately ON FOOT.
It is estimated that you will have twenty minutes to reach higher ground.
Follow the evacuation route to the designated assembly area. Please note that some
bridges may be impassable after an earthquake, but these are the recommended routes at this time.
When Tara comes out of the bathroom, she gives me another hug. She isn’t wearing any makeup as far as I can tell.
Outside, rain is falling in sheets. “Don’t you want to change clothes?” Paul asks, but Tara is happy in her pajama bottoms.
We drive around looking for a place to go. There’s nothing open on Christmas day except a Starbucks in a shopping plaza. The place is weirdly crowded: a gaggle of teenage girls, a young mother with four little boys, a lady in a wheelchair reading the Book of Mormon. An old man with hearing aids stares at a newspaper and ignores his wife, who delivers an energetic monologue in Spanish.
We get in line behind a red-haired girl dressed for work in a Burger King uniform that smells of beef and cigarettes. It means that somewhere in town, a Burger King is open, but whatever, we’re already here. When Tara orders a Frappuccino with extra whipped cream, Paul hesitates—at her intake physical she was diagnosed with hep C and type 2 diabetes. In the end he buys it for her anyway, because it’s Christmas and there’s nothing else he can give her.
We sit at the counter near the window, next to the Burger King girl. Tara is in a buoyant mood. She chugs her Frappuccino and talks about getting her GED, finding a job, getting her kids back. She says the things she always says, having learned long ago that this is the way to Paul’s heart and, consequently, his wallet. Paul is cynical too—it’s impossible not to be—but a part of him always believes her. He wants so badly to believe.
“How’s Dick?” she asks.
She means their father, whom I and everyone else in the world know as Rick. He and Tara haven’t spoken since the day, nine or ten years ago, when he came home from work to find his house ransacked. He lost a good stereo, a crappy television, and a bunch of expensive tools. A few weeks later, the same thing happened at his sister’s house, except that Paul’s aunt had been knocked unconscious, her elderly Labrador shot dead. Rick has maintained for years that Tara and her boyfriend were responsible, which is almost certainly true.
There’s always a boyfriend. This is why Tara can’t stay with us or even know where we live.
“He’s the same,” says Paul. “Arlene”—their stepmother—“was in the hospital. She had a hysterectomy.”
Tara has nothing to say about this. Instead she talks about people at Hope House: Maria, the bossy house manager, and Brittany, a fellow resident who has long blond hair and is known around the house as Rapunzel. Tara calls her my best friend.
Paul frowns. “How long have you known her?”
Tara gives him a playful shove. “You’re so uptight, Wally. I’m not like you. I make friends wherever I go.”
It’s a conversation they’ve had many times. She needs better friends, Paul often says. Her friends are all junkies and losers. He doesn’t add—there’s no need to—that when you’re a homeless drug addict, those are pretty much the only people you meet and that making friends quickly is what keeps you high.
At three o’clock the barista tells us they’re closing—the bleakest moment of that day and possibly of my entire life, being kicked out of a strip mall Starbucks with all the other people who have nowhere else to go on Christmas.
We get back into the car and drive some more. Tara points out the local hangouts, a Popeyes Chicken and an abandoned-looking shopping mall. She tells us about the two guys she and Rapunzel met yesterday at the food bank, which is located inside a storefront church that used to be a Kmart. The church has a living nativity set, complete with an actual baby and live animals—a donkey and a sheep but no camel.
The guys were living in a Ford Bronco. “They’re both veterans,” Tara says with some pride, lest we think her new friends were deadbeats, garden-variety homeless dudes without ambition or skills. The tall, handsome one—his name was Mark—homed in immediately on Rapunzel. Tara felt left out until they were joined by Mark’s friend, who was short and loud and plump and cute, like Tara. The guys invited them to lunch, which was served free of charge by the people at the Kmart church. After lunch, the four of them piled into the Bronco and went back to the guys’ camping spot by the river.
“To hang out,” she says, when Paul asks what for.
He has the sort of face that hides nothing. I can see exactly what he’s thinking: why follow two homeless guys back to a secluded spot by the river except to have sex or smoke meth, two things Tara is supposedly not doing at the moment?
“Let me get this straight,” he says. “You just met these two homeless guys—”
“Veterans,” says Tara.
“Sorry. Two homeless guys who happen to be trained killers, and—”
Tara dissolves into giggles. She and Paul look nothing alike—they’re adopted—but they both laugh with their eyes squeezed shut, as though the world is too terrible to look at. Their laugh will break your heart.
“Wally, you worry too much,” she says, and again I think of Ted Bundy, the brave, adventurous girls he raped and stabbed and strangled and bludgeoned. I wonder, not for the first time, how Tara is still alive.
When we leave Oregon it feels like midnight. The dashboard clock reads 5:25.
Traffic is sparse, the sky so dark that I keep the high beams on. Paul snores softly in the passenger seat; the sound of windshield wipers puts him right to sleep. It’s entirely possible to avoid driving on principle, as long as you live with someone who has a car.
The world is full of blind people.
He will always pick up the phone. When Tara was thirteen and found their mother collapsed on the kitchen floor, dead from a massive hemorrhagic stroke, she immediately called Paul. When he didn’t answer, she didn’t run to the neighbors or call 911. She crawled back into bed and waited for the next disaster to hit.
I have never felt an earthquake. A year from now, when I’m safely back in Boston, I will feel them in my dreams. Long after our divorce is final, I’ll dream of Paul riding his bicycle along the rumbling edge of the continent, looking for survivors: the unsheltered and undefended, the unsavable and the not-yet-saved.
The rain is louder than the radio. Roadside signs remind me that I’m in a Tsunami Readiness Zone. At the exit I pull into a gas station. In the distance, a dog is barking.
No one is ever ready for a tsunami. This is an established fact.
