In a Perfect World (17 page)

Tara Temple turned back around, and Jiselle watched her descend the steps.

Had she been trying to tell Jiselle what Jiselle thought she might? Had she and Mark…?

Tara Temple was already opening her car door when Jiselle noticed that she was still holding on to the can of evaporated milk. (Absentmindedly? Or had she come to think of it as hers? Had she thought it was wasted on Jiselle, who would never take her advice about vitamin D or meditation, and so just die of the Phoenix flu anyway?) In any case, Tara Temple carried the can with her out the front door, and she still had it in her hand when she got behind the wheel of her car and called out her open window, “Goodbye!”

Jiselle said nothing about the milk. She had another can in the cupboard.

In the morning, Sara wandered into the family room where Jiselle and Camilla were reading together. She held up a pair of scissors in her hands. Jiselle instinctively sat up straighter, inhaling. The combination of Sara and a sharp instrument seemed full of dangerous potential.

But that morning Sara was wearing a white nightgown with yellow smiley faces on it—something Jiselle had never seen before and had not known that Sara owned. She said, handing the scissors to Jiselle, “Will you cut my hair? So it’s all one color?”

“Of course,” Jiselle said, taking the scissors from her, hoping she didn’t sound as breathless to Sara as she did to herself, and stood to follow her into the bathroom.

Since school had been closed, Sara’s hair had started to grow out of its ebony dye-job, and what had emerged were several inches of a sandy and reddish blond that reminded Jiselle of the color of fawns. The black fringe around her shoulders, contrasted with her natural color, made her look even more fearsome than when her hair was all one color, but Jiselle had assumed she liked it that way.

“This is so ugly,” Sara said, flipping the ends of her hair with her fingers. “Get rid of it. Please.”

“Sure,” Jiselle said.

She got a towel out of the linen closet and spread it over the sink, and then put her hand between Sara’s shoulder blades, pushed her forward gently. She rarely touched Sara on purpose—just accidentally when they reached for the salt shaker at the same time or when she found Sara’s elbow pressed against her own as they tried to walk through a door at the same time—and Jiselle was surprised how thin, almost fragile, Sara’s back felt, and her neck. She could feel the knobs of her vertebrae, and when Sara tilted her face to the side, Jiselle could see the pulse beat in a fluttering vein at her temple.

“Okay,” Jiselle said, taking a bit of the hair between her fingers. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” Sara said.

So Jiselle snipped at Sara’s hair until the black fringe had fallen either onto the towel in the sink or around their feet on the bathroom floor. It took a long time. Jiselle wanted to do a perfect job. “Okay,” she finally said, and Sara straightened up.

Jiselle stared at Sara’s reflection staring at herself in the bathroom mirror, and it was as if she were seeing this girl for the first time.

Sara, without the unnaturally black hair, seemed to have skin the color of peaches. She wasn’t, Jiselle realized, wearing her lip ring or her black makeup. Without these things she looked like an awkward adolescent—a young girl with a round face, wide eyes, soft hair, which Jiselle could not stop herself from touching.

It felt like rabbit fur, she thought, running her hand over the top of her stepdaughter’s head.

It felt like infant hair.

The next night they heard, in the distance, what sounded like either fireworks or gunfire.

The sun had just set, and Sam, who was playing with his action figures in the candlelight, looked up. He said, “Shouldn’t we be celebrating?”

“Celebrating what?” Camilla asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Independence?”

It was the Fourth of July?

Sara was crocheting by candlelight, and Jiselle was trying to read
Far from the Madding Crowd
with a flashlight balanced on her shoulder. Next door, Diane Schmidt could be heard humming a vaguely familiar tune, something Jiselle thought she might recognize from a documentary about the Civil War she’d watched on PBS in what seemed like another lifetime, a century before.

Again, they heard what might have been fireworks or gunfire. When Sam said,
“See?”
—as if the sound were evidence of their call to celebrate—they all started to laugh, and Jiselle said, “Okay,” and they headed outside, where they set the brush pile on fire, and Sara, Camilla, and Sam marched around it singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

During the march, Jiselle suddenly remembered a trick from Girl Scout camp—how, if you boiled a closed can of evaporated milk long enough, somehow it turned to caramel. She went back into the kitchen for a can of milk and a pan of water.

When she came back out, Jiselle boiled the can over the fire, watching Sam and Camilla and Sara march around her. They looked beautiful and feral in their strange clothes—the girls in mismatched summer skirts and tops, their hair long and wild, like pagan princesses, forest creatures, flushed in the firelight, bare arms and legs glowing orange.

And laughing between his sisters in the circle, Sam, in his cutoffs, bare-chested, appeared to be half-human and half-elf.

They looked like children from a time before civilization, before television and computers, vaccinations and fast food and jets—or children
after
these things, singing a patriotic song written so long ago she was surprised they knew the words.

Later, when she opened the can of evaporated milk, and it was miraculously caramel, they went back into the kitchen and stood around, eating the dense sweetness with spoons.

I
t was two o’clock in the morning, but they had gotten used to going to sleep later and later. They were wearing their nightclothes—Jiselle, her long summer nightgown, and Sam, his Star Wars T-shirt and checkered boxer shorts—but it didn’t seem past midnight to her, and Sam was wide awake, although the girls had gone to bed after Bobby left, an hour before, riding his bicycle off into the dark.

For eight days straight, the power had been out, so Jiselle and the children waited each night until ten or eleven o’clock to eat dinner by candlelight—a meal of bread, peanut butter, raisins, and canned soup she could heat up outside on the grill they’d bought at Wal-Mart the first week of March, before there were no more grills for sale anywhere, at any price. The charcoal was gone, and the lighter fluid, but Jiselle had the kindling that Bobby had broken up for her and left in a neat pile under an old plastic tarp on the deck.

If they ate earlier, the dark nights seemed to stretch on even longer.

Most days, until the sun set, they managed to keep busy reading, playing chess, Sara crocheting or writing in her journal, Sam throwing the Frisbee with Bobby, Jiselle trying to organize the pantry, dust the bookshelves. They had burned what trash had to be gotten rid of in the fire pit. Afterward, it was a perfect ashy black circle at the center of the brown lawn, but while it was burning, the fire there would glow in hundreds of shades of blue and orange. Watching it, you might have thought it was something magical, something biblical, if you didn’t know it was burning trash.

Jiselle was still able to charge the battery in her cell phone off the battery in the Cherokee, but only occasionally could she pick up a signal. When she could, she called her mother, who answered the phone, “This is Anna Petersen,” as if her office might be calling—but why would they? No one could be selling real estate now. When Jiselle asked how she was, and how she was going to be, and if she needed to come stay with them in St. Sophia, her mother would only chat about the weather, ending with a few last words about Jiselle’s “impossible situation.”

Mark hadn’t called in two days—or if he’d tried, he hadn’t been able to get through—and then it had been only to say hello and that he couldn’t talk long. There were German officials coming to speak to the detainees that afternoon, and he had paperwork to fill out. He told her, “Don’t get excited about a homecoming anytime soon. But I have a feeling we will, at least, be seeing a large monetary settlement from the German government when this is over.”

“I just want you home,” Jiselle said. “I don’t care about the money.”

“Of course you don’t care,” Mark said.

Jiselle was about to object—she felt a warmth spreading across her chest as though a hot soaked cloth had been placed there—but by the time she finally was able to open her mouth to speak, Mark said, “This is it. They’re here. Gotta go,” and hung up.

Jiselle did the laundry outside in the rain barrel and hung it on the line Paul had stretched for her between the deck and a tree at the end of the yard. That chore alone could sometimes take an entire afternoon before Jiselle even realized how long she’d been outside. The ravine seemed empty and completely quiet behind her as she twisted the shirts and socks until they were dry enough to hang. Occasionally, Beatrice might waddle up out of the ravine for a surprise midday visit.

The grass, which they’d had to let grow since the mower ran out of gas, had grown a foot in only a few weeks. Returned to what must have been an earlier, wilder state, there were long pale grasses mixed in with the green ones, and wildflowers Jiselle didn’t know the names of—orange, ruffled cups swaying on thin stems, delicate white frills, purple beads and pearls on long straw-colored stalks—mixed in with those.

Now it was very unusual to see a plane, and when she did, it was almost always a military jet flying fast and high. The trees and sky seemed strangely empty even of birds. It was only the end of July. Could they have flown south early this year?

There had been news reports of dead birds, numbering into the hundreds, in yards and parks and in the streets of Chicago, but Jiselle had found, a few weeks before, only a single dead sparrow—a soft gray ball of feathers—in the backyard. One of its wings looked broken, spread out at a strange angle, and there was blood on its breast.

A cat?

She took a shovel out of the garage and buried the sparrow at the edge of the ravine.

The rodents, like the birds, seemed to have fled. Every morning, Sam’s traps were empty, and he and Jiselle never saw mice or rats on their walks into the ravine any longer. Their absence was not reassuring. Jiselle felt more abandoned by their disappearance than relieved.

It was one of so many disconcerting things. Wave after wave of disastrous statistics on the news were being made human now by a few familiar faces:

Donald Trump’s son. Brad Pitt’s brother. The woman who’d founded Mrs. Fields cookies, and her entire family.

All of these cases proved what they’d already been telling people for months—that no amount of money, specialized medicine, private planes, or island hideaways could spare you.

The Fieldses, it was said, had retreated together to a house in Idaho, thinking it was an escape from the infected areas with higher populations—but they were found there by a UPS man delivering blankets, which they’d had shipped to them from Denmark because they were unwilling to use blankets that had spent any significant amount of time within U.S. borders.

“These people did everything ‘right,’” a man who was identified by a caption on the television as “Health Expert” said, making elaborate quotation marks in the air, raising his bushy eyebrows knowingly, “which goes to show that you can’t flee from a virus that’s already circulating in your body. People need to keep themselves fit, mind their nutrition, and stay close to health experts who can help them at the first sign of illness.”

But the story that completely eclipsed the others was “A Mother, a Saint, in Maine.”

In Portland a mother of four had left a note on the kitchen table that read, “I know I have the Phoenix flu. I’m going away until it’s passed, so I won’t infect you.”

Her husband and children and the local authorities had mounted a massive search. They’d posted flyers and bought a billboard on the interstate:
MOMMY. WE NEED YOU TO COME HOME. WE LOVE YOU. PLEASE.
But she was found dead and alone a few days later by a maid at a Holiday Inn in Concord, New Hampshire—her bed surrounded by photos of her family.

Now the family was suing the local authorities because they’d had her remains cremated before the family had a chance to identify her, to say goodbye.

That night, on the couch in the dark, Sam was a warm weight at her side, his head on her shoulder, and Jiselle could feel both the steadiness of his breath and the depth of his concentration. The flashlight was a bright zero on the page they were reading together. His hair was a little longer now, and it tickled the side of her face. Occasionally she’d rub her cheek against the top of his head. He snuggled closer to her when she did.

As if on cue, there was a knock on the front door.

Sam and Jiselle both sat up fast, and Jiselle instinctively snapped the flashlight off and let the book fall closed on her lap. She was surprised to find her heart beating hard. She’d told everyone—Bobby and Paul Temple, Mark, her mother, the children, Annette, Brad Schmidt—that she wasn’t scared in the house, in the dark, alone with the children, without a gun, and she’d believed it.

But now she couldn’t move.

Sam whispered, “Who could it be?”

Jiselle shook her head. She put her finger to her lips. Another knock. Three times. More insistent. She felt every muscle in her body tense, as if her limbs were ready to take action, whether or not her mind agreed to it. A host of images flashed in front of her: Throwing herself over Sam to shield him. The ravine. Thrashing with his hand in hers through the brush and trees. The girls, in their nightgowns, running ahead of them. She wished that her feet weren’t bare, that Sam was wearing long pants and sleeves, that the girls did not sleep so deeply. She’d just begun to form the terrible question of how loudly she would have to scream to wake them, and felt herself inhale, and sensed the instinctive, welcome rush of what could only have been called courage beginning at the base of her brain, readying her to stand, to make some kind of decision, although only her body knew yet what that decision would be, when a voice she recognized as Diane Schmidt’s called through the crack in the door, which she had opened, because Jiselle hadn’t even locked it, “I am a little old woman.”

“Mrs. Schmidt!” Jiselle said, opening the door all the way. “What is it?”

“I am a little old woman,” Mrs. Schmidt said again. She was wearing a white nightgown.

“Oh, dear,” Jiselle said. “I’ll go find your husband. You stay here with Sam.”

As Jiselle ran across the yard to the Schmidts’ house, she wrapped her arms around herself, shivering suddenly, although she wasn’t cold. The moon lit up the backyard, and she hurried up the back steps, holding her flashlight in front of her. She knocked on the door. “Mr. Schmidt? Mr. Schmidt?
Brad?
”

There was no answer. Jiselle tried to look through the screen door and the kitchen window, but the shades were drawn, the curtains pulled. There were no lights on inside. Maybe he was asleep. She knocked harder on the door, and then stood waiting on the steps. She cupped her hands around her mouth and called to the window, “Mr. Schmidt?”

Certainly, if he were in there, he would have heard her by then. But still there was no answer.

She turned the knob on the back door.

It was unlocked.

She pushed it all the way open and stood in the threshold.

“Hello?” she called to the darkness, shining her flashlight into the tidy kitchen before stepping in.

Jiselle had never entered the Schmidts’ house from the back door before. With her flashlight, she could make out checkerboard curtains on the windows. The cupboards were painted pastel green. There was a throw rug with a rooster embroidered on it beneath a Formica table. A little yellow rag was folded neatly over the edge of the sink. Jiselle walked through the kitchen toward the hallway that led to the living room, leaving the back door open behind her.

“Hello?” she called, but quietly.

The hallway was even darker, but when she shone her light on the walls, Jiselle could see photographs of Brad and Diane in younger days: Holding hands at the edge of a canyon. Standing with their backs to a waterfall. Diane Schmidt waving from a lounge chair at the side of a pool, wearing a two-piece bathing suit, her skin tanned and smooth, her hair still dark and pulled back, tied with a bright scarf.

“Brad?”

She peered into what must have been their bedroom.

The bed was carefully made, the white bedspread without a single crease.

He was not in the bed.

She walked past that room and what must have been the family room, and then the bathroom, which smelled of air freshener and floral soaps.

She stepped into the living room, which was darker than any of the other rooms had been. The television was off, of course, although Mr. Schmidt was sitting in front of it with his feet propped up on an ottoman, staring straight ahead with eyes that appeared to have melted deep into his skull, or fallen from it.

“Hello?” Jiselle said, although she knew he wouldn’t answer.