In a Perfect World (8 page)

I
n Puerto Rico, their plane skidded to a stop in the midst of a driving storm. Thunder, sounding like far-off artillery, rolled in off the Caribbean in one unbroken wave of sound. They’d flown through the night, and Mark was still heavily asleep beside Jiselle. His small airline-issued pillow had fallen onto her lap.

On the flight from Newark to Ponce, there had been only a dozen other passengers, and these all seemed to be native Puerto Ricans, going home, speaking Spanish. The flight attendants never bothered to give their announcements in English, except for the standard warning that North American travelers who displayed suspected symptoms of the Phoenix flu could be turned away at their ports of entry without forewarning.

Mark and Jiselle were alone in first class, separated by twenty rows from the rest of the passengers.

When they deplaned, the flight attendants didn’t smile.

While Mark went to fetch the rental car, Jiselle waited inside the little terminal and watched the baggage carrousel lurch in circles, bearing its suitcases and bags—an eternal loop slipping through and under the fringed rubber curtain, returning from that mysterious beyond with a new bag every few minutes. She watched as bag after bag passed by but didn’t see theirs. Finally, Mark came up beside her and said, “There’s no car for us, and apparently there’s not one fucking vehicle for rent on this entire fucking island.”

They decided to make the best of it.

It was their honeymoon!

What else could they do?

They laughed in the empty airport terminal. Mark made some calls to airline personnel, who said not to worry, they’d find the bags. The bags would be on the next flight. They’d be delivered to the resort.

After numerous cell phone calls, a driver was procured who was willing to drive them to their resort, and Mark and Jiselle sat together on a bench outside the airport waiting for him. The air was warm, sultry. It smelled of seawater and the rot of weeds in seawater, but it was pleasantly pungent—a kind of necessary and utterly natural decomposition taking place offshore under turquoise waves. Eventually a rusted white van that read
NORTH AMERICAN TRANSPORTER
on the side, in stenciling that looked far newer than the van, pulled up.

“Hola.”

The driver was an elderly man. He bowed to them and said in a heavy Spanish accent what sounded to Jiselle like “Welcome to Purgatory” but must have been “Welcome to Puerto Rico.” Then he held out a wet towel and said,
“Por favor,
you must wash your hands.”

Mark looked at Jiselle, amused. They shrugged, smiled at each other, and passed the towel between them, wiping their hands. It was warm and sodden and smelled of bleach. When they tried to hand it back to the driver, he only shook his head at it, and nodded toward a trash can. Mark stepped over and dropped it in, and they followed the driver to his van.

The drive to the resort was quick. The freeway followed the seashore, which was lapped by azure water. The sky was radiant. The old man turned on the radio, and someone seemed to be reading poetry, in Spanish, in a monotone. The words washed around Jiselle with the breeze through the van windows. She put her head on Mark’s shoulder, closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, she found that she was no longer resting on Mark’s shoulder but had her temple pressed to the armrest between them, and Mark was outside of the parked van arguing with the driver, whose thin empty hand was held out.

“No one takes North Americans in a van now! No one but
me!”

“It was a thirty-minute drive!” Mark said.

“Well, it would have been a longer walk,
señor.
Two. Hundred. Dollars.”

Mark stared at the old man in disbelief, and then looked into his open hand. After a few slow seconds, he reached around for the wallet in his pocket, took it out, counted ten twenty-dollar bills, and placed them in the open hand, where they disappeared instantly into the old man’s pocket.

The Hotel Paradiso—which Jiselle and Mark would begin, over their seven-day honeymoon, to refer to jokingly as the Hotel Limbo—was nearly deserted except for another couple from the United States, also there on a honeymoon, and a family from New Jersey with three small children named Cato, Caitlin, and Calli.

Except for those three occupied suites, the rest of the rooms seemed to be empty. The whole resort had the feel of something that had been abandoned abruptly. There were empty lounge chairs placed carefully around the pool. The hot tub bubbled forsakenly.

Their luggage never arrived, so they bought bathing suits, shorts, and T-shirts in the dive shop on the beach.

The other honeymooning couple from the United States was younger than Mark and Jiselle and spent much of their time strolling along the beach. By the middle of the week they were both sunburned almost beyond recognition. Their faces were red and swollen—eyelids, lips, bloated with burn.

“I think they sold us phony sunblock in the dive shop,” the young woman said. “We were both slathered in SPF forty-five, and
this
happened.” She gestured to her face. “Joe can’t even lie down,” she said, nodding at her husband.

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” said the mother of the three Cs from New Jersey, sauntering over to their table. “They hate us here. Have you seen all the buttons and bumper stickers?” She was referring to the red circles with slashes through the outline of the United States—similar to the ones Jiselle had seen in Denmark months before and in every country outside the United States she’d been to since.

“Our kids wanted to snorkel,” the father of the three Cs said, scratching his large, hairy stomach, “so we asked about it in the dive shop, and the old woman said, ‘Well, you have killed our coral reef, so there can be no snorkeling.’ And I said, ‘Hey,
señora,
I’m not responsible for your coral reef…’ I mean, you can’t blame Americans for
everything.”

“But they do,” the honeymooning wife said. “They blame us for the coral reefs, and the fish, and the hurricanes, and the flu. All of it. A plane crashes, and it’s our fault. Some species of bird dies out, and we did it. You name it, they blame it on us.”

There was a moment of silence.

A bird high in a palm tree made a screeching sound, but otherwise there was just the white noise of waves washing onto sand.

The mother of the three Cs agreed, nodding vehemently. She said, “You know, that witch at the front desk gave me the evil eye. She accused me of
stealing
my children.”

“What?” all the others, including Mark and Jiselle, cried out at once.

“Yes,” the woman said. “She said, ‘Look, you stole them all from different countries. They aren’t your children.’ I said, ‘We
adopted
our children from different countries—
poverty-stricken countries.
We didn’t
steal
them.’”

“What did she say then?” Jiselle asked.

The mother shrugged.

“Well, I tell you,” the honeymooning wife said, “that’s unforgivable. And so is this.” She pointed to her sunburned neck.

“And look at
this,”
her husband said, holding out his arms. “If they did this to me, it’s tantamount to attempted murder.”

“That’s true,” his wife said. “This much sun can kill you. I tell you, I’m not coming back to Puerto Rico in this lifetime.”

Jiselle looked out at the ocean. The undulating turquoise, and cobalt, and indigo. A pelican was riding an air current just over the water, looking black and prehistoric. It plunged into a wave, emerged with something silver and wriggling in its beak.

Still, the days of Mark’s and Jiselle’s honeymoon were full of quiet luxuriating in each other’s company. They strolled alone along the ocean. They swam alone in the pool. They sat alone in the swirling vortex of the hot tub. They rented a kayak and stroked their way in perfect coordination out to the dead coral reef, where they snorkeled side by side.

Just beneath the surface of the Caribbean, wearing that snorkel mask, Jiselle could hear only her own steady breathing. The sunlight turned the pale blue water on the ocean floor to dancing, electric brainwaves. And the ghosts of the coral, like a white forest, were spread out beneath her for what seemed like miles and miles of serenity. The rictus of cacti, bleached to bone. Or the bare branches of winter trees, coated in snow—blameless, voiceless, motionless peace. She cast her own floating shadow down on it, as if she were a cloud passing over the shared dream of a million vanished people. Mark, beside her, fluttering in his fins, reached out and caressed her through the water. She was so happy she shed a tear or two, but the tears simply slipped out of her snorkel mask and joined the salty, abiding tears of the sea.

I
t seems your son has head lice,” the woman on the other end of the line said.

At first, no part of the sentence registered.

Head lice.

Your Son.

But when Jiselle leaned down to look at the Caller ID, she saw that the woman was phoning from Marquette Elementary, where she’d dropped Sam off a few hours before.

“You need to come and get him, I’m afraid. School policy.”

When Jiselle arrived at the school, Sam was sitting alone in a corner of the main office. He was scratching his head, pulling the fingers of both hands through the long strawberry-blond curls. The secretary looked up at Jiselle with what seemed to be skepticism or disapproval. “Are you the nanny?” she asked.

“No,” Jiselle said. “I’m the stepmother.”

The secretary raised her eyebrows.

“Here,” she said, sliding a piece of paper over to Jiselle gingerly, as if she, too, might be infested. “You need to sign him out.”

Jiselle signed her name
Jiselle McKnight
—and then remembered, scratched it out, and wrote
Dorn
over the last name. The secretary took the clipboard, looked at it, and then looked up at Jiselle again, as if trying to see through her, to read something on the other side of the room, something Jiselle was blocking her view of. She said then, “You know, no one
knows,
but
my
thinking is that this virus could just as easily be spread by lice as by anything else. If he were my son, I’d shave his head right away.”

Jiselle nodded at the woman and mouthed the words
thank you,
although no sound came out of her mouth.

In the parking lot, Sam slid onto the passenger seat of Mark’s Cherokee, slouched over the backpack in his lap, and said, “This sucks.”

Jiselle nodded at him, started up the car. “Yeah,” she said, and then, as an afterthought, quietly, “Sam, I think you’re not supposed to say ‘sucks.’” Wasn’t that one of the admonitions she’d heard Mark give him?

Sam nodded with the infinite weariness of a very old child.

They drove to the drugstore. The school receptionist had given Jiselle what looked to be a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a handout on head lice, and a list of the products you could buy to rid your child of them. Sam held that list in his hand beside Jiselle as she drove.

It had rained hard the night before, and the weather—still like early autumn although it was the first week of November—had the feel of the tropics, although the leaves had fallen from most of the trees. Humid, bright air lingered over everything. Blue puddles of rain and oil dotted the drugstore lot. After she parked and picked up her purse, Sam said, “I don’t want to go in.”

“No one can
see
them, Sam,” Jiselle said.

“Mrs. Hicks saw them.”

“No, she didn’t
see
them. She just—figured. Because you were itching.”

“No,” Sam said. “She
saw
them.”

Jiselle looked at Sam’s head.

In truth, she thought perhaps she
could
see something black, and maybe moving, in the silky part in the hair at the top of his head.

She said, “Okay. You can wait here if you want.”

Inside the drugstore, Jiselle scanned the shelves for a few minutes for something with the word
lice
on it, until, finding nothing, she had to ask the girl behind the counter, who called across the store to the pharmacist, “Where’s the head lice stuff?” She felt relieved that Sam had waited outside.

It took a minute or two, but the pharmacist came out from behind his glass cage and led Jiselle to the shelf for “pests and critters.” To get to it, they had to walk past the cardboard displays of flu “cures.” Life-size cut-outs of healthy-looking men and women holding bottles of Immune Master. Pink-cheeked children running across a green field overlaid with the words
Dr. Springwell’s Secret!

They made their way through the leftover Halloween costumes and candy and decorations displays, and a variety of gags, such as battery-operated plastic hands that scooted across the floor, tarantulas and bats on strings. That year had been like no Halloween Jiselle ever remembered, festive and commercial beyond anything she would have imagined for what had, at one time, been the simplest, briefest of holidays.

Mark had been home Halloween weekend. He’d donned a top hat, Jiselle had worn one of his trench coats, with black sunglasses, and they’d walked door to door with Sam, who had dressed as a soldier. Red vest over a white T-shirt. White pants and black boots. A tall red hat with a blue feather in it. He’d carried a pillowcase. By the end of the night, it weighed forty pounds.

Not only were the children out trick-or-treating that night, but adults were, too. Alone and in crowds, with their children and without, wearing elaborate costumes—beggars, prostitutes, Abe Lincolns, Grim Reapers—they were swigging from flasks, passing the flasks to strangers, exactly the kind of germ-sharing they were constantly warned against. But they were happy, friendly. Raucous with laughter and polite at the same time. Some of the houses in town had absurdly elaborate Halloween displays. Enormous inflatable cartoon animals on their front lawns. Hundreds of them. Pranksters had taken to stabbing them with screwdrivers and box cutters. All over town, deflated decorations littered lawns. Their owners, playing along with the pranks, erected tombstones over them.
R.I.P. SCOOBY-DOO. HERE LIES SNOOPY, STABBED THROUGH THE HEART BY A HEARTLESS KILLER.

There were light displays, too, and someone had strung naked baby dolls from telephone poles all along one street. Someone else had built a scaffold in the elementary school parking lot and hung an effigy of the president wearing a witch’s hat. One family had dangled hundreds of plastic bats from the birch tree in their front yard.

The regular codes of conduct were being pleasantly broken or ignored that night. People walked in the middle of the street, unwrapping candy and discarding the trash on sidewalks. Despite the public service announcements about not eating candy the origins of which you were uncertain, children and their parents were gobbling it down even as they collected it. Teenagers were handed cans of beer by homeowners. A few macabre revelers wore zombie masks and nurse uniforms in reference to the Phoenix flu. One tall, frightening boy sauntered alone, without bothering to collect candy, from door to door in a black cloak and a long-beaked bird mask. People smiled at him, and he nodded somberly back.

The pharmacist joked about the lice—“How big are these bugs? Can you fry ’em up for supper?”—but when Jiselle was apparently too flabbergasted to respond, he explained to her soberly what she needed to buy and what she needed to do, and she left the store with a small comb and a bottle of something called Nix, with a horrifying cartoon of a beast with eight legs on the label.

“You okay?” she asked Sam when she got back into the Cherokee with her paper bag.

He was staring straight ahead. “Look,” he said when she was behind the wheel, and he pointed to something in the parking lot.

She put on her sunglasses to see what it was through the glare on the windshield. She leaned forward, squinting.

There, in the middle of the nearly empty drugstore parking lot, was a small group of dark furred things. Moving but not scurrying.
Milling.

Animals, clearly. But what kind?

She rubbed her eyes and leaned forward to see them better. There were eight or nine of them. Tails. And paws. Black.

“Listen,” Sam said.

Jiselle held her breath and listened, and even through the rolled-up windows she could hear them making a quiet high-pitched sound, like childish chuckling, or singing. She turned to Sam and asked, whispering the question to him, “What
are
those?”

“Rats,” he said.

“Oh my God,” Jiselle said, putting a hand to her mouth and seeing them, then, clearly. Their naked tails. Their sharp pink ears. Her heart sped up. She started up the engine of the SUV, and the rats, seeming to have heard it, turned their horrible faces in its direction but didn’t run off. They simply stared at Jiselle and Sam in the SUV. As she drove out of the parking lot, she was careful to make a wide loop around the rats, which did not leave their tight circle but seemed, instead, to stand their ground even more stubbornly, watching them drive away.

Back at home, Jiselle read the directions on the bottle of Nix, while Sam ate the grilled cheese sandwich she’d made for him. It was the one thing she’d mastered in the kitchen since moving into Mark’s house. The
only
thing. She’d gone so long in life without learning how to cook, it seemed that she had lost the capacity to learn. She’d burned omelets and served up pink-centered chicken breasts a few times before the girls took to cooking for themselves, Lean Cuisines and pot pies.

(“None of the other nannies could cook, either,” Sam said to her once, and then stammered an apology when he saw the look on her face.)

The few dinners she’d made that had actually succeeded—lasagna, seafood manicotti, chicken and dumplings, an enchilada casserole—had displeased the girls as much as the ruined ones. Too spicy. Or not spicy enough. Sara would say she was a vegetarian some days. Camilla would claim to have allergies she’d failed to mention until a certain meal was served. And although Sam was always willing to eat anything she made, all he really wanted was grilled cheese, and that, at least, Jiselle had finally figured out how to make exactly as he liked it.

Browned but only slightly. The cheese soft and warm but not gooey in the center.

She’d put the sandwich in front of him on his favorite plate—pale blue with a faded picture of Scooby-Doo in the center—and poured him a glass of milk. She unscrewed the top of the bottle of Nix and sniffed it, and realized she must have made a face when Sam said, “Is it super bad?”

“Well,” Jiselle said softly, “it’s not great.”

In truth, it smelled like tar and also formaldehyde.

“We’ll do this a little later, okay?” she offered.

“Okay,” Sam said, tearing parts of his sandwich off before eating them. Jiselle put the bottle of Nix on the table and folded her hands. Sam was going to hate this. This boy who squirmed away from his father when he simply tried to wipe some ketchup off his face—who, once, when Jiselle had suggested cleaning out his ears with a Q-tip, had looked at her with wide, horrified eyes and said, “Are you
kidding?”

She watched him eat. She tried not to stare at his hair—all those beautiful curls, and what might be crawling among them—but she leaned a little to the left, considering the shape of his skull. He had beautiful cheekbones. A pleasing jaw and brow. She said, “Have you ever considered having your head shaved?”

Sam looked up brightly from his Scooby-Doo plate. “Wow,” he said. “You mean, like a total skinhead?” Sam knew about skinheads. They’d been the latest bad news. Burning down Chinese-owned businesses. Burning crosses on the lawns of Jews, African Americans, Muslims—anyone they chose to blame at the moment for the Phoenix flu.

“Well, yeah,” Jiselle said. “I guess. Like a skinhead—but
nice.”

“That would be
so cool,”
Sam said, holding a piece of his grilled cheese aloft. His eyes were wide. In them, Jiselle could read the clock on the microwave behind them blinking 11:11, 11:11, 11:11.

Jiselle told herself she was not shaving Sam’s head because of the advice of the hysterical secretary at his school, but what could it hurt?

It was just hair. It would grow back.

So, after lunch, she stood behind him at the kitchen sink. First, she used scissors to cut the strawberry-blond curls off his head—soft, beautiful handfuls—and then she shook the satiny strands off her fingers into the trash can. They clung to her arms, her shirt, her jeans, and the static electricity actually crackled when she brushed them off in little jumping sparks. She wet what was left of his hair by leaning him forward over the sink, filling her hands with lukewarm water, splashing it over his hair, and then she patted shaving cream onto his head. Finally, she used Mark’s razor to carefully smooth the last of it from his scalp, and afterward they both went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror so Sam could see.

The skin on Sam’s scalp was pale, but it looked healthy—and without hair, it was possible to really see how handsome his features were. The nose was Mark’s, but the eyes were deep set and olive-brown. At his temples were subtle and delicate blue veins just under the surface. The head was a beautiful shape, and the back of his skull felt solid and satisfying in her palm. Touching it—the weird, beautiful, wonderful nakedness of it—Jiselle could imagine what it had been like for Mark, and for Joy, to bring him into the world for the first time, the way the skin of a newborn might really feel like the organ that skin is: breathing, alert, warm and cool at the same time. She had the impulse to kiss his head, but she had never actually kissed Sam before, except for the kind of air-blown kiss to the cheek her mother had always given her, and she had no idea how he’d react, so she settled for smoothing her fingertips along the beautiful ridge behind his ear, tickling him a little. He laughed. He moved his head around so he could inspect himself from both sides in the mirror, and asked, “How do I look?”

“You look perfect,” Jiselle said.

Because of head lice and the public school’s policy on them, Sam and Jiselle had the whole day free, and it wasn’t even noon.