In a Perfect World (11 page)

Christmas morning, Sam was up first. At daybreak, he came to Mark’s and Jiselle’s door and knocked until they got out of bed. “Presents!” he shouted. “Now!” When he was certain that Jiselle and Mark were up, he went into his sisters’ rooms, pulling them by their arms, groaning, yawning, into the living room.

While Jiselle went to the kitchen and made coffee, Mark started a fire in the fireplace, and the smell of the Christmas tree mixed with the coffee and the sulfur smells of the fire, which roared up quickly—a few black ashy stars from the newspaper drifting among the dancing flames.

Sam was wearing his thermal underwear. Camilla, a long white gown with lace at the sleeves. Mark had his black velvet robe pulled around him, socks on with his plaid slippers.

Sara wore a black slip. Dime-store satin. She perched herself on the arm of the couch, and from where Jiselle sat on the floor, she could see that Sara was again wearing that pair of panties trimmed in black lace that Jiselle had bought for herself in Paris.

“I have to warn you,” Mark had said after Thanksgiving. “Christmas. It was Joy’s favorite holiday. She was very
elaborate
about Christmas. As you can imagine, for the children, well, it can be a difficult day. For the girls, at least. Sam was so young. I’m sure he doesn’t even remember those years, but…”

Jiselle didn’t speak as he shared this information with her, but later she tried to get more details. What had Joy done for Christmas? How had she decorated? What did she cook? But Mark dismissed the questions, saying, “Joy’s been gone a long time by now, Jiselle. It would be worse if you tried to…” He didn’t have to say it:
Be Joy.
Behind him Jiselle could hear the kitchen clock ticking like a little hidden bomb.

But if the children were thinking of their mother on Christmas Eve, they didn’t show it. Bobby Temple came over and watched TV with Camilla, and Sara listened to her iPod, sprawled on the family room rug. Sam helped Jiselle frost cookies, and they ate together what was left of the frosting, sitting at the kitchen table with spoons and bowls until Jiselle’s teeth ached with the sugar and Sam’s face and hands were sticky with it. Mark arrived, like Santa Claus, in the middle of the night. He slipped into bed beside Jiselle, smelling of snow and sky. She fell back to sleep in his arms, and then Sam was pounding on the door, and it was Christmas morning, and they were unwrapping presents.

For Jiselle, there was a clay mug from Sam with her initials drawn into it. It had been a class art project. It was a beautiful, solid, turquoise mug, the kind of thing you might find in a museum. Circa 800
BCE.
Jiselle held it up for everyone else to see and said, “I love this, Sam!”

She did.

From Camilla, a paperweight with a daisy captured—floating, immortalized—at the center of the heavy globe. As Jiselle looked at it, Camilla said, “You said they were your favorite flower,” smiling.

Jiselle didn’t remember saying that daisies were her favorite—truly, roses were—but she was touched. “Thank you,” she said, “so much,” holding the satisfying weight of it in her palm.

From Mark she received a pair of jade earrings from China—exquisite, breathtaking, something an empress might wear, and she said, “Oh my,” holding them up to her earlobes. “Oh. Mark.”

“Do you like them?”

“Of course!”

And then there were the gifts for the children.

Mark had left the buying of their presents to Jiselle. (“Oh, you know what kids like better than I do,” he’d said. “It’ll be easier for you. I’ll just pick up a few things at the airport if you don’t mind doing the rest.”)

Sam had been easy. He’d happily made a very specific list for Jiselle, all the details, down to the manufacturer of the plastic toys he longed for. On Christmas morning, he ripped the boxes open, exclaiming over each one, shouting out the names, the model numbers.

The girls, however, had not been easy.

Jiselle had shopped for them for weeks, and every time she picked up a sweater, a book, a board game, she imagined the look of exasperation on Sara’s face, or the cool acceptance on Camilla’s. In the end, she decided to shop by material. Cashmere. Linen. Pure silk. How, she’d hoped, could anything made of the right material be scorned?

But the girls’ reactions to Jiselle’s presents were perfunctory. “Thanks,” they said, and then exclaimed brightly over the perfume their father had picked up for them at the Duty Free shop the day before. But that little injustice, Jiselle felt, was to be expected. She herself remembered the thrill of the small afterthoughts her father would sometimes pick up a few days before a holiday—the way the exotic wrapping paper, no doubt chosen for him by a woman at the store, outshone her mother’s dependable efforts. She could still smell the sweet watery little-girl’s perfume he’d bought for her the Christmas she was sixteen, and the way the soft bristles of the vanity brush had felt in her long hair when she pulled them through it, and the weightless feel of the matching gilt-handled mirror in her hand—although she remembered, too, that the gold of it had flecked off on her hands within a few weeks. Still, it had been her favorite gift, and it did not matter that her mother had given her a stereo, the best one at the store.

“This is for you,” Sara said after everything else had been opened. She handed Jiselle a small box.

It was the size of a ring box or a box for a pendant. Beautifully wrapped, in silver. A large white bow. A little glittery tag hanging from it.
For: Mommy. From: Sara.

“What is it?” Mark asked. He was sitting on the couch pulling up the wool socks Camilla had knitted for him. Jiselle was still on the floor, her flannel nightgown spread out around her.

The tape along the wrapping seams was gummy. She had to shake it off her thumb and forefinger. She took off the white ribbon, peeled away the silver paper, and opened the box.

Sam leaned over to look. He said, “Huh?”

“Well?” Mark asked, looking up from his socks. “What is it?”

Sara started to laugh then. A high, cackling laugh at first, and then a deep wild hiccupping. She slid off the arm of the sofa and onto the floor, holding her stomach with one hand, covering her face with the other, laughing and gasping as Mark and Camilla watched. Gently, Camilla kicked her sister with the toe of her slipper and said, “So what
is
it, idiot?”

Jiselle stood up fast, snapped the lid of the box shut. She tried to swallow, but her mouth had gone so dry she had nothing to force down her throat.

“What?” Mark asked, and then looked down at Sara, writhing on the floor. She was still laughing, but it was silent laughter now. Her mouth was open. Jiselle could see her tonsils. The wet red entrance to a cave. “What’s up here, Jiselle?” Mark asked, but Jiselle still could not speak and could not take her eyes off Sara.

“Sam?”
Mark asked then. “What’s going on here, Sam? What was in the box?”

Sam shrugged. He cleared his throat. He said, “It looked like a big booger to me.”

Jiselle walked quickly out of the room then, took the box to the kitchen, and tossed it into the trash under the sink. She stood, holding tightly to the edge of the sink for a minute or two, and then she started to run water into it, rinsing the dishes they’d left there the night before. A high ringing started in her ears, as if she were at the end of a long metal tunnel and someone outside of it was pounding on it with a metal spoon.

“Honey?” Mark said, coming up behind her. “Honey?” he said again, burrowing his face in her hair. “Oh, Jiselle. Jiselle. I’m sorry.”

Jiselle said nothing. She continued to rinse the dishes. After a few seconds, she had to break free of his embrace to put a rinsed dish—Sam’s Scooby-Doo plate—into the dishwasher.

“Sweetheart,” Mark said into her hair, and then into her neck. “Sweetheart, you know Sara’s just a mixed-up kid. She’ll be so ashamed of herself in a few days. But this is a tough time for her. Having a stepmother. Christmas. All the adjustments.”

Jiselle continued to rinse dishes.

Camilla’s ice-cream bowl. Sara’s orange juice glass. Then she let a few pieces of silverware slip out of her hand, clatter into the sink, and let her hands rest at her sides. She drew a trembling breath. She opened her mouth but closed it again. She cleared her throat. Finally, with her back to Mark, she was able to say, in a tone she wanted to snatch back even as it traveled out of her into the air above the sink, “Of course, it’s so easy for me.”

“Oh,” Mark said. “Oh, of course. I know, my darling. My
darlingest.
Of course. Of
course!
It’s hardest of all for you.”

Jiselle swallowed but could say nothing more, and Mark said nothing but kept his head on her shoulder as she began to rinse dishes again, moving with her as she went from the sink to the dishwasher, keeping his arms around her waist. He had to shuffle to stay attached to her, and it was ridiculous, comical. On the way back from the dishwasher, holding her waist as she moved in front of him, he stumbled, and when Jiselle started to laugh, reluctantly, he whirled her around, pulled her to him. She let go against him then, kissing, and being kissed, and laughing and shedding a few hot tears at the same time, while outside, the actual sound of sleigh bells seemed to jangle somewhere close by.

O
ne morning, Camilla leaned over the bowl in which Sam’s sea monkeys were swimming in languid, microscopic circles for the first, and only, week of their lives, and stated, both casually and profoundly, “They’re dead.”

It was the second week of January, and the sky was deep purple now every day. Low clouds, looking like steel wool, skimmed over the tops of the trees in the ravine. There was no snow on the ground, but the wind blew it in hard little flakes sideways past the windows. Jiselle, eating Cheerios at the kitchen table, looked up when Camilla spoke.

“No,” she said. “They’re not dead. They’re just—”

“Yeah, they are,” Camilla said. “They’re dead.”

Jiselle stood up from her Cheerios and walked toward the counter, still shaking her head.

No.

Only an hour had passed since Sam had so carefully changed the water, taking a clean bowl from the cupboard, rolling up his sleeves, gently tipping the dirty water into the bowl. Jiselle watched as he did it. He bit his lip. He rinsed out the dish—the green scum swirling around in the sink before it disappeared—and tested the water from the faucet with the tips of his fingers, and then filled the plastic dish, and then scooped the sea monkeys out of the dirty water with a teaspoon, and put them in the fresh dish.

She went to it. Sam stepped into the kitchen then. He’d overheard. He walked straight to the dish, and he and Jiselle both looked down.

“Oh, Sam,” Jiselle said, rubbing his back in tiny, nervous circles.

“Camilla’s right,” he said. “They’re dead. The change in water temperature killed them.”

“Oh,” Jiselle said. “It’s—”

“It’s my fault,” he said. He shrugged.

“No!” Jiselle said.

But Sam walked out of the kitchen to the living room, and Jiselle listened to his footsteps cross the wood floors to his room.

“Jesus,” Camilla said. “They were just sea monkeys.”

When Mark was gone for more than a few nights in a row, Jiselle began to
pine.
She had not, she realized, really known before what that word meant or the feeling of it—to long for something or someone to the point of physical suffering. She would close the door to their bedroom and lock it behind her, and go to his closet, where she would gather up his uniforms in her arms and breathe them in. The blood around her heart seemed to ache. She would close her eyes, and sometimes she had to get on her knees—doubled over with a pain in her stomach, as though she had been shot with a poisoned arrow.

It was even worse during the day, when the children were at school, and the hours seemed to hover around her like some sort of exquisitely heavy gown. When they were home, the girls barely spoke to her, but even their angry outbursts at each other were a distraction from the longing. Sara’s screaming music behind the curtain in the doorway of her room filled the house with a kind of ear-splitting clutter that was mind-numbing and, therefore, somehow comforting. Camilla’s boyfriend, Bobby, would come over sometimes, and if he wasn’t on the couch in front of the TV with Camilla, he might get on the floor with Sam, and the two of them would move action figures across the rug, sputtering out artillery noises.

There was Sam.

Sometimes Jiselle wasn’t sure if he was suggesting Monopoly or a walk in the ravine or a card game for his sake or for hers, but she never turned him down. Why would she? What else did she have to do? It had taken her these months in St. Sophia to learn that, despite the brick and clapboard storefronts and the shady streets of the town, no one really
lived
in St. Sophia. They slept there, and they dropped their children off at schools there before heading for the freeway ramps. People from the cities and suburbs nearby drove in for quaint small-town lunches and antiquing on the weekends, but Jiselle was, she realized, never going to make friends in St. Sophia. There would be no reading groups or knitting circles. She’d be invited to no tea parties. There was no one in the park or at the library during the day, and the only people she’d met so far had been the Schmidts, next door, and Camilla’s boyfriend’s parents, Paul and Tara Temple. Still, even in her loneliest hours, she could barely tolerate the television, and the radio was full of music she didn’t like, or paranoid ranting:

“Dr. Springwell has been broadcasting his show from the Canary Islands for the last three months,” the woman on the radio said.
“That’s
Dr. Springwell’s secret!”

Laughter followed from a small studio audience.

That morning they’d announced the resignation of the secretary of state, the suspension of interstate Amtrak service, the death of a basketball star, the president’s plans for military action against the Alliance of Nations embargo.

“We cannot allow our nation to be destroyed during this brief troubled period. We have been a friend to the nations that would turn their backs on us now, and we must now demand their friendship in return.”

But there were no more white balloons, and the federal government had ordered all flags to be flown at full mast.
No more doomsday thinking.
This had been a strategy that had helped the country survive two world wars—the careful manipulation of information to the public and the suppression of pessimism.

“These
frauds,”
the woman on the radio, sounding happy and full of excited energy, said about Dr. Springwell and his ilk, “should be executed when this is over and they try to get back into this country.”

One Friday afternoon, when Mark was flying to Australia, and then to Hawaii, and would not be back until Monday, Jiselle, on her knees in his closet, began to feel around on the bottom of it. If she was looking for something, she didn’t realize it, until she came upon a shoebox in the back, beyond his tennis shoes and snow boots and a pair of shower shoes she’d had no idea he owned.

She pulled out the box, brought it to the bed, and opened it.

On top were a dozen photographs. Mostly, they were of Joy. Jiselle recognized the curls, the tilt of her head, the slightly crooked smile. But there were others. A woman with a short blond bob standing with a surfboard at the end of a jetty. Another with brown tresses pulled back behind her head; this one had an arm thrown around a much younger Camilla, who wasn’t smiling. Another one Jiselle recognized as the nanny who’d come to the house to retrieve a pair of flip-flops she’d left on the deck. Jiselle had come out of the bedroom to be introduced to her but could not fail to recognize the girl’s coldness as anything but hostility. Mark hadn’t been home, and Sara was the one who handed over the flip-flops with a smug smile. “See ya!” she said, closing the door on the girl.

Jiselle had assumed the hostility was because the nanny had been displaced from her job by Jiselle’s marriage to Mark. But, looking at this photograph, Jiselle understood what she had found. The girl, lounging on the couch in the family room—her straight brown hair hanging down over her shoulders in a glossy cascade—had a smile of such radiant pleasure on her face as she stared into the camera that there was no mistaking what this box contained. And it didn’t surprise Jiselle to find, under that photograph, one of herself in a black silk blouse, in Copenhagen, outside the Round Tower.

Jiselle’s hands were trembling, and coolly damp—but why? If Mark had searched through her own things back at her old house, he could have found a similar stash of old images of boys and men Jiselle had been with. There was a Polaroid, she knew, of Stephen in her bathtub, with his wet hair streaming down his face. Aaron, just waking up in her bed. She could hardly complain that Mark had photographs of old girlfriends, or that he had old girlfriends. Could she?

She was about to close the box when she decided to look at the newspaper clipping at the bottom of it. It was yellowed and softened, and she opened it carefully. It was an account from the
St. Sophia Gazette
of Joy’s “untimely death.”

Local Mother Killed While
Attempting to Protect Her Child

Jiselle folded the clipping up again carefully along the original creases, put it back in the shoebox, with the photographs on top of it, and put the box on the floor in the back of the closet where she’d found it.

That afternoon, Jiselle waited until she saw Brad Schmidt at the end of his driveway before she went, herself, to retrieve the empty trash can. “Hello!” she called out to him. He turned and waited for her to reach him.

He wanted, as always, to talk about the flu: “Don’t kid yourself that the rats don’t have it. And the mice. Protect yourselves.”

Jiselle nodded. She said, “Well, we’re doing what we can.”

“What kind of traps do you have?” he asked.

“Live traps.”

Brad Schmidt shook his head, as though at very bad news or at foolishness so vast there could be no other response.

The exterminator thought it might be the unusually mild winter, the early spring and summer weather, that was causing all the trouble with the rodents—a complaint across the Midwest and the eastern states. By the last week of May, you couldn’t cross a room without having a mouse dash in front of you. Every morning, when Jiselle came into the kitchen for her first cup of coffee, something small and dark and alive would flee from her. She’d scream—a high, unfamiliar yelp that seemed to come straight out of her subconscious—heart pounding, all her senses jolted to high alert.

As with the birds, there was a barrage of public service announcements about the rodents. They were not carriers of
Yersinia pestis,
just as hemorrhagic zoonosis was not the bubonic plague. The stories of corpses found in abandoned buildings and in ditches gnawed to pieces by rats could certainly have been true, but this did not link any particular illness to the presence of rodents. Rats had always eaten dead bodies. The usual care was needed to keep rats and mice out of homes and businesses, but panic was unnecessary and unproductive, and even un-American. Some of the announcements on television showed a flag waving at full mast against a blue sky, while the voiceover cautioned the public against panic.

A decision to use poison or traps, the exterminator told Jiselle, would depend on whether or not anyone in the house would be willing and able to empty the traps—live or otherwise. The poison was slower, he said, and less predictable, but the mice would usually go elsewhere to die. You didn’t have to see them or dispose of them. The traps, however, required “cleaning” and maintenance. Clearly, he’d noticed the absence of a man in the house.

“I’ll take care of it!” Sam insisted. “I want to do it!”

“We’re not going to
kill
them, are we?” Sara called from her room.

Jiselle hadn’t realized Sara was listening to the exterminator talk to her and Sam at the kitchen table, but when Sara shuffled out wearing her black Saturday morning pajamas—already (or still) in her black makeup—it would have been impossible for the exterminator not to notice her resemblance to a rodent.

Sara said, “I’m not going to live here if we’re going to kill innocent creatures.”

Jiselle held up a hand to try to keep Sara from saying anything else, but it might also have looked as if she were waving goodbye.

The exterminator looked at Jiselle.

“Live traps?” she asked.

“I can do live traps if you can do live traps,” he said.

As it happened, Sam was perfectly happy to hear that the traps would fill up fast, that some of the mice might be diseased, or “biters,” and that he would have to wear mesh gloves so he could grab the ones that refused to vacate their cages. Over the next few weeks, like an apprentice exterminator, he took complete responsibility for the mice, for the cages and their maintenance, for the whole operation of trying to keep the mice from taking up permanent residence in the house, or taking it over. Jiselle would wait in the living room as Sam ran through the family room each morning and out the back door with a cage full of mewling and fur. He quit sharing the details with her—their numbers, the state of their health, their attitudes toward their captor—after the first tale of an albino mouse “the size of a baseball” that had bled from its nostrils and—“Stop,” Jiselle had said, trembling, placing her coffee spoon down on the kitchen counter.

“I’m sorry,” Sam said, looking apologetic but smiling at the same time.

“I hope you’re burning them,” Brad Schmidt said, and Jiselle decided there’d be no point in arguing with him about why she would have live traps if she was going to burn the mice, except to be sadistic.

“Can I ask you a question?” she said instead.

“Go ahead,” Brad Schmidt said.

“So. You were here when…?” Jiselle looked toward the road, unable to finish the question.

“When Mrs. Dorn was killed? Sure! We took care of those children until Mark got back.”

“Did she—how did it happen?”

“He never
told
you?” Brad Schmidt’s eyebrows shot up as if he’d caught someone in a fantastic crime.

“Well, he told me of course about the bus, but of course he doesn’t like to talk about it.”

“That little Sam,” Brad Schmidt said, “he tried to dash away from her, into the road; the bus had just started up, and she went after him.” He slammed his left fist then into his right hand to show the impact. “She was a saint, that woman. Not just because of that. Because of
everything.
If there was ever a mother who would have wanted to die taking care of her children, that was Joy Dorn. It’s the only comfort any of us can have.”