In a Perfect World (13 page)

“Do I have to sleep in my room?” Sam asked, and Jiselle remembered then—his night-light: a frog plugged into the electrical outlet next to his bed. Sam couldn’t sleep without that.

“No,” she said. “We can camp out. On the floor. In the living room. Until the power comes back on.”

His eyes widened, and he smiled.

After Sam and Jiselle were done with their sandwiches, they took their flashlights to the linen closet and hauled out the spare blankets and a couple of pillows. Sam held the flashlight while Jiselle made pallets for them on the rug on the floor of the family room.

They didn’t bother with pajamas. Sam lay down on the floor in his khaki pants and green sweater, and Jiselle lay beside him in her black slacks. He’d brought the book of tales with him from his room, and Jiselle rolled over, opening it beside her, holding the flashlight on the page they’d marked the night before:

“Sam?” Jiselle whispered after another page or two.

No answer.

He was asleep.

She closed the book and snapped off the flashlight. It surprised her how total the darkness was. And how quiet. From the girls’ rooms there was no sound at all, and outside there was nothing but the tick-ticking of icy rain on the deck. She closed her eyes, and after what seemed like a long time listening to the sputter and hiss of rain on wood, she fell asleep, dreaming of sitting beside the old woman from the story, who was cooking a fish. The fish glowed with a kind of reflected light from the oil lamp beside the woman—silvery, like a moon in the shape of the fish—and she was leaning over it with a knife when a sudden, brilliant, digital, pealing music slammed into the silence, and Jiselle’s eyes snapped open, and she caught her breath and sat up fast, recognizing her cell phone theme, “The Blue Danube,” and found herself jumping, moving toward it instinctively, still mostly asleep—but where the hell was it?

Stumbling toward the music into the family room, she banged her shins against the coffee table.
“Fuck.”
She got on her hands and knees and scrambled toward the music, which was apparently coming from somewhere deep in the couch—a tiny technological box with a relentless orchestra stuffed inside it.
“Shit.”
Sara must have taken it when they’d gotten back to the house in the dark, talked on it in whispers in her room. This happened every few weeks, when, Jiselle suspected, Sara’s own monthly minutes were used up. Afterward, she’d stuff it into the cushions of the couch so Jiselle would think she’d misplaced it herself.

Jiselle felt around among the upholstery and crumbs until she touched something solid and cold, pulled it out, opened it, and held it to her ear. “Hello?
Hello?”

“Jiselle?”

“Mark?”

“Jiselle, I—”

“Mark,” she said. “Where are you? The electricity’s gone out. Completely out. What do I do if…” She did not know how to finish the question, so she just listened, waiting for an answer, which didn’t come. In the silence, however, she thought she heard Mark sigh. She did hear him clear his throat, she was sure of that, but still he didn’t speak. Finally, to the silence, Jiselle said, “Mark?”

Crackling between them, she suddenly understood, was an ocean. She could hear the waves. There were ships on that ocean, she thought, listening to the silence. Ships bearing good news and bad. False documents. Stowaways. Silk flowers. Parrots in cages. Diamonds in felt sacks. But before the static of all that ocean was yanked away and replaced by the true silence of a connection gone completely dead, Mark said, “Jiselle, I don’t know when I’ll be back. They’ve got us detained here. We—”

“What?”

“Yes,” he said. “Detained.”

“Detained?”

“Well,” Mark said, “that’s what I just said, Jiselle.
Detained.
Don’t you know what
detained
means?”

There was an exasperated huff, and Jiselle felt tears spring into her eyes. Her heart rose into her throat. Of course she knew what
detained
meant, but it wasn’t like Mark to speak in jargon. If there had been mechanical problems, he’d have said,
The fucking incompetents can’t get their plane put together.
If it had been political,
The fascists snatched our passports.
If there had been a strike or a storm,
We’re stuck on this toilet until tomorrow.

Detained?
He was supposed to be home in twelve hours. He was going to take her out for Valentine’s Day. They had reservations. She’d pictured champagne and candlelight, and their knees touching beneath a white tablecloth, opening that small red package he’d spirited away in his sock drawer—a silver bracelet or gold. She could barely speak, but she finally managed to say, “Of course I know, Mark. But—Mark?”

He didn’t answer.

“Mark?”

Nothing.

Jiselle took the cell phone from her ear then and looked at it.

Dead.

Some kind of blind hope made her bring it to her ear again and say his name once more, but still there was no answer. Only the sound of her own ear.

And that ocean.

Ships going down in that ocean. Swallowed without a sound.

J
iselle didn’t sleep again that night. She tried over and over to call Mark at the number he’d phoned her from, but there was never any answer. She let it ring for what seemed like hours, and then she went into the bathroom and closed the door so she wouldn’t wake the children, and tried to call the airline.

“We don’t have that information,” she was told, and Jiselle knew the airlines well enough to know that, if this was what they’d been told to say, it was hopeless—that she could dial a hundred numbers, explain who she was, invent stories
(His mother’s in the hospital, his children are missing, the house burned down, we have to get in touch with Captain Dorn…)
and it would make no difference. They weren’t going to tell her anything whether they had anything to tell her or not.

She lay back down beside Sam on the floor, keeping her cell phone on her chest, and tried to go back to sleep, but the phone never rang again, and she never fell back asleep, and the power never came back on. When the sun finally rose high enough that she could see to make her way through the house without stumbling, she went to the bedroom and opened the little red package in Mark’s sock drawer.

She couldn’t help herself.

It was Valentine’s Day.

Inside the box, it turned out, were both the gold bracelet and the silver bracelet she’d imagined. Jiselle put them back in the box, wrapped it again, put it back in Mark’s sock drawer, and then stood for a moment practicing the bright smile she’d flash when he gave the gift to her.

The power was still out later that morning. Jiselle went to the refrigerator, somehow surprised when the light didn’t come on when she opened the door. She had spent most of her childhood believing that the light in the refrigerator was always on, until her mother explained it to her, showed her the darkness inside by opening the door only a crack and telling Jiselle to look in.

This time not only did the light not come on, but the smell of spoiled milk, bacteria, and lunch meat gone bad had filled up the darkness. Jiselle took out a garbage bag and started dumping the things she was sure couldn’t be salvaged.

She took the bag to the garbage can outside and marveled at how warm and bright the day had turned out to be after the rainy ice of the night before. What snow there was before the storm had been washed away by the rain, and the ice had melted. The lawn rolling toward the ravine, which had been covered in slush for a month, looked like a carpet of crushed green velvet.

Perhaps, Jiselle thought, she’d better go over to the Schmidts’ to see if they were okay over there without electricity. Who knew what kind of special needs the elderly might have that depended on electricity?

She went back in the house to get a sweater and saw that Sara was awake, standing barefoot in front of the refrigerator, with the door open, staring into its emptiness.

“Where did the food go?” she asked, and then, “Why isn’t the light on?”

Pulling on her sweater, Jiselle considered explaining to Sara, as her mother had to her, that the light in the refrigerator was not always on, but she felt sure this was something Sara, so full of her own inner darkness, would have been born knowing. She said, instead, “Well,
no
lights are on, and the food was rotten.”

“When’s Dad getting back?”

Jiselle decided to wait to say anything about that until she knew more. “Soon,” she said, and went out the sliding doors to see to the Schmidts.

Brad Schmidt opened the door wide enough to let Jiselle in, but he didn’t invite her to sit down. “Sure
we’re
okay,” he said, waving his hand in the air as if to wave her concern away. He said he’d grown up in a sod house in Nebraska. He was prepared for the inevitable. He’d always known the electricity was going to be the first thing to go. Gas was going to be next, then food, and then water. “When’s your husband getting back?”

“I don’t know,” Jiselle said. “He’s been”—for a few seconds she couldn’t think of the word—“detained.”

Brad Schmidt’s eyebrows leaped, as they always did when he heard bad news. “That right?” he said.

“Yes. I mean, I guess. He called last night, but I haven’t been able to get in touch with him since.”

“Where’s he at?”

“Germany,” she said, and Brad Schmidt snorted through his nose, a kind of knowing chuckle. “He’ll be back when—”

“When hell freezes over!” Brad Schmidt said. “They warned us! You gotta give ’em that. The Krauts aren’t like Americans, you know. They’re not just gonna let a bunch of foreigners in and tell them they can spread their disease all over the place.”

“Well, they’ll send them back in that case,” Jiselle said. “Why would they keep them?”

“It’s obvious!” Brad Schmidt said. “To teach us a lesson!”

“That would be against the law,” Jiselle said.

“Whose law? What law? You think the Europeans have any sympathy for
us?
Ha! We burned that bridge, and all the other bridges are burning as we speak.”

“I don’t think—”

But he cut her off, seeming to be gesturing to the door or to the world, suggesting with the gesture that she should go. “Good luck, Mrs. Dorn. I suggest you get yourself a rifle.
I’ve
got one, and enough water to last me a year.”

“I’m not worried about—”

“Of course you’re not,” Brad Schmidt said, smirking. “You don’t seem like the worrying type. But, in the meantime, you need a weapon.”

Jiselle was just turning in the doorway when Diane Schmidt wandered out of a back room wearing what looked like an old wedding dress and curtsied to Jiselle.

Before she realized she was doing it, Jiselle was curtsying back.

Back at the house, the children were gathered around the kitchen table eating peanut butter on bread and drinking warm Coke.

“What the hell is going on here?” Sara said when Jiselle slid into a chair at the table with them.

“I don’t know,” Jiselle said. She suggested that they listen to the radio. Did they own a radio that didn’t have to be plugged in? Sam and Camilla left the table to try to find one, but Camilla came back with the only thing they had, dangling it by its electrical cord.

“Call Dad,” Sam said.

“Well,” Jiselle said, trying to use the voice she’d needed so often (and so often failed to have) on planes, during turbulence, during lightning storms, during snowstorms, “everything is fine, but your father called last night, and he’s in Germany. He’s been”—again, the word escaped her for several heartbeats—“detained.”

“What’s that mean?” Sam asked, his mouth full of peanut butter sandwich.

“Well, they seem to be holding the crew—and, I don’t know, actually, maybe the passengers. I think it probably has to do with—”

“How long?” Camilla asked.

“We’ll find out,” Jiselle said. “Later. He’ll call. I’ll call. If I can’t reach him, I’ll call the airline.”

It seemed to her that, as she looked at them, the children were exchanging a look among themselves.

When it got lighter outside, the house was bright enough to clean it up a bit. Sam was playing with two small soldiers and a truck on the family room floor. Camilla was reading on the couch. Sara was in her bedroom, and it sounded to Jiselle as if her pen were scratching wildly across the pages of her diary, the pages flipping fast. She tried not to think about what Sara might be writing.

She picked Camilla’s sweater up off the floor.

Sara’s balled-up white knee socks.

She could find only one of the shoes from Madrid she’d let Sara borrow—lying abandoned on the floor of the family room, as if Sara had stumbled out of it.

Jiselle got on her hands and knees, looking under the couch, under the chairs, for the matching shoe, finding nothing.

“Sara?” she called.

“What?”

“Where’s my other shoe?”

“How the hell should I know?” Sara called back. “We were in the dark when we came home. Maybe it fell off outside.”

“Well, if it fell off your foot outside, wouldn’t you have noticed that you were wearing only one shoe when you came
inside?”

“No,”
Sara shouted, as if the question were absurd. “It wasn’t my idea to wear
your
shoes.”

Jiselle closed her eyes for a moment. There would be, she knew, no point in continuing the conversation. She held the one shoe in her hand before taking it to the bedroom and placing it carefully at the bottom of the closet. Afterward, she went to the front door and looked out to see if she might find the other shoe, discarded on the lawn.

No.

A little while later, when she heard the shower running and Sara complaining, “The water’s
fucking freezing,
” Jiselle hurried into Sara’s room, to her closet, and opened it.

Her heart was pounding with the thrill and anxiety of it, as if she were a safecracker or a cat burglar. She got down on her knees and moved her hands around through the shoes scattered on the closet floor, feeling for her own. It was too dark without the overhead light to see well, but each time Jiselle felt a shoe she thought might be hers, she picked it up and looked.

No. No. No.

They were all Sara’s.

Her sandals. Her flip-flops. Her combat boots and stilettos and slippers.

She was feeling around farther in the back of the closet when she heard the shower go off—and then, as if somehow it had been kick-started by the end of Sara’s shower, the lights blinked, and blinked again, and then blinked back on, and everything in the house seemed to come alive at once—the television, the stereo, Sam whooping with happiness, Camilla calling out in surprise, the clocks beeping, every light blazing, and Jiselle looked up from the shoes, seeing everything in Sara’s closet vividly and brightly at the same time, and she gasped, finding herself staring directly into the deep green eyes of Joy Dorn.

Who was smiling.

Who was dressed in white, holding up that piece of white wedding cake. Beaming. Lovely. Full of light, as if she’d been the source of it, or had absorbed it and was letting it back into the world now.

The portrait. Sara kept it in her closet.

“What the fuck are you doing in my closet?”

Jiselle turned to find Sara standing over her, wrapped in a towel, mouth open wide in astonishment and outrage, but just at that moment she heard “The Blue Danube” coming from the other room and hurried past Sara to answer her cell phone without trying to explain.

“Oh my God, Mark,” she said. She was crying before she could say anything else.

“Look, Jiselle,” he said. “I’m not going to be able to talk long. They’re holding the whole plane here, and not telling us how long. Quarantine. But the airline’s lawyers are on it like piranhas. This can’t go on for longer than a week without an international—”

“A week?”

“Jiselle. Please. I need you not to be hysterical, okay. This is bad enough. You need—”

Jiselle said, “I’ll come
there.”
The whole plan spun out around her as she held the phone to her ear. The children could stay with the Schmidts. She would fly to Munich. If they wouldn’t let him come out to her, she would go in to be quarantined with him.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Now, I love you. I have to go.”

“I love you, too. Mark. Please, don’t—”

But he was gone. She tried to call the number he’d called her from, but it rang a long time and no one answered.

She had just hung up the phone when she looked up to find Sara standing in the hallway. The bedroom door was open, and she was looking in at Jiselle. “So,” she said, “when are you leaving?”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on,” Sara said. “Just tell me. You think we didn’t know the second you realized how much Dad’s gone you were going to be outta here? You think you’re the first one who got fed up with Dad being gone all the time?”

Jiselle put the phone beside her on the bed. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“The hell you aren’t,” Sara said. “I thought you looked clueless enough that it might take you nine or ten months, but I guess this time Camilla won the bet—although, to be fair,
Mommy,
you pretty much set the record for the longest he’s managed to keep a girlfriend around. I guess he was right that getting married might be the way to go this time.”

“Sara?”

But she was gone.