In a Perfect World (16 page)

When she’d finally scanned the last item, the cashier looked at her watch for several seconds, as if timing something internal before she looked up, sighing, and asked, “That it?”

“Yes,” Jiselle said, and paid in cash.

The man who had been unloading boxes from the semi was sitting now, unmoving, behind the wheel of his truck in the parking lot. He blared his horn when they passed in front of him, and it felt physical, that noise—Jiselle and the girls stumbled a bit, their cart veering slightly out of control. Sara was pushing, Camilla was walking beside her, and Jiselle quickly stepped between the two of them, linking their arms through hers, hurrying to the Mazda. “Fucking asshole,” she said, and she saw the girls exchange amused looks. It crossed Jiselle’s mind to say something to them then—about men, about being careful, now that they were a house without a man in it, but when she began to form the first part of the first sentence, she could not find the words. Instead, she kept their arms hooked around hers.

Jiselle turned the radio back on to the oldies station. She was about to turn right into the road when she realized that the long stream of vehicles passing the Safeco exit was a funeral procession. “Shit,” she said before she could keep herself from saying it. The procession was, of course, going in her direction. Who knew how long they’d have to wait? Sara took a fingernail file out of her purse and began to file her nails. Camilla opened a months-old
Elle
she’d bought at the store and began to page through it. Jiselle took a deep breath and listened to the song on the radio until she realized that it was—maybe loud enough for those slow-moving mourners to hear—“Na Na, Hey Hey, Kiss Him Goodbye.”

She snapped it off.

She bit her lip.

When she looked over, Camilla was also suppressing a smile, and then they all three started to laugh at the bad joke of it, the morbid coincidence, as car after car continued to pass, headlights shining garishly in the bright sun, little funeral parlor flags snapping from their antennas, until finally the last one, a Mazda just like Mark’s, passed, and the driver, a middle-aged man in a black suit, waved to them as if to let them know the procession was over. He was smiling brightly, not like a mourner. Still, Jiselle hesitated before following him into the road, joining the procession.

“Oh, forget it,” she said, turning left instead of right. “Let’s take the long way, or we’ll be behind them for days before they turn off at the cemetery.”

“Definitely,” the girls agreed.

“Can we turn the radio on again?” Sara asked from behind her.

Jiselle turned it on again. The song was, “Baby, It’s You.”

The long way home took them past the car dealership—where a salesman was sitting in a lawn chair, seeming to be staring up at the sun—and past the library, closed down with the other nonessential public services, and then past the high school, where the flag had been taken down. Nothing flapped there but a loose gray piece of rope.

Then they passed Sam’s school, Marquette Elementary, where the statue of Father Marquette stood in an overgrown garden with his arms open. A white plastic grocery bag was snagged around one of his wrists. The bronze plaque below the statue appeared to have been hacked away from the base, a gouged square in its shape left behind. (Was it simple vandalism, Jiselle wondered, or was there some value in bronze?) She remembered, months before, getting out of her car while waiting for Sam after school to read that plaque. She had learned that Jacques Marquette had stopped in the area during his explorations, due to poor health, and had written his journals there.

She thought, then, of Sara’s journal. All those hours she spent now hunched over, when she wasn’t crocheting, the tiny little letters spilling out of her furiously across the pages.

“Maybe that girl will be the great chronicler of these times,” Paul Temple had said. “Keeping a record of it all. You’ve heard of Brother Clynn, during the Black Plague in Ireland? He was the last monk alive in his cloister, writing a letter to the future he assumed no one would live to see. The last sentence of his journal was ‘Waiting among the dead for death to come,’ and then, written in another hand, ‘And here it seems the author died…’”

“Oh, Paul,” Jiselle had said, “don’t tell me that.”

“I’m sorry,” he’d said, laughing as he apologized. “But at least talking doesn’t make anything happen.”

They drove home along the ravine, dark and leafy-green at the same time. When they were only a few miles from home, they came upon several police cars and a fire engine idling and, along with them, a double row of parked cars. A small crowd of people had gathered, standing in a little huddle, almost as if they were posing for a photograph but looking down into the ravine instead of at a camera.

“Stop,” Camilla said. “Shouldn’t we see what it is?”

“I don’t know,” Jiselle said, but she was slowing down as she said it. “I mean, do we—”

“We have to see,” Sara said. “We can’t just drive by. Something’s going on.”

Jiselle pulled the Mazda over. She put the car in park, and she and the girls got out and walked over to the little gathered group.

No one was speaking. The only sound was the raspy call of a crow overhead and the sound of the fire engine idling, wasting fuel.

Jiselle and the girls came up behind the small crowd and stood on their tiptoes but still could see nothing, so they walked beyond them to the edge of the ravine and looked down.

At first, Jiselle thought she was looking down on flowers—a blurred garden, a wall of flowers built around a heap of flowers—roses and peonies, perhaps covered with a thin sheet of frost so that the flowers shimmered. An enchanted garden. Then she blinked.

No.

This was something else.

Down there in the shadows and among the foliage, she recognized first the face of a goat turned up to her. Its hollow eyes. Its jaw hanging open. Its implacable expression. And then others came into focus:

A bloated cow and what seemed to be a lamb tossed onto its side. Kittens, curled into a mass—or were they rabbits? A scrawny dog or a coyote. A small horse, which seemed to be bowing on its knees like a circus animal performing a trick.

The smell of it, also flowery, overpoweringly sweet and rotten, drifted up to her on the breeze, and Jiselle put her hand over her face and mouth but didn’t gasp until she saw movement—the black shadow of a rat darting under the horse’s pale corpse.

“What the hell is it?” Sara asked, holding on to Jiselle’s upper arm. Her hand was cold. She was breathing hard. Jiselle couldn’t speak. A woman in front of them answered.

“Animals,” she said. “Dead. You know, they dump them. The diseased. Farmers, I guess. Or someone. Or a bunch of someones.”

“Jesus,” Camilla said, backing away.

B
ack at the house, Jiselle and the girls unloaded the groceries in silence. From the glass doors, Jiselle saw that Sam, Bobby, and Paul were filling a narrow black dirt path with bricks. They had their shirts off now, and their backs were shining in the sun. Sam was holding a brick, waiting for Paul or Bobby to take it from him.

Unlike the other two, he wasn’t sweating. He’d taken off his shirt only in imitation. When Bobby or Paul wiped his own brow, Sam did the same.

Jiselle made lunch from what she’d bought at Safeco. Bread, canned ham. She made lemonade from powder and bottled water, poured it, set out a glass for each of them, and called them in for lunch.

The conversation around the table concerned trips they’d taken. The Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon. The time Jiselle’s plane to Sweden had been rerouted to Iceland.

Nothing was said about the animal dump. The girls ate heartily. They seemed to have forgotten the shock of it.

Back near the Mazda, Sara had vomited. Camilla had held her hair. They’d opened the trunk and gotten out one of the dozens of bottles of water they’d bought, and Jiselle had poured some of it onto a paper towel, wiped Sara’s face for her, given her the rest to rinse out her mouth, spit, drink. When they were back in the car, Camilla said, “What the hell is going on? Did those animals get the
flu?
Is something going to happen to
us?”

“Of course not,” Jiselle said. “Humans and animals don’t get the same diseases. It’s just—like the woman said. Farm animals. It’s convenient. Like people who dump old refrigerators in the woods. You don’t have to pay to—”

“They weren’t all farm animals,” Sara said. “How did they get there? Why were all those people standing around? Why were the cops there?”

Jiselle said nothing. She could not think of any explanation for the animal dump that was not completely absurd. There
was
no explanation. Finally, she said, “We should have asked the fireman or the police.”

But then she recalled the look on the fireman’s face—stern, unapproachable, the expression the guards at the queen’s palace wore. An expression that forbade the asking of questions.

Now Sara was eating, looking pink-cheeked again. Sam told a joke about a monkey on a bicycle. There was laughter. They lingered long enough for Jiselle to make a second pitcher of powdered lemonade, and when they were done eating, Bobby and Camilla sat down on the couch to watch television together, and Sara went to her room, where Jiselle could hear one of her own old Joni Mitchell CDs playing. She’d told Sara weeks before to feel free to borrow anything she liked but hadn’t really imagined she owned any CDs Sara would like. Apparently, she did.

Jiselle and Paul took their glasses of lemonade to the deck, along with Sam, and they sat for a while looking out at the ravine, at the half-laid path down the lawn to the edge of it. Not until Sam went back inside for a cookie did Jiselle tell Paul about what they’d seen—the animal dump.

He nodded. He bit his lower lip. He didn’t speculate but said, “I wish I could say I’m more surprised. Something’s headed in our direction. The year before the Black Plague did its worst damage, people said they saw herds of horses in the sky. Whole crowds would gather together to stare up at them.”

Jiselle was about to protest that this hadn’t been a hallucination, that there were actual animals—dozens of them—dead and dumped at the side of the road, but Sam came back out then with a cookie for each of them on a small white plate, and Paul and Jiselle each took one and ate them in the sunshine.

“Jiselle,” Paul said to her when she stood to go back in the house.

“Yes?” she said.

But there was a look in his eyes that she understood to mean he had only been saying her name, not asking anything of her.

“Mark?” Jiselle asked.

“Yeah?”

These days he simply sounded distracted when she spoke to him. He said there’d been no progress whatsoever made on their release. “No one’s going anywhere,” he said. “Anywhere. For God knows how long.”

“I love you, Mark,” she said.

“Love you, too.”

“The children are doing fine,” she said.

“Good.”

Everything must have seemed so far away to him, she realized. What was there to talk about? What were the mice, the birds, the animal dump, the weather in St. Sophia, or even the children, to Mark, detained on the other side of the ocean? When she could think of nothing to say, she said, again, “I love you.”

“I love you, too.” He said the words as if she’d badgered him into saying them.

By the end of the week, they’d finished the path.

“Do you like it?” Paul asked her. He was standing a few feet ahead of Jiselle. He crossed his arms over his sweaty T-shirt. He worked his tongue around near his back molar, the one that had been bothering him for a few days, and waited for her to answer.

It was a perfect path, straight down the back of the lawn into the leafy distance. It divided the backyard into two interlocking halves. It meandered a little, but it was a clear path. Already a bit of moss was growing in the cracks. “It’s beautiful,” she said.

It was.

Nights, under a full moon, it glowed. There was something in the bricks—ground glass?—that couldn’t be seen in daylight but that became luminous in moonlight.

Standing on the path ahead of her, Paul Temple said, as if it hurt him to say it, “You’re so good to his children. And so lovely. I hope he appreciates you.”

Jiselle inhaled and put a hand to her mouth, before turning back to the house.

“Jiselle!” he called after her. “I’m sorry…”

The weather had been so warm and sunny and so wet so early that all the flowers were already at the height of their blooming, and then starting to die already by the beginning of July. The magnolias looked soggy, littering the grass with petals. The branches of the rose bushes sagged with roses. The daffodils lay prone on the earth, their stems having slumped over under the burden of their enormous flowers.

That day, Tara Temple came to the door. Jiselle opened it, surprised to see how plump she was—certainly she’d gained fifteen pounds since Jiselle had seen her in line at the bank—and how scantily clad. She was wearing a silvery sundress, and it plunged between her large, loose breasts, even revealing a shadow of the aureolae around her nipples. The dress floated over her thighs in the breeze, threatening, it seemed to Jiselle, to fly right off.

Yes, she said to Jiselle as she stepped through the door, she’d love to step in and have a cup of coffee. She’d stopped by to tell Bobby she was going to need to go to Virginia for a week. “Grandma’s sick.”

But Bobby and Camilla had taken Mark’s car into town, on Jiselle’s request. The electricity had gone out for three days, spoiling everything, but it had been back on for a day now, and the refrigerator was working, and it seemed to Jiselle that if there was milk and butter at the Safeco, they could risk a few things in the refrigerator again, and that it would be worth the gas to stock up while they could.

While Tara Temple sat at the kitchen table, Jiselle made coffee, poured it into mugs, and, after punching holes in the top, handed the can of evaporated milk to Tara, who added it to her cup.

“It’s so important, you know,” Tara said, pouring the milk into her coffee. “Vitamin D.”

“Oh,” Jiselle said, but she had never liked evaporated milk and did not want it in her coffee, which was now a rare enough treat that spoiling it seemed like a crime. Like so many other things, coffee had become harder and harder to come by. Luckily, Jiselle had thought to buy several cans before the shortages, and now she limited herself to one cup every other day, because who knew how long it would have to last?

She looked disapproving when Jiselle set the can back down on the counter without pouring any into her cup, and Tara picked the can back up herself before following Jiselle out to the deck.

They sat together with the evaporated milk between them, both women holding their coffee to their noses, taking deep breaths of it.

“It’s not a healthy addiction,” Tara said, but she closed her eyes when she sipped.

So did Jiselle.

“My,”
Tara said, and rested the cup on her knee, “that tastes good.”

She sat with her legs crossed, swinging one over the other, and her dress was so short that Jiselle could see her black lace underwear as she rested her head on the back of the chair, her face to the sun.

“Dairy products,” Tara said. “And sunlight. This disease preys on people who aren’t getting enough vitamin D, which is almost impossible to get in sufficient quantities because of the diminished sun function. Did you know that?” She looked at Jiselle.

“Really?” Jiselle asked. It was all she could think of to say. Tara Temple had delivered this news with such an air of authority that Jiselle found herself both intimidated and comforted by it. Someone, she thought, at least
thinks
she knows what’s going on here.

Tara reached over and handed Jiselle the can of evaporated milk, urging it on her. “You really must,” she said.

Obediently, Jiselle poured some into her cup. The coffee was strong—stronger than she would usually have made it back when she’d taken coffee for granted—and the evaporated milk made a little mushroom cloud in her cup. “Thank you,” she said, placing the can back down between them.

“That’s why the quarantines are so shortsighted,” Tara Temple went on. “It only keeps people indoors, when the problem in the first place is not enough sunlight.”

“Oh,” Jiselle said.

“We’re not
catching
this,” Tara Temple continued. “We’re
developing
this. The subtle changes in the environment are signaling changes in our bodies, our nutritional needs, and it’s happening too fast to adapt.”

This was something Jiselle had heard Dr. Springwell say, back when he was still broadcasting his show.

“Do you meditate?” Tara asked, leaning toward Jiselle, looking directly at her.

“No,” Jiselle said, sipping from her cup, avoiding those eyes. So blue. So full of certainty.

“You
should,”
Tara said. “Clarity in a time like this is extremely important.” She paused and looked at Jiselle as if she were inspecting her for disease. “What are you eating at least?” she asked.

“Well,” Jiselle said. “I’m just trying, you know, to keep us all fed.”

Tara Temple shook her head. “You need to be very conscious of what you’re eating,” she said.

“Yes,” Jiselle said. She nodded as if she understood, as if she would try to be more conscious of what she was eating. But how? It was so much harder than Jiselle had ever guessed it would be, keeping her small family fed. All those years, dashing from kiosk to kiosk, drive-thru to convenience store, she’d never once imagined how much time it would take to make a meal, to serve it. Without a stove. With a refrigerator that couldn’t be counted on. No gas in the car, and the grocery store closed half the time, ten miles from home.

The good decisions she’d made had nothing to do with her
consciousness,
as it turned out. They’d been lucky guesses. She’d somehow known that flour would be important and so, before the shortages, had bought twelve pounds of it. And sugar. Baking powder. A can of Crisco, a thing she’d never even seen up close before she bought it. Now, late mornings, when the power was on and she could use the oven, Jiselle would make enough muffins to last a week. She’d gotten the recipe out of an old
Good Housekeeping
magazine she’d found in the garage.

She’d learned, too, how to take care of fresh food. Potatoes and onions lasted an amazingly long time in the cool dark. Bouillon cubes. Cabbage. Apples. She’d torn out an article from the same
Good Housekeeping
magazine on how to soak beans so long that they needed to be boiled for only an hour to make soup. After all those years of relying on frozen dinners and packaged bread, it amazed Jiselle that she could prepare a meal out of beans and water and a single carrot that was so delicious even Sara would ask for seconds.

She’d stocked the cupboards and filled boxes in the cellar with canned food and dried fruit after hearing a woman on the radio say one day, “I’m stocking up on food. I know we’ve been warned not to ‘hoard,’ but protecting your family is not the same as ‘hoarding.’”

The woman’s voice sounded like a sober and practical Martha Stewart’s, but it couldn’t have been. Martha Stewart had died of the Phoenix flu two weeks before. In any case, Jiselle had taken the woman’s advice. She and Camilla had driven into town to the Safeco three times, loading the car each time with all the canned and dried goods they could buy. Ramen noodles. Crackers. Pop-Tarts. Broths. Powdered milk. The flour and sugar.

“Well, I have to go, but tell Bobby I stopped by and that I said I’d call in a couple of days, and I’ll be home next week. By the way,” Tara Temple said, stopping, turning to look at Jiselle, “how is Mark?”

“Well,” Jiselle said. “Still in the quarantine, of course. He’ll be in Germany still, for a little while, I’m afraid.”

Tara Temple smiled, wistfully it seemed. She said, “Ah, Mark.”

Jiselle said nothing. She waited for Tara Temple to go on.

“We’ve known him, you know, for a long time. Since long before the—” Here she paused and looked toward the road. “Since long before Joy, and all the years since. We were happy, I suppose, to hear he’d gotten married again. But not surprised. He was always such a—” She moved her hand through the air, as if trying to snatch the right phrase out of it. There was a look of unmistakable pleasure on her face as she said, “Mark was always such a fool for love.” She shook her head. “Such a hopeless romantic. In and out of love, always rescuing some damsel in distress or being rescued by one.” She let the hand dash back and forth in front of her for a few seconds before she went on, “And everyone put up with it because, as you must know better than anyone, he was so…
attractive.
It was a relief, and such a surprise, to imagine him settling down. There were
not a few of us
in this little town who were…” She looked, then, up to the sky and said, “Oh, never mind! I’m sure this isn’t something you want to hear about, my dear!”