In a Perfect World (19 page)

In the oncoming lane, a figure on a red bicycle wobbled past them. He didn’t look at their car as he pedaled past. He was bent over his handlebars, legs moving wildly, propelling himself forward, staring straight ahead, like someone on whom, recently, a terrible spell had been cast.

Jiselle thought of the little boy she’d seen so long ago, when Mark drove her through St. Sophia for the first time.

This was, she felt sure, the same boy.

“Did you get something for Beatrice to eat?” Sam asked.

Jiselle swallowed before she said, “No.” She had to look away when she saw the expression on his face. “But Sara has some ideas,” she said, “about how to make food that Beatrice will like.”

After the bank, on the way out of town, they had stopped at the Safeco, surprised to find it open and with a few modest things still on the shelves—the kinds of things no one ate because they didn’t know how to prepare them or didn’t want to eat them. Lentils. Wheatberries. Bulgar. Dried seaweed. A few burlap bags full of raw chestnuts. From what was there, Sara had been able to gather up the three ingredients she thought might mimic those listed on the commercial bag of fowl feed: vegetable oil, corn meal, chestnuts.

“We’ll crush up the chestnuts,” she said, “and just mix the rest of it so it’s about the same consistency as the other stuff. There’s plenty of protein. If Beatrice doesn’t mind the taste, she should be okay.”

“How do you know so much about birds?”

Sara smiled, shrugged. “I’ve thought a lot about birds,” she said.

As it happened, Beatrice loved what they came to call Sara’s Fabulous Fowl Feed.

That night Jiselle stayed up long after the children and Diane Schmidt had gone to bed. She paced for a while, and then she simply sat in the family room looking out the window at the dark ravine, and then she made her way in the dark to Mark’s room. Instinctively, she hit the light switch when she entered—an old habit that, it seemed, would never die—and was surprised when the overhead light came on. They’d made a new habit during the outages of being sure that all the appliances and light switches were off before they went to bed because it was so alarming to wake up in the pitch darkness to the sudden blazing of overhead lights, or the blare of the television, or the microwave beeping, or the stereo—or all of them at once—when the power came back on unexpectedly.

She rubbed her eyes in the bright, surprising light and saw, draped across the foot of the bed, an exquisite triangle of fawn-colored yarn spread on the bed: the shawl Sara had been working on.

Jiselle ran her hand over it.

It was fringed with silk thread.

She picked up the edge of it.

Soft and warm but also exquisitely light.

Finished.

She sat on the bed, still running her hands over it and then saw the note beside it:

Her birthday. Jiselle herself had completely forgotten. How had Sara remembered?

She brought the shawl to her face and breathed it in for several seconds before she wrapped it around her shoulders.

It was light, like standing in summer air.

Then, on second thought, Jiselle slipped it off her shoulders and removed her wedding ring. She slid the narrowest corner of the shawl into the ring, and then, in a swift and elegant flourish, pulled the whole thing through.

T
he power returned mysteriously after two solid weeks without it, long enough for them to get dangerously used to the convenience of the furnace in the first cool days of autumn and to watching the news. The reporters were circling the story of the Princess Cruises liner that had disappeared in the Caribbean ten months earlier—a ship sailing from Fort Myers to Tierra del Fuego, with brief stops at all the small islands between them, before such cruises had been entirely proscribed.

This particular ship had never arrived in Tierra del Fuego, but, these many months later, had run aground on the shores of the Isla Mujeres, Mexico, instead.

PLAGUE SHIP: AN UPDATE!

Jiselle and Mark had been on a ship like it—perhaps even this very ship, she realized, the name of which was being withheld until the next of kin had been notified, although surely those kin must have noticed that their loved ones hadn’t returned from the cruise they’d set out on nearly a year before.

Jiselle remembered the buffet table, every night—mounds of shrimp, oysters glistening in their half-shells, crystal bowls of cold crab and lobster meat, caviar on French bread, tropical fruit sliced into anchors and swans spread across yards and yards of crushed and sparkling ice. She remembered dancing with Mark, her head on his shoulder, the white silk shirt she’d bought for him against her cheek.

Now when she tried to call Mark, there was no answer at all.

By the time the cruise ship ran aground on the Isla Mujeres, all the passengers were long dead.

“A macabre scene greeted Red Cross workers on this small Mexican Island yesterday—”

Jiselle imagined the passengers in their lounge chairs on the deck, wrapped in their plush white velvet robes. Dancing on the parquet floor in their shiny shoes, the brass instruments of the band glittering under the slowly revolving disco ball suspended from the ceiling.

The volunteers had boarded the ship in their biohazard suits and returned from it with faraway looks on their faces, captured in photographs as they disembarked in the hours before the island was evacuated entirely of rescuers, of journalists, of residents, while decisions were made about what to do with the ship.

In the meantime, planes owned by American television networks flew over and around it, videotaping the great silence of that ship stalled on the coast of the Isla Mujeres, which Jiselle remembered as a pale and nearly treeless expanse of white in the middle of the turquoise dream of the Caribbean.

“Are you giving me this so I won’t steal it again?”

Jiselle shook her head. She said, “No. I’m giving it to you because you love it.”

“Thank you,” Sara said as she slipped onto her finger the onyx ring Mark had bought for Jiselle on Isla Mujeres. “I do love it.”

On Sara’s finger, it sparkled darkly, absorbing their reflections as they looked into it. Jiselle took Sara’s hand and kissed the ring goodbye.

That night, Jiselle woke in the dark to a sound in the hallway and sat up in bed fast. She looked to the threshold of the door, which was open. “Camilla?”

There was no answer, but the shape of a woman in a white gown was there.

“Mrs. Schmidt?” Jiselle tried to focus her eyes, but the figure seemed to be made of shadows, waving rather than standing. She swung her legs off the edge of the bed and stood. Her heart was beating hard—in her chest, in her ears, all along her arms and neck. She was holding her breath. She stepped toward the door. “Sara?”

The figure seemed to float away from her then, and then float back, and then rise, and recede, and then flash in the threshold, and Jiselle gasped when she saw who it was.

“Annette?”
she whispered to the doorway, before sinking to her knees.

There was a beam of light glowing on Annette’s pale face, which was changed but familiar, and the light spilled down her chest to the place where she held a baby to her breast.

Jiselle looked from the baby and back up to Annette, and just before she vanished, Jiselle saw the look of pain and anguish on her face, and she reached toward her, touching nothing. She continued to reach toward the vanished figure long after she knew what she knew, and then she got back into bed.

The power came on for four days again the next week, and although there was nothing on television or on the radio, they kept music playing all day on the stereo, as if they might never hear music again if they turned it off—Joni Mitchell, Bach, Britney Spears, Kool Moe Dee, the Muppets, whatever CDs they could find, one after another, without a pause between them beyond what it took to take one off and put another one on. Bob Dylan was crooning “Jokerman” when the power went out again.

They went to bed early, and the sun came up bright, but the power was still out, so Jiselle went through the house resetting the electric clocks. It was a silly, optimistic gesture, she knew, but whenever the power was out, Jiselle reset the electric clocks every few hours. To see them frozen on the counters and on the walls disoriented her.
Could it still be two o’clock?
she’d think five times in a row before realizing it couldn’t be.

“Why don’t we just get rid of the clocks?” Sam asked. He pointed out that Jiselle’s watch still worked—although the battery in his own was dead, and there was no way to replace it. “Anyway,” he pointed out, “what difference does it make what time it is?”

Jiselle smiled a little apologetically and shrugged as she reset them.

After the clocks, she went to the refrigerator—the now-familiar routine of scouting through it for what had spoiled, what could be salvaged.

A few days earlier, a man in a white truck had pulled into the driveway. There had been no lettering on his truck, but Jiselle felt confident he was a farmer as soon as he stepped out. He was older, with a gray beard. He wore overalls and a straw hat, as if it were a farmer’s costume or a uniform.

“Howdy!” he’d called to her when he saw Jiselle standing at the front door. “I’ve got dairy!” Jiselle walked around to the back of the truck with him.

The farmer smelled reassuringly of manure—pleasant, authentic: earth, and animals, and work. His cheeks were rosy, his smile warm, although one of his front teeth was missing. He opened the back of the truck, and Jiselle gasped when she saw it.

At least a hundred beautiful glass bottles of milk. Old-fashioned, dusty wheels of cheese. What must have been another hundred golden bricks of butter wrapped in waxed paper. “Where did you get all this?” she asked.

The farmer laughed, putting one hand on his round belly as he did. He looked at her, amused, and said, “Well, ma’am, I
made
it. From
cows
. That’s where dairy products come from!”

Jiselle laughed, too, at herself. Farms. Animals. Had she forgotten? She said, “Well, I’m impressed.”

“What would you like?”

Jiselle looked at the bottles, the waxed bricks, the wheels of cheese. She said, “I’m short on cash, will you take—?”

“I’ll take gas, valuables, or cash, and that’s my order of preference,” the farmer said, counting them off on his fingers, which were dirty but plump. He’d been ready with the answer, as if he’d been asked it often. “I’ll
consider
other things, such as canned goods, tools, and the like. But I sure as hell ain’t takin’ a check.” Again, he put a hand to his belly as he laughed.

Jiselle went into the house and came back out with the jade earrings Mark had given her for Christmas. She held them up for the farmer.

In the sunlight, they looked paler than they did in the house. Green teardrops. Seadrops. The farmer held them in his hand, as if to weigh them. He held them up. He looked at her, and at the gold watch on her wrist. Mark had given that to her as well. “Those real diamonds?” he asked.

She looked at the watch face, the little sparkling aurora of jewels around it, and said, “Yes. Of course.”

“I’d rather have that,” he said, and handed the jade earrings back to her.

Jiselle took off the watch and gave it to him, and he carried four bottles of milk, two bricks of butter, and a wheel of cheese into the house for her.

She had paid, she realized, what might have been seven or eight hundred dollars for a few groceries, what might have cost twenty dollars in another time—but she didn’t need the watch, and Sam looked thin to her, and she’d been thinking about Tara Temple’s warning about vitamin D.

That night she made everyone—even Bobby and Paul, even Diane Schmidt—drink a large glass of milk and eat a huge piece of cheese with the bean soup she made for dinner.

She slathered the bread she’d baked for them with butter.

Now what was left of it, eight hours after the electricity had shut down, already smelled of bacteria, decay. She took the milk out of the dark refrigerator and set it aside. She took the butter and leftover cheese outside to the deck in a sack, which she tied to the highest branch of the oak tree she could reach, hoping the height would keep animals away and the cool air would keep it fresh a little longer.

Then she went back inside and gathered up the things to make tea—the kettle of water, the matches to make a fire in the grill—and wrapped her shawl around her.

It was a damp morning after the rain of the night before, but a clear morning—the sky a pale blue overlaid with thready clouds, as if spider webs had been carefully draped over a dome. The leaves of the trees in the ravine were wet and shining in the sunrise. The branches appeared to be wrapped in black velvet against the bright sky. She put the kettle down, opened the box of matches, and was about to strike one against the side of the box when something in the side yard caught her eye, and she turned.

“Bobby?”

He was standing over the woodpile with an ax. Not swinging it, just holding it.

Despite the chill, he had his shirt off, and he was naked to the waist. He appeared to be soaked with sweat.

“Bobby?” she asked again. “What are you doing here?”

He didn’t answer. The ax dropped from his arms, and he made no sound when he fell into the long grass beside it.