In a Perfect World (20 page)

A
fter neither the Mazda nor the Cherokee would start, Camilla ran the two miles to the Temples’ house and returned in the Saab with Paul—who, jumping out of it, loped in long strides around the house to the backyard and, without asking any questions at all, bent down and scooped up his son, cradling him in his arms as if he were a child instead of the large man he was and carrying him to the car. Jiselle ran behind them, and after Paul placed Bobby carefully in the backseat, she slid in with him, still in her nightgown, without asking if she should. Behind her, she saw Camilla, weeping, trying to break loose of her sister, who was holding her back.

Over Paul’s shoulder, Jiselle watched the speedometer inch past eighty, past ninety, and then to a hundred, while Bobby lay with his head in her lap. The boy breathed steadily, but there was an oddly hollow sound when he exhaled, as if the air, instead of coming out of his lungs, were rattling through a wooden box. A wooden box on fire. His head was damp and burning at the same time, and his breath, too, seemed strangely hot. His mouth stayed open, and although his eyes were closed, Jiselle saw, in the corner of one, a tiny teardrop of watery blood.

For as far as Jiselle could see, there was no one else on either side of the freeway—not another car, or cab, or truck—so when they pulled into the St. Sophia Mercy Hospital parking lot, she thought, at first, they must have accidentally pulled off at a stadium or a mall. Except that those places were no longer open, those sorts of gatherings no longer occurred. Paul squealed past the hundreds of parked cars, leaving the smell of his tires burning against the parking lot tar, pulling up at the Emergency Room entrance. He jumped from the car then and ran inside, without saying anything to Jiselle or closing the car door, and was back in only a few seconds, followed by a woman in a white lab jacket. She had a nametag that read
DR. STARK
on the pocket, and a stethoscope around her neck, but otherwise she was dressed as if she’d just been called in from a picnic—jeans, tennis shoes, a University of Illinois hockey team T-shirt. Her hair was wispy and blond. She looked no older than Camilla, Jiselle thought.

Paul opened the back door for her, and Dr. Stark leaned in.

Bobby’s eyes were closed. His torso was naked but still sweat-soaked. Dr. Stark appeared curious but not alarmed. She took his arm and pressed his wrist with two fingers. After a few other things—feeling the glands in his neck, asking Jiselle what his name was and then saying the name, slapping her hands in front of his face and then sighing as if he’d disappointed her when he didn’t respond, Dr. Stark backed out of the car and stood in front of Paul in the parking lot.

“I’m sorry,” she told him, not sounding sorry. “There’s nothing we can do for him here except have him lie around in the hallway all day, until we send him away. I can’t tell you what to do, sir, but if this were my son, I’d take him home and get some sleep in case he needed me in the night. He’s probably in no immediate danger. No more so than any of us.” She gestured around—to the parking lot, herself, Paul, the sky.

Paul just stared at her as if he were waiting for her to say something else, to go on. His tongue was working over the sore molar, as it did all the time now, and then he began to shake his head in little snaps, and reached out to touch the doctor’s arm, but she stepped away and turned toward the hospital. When he said to her back, “But—” She turned once more and seemed to scan the parking lot behind him. Without emotion, she said, “If you’re up for the drive into Chicago, you might hear a different story, but the word we’re getting from there is that they won’t even look at anyone with the Phoenix flu. Still,” she said more softly, “you have to do what you have to do.”

“Medicine?” Jiselle called out the car window to Dr. Stark’s back.

Dr. Stark turned again, shrugged, and said, “Got any?”

Some people fell ill and recovered. Some lingered, it seemed. Some died quickly within a few terrible days.

Bobby Temple died quickly and terribly.

Weeping blood. Coughing blood. His sheets soaked with blood. His pillow.

The power was on, but Camilla went through the Temples’ house and turned the lights off one by one. They watched Bobby die by candlelight, and when it was over, although the phones were working again, Paul said there was no point calling the funeral home, no point notifying anyone. Who could help them? They would stay with the body until the sun rose—no one could go anywhere until it was light out anyway—and then he wanted Jiselle and Camilla to leave. He wanted to burn the body of his son in his own backyard, and he wanted to be alone.

But Jiselle and Camilla washed Bobby’s body before they left—carefully wiping the dried blood out of his eyes, swabbing the blood out of his mouth with a washcloth. Camilla clipped his fingernails, kissing each finger after she did. Jiselle went through his closet and found his best shirt and slacks. Paul knotted the tie around his neck, folded the collar of his shirt down over the tie. In the candlelight, Bobby’s eyelids appeared to flicker as if he were dreaming, but there was a look of such relaxation on his face that Jiselle knew he wasn’t.

They sat back in their places around the bed, Jiselle holding Paul’s hand in one of hers and Camilla’s in the other. Paul and Camilla each held one of Bobby’s hands. When the sun finally broke into the darkness, and the warm light of it seeped over the windowsills and cast the shadows of the bare tree branches against the shades, Paul said, “You need to go.”

Jiselle looked up at him.

The swelling on the side of his face had gone down in the night, and he looked more like the man she remembered, making that brick path with Bobby and Sam in the backyard in the sun. He was not in physical pain. The afternoon before, after Bobby had finally fallen quiet—the screaming and the clawing having subsided into an awesome silence—Paul had left the room and returned with a pair of pliers.

“Please,” he said to Jiselle. “I can’t have this distraction while my boy dies.”

Jiselle followed him into his bedroom, where he’d already spread a towel over the pillows. He’d brought two tennis rackets in from the back porch to hold on to. He said to Jiselle, handing her the pliers, “I sterilized them.” He swallowed. “I passed them through a fire, and I just had a shot of whiskey. I’ll try to be quiet.”

When it was over, Jiselle wiped the blood from the side of Paul Temple’s face with a towel, and the tears out of his eyes with her fingertips, and as she did, he reached up and pulled her down next to him on the bed.

She put her head on his shoulder.

For the first time in two days, for a few minutes there in Paul Temple’s arms, Jiselle fell asleep.

S
he was reading to Sam the morning the National Guard came to the door. It was the end of November, and it had been snowing all night.

Four men—boys, really, wearing army-green fatigues, stood outside the front door. Although they were taller and more muscular than Sam, they did not look much older. The same clear eyes, poreless skin.

They’d parked their Jeep in the driveway, and behind them, it looked strangely mechanical to Jiselle, out of place in the snow—primitive, like something cobbled together by a creative but unimaginative people. Prehistoric. They wanted to know if she had a vehicle, too, and, if so, did the vehicle have any fuel?

Jiselle pulled her shawl around her shoulders. A hard wind was blowing across the yard, bending the bare tree branches to the east. One of the boys was wearing gloves without fingers, and Jiselle saw that his fingernails were tipped with blue. There were matching blue circles under his eyes. Looking at that one, Jiselle invited them in, and then she stepped out of the way as they passed, one by one, through the door. She’d just added another log to the fire, and it was pouring warmth into the living room. The soldiers moved toward it as if magnetized.

The power had gone out the week before and hadn’t come back on. Still, Bobby and Paul had stacked enough wood behind the house that Jiselle was hopeful that if she was conservative with it, she could keep the house heated until March, when the weather would surely get warmer, whether or not the power came back on.

She’d stopped assuming that it would.

The boys sat next to one another across from the fire, squeezing together to fit themselves on the couch, and apologized for their boots, which were wet but not dirty—huge black boots laced halfway up their calves, tightly, over olive-green pants. The snow on the soles was melting in clear and shallow puddles around them on the wood floors, but Jiselle said not to worry about it. She’d mop up when they left.

Along with the snow, a scent had been tracked in with them—the smell of burning oil, tarnished brass, old coins and canvas left in a trunk in an attic, taken out again. Industry, travel, commerce, the world. Nothing like the ordinary smells of the house—soap, candle wax, kindling, tea. It would take longer, Jiselle knew, to get that smell of the world out of the house than to mop up the melted snow on the floor around their boots.

“I’m Mrs. Dorn,” she said.

The soldiers nodded to her but didn’t introduce themselves. They seemed stunned into speechlessness by the warmth of the fire.

Sam stood beside Jiselle, staring in appreciative wonder at them. The soldiers nodded at him in unison, kindly—the understanding of soldiers for the great reverence they were held in by boys. Jiselle put her arm around Sam, pulled him closer to her, her shawl around his shoulders, too—although she wasn’t afraid of these soldiers. In her house, in a row on her couch, these were just shivering boys in wet boots.

If they had rifles, they’d left them behind in the Jeep.

Answering their question, she said, “I have two vehicles. But no fuel,” and then, “Would you like some tea?”

Three of the boys glanced for an answer to the one on the end of the couch, who looked no different from the others except that his green cap had two small black stripes glued to the brim. He shrugged at the others, and then at Jiselle. He said, “Sure.”

So Jiselle went to the kitchen, poured water into the kettle, brought it back, hung it on a hook from the tripod over the fire. Back in September, Sam had rigged up the tripod, made from the legs of an old aluminum lawn chair. He’d gotten the idea from an illustration in the Hans Christian Andersen book, in which an old crone had been pictured stirring a pot hanging over a fire from just such a tripod.

“What are the vehicles, ma’am?” the boy with the black stripes on his cap asked.

“A Jeep Cherokee,” Jiselle said, “and a Saab. And also a little Mazda. You’re welcome to them—but, as I said, there’s no gas.”

The morning after Bobby’s death, Paul had insisted that Jiselle take the Saab.

“I filled it up with the last can of gas I had in the garage. It can’t get me to Virginia with one tank of gas,” he said. “And you might need it, in an emergency. If you won’t take it for yourself, think of your children.”

“But we have the Mazda,” Jiselle protested. “And the Cherokee.”

Paul shook his head. “This has gas, and it runs,” he said. He pressed the key into her hand. Its little teeth shone in the sunrise.

“What will you do?”

“I’m walking,” he said, shifting the satchel he was carrying from one shoulder to the next. “I’d be walking before long one way or another.”

“I could drive you as far as—”

He held up a hand, shaking his head. “You might never make it back, whether you had any gas or not.” He didn’t continue, and Jiselle didn’t try to say anything else.

She took the car but had driven it only one time before it too was out of gas. That time had been the morning Diane Schmidt died.

Together, Jiselle and Sara had wound the sheet around her body and carried her to the car, placing her carefully in the backseat. Jiselle drove to the funeral parlor in town, where two ugly women—sisters, surely, with the same fierce jaws and close-set eyes, one of them with a wart on her nose from which a black hair sprouted—demanded two thousand dollars in cash. When Jiselle said she had no cash at all, they reluctantly took her wedding ring and pulled Mrs. Schmidt’s body, without any grace or care at all, out of the back of the car.

From there, Jiselle had gone to find her mother. She had not been able to reach her by phone for a long time. Only once she’d gotten through and heard her mother answer, “This is Anna Petersen,” before the connection was lost again.

What else could Jiselle do? Her mother might have been fiercely independent, but how independent could an older woman, alone while the world crumbled around her, be?

Jiselle had found herself having to drive straight through Chicago because there were roadblocks, looking unofficial, homemade, thrown together by mobs without machinery or organization, on the freeway—walls of cinderblock, and even a few places where old school buses had been parked to keep traffic from traveling from one state to another.

She’d had no choice but to wind her way through downtown, and so Jiselle had seen for herself the blocks of burned houses. The vandalism. The fountains clogged with garbage. The broken-down door of Duke’s Palace Inn. The smoldering darkness inside it. The smoke pouring out of the highest floors of the Sears Tower. The debris littering Millennium Park. Windows of stores smashed all along the Magnificent Mile. Snowflakes falling peacefully and sparsely over all of it. On a few corners were boys like the ones in her living room now, wearing camouflage (why camouflage, she’d wondered, in the city?) with surgical masks, holding automatic rifles, and beyond them ashes everywhere.

It seemed possible to Jiselle that those boys had, themselves, set the fires—who else was there to do it?—but her mother had told her that it had been boys like those, with the National Guard, who’d stood outside B.C. Yu’s dry cleaning business, weeks earlier, after the rumors began that a Korean scientist had created the bacteria that caused the Phoenix flu.

The rumors weren’t quelled fast enough to keep the Korean-owned businesses in large cities and small towns alike from being destroyed.
EVIL
was spray-painted over the dry cleaner’s sign, and the door was boarded over, and someone had thrown what must have been a bucket of red paint over that. But the windows weren’t smashed, and the building had not been burned. The National Guard had prevented that. B.C. Yu himself had died of the Phoenix flu before the rumors even began.

Jiselle’s mother had brought nothing with her but a large box from her sewing room filled with what looked like rags, her tea set, some clothes, and the Little Mermaid statuette from the mantel, which sat on Mark’s mantel now, and they’d managed to drive back to the house in Paul’s Saab, although the gas gauge was on
E
for the last forty miles.

Jiselle knew that the National Guard couldn’t take the vehicles with them, that the possibility that they had some stash of gasoline with them was low. If they did, there were cars littered all over town—keys still in the ignition, thousands of dollars’ worth of chrome and upholstery. Why would they have come all the way out here?

But she meant it, too. They could have the cars. They were welcome to the cars, which meant nothing to her now in their silence, in their huge weight and useless gravity.

Jiselle poured the water into her mother’s teapot, over the dried mint, and the room was suffused with the scent of spring and fresh air, and the four boys seemed to lift their chins to it, as if to information they hadn’t come in search of but were happy to receive.

After the tea had steeped, and Jiselle had poured it, they sipped gratefully from her mother’s delicate cups.

“You’re sure there’s no gas left in either tank, ma’am?” the one with the stripes asked.

“None,” Jiselle answered.

The soldiers finished their tea and handed the cups back to Jiselle carefully, one by one. They stood in a row in front of the couch. “Do you mind my asking, ma’am,” the one with the stripes said, looking around the room, “do you have a plan? Do you have a weapon? Is your husband home?”

“Yes,” Jiselle said, although none of these things was true.

“Good,” the soldier said. “There’s a lot of looting, you know. And illness. And rumors.”

“I know,” Jiselle said.

She did.

She had seen what had happened in the city.

“What are the latest rumors?” she asked anyway.

The boys looked at one another as if deciding among themselves, in silence, whether or not to tell her.

“Well,” the boy with the stripes said after clearing his throat, “it’s all over the world now, you know. One in three, they’re saying. But this could just be the beginning. They’re saying it’s a bacteria. Biological warfare? It could be something as simple as a bit of some anthrax-like agent, sprinkled on the floor of a restroom, in an airport, maybe. Something entirely new. Someone could have stepped in it, worn the contaminated shoe all over the world. It could be potent enough that the spores—”

“Thank you,” Jiselle said.

She held up a hand, glanced at Sam. She was sorry she’d asked. Somehow—how?—she’d hoped for something good.

The soldier nodded, understanding. He said, “But you need to understand, and so does your son. There are groups, gangs, on the roads. You’re set back here in the trees, and without lights maybe they won’t see you, for now. But we did. And there’s a lot of desperation. And trust me, they’ll figure a new way to travel without gasoline. They’ll find a way, and they’ll find you, too, eventually. There are—”

“The garage is open,” Jiselle said, nodding toward the door, “and the keys are in the cars.”

“Thank you, ma’am. And good luck.”

They filed out then, back into the snow, turning once, in unison, to wave goodbye. They spent only a few minutes in the garage with the Cherokee, and then peering into the windows of the other two cars, before trudging back out to their Jeep and driving away, and Jiselle and Sam went back to the couch in front of the fire to finish the story they’d started.

It ended happily, with the witch vanquished. The spell broken. The children returned safely to their mother, whom they’d feared was dead.

Only later did Jiselle go to the bedroom closet and pull out of the shadows the one shoe left from Madrid.

That lovely black shoe. Its mate had never been found.

The high, narrow heel. The way the arch fit her foot perfectly. The leather polished to a glossy shine.

She remembered again the salesman on his knees in front of her in that old-fashioned shoe store in Madrid. How he’d cradled her foot in his hands, as if it were a precious gift. How he’d slid the shoe on.
“Perfecto,”
he’d said.

And it was. That shoe had fit her as if it had been made for her by elves, by fairies, by angels.

How many millions of places had she worn those beautiful shoes?

She’d walked through a thousand streets in a hundred countries. She had stood in lines, sat in theaters, strolled down cobbled paths, occasionally bending down to pet a cat, admire a baby in a bassinet. Years before, in Phoenix, Arizona, she’d stopped by a booth at a street fair and admired a silver bracelet, slipping it over her wrist, holding it up in the bright desert sun to look at it.

She’d handed it back to the jewelry maker, an old man with a windburned face, with an apologetic smile.

She could no longer remember why she hadn’t bought it.

Now, she held up the one shoe, turned it over, ran her fingers over the sole, looked at her fingertips.

Nothing.

Not even dust.

She put the shoe back down in the shadows at the bottom of her closet, and when she turned around, she saw that Sam was standing in the doorway, smiling.

He said, “Jiselle,” shaking his head, “it wasn’t your shoe.” Smiling. “It’s nobody’s
shoe.”

“But what if it was?” she asked him.

Still smiling, Sam shrugged. “What if it was?” he said.