In a Perfect World (21 page)

T
he beginning of December was warmer, although the sky, day after day, was a deep purple. The clouds scudding across it looked ink-stained, seeming perpetually to threaten snowstorms that never came. In the afternoons, Jiselle played chess with Sam, read with him in the evenings. Mornings, there were dried beans to sort and soak. There were a few novels left from Camilla’s English Lit course to read. The fire had to be made and stoked. The ashes had to be swept up and thrown out the back door. They’d forgotten about Thanksgiving, so when Jiselle finally remembered, she gathered them all together and surprised them with a dinner of Swanson turkey and dressing from a can. She’d planned to save the turkey for Christmas, but by then, perhaps, she knew, there might be an entirely new plan.

The fire in the living room kept the house warm. There was still food in the cellar: soups, tuna fish, pasta in boxes, powdered milk. Fresh water still poured out of the faucets. But Jiselle knew they needed fruits and vegetables. There were only a few boxes of raisins and cans of peaches left. There was enough toilet paper in the linen closet to last for months, and tampons—although Jiselle and Camilla had both stopped menstruating. (Sara said it was because they weren’t drinking enough water. “You’re not getting enough iron. You can get it in the water, you know.”) They’d stopped using paper towels and napkins at the table, using rags instead, which could be rinsed out and hung up near the fire to dry with the underwear and socks.

How wasteful, Jiselle marveled now, they’d been, and for so long! She wished now she had just one of the large plastic bags she’d thrown away in the last year. So many things she could think of to do with that now. With only one notebook left in the house she realized that soon the only place they would have to write would be on the walls, in the margins of the books on the shelves.

She’d given that notebook to Sara, who had filled up all the pages of her black diary.

“You’re the chronicler,” Jiselle had said when Sara protested that there was no reason she should get the precious notebook. “Take it.”

For the future, Jiselle took down a few books she knew they wouldn’t be needing, in preparation. Some had wide margins, blank pages between chapters.
Aviation Through the Ages. Light Aircraft Navigation Essentials.

The days passed so slowly they might have been lifetimes. Jiselle tried to impose a shape on each one:

The Day of the Spider in the Bathroom, The Day of Split Pea Soup, The Day the Wood Seemed Wet and Would Not Light, The Day of Paging Through an Old Copy of
The New Yorker
and Marveling at the Ordinariness and the Advertisements, The Day We Thought We Heard a Horse Whinny in the Distance, The Day the Lights Flickered, The Day We Might Have Heard Shots Fired in the Ravine, The Day Sam Invented Mint Toothpaste from Baking Soda and Tea…

Because, if she failed to do this, she would go to bed at night and feel as if she were on a drifting ship with no idea where in the world, or in time and space, she might wake up.

Now, every night, the hounds in the ravine howled longer and louder, sounding closer, hungrier. Twice, Jiselle had glimpsed one wandering in the backyard through the snow. Some scrawny blond thing. Was it a dog, she wondered, as Paul had thought—someone’s pet, altered by events? Or a coyote—something wild that no longer sensed danger from the human world it had once shunned?

It didn’t matter. There was such a feral emaciation about the animal that there was no way to tell what else it might, at one time, have been. The creature itself might not have remembered whether it had once been something tame, someone’s pet, or a dangerous predator. When Jiselle came to the glass doors to watch it, it would lift its muzzle to the air, seeming to smell her, and then slip back into the ravine.

After she was sure it was gone, she would go outside to see if Beatrice was still in the little wooden house Sam had built for her—carefully, ambitiously, nailing together some wood planks he’d found in the garage.

Each time, Jiselle was ready for the worst, but Beatrice was always still there, sitting on a nest of Mark’s old uniforms they’d piled up for her, ruffling her feathers.

But the next week the goose quit eating. Jiselle no longer had vegetable oil to mix into the feed, and it became a sticky mess, unconsumed, on the ground around the nest Beatrice never left.

Then, one morning, Jiselle saw a small rabbit in the snow, running like a vivid rag from one end of the backyard to the other. A few hours later, there were animal tracks in the snow, and blood, and the next afternoon, Jiselle saw another animal—something she didn’t recognize, an animal with a long black body, pointed ears—low to the ground, sliding across the deck, disappearing under the Schmidts’ hedge.

An enormous mink?

A wolverine?

Or an entirely new kind of animal?

Was it stalking Beatrice?

That night she woke to the sound of something like a fight between creatures in the dark—a yelping bark against a mewling scream, and she knew instantly that this was an animal, not human, scream, but still Jiselle jumped from the couch with her flashlight and checked the rooms where the children and her mother were soundly sleeping. Afterward, she went back into the family room and sat on the couch with her hands over her ears. The violence of those noises was terrible. There were teeth involved, she could tell, and claws, and blood, and when the silence came, swelling up around the house, she knew there had been a death.

In the morning, she found a dark path worn away around Beatrice’s shack. Something had circled it in the night more than once looking for a way to get in. But when Jiselle pushed open the little makeshift door, Beatrice was still there, alive. Jiselle stepped in, knelt down, ran her fingers along the white feathers, and Beatrice shifted her wings beneath Jiselle’s hand.

In the middle of December, Jiselle’s mother decided that since they could not know if or when the schools would reopen, the children had to be home-schooled, and she would do it.

So, the long afternoons of chess with Sam were replaced by lessons carefully planned out by Jiselle’s mother for the children. She’d sit up at the kitchen table in the flickering candlelight long after everyone else had gone to sleep, using the schoolbooks the children had at home, the encyclopedia, the dictionary, an atlas Mark had kept tucked into the glove compartment of the Cherokee, a medical handbook, and a book of baby names, which must have belonged to Joy.

The children were eager for the lessons, sitting down at the kitchen table in the mornings, thumbing through the books.

During “school,” Jiselle would pick up one of Camilla’s novels and read. She was halfway through
Anna Karenina,
but it was getting harder to concentrate. She’d find her mind returning again and again to Bobby. Those final hours.

Or Paul. Where was he now?

She’d try to imagine him, but the image that came to her was always the same: Paul walking down the center of a freeway littered with cars.

Since the day after Bobby died, and Paul left, none of them had spoken of it again. Every night, Jiselle could hear Camilla weeping in her bedroom, but in the morning she was dry-eyed. She studied at the kitchen table with Sam and Sara. She helped Jiselle around the house. In the evenings, she read while Jiselle and Sam played chess.

They kept busy.

Jiselle’s mother and Sara were involved in a sewing project together that required hours of counting and concentration. Jiselle would overhear them bickering—“Did you
count
these?” “Yes!”—but they seemed on friendly terms. Sara had begun to call her “Anna,” something Jiselle had known only her mother’s best friends to do.

This forgetting, this continuing—how heartless was this, Jiselle sometimes wondered, and she would close her eyes and see Bobby, and Annette, and Dr. Smith, and Diane Schmidt—a dark line of familiar silhouette against the sky, each holding the other’s hand, and instead of looking harder, Jiselle would open her eyes. She would read ten pages and comprehend not one word. She’d put the book down and find herself wandering through the rooms of the house—through the family room, and the bedroom, where Mark’s slippers still waited under the bed. Like a ghost, she’d pass through the kitchen, overhear a few sentences:
He led the Mongols into China…Ferdinand and Isabella…Alfred hid from the Vikings…

But these fragments meant nothing to Jiselle. They were like fuzz, radio static.

“Did you know,” Sara asked one afternoon as Jiselle passed back through the kitchen, pointing to a place on a page in Joy’s book of baby names, “that your name means—?”

“Hostage,” Jiselle said.

“Princess,” her mother corrected.

Sara looked up and smiled. “No,” she said. “It means ‘pledge.’” Reading aloud: “Jiselle. Danish. Definition: She who keeps her promise. Pledge.’”

Jiselle went to the book and looked over Sara’s shoulder. Her finger was on the name. Jiselle read the entry silently to herself. Sara was right.

Jiselle looked up at her mother, who shrugged and said, “Who knows? I always thought it meant ‘princess.’”

Sara flipped the pages to her own name then, and looked up, laughing. She said, “Sorry to break the news to you ladies, but
my
name means ‘princess.’”

One night, Sara insisted they play charades. The evenings were so long. The snow had been falling steadily for days, and it made a silencing moat around the house and the world. Even the hounds stayed away, or couldn’t be heard over the insulating white.

Sam and Jiselle were playing chess by candlelight at the kitchen table, but they looked up from their game when Sara came in and announced charades. Jiselle shrugged. “Why not?”

They went into the living room, where Camilla and Jiselle’s mother were listening to some distant station they’d found on Brad Schmidt’s transistor radio. They’d had to put the radio on the windowsill, on its side, with the antenna pointed toward the fire, but behind the snowy crackle was the unmistakable sound of an orchestra playing something bright and rhythmic, full of exuberance, vibrant with possibility. The future, it seemed, was hinted at in every note. Even the static, which seemed to rise and fall with the wind through the dark night outside, couldn’t drown that out.

When the radio finally died completely, they turned it off and started their game.

Camilla was first.

As soon as she waved her elegant hands around in the air, they all shouted, “Mozart!” at the same time.

“Jiselle,” her mother said one morning while the children were still in bed, “Sam needs to get more to eat.”

Jiselle nodded. She knew. It had been a growing sense of dread for weeks. She looked through the kitchen into the living room, where Sam and the girls were decorating the little tree they’d cut down at the edge of the yard. They’d found Joy’s box of beautiful Christmas decorations in the basement—sugary angels, little gingerbread houses, gilded fruit—and they were hooking them onto the tree’s bright branches.

In his T-shirt (one Mark had brought home for him:
HARD ROCK CAFÉ TOKYO),
which was at once too small and too large, he looked like a stick figure. The shirt rode up on his waist, and Jiselle could see his ribs, but it also hung too loosely off his shoulders, and she could see the blades of those jutting out of his back, too skeletal.

This was a boy who was starving.

It had been only a week since Jiselle had opened the cupboards and counted what she had left in them—the cans, the packages—and peered into the last box of powdered milk to assess how much was left, and then put a hand to her eyes to do the math. How long did she need to make what they had last?

Surely there would be enough food left for another month.

Or two, if she was careful.

But only if she was careful.

So she began to divide two cans of soup instead of three among them for dinner. She added an extra cupful of water. If they ate Ramen noodles for lunch, she saved the water she’d boiled them in and added it to that night’s canned stew. There was always some flavor left in it. Surely there were some nutrients, too?

She started pushing her own bowl away before she finished her soup, asking Sam if he was hungry. Her mother did the same. But if Camilla or Sara tried to offer anyone else their food, Jiselle’s mother snapped, “Finish your
own
food.”

Although the girls quit offering Sam their food at the table, Jiselle had seen them taking their napkin rags away with them from their meals suspiciously heavy.

Once, she overheard Sam say to Sara in his bedroom, “Thanks, Sara, but I’m not
hungry.”

“Eat it
anyway,”
Sara whispered back.

Now, in the bright winter light coming in through the family room windows, it was clear that Sam was a child who was not getting enough to eat. For how many decades had Jiselle looked at photographs of such children in newspapers and magazines, and how far away had those children seemed?

“I’m going to go look around the Schmidts’ house,” Jiselle said to her mother. “To look again. To see if there’s anything stored we didn’t find.”

Jiselle hadn’t been inside the Schmidts’ house since a few days after Brad Schmidt died, when she’d gone over with Camilla and taken what appeared to be the only useful things—a few sharp knives, some cans of anchovies, the radio, Saltines, a sack of flour, and a canister of brown sugar—and had boxed up Diane Schmidt’s clothes and medicines and brought them home.

But they hadn’t been hungry then.

Had she looked in the basement? The attic? Brad Schmidt had spoken of being prepared. Why hadn’t it occurred to Jiselle before now that he might have a cellar full of provisions?