In a Perfect World (22 page)

The yellow biohazard tape had torn away from the doors and windows, and it fluttered like party streamers in the snowy wind. The hedge was white with snow, and the paving stones were buried under it, but Jiselle could feel them beneath her boots, and she followed the path to the back door, which was open. The threshold had warped and split. She stepped in.

“Hello?” she called.

Old habits. She couldn’t help it. She even flipped the light switch next to the door, but of course the kitchen light did not come on, and there was no answer to her greeting.

Still—could she be imagining things? Jiselle sensed some movement somewhere deeper inside the house and instinctively stepped backward, and then stood quietly, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness, holding her arms protectively across her chest.

If it hadn’t been that there had been no mice or rats around for so long, Jiselle would have expected the house to be full of them. Or squirrels. Swallows. A family of raccoons. They would be wild, unfamiliar with human beings.

What she hadn’t expected to encounter—like a wild ghost, padding out of the bedroom and into the hallway, and then, barely bothering to glance in her direction before slipping into the hallway, and then into the living room—was this sleek and tawny cat, as long as a man, with enormous shoulder muscles, dark ears bristling with fur.

An enormous, magical cat.

Jiselle stood frozen in the doorway for several seconds, hand over her mouth, trying to breathe and not to scream, before backing out into the snowy light, running across the yard and around the hedge, home, heart pounding cou-gar, cou-gar.

Cougar.

How? In Wisconsin? In the Schmidts’ house near the edges of St. Sophia, seventy miles from the heart of Chicago?

Jiselle knew, now, what had been making the tracks around Beatrice’s shed. Now she recognized the paw prints in the snow for what they were.
Whose.
The pads and claws. She hurried in the front door of the house, as excited as she was alarmed. “Sam?” she called.

Where had it come from?

North?

West?

And how had it come to live in the Schmidts’ house?

Was there so little of the usual human activity that the big cats had come back now after a century of hiding in remoter places?

Or was this someone’s exotic pet, escaped? Abandoned?

Would there be more?

Were
there more?

Sam would know. He would have a book, an idea.

“Sam?” Jiselle called out to the house, but the girls and her mother were no longer at the kitchen table. “Sam? You won’t believe this. Sam? Where are you?”

Jiselle’s mother stepped out from behind the curtain to Sam’s bedroom then. “He’s sick,” she said.

As soon as Jiselle stepped into Sam’s room herself, she could smell it: The physical humidity of that sickness, the way it rose off him like a damp fire.

Outside the room, Camilla had collapsed at the kitchen table with her head bowed into her tightly folded hands. Sara paced in the family room, making circles around the half-decorated Christmas tree.

“Sam,” Jiselle said, kneeling beside his bed, putting a hand on his cheek, and then on his forehead. “Sammy. Sweetheart. My baby.”

There was once a princess
…

There was once a mermaid…

There was once a king…

There was once a kingdom…

They’d finished the book weeks before, so Jiselle started over again at the beginning.

That first night, there were sounds all around the house. Animals. And something else. Wind, but as if the wind were marching in circles.

“Jiselle, you need to sleep.”

No.

The boy in the bed appeared to have been taken away and tossed back, bones beneath blankets. He did not open his eyes, and he’d eaten nothing—not a sip of water, not a cracker, not a spoonful of soup.

“Jiselle, what are we going to do?”

She closed the book.

In the morning she opened the door to the little shack, and the goose looked up.

Clearly, Beatrice had expected some animal other than Jiselle, bare-limbed, holding a long knife.

Did she understand that it was only a matter of time?

The path around the shack had been worn down to dirt, and now Jiselle knew what was making those tracks.

Had Beatrice also known? Was it why, before Jiselle cut the white throat, the goose let Jiselle gather her, stroke her pure and bristling neck, the gleaming wings, the elegant strangeness of the beak, and even closed her eyes as Jiselle drew the sharpened blade across the throat, and the blood poured over her bare arms and legs?

Afterward, Jiselle sat holding and rocking the beautiful goose in her arms.

Jiselle’s mother brought the kettle full of scalding water into the kitchen. “We had to do it,” she said, taking the bird out of Jiselle’s arms, plunging it into the water, going to work right away, hands coming up full of feathers, pulled off the body, tossed out the kitchen window and into the snow, “if it could save our little boy.”

It was clear to Jiselle, looking on, that this was something her mother had done a hundred times. Anna Petersen must have watched her own mother do it, and her father, and she had done it herself as a child on that farm, had done it in her dreams every night since then. She had, perhaps, been waiting her whole life, knowing that someday she would need to do it again.

Her mother boiled the goose soup in a pot that hung from the tripod Sam had made, and the whole house filled up with the warm smell of it, and then they brought a cup of the broth to Sam, who sat up long enough to take a sip of it, and then another.

Jiselle’s mother had given the feet and the bones to Jiselle, sifting them out of the pot with a slotted spoon, and Jiselle took those along with a handful of feathers back to the shack, and put them in the nest of Mark’s old uniforms, and left the door to Beatrice’s shack open behind her.

That night, while her mother sat with Sam, Jiselle sat on the deck in the moonlight, watching, wearing an old coat of Mark’s. She shivered as the snow fell around her, but she didn’t feel cold, breathing as quietly as she could until the sun began to rise and she finally saw the cougar slip through the hedge—slow and low on its sinewy haunches, with nightmarish glamour, an elegance made of stealth—to the shack, and as soon as Jiselle saw that the cat was there, inside, busy with the feet and the feathers, which it must have believed to be the goose that it had been stalking for so long, she leaped to her feet and ran across the backyard and into the Schmidts’ house, slamming and locking the door behind her.

“Jiselle,” her mother said, a hand to her chest, when she returned an hour later with the rifle. “You did it.”

The girls and her mother stood around Jiselle, running their hands down the gloss and wood.

“Thank God,” Sara said.

“Thank Jiselle!” Camilla said.

“It’s all I could find,” she said. “He didn’t have any food. Not even any water. All he had were boxes of seeds and ammunition and this.”

There was once a king…

There was once a kingdom…

There was trouble in the kingdom…

There was a little boy…

Another night passed, and then another.

“It’s not the flu,” her mother told Jiselle, standing in the threshold. “He’s sick, but not with that,” and Jiselle stood and went to her mother, put her arms around her, and sobbed into her shoulder for a little while, like a child.

On Christmas Eve, Sam drank a cup of mint tea in little sips on the couch beside the Christmas tree. Camilla sat at his feet, her hand on his knee. Sara fussed with the decorations.

Jiselle could do nothing but stand in a corner of the room and stare at the miracle of Sam. The December afternoon light shone through the window and over the snowy trees in the ravine, which seemed, also, to shine inward—breathing, botanical—with nearly unbearable brilliance. She went to the window and saw, for the first time, the potential beyond it. How little they might need that wasn’t there waiting for them.

There was wood to cut down, and in the spring there would be berries in the ravine. Now that Jiselle knew she could kill an animal, and that her mother could clean it and cook it, the world could start all over again, full of possibilities. The whole house seemed radiant with these possibilities. With the seeds she’d found in the Schmidts’ cellar, there would be vegetables, and with the rifle and the boxes of ammunition they would be able to hunt for small game and deer. Sara had found a handbook on the shelf, something of Mark’s, that explained the gutting and tanning of antelope. Surely a deer would be no different from an antelope. Only that morning, Sara had come into the kitchen with the hunting book open like a hymnal in her hands, and said, “It says here that it’s much less messy if you can string the antelope up, and bleed it before you clean it. See—”

She held up the book for Jiselle, open to an illustration of a man standing beside the carcass of an antelope hanging by its neck from the branch of a tree.

“Do we have any nylon rope, do you think, in the garage?” she asked.

Then Sara took Brad Schmidt’s rifle off the mantel and held it in her hands, weighing it.

“You’ll have to let me be in charge of this,” Sara said, “since we don’t have enough ammunition for target practice. I was the BB gun champion at Camp Newaygo three summers in a row. There isn’t anyone else here who can claim that, is there?”

Jiselle pretended to consider it, and then shook her head. “No,” she said.

The cougar had disappeared only two days before, and already the yard was full of rabbits again.

On Christmas Day, there was snow. A sparkling carpet of it over everything. The radio picked up some station—from where, they had no idea—that played carols all afternoon, until the signal finally faded away. For Christmas presents, Jiselle gave Sam the brass wings she used to wear above her heart. Camilla and Sara got the bracelets Mark had bought and hidden for her for Valentine’s Day. She gave her mother the jade earrings, which looked beautiful on her—exotic and lost in her hair, which had grown wild and white in the last few weeks.

“I want to give you your present now,” her mother told her. “It’s been a long time in the making. I don’t want to wait.”

Jiselle turned from the fireplace, where she’d been stirring the stew for dinner, and said, “Okay.”

“Sara helped me,” her mother said. “I could never have finished it without her.”

Her mother and Sara dragged out the box Jiselle recognized from her mother’s sewing room—the one full of rags—into the kitchen and hoisted it up onto the table. Sam and Camilla pulled up chairs and waited for Jiselle to open the box. Sam’s cheeks were flushed with health. Both he and Camilla looked radiant. Camilla had been gaining weight since the gauntness of the fall, and her hair had grown down to her waist. It hung heavy and loose tonight around her bright, rounded face.

Jiselle hesitated, without knowing why.

“Well, aren’t you going to open it?” Sam asked, nodding at the box.

Jiselle pulled open the cardboard flaps and pushed them away, peering in. Then she looked up. “What is it?” she asked, looking around the table.

“A quilt!” Sam said. They were all nodding.

“But not
just
a quilt,” Sara said.

Jiselle began to pull it out then: an enormous patchwork of multicolored flowers. Little hand-stitches held the hundreds of pieces of it together.

“Your mother saved everything.
Everything,”
Sara said.

They all stood around Jiselle, watching. She ran her hand over the quilted flowers as they watched, until, slowly, the bits and pieces came into focus.

“Do you see?” Sara asked.

A scrap of bright green satin: Prom dress?

A polka-dotted flower: a blouse she had worn almost 305 every day the summer between fifth and sixth grade?

“This,” her mother said, “is from your costume, remember?
The Nutcracker?”

Jiselle nodded.

“And this you couldn’t remember. This is a piece of your baptismal gown. And this”—she pointed out a soft pink scrap—“is what I was able to snip from your baby blanket, the one part you never managed to drag through the mud or throw up on. And here: your high school graduation gown. This is a bit of your first flight attendant’s uniform. This—”

Her mother went on and on.

Jiselle couldn’t speak. She ran her fingers over familiar lace and then a bit of suede. A purse, high school, which came back to her with a whole year of sights and sounds: Ellen tossing a French fry at her across the cafeteria. A carnival at the edge of town. A huge wheel of lights spinning slowly in the sky. Jiselle closed her eyes and saw that wheel again, and this time, spinning there, she was one of the lights.

They laughed at her when she opened her eyes again, still unable to speak, until finally she managed to say, “Thank you.”

It was the only thing she could say.

The rest of the day was like any other, taken up with chores. The stoking of the fire. The boiling of water. The sweeping of the floors. The hunting and skinning of the rabbit.

For Christmas dinner they ate a stew of that rabbit and a can of potatoes. It was delicious. Jiselle’s mother had spiced it with things she found in the cellar and things she found growing under melted snow in the backyard.