In a Perfect World (23 page)

“Believe me,” she said, “when you grow up the daughter of a poor farmer, you learn how to cook a rabbit.”

After dark, they gathered in the living room to play charades by candlelight. Because Sam was too happy to sleep and the color was back in his cheeks, when he begged Jiselle to let him stay up (“It’s Christmas!”), she couldn’t refuse.

So Sam started the game, marching around the room staring straight ahead as a candle flickered on the coffee table and the others shouted wrong guesses at him, sidetracked by the idea that he was a chess piece, and then a knight, and then a sandhill crane.

“A
soldier,”
he told them when they finally gave up, and then it was obvious to all of them: the stiffness of his limbs, that weapon he’d had resting on his shoulders, the grim expression on his face.

“I’m the king of charades!” Sam shouted, and Sara threw a pillow at his head. Over them, Joy wore her beautiful gown. No one had said a word about the portrait, which Jiselle had taken out of Sara’s closet after Sam was well again and hung in its proper place from the nail over the mantel, above Brad Schmidt’s rifle and her mother’s Little Mermaid statuette. Now Joy smiled down at them, offering that bright piece of cake to the future, as if it were her life.

Jiselle was a coffee mug, which they all shouted out at once as soon as she put her hand on her hip.

When it was her turn, Camilla rowed a boat down a river. “That’s not fair!” she said when they guessed it after only a second of rowing. “Let me go again.” This time she put her arms together and rocked them back and forth.

“A mother?” Sam asked.

“A baby?” Sara asked.

“Both!” Jiselle’s mother called out. She looked around the room. “Am I the only one who can see that Camilla’s going to have a baby?”

Jiselle put a hand to her throat.

How had she not seen it? Camilla’s growing waist. Her breasts. Her face. Of
course.

“Camilla—” she said, but Camilla waved her words away. She said, “We can talk about that later. It’s Anna’s turn.”

There was a quiet moment while Jiselle’s mother stood before them, seeming to be trying either to decide what she was or how to express it. She wore a silk kimono Jiselle hadn’t known her mother owned. Her shins and feet were bare. The candlelight on her legs made the sparse downy hair on them shimmer, and the flame made the sound of little insistent wings.

But there was another sound, too, in the distance. Something familiar, Jiselle thought, and also completely new, was out there in the dark. She looked around at the others, but they didn’t seem to hear it. She turned her face to the front door. When she held her breath, she could hear it more clearly.

A purring. A propulsion. She lifted her chin and listened.

Yes.

Whatever it was, it was moving steadily, inexorably, in their direction. The hum of an enormous cat or a gathering of winds—accumulating, approaching. A vast population, migrating. An army shuffling, shoeless, toward them, marching through high grass or over gravel.

Or a parade of children. In robes. Holding lanterns. Silk banners slapping at the darkness.

Or—could it be?

Was it some forgotten piece of machinery crawling toward them: its motor grinding closer, its small oiled teeth and gears, its wheels rolling over the earth, or its wings sailing over their heads?

Jiselle stood up.

She was holding a hand to her ear, trying to hear it when Sam and Camilla and her mother shouted at the same time, “A plane!”

Jiselle turned around quickly to see Sara before them now with her arms outstretched, soaring, and then shaking her head of shining, tangled, tawny hair with an exasperated, victorious expression on her face.

Jiselle sat back down.

Outside, there was silence again.

She’d imagined it, hadn’t she?

Or was it still far enough in the distance—just something picked up by the wind? Something that might never arrive. Or something that had already come and gone. Or something that was there, now, waiting for them outside as Sara stood with one arm held over her head in a graceful white arc—so clearly and beautifully the neck of a swan that Jiselle chose not to say a word as the others called out, “Question mark! Fishing rod! Coat rack!” so that she might prolong the mystery of that bird, the passing of that night, and the end of a perfect world.

I am deeply indebted to Katherine Nintzel for her help with this novel. I also owe thanks to Laura Thomas and Carrie Wilson for stories and insights that found their places here.

LAURA KASISCHKE
teaches in the University of Michigan MFA program and the Residential College. She has published seven collections of poetry and seven novels. She lives with her family in Chelsea, Michigan.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

FICTION

Feathered

Be Mine

Boy Heaven

The Life Before Her Eyes

White Bird in a Blizzard

Suspicious River

POETRY

Lilies Without

Gardening in the Dark

Dance and Disappear

What It Wasn’t

Fire & Flower

Housekeeping in a Dream

Wild Brides

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

IN A PERFECT WORLD
. Copyright © 2009 by Laura Kasischke. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Adobe Digital Edition August 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-194182-5

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1