In a Perfect World

by Laura Kasischke

  No.

  A little while later, when she heard the shower running and Sara complaining, “The water’s fucking freezing,” Jiselle hurried into Sara’s room, to her closet, and opened it.

  Her heart was pounding with the thrill and anxiety of it, as if she were a safecracker or a cat burglar. She got down on her knees and moved her hands around through the shoes scattered on the closet floor, feeling for her own. It was too dark without the overhead light to see well, but each time Jiselle felt a shoe she thought might be hers, she picked it up and looked.

  No. No. No.

  They were all Sara’s.

  Her sandals. Her flip-flops. Her combat boots and stilettos and slippers.

  She was feeling around farther in the back of the closet when she heard the shower go off—and then, as if somehow it had been kick-started by the end of Sara’s shower, the lights blinked, and blinked again, and then blinked back on, and everything in the house seemed to come alive at once—the television, the stereo, Sam whooping with happiness, Camilla calling out in surprise, the clocks beeping, every light blazing, and Jiselle looked up from the shoes, seeing everything in Sara’s closet vividly and brightly at the same time, and she gasped, finding herself staring directly into the deep green eyes of Joy Dorn.

  Who was smiling.

  Who was dressed in white, holding up that piece of white wedding cake. Beaming. Lovely. Full of light, as if she’d been the source of it, or had absorbed it and was letting it back into the world now.

  The portrait. Sara kept it in her closet.

  “What the fuck are you doing in my closet?”

  Jiselle turned to find Sara standing over her, wrapped in a towel, mouth open wide in astonishment and outrage, but just at that moment she heard “The Blue Danube” coming from the other room and hurried past Sara to answer her cell phone without trying to explain.

  “Oh my God, Mark,” she said. She was crying before she could say anything else.

  “Look, Jiselle,” he said. “I’m not going to be able to talk long. They’re holding the whole plane here, and not telling us how long. Quarantine. But the airline’s lawyers are on it like piranhas. This can’t go on for longer than a week without an international—”

  “A week?”

  “Jiselle. Please. I need you not to be hysterical, okay. This is bad enough. You need—”

  Jiselle said, “I’ll come there.” The whole plan spun out around her as she held the phone to her ear. The children could stay with the Schmidts. She would fly to Munich. If they wouldn’t let him come out to her, she would go in to be quarantined with him.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Now, I love you. I have to go.”

  “I love you, too. Mark. Please, don’t—”

  But he was gone. She tried to call the number he’d called her from, but it rang a long time and no one answered.

  She had just hung up the phone when she looked up to find Sara standing in the hallway. The bedroom door was open, and she was looking in at Jiselle. “So,” she said, “when are you leaving?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come on,” Sara said. “Just tell me. You think we didn’t know the second you realized how much Dad’s gone you were going to be outta here? You think you’re the first one who got fed up with Dad being gone all the time?”

  Jiselle put the phone beside her on the bed. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “The hell you aren’t,” Sara said. “I thought you looked clueless enough that it might take you nine or ten months, but I guess this time Camilla won the bet—although, to be fair, Mommy, you pretty much set the record for the longest he’s managed to keep a girlfriend around. I guess he was right that getting married might be the way to go this time.”

  “Sara?”

  But she was gone.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Jiselle called Mark every day. On the other end of the phone, he always sounded no farther than a few yards away. He sounded as if he were in the other room, or as if he were out in the street, in the backyard—but when Jiselle went to the windows, holding the phone in her hand, listening to Mark’s voice on the other end, she’d see that the backyard was empty, as was the front yard, and, at the end of their driveway, the road.

  He sounded close, but Mark was in Munich.

  Mark was detained.

  By the middle of March, he’d been detained for a month.

  Some days, she nearly pined, lingering at their closet, trying to conjure the feeling she’d had that used to make her knees weak when she took his uniforms in her arms. But there was so much else to do. She certainly did not have the luxury of locking herself in the bedroom to cry now that the power, when it was on, could only be counted on to go out again. During these brief spells with electricity, Jiselle had to prepare for the much longer periods during which there would be no refrigerator, no lights, no outlets to use to recharge the little appliances one relied on. There were so many things to gather and prepare—and, at the same time, as always, the children needed the usual things they needed. The schools had closed early for spring break due to the power outages and fears of the Phoenix flu. But, after spring break, they did not reopen, and it was not made clear when they would open again.

  “What is it like there?” Jiselle asked Mark.

  “Efficient,” Mark said.

  But she had meant the weather. At home, it was the kind of weather you would invent for a perfect early spring. On their walks into the ravine, Sam and Jiselle saw chipmunks under every leafy, unfurling fern. Their fat, cartoon cheeks looked full, and they were all but tame, scampering toward the two of them on the path, looking up expectantly. If Sam and Jiselle knelt down, the chipmunks would come right to them, seeming content to gaze into their eyes for as long as they liked. Sam and Jiselle started bringing bags of nuts along on their walks, and the chipmunks took them shyly, graciously, right from their hands.

  When Jiselle told Mark about the weather at home, Mark told her it was dreamlike in Germany, too. The windows didn’t open in his room, but he could see that outside the Gesundheitsschutzhaus (which, he said, roughly translated to “Good Health House”), it was sunny, with a blue sky, day after day.

  Jiselle tried to picture the scene he described. The distant snowcapped mountain, the foothills surrounding it. The way those hills appeared in the evenings to breathe slowly—sleepily, deeply, purple. There was a train track, Mark said, looking like a silver stream up the side of the mountain. He could see it shining sometimes in the early mornings, behind the pines. At four o’clock every afternoon the rushing glint of a train passed over the tracks.

  “I’m learning patience,” Mark said. “And studying German.”

  In the background she sometimes heard a woman say something—to Mark?—in German.

  “It can’t be too much longer,” he told Jiselle. “Since not one of us has even shown symptoms, they’re not going to be able to justify quarantining us forever.”

  “I love you,” she said. “I miss you.”

  “My dearest,” he said. “My princess. My darling. Imagine I am kissing you.”

  She closed her eyes.

  She tried to imagine it, but the phone made an unnerving humming in her ear.

  “Herr Dorn?” someone called in the distance.

  The woman.

  “I have to go now,” Mark whispered. “It’s morning here. Time for breakfast.”

  Bobby’s father, Paul Temple, gave Jiselle the extra generator he kept in his garage, and if Bobby wasn’t already there, he would come over during the longer outages, hook it up, fill it with gas, start it.

  “Feel free to call on my son for anything you need,” Paul Temple said. “There’s nothing worse than a population of young men without enough to do. It’s the reason they launched the Crusades.”

  As always, Paul Temple, the high school history teacher, seemed unable to keep himself from sharing his knowledge, and was embarrassed to have shared it. He looked away from Jiselle an
d scratched his sandy hair.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Except for the mechanical purr under the kitchen window and the darkness of the neighbor’s house, it was as if nothing were different.

  Every few days Jiselle would go over to the Schmidts’ to see how they were faring, but Brad Schmidt always waved her away.

  She called her mother, who said, “Don’t worry about me, Jiselle. You’re the one with the problem.”

  One morning, the first week of April, a flock of thousands of blackbirds flew out of the ravine behind the house, over the roof. The sound of them woke Jiselle, and even Sara roused herself to come onto the deck, look out. The sky was dark but shivering—all wings and fretful energy, as if the morning had been peeled back to expose its nervous system.

  “Whoa, whoa!” Sam called, waving his arms over his head as if trying to stop them.

  Sara said, “Holy shit.”

  “Where are they going?” Jiselle wondered aloud, and the children looked from the birds to her as if they were surprised that she didn’t know.

  As it turned out, they didn’t go anywhere. They flew from one end of the ravine and back again, and then they dispersed.

  On the radio it was said that people in Chicago had reported the same thing. The birds went from park to park, circled, flew over the lake, and then were gone.

  This incited some panic.

  The birds looked healthy, but who knew what sort of secret viruses they carried, or what their circling and disappearance portended? Parents kept their children indoors and out of the parks—although flyers were posted all over the city and delivered door to door explaining that fear of birds was superstitious, not scientific.

  But who was delivering these flyers, people wanted to know.

  The government?

  And why? To keep people from panicking or because there was something to hide?

  The movie The Birds became the number one movie download of all time, and television psychologists had a hard time explaining its popularity. You would think no one would want to see a movie that so closely paralleled the fears of the time. But they did.

  A week after the blackbirds, a white goose took up residence in the backyard—some escaped farm fowl, it seemed. At first, Jiselle considered shooing it away. It could be diseased. But it looked harmless and lost in the backyard. Its orange beak matched its orange feet, and it came and went from the ravine without flying, just waddling. When Jiselle and the children went out on the deck to watch it, the goose would look up and honk.

  Sam wanted to make a pet of it, but whenever he stepped off the deck to try to approach it, the goose turned and headed down the slope into the ravine, disappearing in the shadows. Once or twice, Jiselle heard it outside in the middle of the night, honking right under the bedroom window as if it wanted something, but when she went to the window to look out, the goose seemed only to be wandering in awkward circles in the dark—a bright patch of reflected moonlight.

  Within a few days of the blackbirds and the arrival of the goose, a small flock of swifts took up residence in the chimney, and they whirled and screamed, glistening blackly, like living ash, from the roof of the house to the leafy trees, coming and going all day long. And some finches built a nest in the oak that grew out of the deck in back. Soon there were eggs in the nest, which seemed to have been pieced together with twigs and toilet paper and also hair—Camilla’s? Golden strands of it glistened when sunlight hit the oak in the mornings.

  Jiselle ignored Brad Schmidt’s advice to clear the birds out. He stood at the edge of his own yard, looking up. “They might as well be living in your house,” he said. “Whatever diseases they’ve got, you’ve got.”

  But Jiselle could not bring herself to be worried about the birds. There were stories every day on the news now about celebrities who’d fled the country, entering other countries illegally. Jodie Foster was living with a long list of fellow celebrities in the Canadian wilderness. No one had seen the wife of the governor of California for months, so she was presumed to be dead of the flu. Reportedly there were hygienic bunkers built under Washington, D.C., in which the Supreme Court justices were being housed.

  Closer to home, it was said that thousands of people had started an encampment at Millennium Park in Chicago to get out of the apartment buildings where there was illness and where the air was presumed to be infected, and that the Beluga whales at the Shedd Aquarium were refusing to eat. Marine biologists all over the world had been consulted, without success. Nothing could be done. A twenty-four-hour candlelight and prayer vigil was being held outside the aquarium, which had been closed to the public for weeks, for the whales, who were said also to be singing whale songs that had never been heard before. “They know what’s ahead for us,” one Chicago evangelist had told a television reporter, “and they are calling out to God.”

  This theory was widely repeated, as if it were a fact, and poets and popular song writers had banded together in a movement called the Whale Prayer Project, which was dedicated to expressing in human language what the whales were trying to sing to God in their own language.

  In the morning, the swifts sounded like wind chimes in the chimney, and Beatrice (the goose—Sara had named it, and the name stuck) heralded morning with a discordant squawk, and then waddled off across the yard into the ravine, disappearing in the dark foliage for the day and coming back after the sun set to walk in circles in the backyard. They never saw her fly.

  In truth, they had no idea if Beatrice was female or male, but Camilla pointed out that the goose had a kind of feminine posture. She held her head high, as if proud of her neck, as if she thought it was much longer than it was. She had a habit of holding her wings away from her body an inch or two, shivering them in the sunlight. It seemed coquettish. Obviously, Beatrice couldn’t fly or she would have, but she enjoyed having wings nonetheless.

  After Jiselle and Sam did some research on what geese liked to eat, they learned that the bread crumbs they’d been leaving were no good. The bread swelled up in the goose’s stomach, making her feel full without actually giving her enough nutrition to survive, so they went to the pet store and bought a sack of something that was supposed to be better: Fowl Feed Deluxe. In the morning, Sam hurried out of bed when the goose honked, ran out to the backyard, sprinkled the feed on the ground, and although the ingredients listed on the side of the bag seemed to be mostly oil and ash, Beatrice pecked happily at it before strolling back to the ravine.

  On Tuesday, Mark sounded wistful. “Do you remember Paris, my love? Zurich? Copenhagen? Will we ever see places like that again?”

  Indeed, those places seemed far away, impossibly remote, charming villages from another time.

  It was hard to hear him over the noises of the household. Camilla and Bobby were starting up the generator again, and it made high whining noises outside the kitchen window. Sara was listening to her music in her bedroom—a man shouting obscenities over the sounds of guitars and garbage can lids being smashed together. Sam was waiting in the family room for Jiselle to get off the phone so they could go for a hike in the ravine. Mark told Jiselle not to tell the kids that she was talking to him. He said he didn’t want to hear their voices, that it only depressed him.

  But Wednesday he was angry. “The world’s going to hell. I could be stuck here forever.”

  “No!” Jiselle said. “Don’t—”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But you don’t understand. Every fucking day here seems to last a week.”

  “I love you,” Jiselle said.

  He said, “I know that.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  For Easter, Jiselle and Sam dyed hard-boiled eggs, and stuffed candies into plastic eggs, and hid them all around the house and the front and backyards, all the way to the edge of the ravine. It took Sara and Camilla two hours to find them all—wandering barefoot through the bright green grass in the late morning sunshine, languid, but laughing.

  That afternoon, Jiselle took them in
to the city to meet her mother at Duke’s Palace Inn. The power had been on for a week without interruption, and the weather was glorious.

  The restaurant was decorated in pastels for the holiday. There were pots of hibiscus and paperwhites everywhere, and pale green and pink papier-mâché eggs were strung from the ceilings. The brunch tables circled the entire dining room. Crystal bowls overflowed with sweet rolls. There was a fresh fruit platter—melon balls and mango, gigantic strawberries. At the center of it all, a chocolate fountain bubbled: three tiers of melted chocolate spilling over, gathering in a rich, dark pool.

  The fragrance of that fountain wafted through the whole restaurant like a decadent, delicious pall, while a young woman in a yellow chiffon dress floated from table to table with a white cloth and an ever-replenishing bottle of champagne. She poured champagne into Camilla’s glass, and Sara’s, and even tried to fill Sam’s glass, until Jiselle’s mother fixed first Jiselle and then the woman in the yellow dress with an outraged stare. “You’re going to let the boy drink champagne? He can’t keep root beer down.”

  “Of course not,” Jiselle said, putting her hand over Sam’s champagne glass. The woman shrugged noncommittally and sashayed to another table.

  The rest of the brunch was uneventful. The girls, perhaps a little tipsy, laughed out loud at the story Jiselle told of the woman on the flight to Scotland who’d grabbed her hand and told her fortune. Sara had agreed that morning, grudgingly, to wear a white T-shirt with her black leather miniskirt, and because her bare legs in fishnet stockings were under the table, from the waist up she looked like a girl dressed for Easter brunch, if informally.