“That’s why the quarantines are so shortsighted,” Tara Temple went on. “It only keeps people indoors, when the problem in the first place is not enough sunlight.”
“Oh,” Jiselle said.
“We’re not catching this,” Tara Temple continued. “We’re developing this. The subtle changes in the environment are signaling changes in our bodies, our nutritional needs, and it’s happening too fast to adapt.”
This was something Jiselle had heard Dr. Springwell say, back when he was still broadcasting his show.
“Do you meditate?” Tara asked, leaning toward Jiselle, looking directly at her.
“No,” Jiselle said, sipping from her cup, avoiding those eyes. So blue. So full of certainty.
“You should,” Tara said. “Clarity in a time like this is extremely important.” She paused and looked at Jiselle as if she were inspecting her for disease. “What are you eating at least?” she asked.
“Well,” Jiselle said. “I’m just trying, you know, to keep us all fed.”
Tara Temple shook her head. “You need to be very conscious of what you’re eating,” she said.
“Yes,” Jiselle said. She nodded as if she understood, as if she would try to be more conscious of what she was eating. But how? It was so much harder than Jiselle had ever guessed it would be, keeping her small family fed. All those years, dashing from kiosk to kiosk, drive-thru to convenience store, she’d never once imagined how much time it would take to make a meal, to serve it. Without a stove. With a refrigerator that couldn’t be counted on. No gas in the car, and the grocery store closed half the time, ten miles from home.
The good decisions she’d made had nothing to do with her consciousness, as it turned out. They’d been lucky guesses. She’d somehow known that flour would be important and so, before the shortages, had bought twelve pounds of it. And sugar. Baking powder. A can of Crisco, a thing she’d never even seen up close before she bought it. Now, late mornings, when the power was on and she could use the oven, Jiselle would make enough muffins to last a week. She’d gotten the recipe out of an old Good Housekeeping magazine she’d found in the garage.
She’d learned, too, how to take care of fresh food. Potatoes and onions lasted an amazingly long time in the cool dark. Bouillon cubes. Cabbage. Apples. She’d torn out an article from the same Good Housekeeping magazine on how to soak beans so long that they needed to be boiled for only an hour to make soup. After all those years of relying on frozen dinners and packaged bread, it amazed Jiselle that she could prepare a meal out of beans and water and a single carrot that was so delicious even Sara would ask for seconds.
She’d stocked the cupboards and filled boxes in the cellar with canned food and dried fruit after hearing a woman on the radio say one day, “I’m stocking up on food. I know we’ve been warned not to ‘hoard,’ but protecting your family is not the same as ‘hoarding.’”
The woman’s voice sounded like a sober and practical Martha Stewart’s, but it couldn’t have been. Martha Stewart had died of the Phoenix flu two weeks before. In any case, Jiselle had taken the woman’s advice. She and Camilla had driven into town to the Safeco three times, loading the car each time with all the canned and dried goods they could buy. Ramen noodles. Crackers. Pop-Tarts. Broths. Powdered milk. The flour and sugar.
“Well, I have to go, but tell Bobby I stopped by and that I said I’d call in a couple of days, and I’ll be home next week. By the way,” Tara Temple said, stopping, turning to look at Jiselle, “how is Mark?”
“Well,” Jiselle said. “Still in the quarantine, of course. He’ll be in Germany still, for a little while, I’m afraid.”
Tara Temple smiled, wistfully it seemed. She said, “Ah, Mark.”
Jiselle said nothing. She waited for Tara Temple to go on.
“We’ve known him, you know, for a long time. Since long before the—” Here she paused and looked toward the road. “Since long before Joy, and all the years since. We were happy, I suppose, to hear he’d gotten married again. But not surprised. He was always such a—” She moved her hand through the air, as if trying to snatch the right phrase out of it. There was a look of unmistakable pleasure on her face as she said, “Mark was always such a fool for love.” She shook her head. “Such a hopeless romantic. In and out of love, always rescuing some damsel in distress or being rescued by one.” She let the hand dash back and forth in front of her for a few seconds before she went on, “And everyone put up with it because, as you must know better than anyone, he was so…attractive. It was a relief, and such a surprise, to imagine him settling down. There were not a few of us in this little town who were…” She looked, then, up to the sky and said, “Oh, never mind! I’m sure this isn’t something you want to hear about, my dear!”
Tara Temple turned back around, and Jiselle watched her descend the steps.
Had she been trying to tell Jiselle what Jiselle thought she might? Had she and Mark…?
Tara Temple was already opening her car door when Jiselle noticed that she was still holding on to the can of evaporated milk. (Absentmindedly? Or had she come to think of it as hers? Had she thought it was wasted on Jiselle, who would never take her advice about vitamin D or meditation, and so just die of the Phoenix flu anyway?) In any case, Tara Temple carried the can with her out the front door, and she still had it in her hand when she got behind the wheel of her car and called out her open window, “Goodbye!”
Jiselle said nothing about the milk. She had another can in the cupboard.
In the morning, Sara wandered into the family room where Jiselle and Camilla were reading together. She held up a pair of scissors in her hands. Jiselle instinctively sat up straighter, inhaling. The combination of Sara and a sharp instrument seemed full of dangerous potential.
But that morning Sara was wearing a white nightgown with yellow smiley faces on it—something Jiselle had never seen before and had not known that Sara owned. She said, handing the scissors to Jiselle, “Will you cut my hair? So it’s all one color?”
“Of course,” Jiselle said, taking the scissors from her, hoping she didn’t sound as breathless to Sara as she did to herself, and stood to follow her into the bathroom.
Since school had been closed, Sara’s hair had started to grow out of its ebony dye-job, and what had emerged were several inches of a sandy and reddish blond that reminded Jiselle of the color of fawns. The black fringe around her shoulders, contrasted with her natural color, made her look even more fearsome than when her hair was all one color, but Jiselle had assumed she liked it that way.
“This is so ugly,” Sara said, flipping the ends of her hair with her fingers. “Get rid of it. Please.”
“Sure,” Jiselle said.
She got a towel out of the linen closet and spread it over the sink, and then put her hand between Sara’s shoulder blades, pushed her forward gently. She rarely touched Sara on purpose—just accidentally when they reached for the salt shaker at the same time or when she found Sara’s elbow pressed against her own as they tried to walk through a door at the same time—and Jiselle was surprised how thin, almost fragile, Sara’s back felt, and her neck. She could feel the knobs of her vertebrae, and when Sara tilted her face to the side, Jiselle could see the pulse beat in a fluttering vein at her temple.
“Okay,” Jiselle said, taking a bit of the hair between her fingers. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” Sara said.
So Jiselle snipped at Sara’s hair until the black fringe had fallen either onto the towel in the sink or around their feet on the bathroom floor. It took a long time. Jiselle wanted to do a perfect job. “Okay,” she finally said, and Sara straightened up.
Jiselle stared at Sara’s reflection staring at herself in the bathroom mirror, and it was as if she were seeing this girl for the first time.
Sara, without the unnaturally black hair, seemed to have skin the color of peaches. She wasn’t, Jiselle realized, wearing her lip ring or her black makeup. Without these things she looke
d like an awkward adolescent—a young girl with a round face, wide eyes, soft hair, which Jiselle could not stop herself from touching.
It felt like rabbit fur, she thought, running her hand over the top of her stepdaughter’s head.
It felt like infant hair.
The next night they heard, in the distance, what sounded like either fireworks or gunfire.
The sun had just set, and Sam, who was playing with his action figures in the candlelight, looked up. He said, “Shouldn’t we be celebrating?”
“Celebrating what?” Camilla asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Independence?”
It was the Fourth of July?
Sara was crocheting by candlelight, and Jiselle was trying to read Far from the Madding Crowd with a flashlight balanced on her shoulder. Next door, Diane Schmidt could be heard humming a vaguely familiar tune, something Jiselle thought she might recognize from a documentary about the Civil War she’d watched on PBS in what seemed like another lifetime, a century before.
Again, they heard what might have been fireworks or gunfire. When Sam said, “See?”—as if the sound were evidence of their call to celebrate—they all started to laugh, and Jiselle said, “Okay,” and they headed outside, where they set the brush pile on fire, and Sara, Camilla, and Sam marched around it singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
During the march, Jiselle suddenly remembered a trick from Girl Scout camp—how, if you boiled a closed can of evaporated milk long enough, somehow it turned to caramel. She went back into the kitchen for a can of milk and a pan of water.
When she came back out, Jiselle boiled the can over the fire, watching Sam and Camilla and Sara march around her. They looked beautiful and feral in their strange clothes—the girls in mismatched summer skirts and tops, their hair long and wild, like pagan princesses, forest creatures, flushed in the firelight, bare arms and legs glowing orange.
And laughing between his sisters in the circle, Sam, in his cutoffs, bare-chested, appeared to be half-human and half-elf.
They looked like children from a time before civilization, before television and computers, vaccinations and fast food and jets—or children after these things, singing a patriotic song written so long ago she was surprised they knew the words.
Later, when she opened the can of evaporated milk, and it was miraculously caramel, they went back into the kitchen and stood around, eating the dense sweetness with spoons.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Once there was a little boy who went out and got his feet wet and caught cold. His mother undressed him, put him to bed, and had the tea urn brought in to make him a good cup of tea.
It was two o’clock in the morning, but they had gotten used to going to sleep later and later. They were wearing their nightclothes—Jiselle, her long summer nightgown, and Sam, his Star Wars T-shirt and checkered boxer shorts—but it didn’t seem past midnight to her, and Sam was wide awake, although the girls had gone to bed after Bobby left, an hour before, riding his bicycle off into the dark.
For eight days straight, the power had been out, so Jiselle and the children waited each night until ten or eleven o’clock to eat dinner by candlelight—a meal of bread, peanut butter, raisins, and canned soup she could heat up outside on the grill they’d bought at Wal-Mart the first week of March, before there were no more grills for sale anywhere, at any price. The charcoal was gone, and the lighter fluid, but Jiselle had the kindling that Bobby had broken up for her and left in a neat pile under an old plastic tarp on the deck.
If they ate earlier, the dark nights seemed to stretch on even longer.
Most days, until the sun set, they managed to keep busy reading, playing chess, Sara crocheting or writing in her journal, Sam throwing the Frisbee with Bobby, Jiselle trying to organize the pantry, dust the bookshelves. They had burned what trash had to be gotten rid of in the fire pit. Afterward, it was a perfect ashy black circle at the center of the brown lawn, but while it was burning, the fire there would glow in hundreds of shades of blue and orange. Watching it, you might have thought it was something magical, something biblical, if you didn’t know it was burning trash.
Jiselle was still able to charge the battery in her cell phone off the battery in the Cherokee, but only occasionally could she pick up a signal. When she could, she called her mother, who answered the phone, “This is Anna Petersen,” as if her office might be calling—but why would they? No one could be selling real estate now. When Jiselle asked how she was, and how she was going to be, and if she needed to come stay with them in St. Sophia, her mother would only chat about the weather, ending with a few last words about Jiselle’s “impossible situation.”
Mark hadn’t called in two days—or if he’d tried, he hadn’t been able to get through—and then it had been only to say hello and that he couldn’t talk long. There were German officials coming to speak to the detainees that afternoon, and he had paperwork to fill out. He told her, “Don’t get excited about a homecoming anytime soon. But I have a feeling we will, at least, be seeing a large monetary settlement from the German government when this is over.”
“I just want you home,” Jiselle said. “I don’t care about the money.”
“Of course you don’t care,” Mark said.
Jiselle was about to object—she felt a warmth spreading across her chest as though a hot soaked cloth had been placed there—but by the time she finally was able to open her mouth to speak, Mark said, “This is it. They’re here. Gotta go,” and hung up.
Jiselle did the laundry outside in the rain barrel and hung it on the line Paul had stretched for her between the deck and a tree at the end of the yard. That chore alone could sometimes take an entire afternoon before Jiselle even realized how long she’d been outside. The ravine seemed empty and completely quiet behind her as she twisted the shirts and socks until they were dry enough to hang. Occasionally, Beatrice might waddle up out of the ravine for a surprise midday visit.
The grass, which they’d had to let grow since the mower ran out of gas, had grown a foot in only a few weeks. Returned to what must have been an earlier, wilder state, there were long pale grasses mixed in with the green ones, and wildflowers Jiselle didn’t know the names of—orange, ruffled cups swaying on thin stems, delicate white frills, purple beads and pearls on long straw-colored stalks—mixed in with those.
Now it was very unusual to see a plane, and when she did, it was almost always a military jet flying fast and high. The trees and sky seemed strangely empty even of birds. It was only the end of July. Could they have flown south early this year?
There had been news reports of dead birds, numbering into the hundreds, in yards and parks and in the streets of Chicago, but Jiselle had found, a few weeks before, only a single dead sparrow—a soft gray ball of feathers—in the backyard. One of its wings looked broken, spread out at a strange angle, and there was blood on its breast.
A cat?
She took a shovel out of the garage and buried the sparrow at the edge of the ravine.
The rodents, like the birds, seemed to have fled. Every morning, Sam’s traps were empty, and he and Jiselle never saw mice or rats on their walks into the ravine any longer. Their absence was not reassuring. Jiselle felt more abandoned by their disappearance than relieved.
It was one of so many disconcerting things. Wave after wave of disastrous statistics on the news were being made human now by a few familiar faces:
Donald Trump’s son. Brad Pitt’s brother. The woman who’d founded Mrs. Fields cookies, and her entire family.
All of these cases proved what they’d already been telling people for months—that no amount of money, specialized medicine, private planes, or island hideaways could spare you.
The Fieldses, it was said, had retreated together to a house in Idaho, thinking it was an escape from the infected areas with higher populations—but they were found there by a UPS man delivering blankets, which they’d had shipped to them from Denmark because they were unwilling to use
blankets that had spent any significant amount of time within U.S. borders.
“These people did everything ‘right,’” a man who was identified by a caption on the television as “Health Expert” said, making elaborate quotation marks in the air, raising his bushy eyebrows knowingly, “which goes to show that you can’t flee from a virus that’s already circulating in your body. People need to keep themselves fit, mind their nutrition, and stay close to health experts who can help them at the first sign of illness.”
But the story that completely eclipsed the others was “A Mother, a Saint, in Maine.”
In Portland a mother of four had left a note on the kitchen table that read, “I know I have the Phoenix flu. I’m going away until it’s passed, so I won’t infect you.”
Her husband and children and the local authorities had mounted a massive search. They’d posted flyers and bought a billboard on the interstate: MOMMY. WE NEED YOU TO COME HOME. WE LOVE YOU. PLEASE. But she was found dead and alone a few days later by a maid at a Holiday Inn in Concord, New Hampshire—her bed surrounded by photos of her family.
Now the family was suing the local authorities because they’d had her remains cremated before the family had a chance to identify her, to say goodbye.
That night, on the couch in the dark, Sam was a warm weight at her side, his head on her shoulder, and Jiselle could feel both the steadiness of his breath and the depth of his concentration. The flashlight was a bright zero on the page they were reading together. His hair was a little longer now, and it tickled the side of her face. Occasionally she’d rub her cheek against the top of his head. He snuggled closer to her when she did.
In a Perfect World Page 17
