In a Perfect World

by Laura Kasischke

  Now when she tried to call Mark, there was no answer at all.

  By the time the cruise ship ran aground on the Isla Mujeres, all the passengers were long dead.

  “A macabre scene greeted Red Cross workers on this small Mexican Island yesterday—”

  Jiselle imagined the passengers in their lounge chairs on the deck, wrapped in their plush white velvet robes. Dancing on the parquet floor in their shiny shoes, the brass instruments of the band glittering under the slowly revolving disco ball suspended from the ceiling.

  The volunteers had boarded the ship in their biohazard suits and returned from it with faraway looks on their faces, captured in photographs as they disembarked in the hours before the island was evacuated entirely of rescuers, of journalists, of residents, while decisions were made about what to do with the ship.

  In the meantime, planes owned by American television networks flew over and around it, videotaping the great silence of that ship stalled on the coast of the Isla Mujeres, which Jiselle remembered as a pale and nearly treeless expanse of white in the middle of the turquoise dream of the Caribbean.

  “Are you giving me this so I won’t steal it again?”

  Jiselle shook her head. She said, “No. I’m giving it to you because you love it.”

  “Thank you,” Sara said as she slipped onto her finger the onyx ring Mark had bought for Jiselle on Isla Mujeres. “I do love it.”

  On Sara’s finger, it sparkled darkly, absorbing their reflections as they looked into it. Jiselle took Sara’s hand and kissed the ring goodbye.

  That night, Jiselle woke in the dark to a sound in the hallway and sat up in bed fast. She looked to the threshold of the door, which was open. “Camilla?”

  There was no answer, but the shape of a woman in a white gown was there.

  “Mrs. Schmidt?” Jiselle tried to focus her eyes, but the figure seemed to be made of shadows, waving rather than standing. She swung her legs off the edge of the bed and stood. Her heart was beating hard—in her chest, in her ears, all along her arms and neck. She was holding her breath. She stepped toward the door. “Sara?”

  The figure seemed to float away from her then, and then float back, and then rise, and recede, and then flash in the threshold, and Jiselle gasped when she saw who it was.

  “Annette?” she whispered to the doorway, before sinking to her knees.

  There was a beam of light glowing on Annette’s pale face, which was changed but familiar, and the light spilled down her chest to the place where she held a baby to her breast.

  Jiselle looked from the baby and back up to Annette, and just before she vanished, Jiselle saw the look of pain and anguish on her face, and she reached toward her, touching nothing. She continued to reach toward the vanished figure long after she knew what she knew, and then she got back into bed.

  The power came on for four days again the next week, and although there was nothing on television or on the radio, they kept music playing all day on the stereo, as if they might never hear music again if they turned it off—Joni Mitchell, Bach, Britney Spears, Kool Moe Dee, the Muppets, whatever CDs they could find, one after another, without a pause between them beyond what it took to take one off and put another one on. Bob Dylan was crooning “Jokerman” when the power went out again.

  They went to bed early, and the sun came up bright, but the power was still out, so Jiselle went through the house resetting the electric clocks. It was a silly, optimistic gesture, she knew, but whenever the power was out, Jiselle reset the electric clocks every few hours. To see them frozen on the counters and on the walls disoriented her. Could it still be two o’clock? she’d think five times in a row before realizing it couldn’t be.

  “Why don’t we just get rid of the clocks?” Sam asked. He pointed out that Jiselle’s watch still worked—although the battery in his own was dead, and there was no way to replace it. “Anyway,” he pointed out, “what difference does it make what time it is?”

  Jiselle smiled a little apologetically and shrugged as she reset them.

  After the clocks, she went to the refrigerator—the now-familiar routine of scouting through it for what had spoiled, what could be salvaged.

  A few days earlier, a man in a white truck had pulled into the driveway. There had been no lettering on his truck, but Jiselle felt confident he was a farmer as soon as he stepped out. He was older, with a gray beard. He wore overalls and a straw hat, as if it were a farmer’s costume or a uniform.

  “Howdy!” he’d called to her when he saw Jiselle standing at the front door. “I’ve got dairy!” Jiselle walked around to the back of the truck with him.

  The farmer smelled reassuringly of manure—pleasant, authentic: earth, and animals, and work. His cheeks were rosy, his smile warm, although one of his front teeth was missing. He opened the back of the truck, and Jiselle gasped when she saw it.

  At least a hundred beautiful glass bottles of milk. Old-fashioned, dusty wheels of cheese. What must have been another hundred golden bricks of butter wrapped in waxed paper. “Where did you get all this?” she asked.

  The farmer laughed, putting one hand on his round belly as he did. He looked at her, amused, and said, “Well, ma’am, I made it. From cows. That’s where dairy products come from!”

  Jiselle laughed, too, at herself. Farms. Animals. Had she forgotten? She said, “Well, I’m impressed.”

  “What would you like?”

  Jiselle looked at the bottles, the waxed bricks, the wheels of cheese. She said, “I’m short on cash, will you take—?”

  “I’ll take gas, valuables, or cash, and that’s my order of preference,” the farmer said, counting them off on his fingers, which were dirty but plump. He’d been ready with the answer, as if he’d been asked it often. “I’ll consider other things, such as canned goods, tools, and the like. But I sure as hell ain’t takin’ a check.” Again, he put a hand to his belly as he laughed.

  Jiselle went into the house and came back out with the jade earrings Mark had given her for Christmas. She held them up for the farmer.

  In the sunlight, they looked paler than they did in the house. Green teardrops. Seadrops. The farmer held them in his hand, as if to weigh them. He held them up. He looked at her, and at the gold watch on her wrist. Mark had given that to her as well. “Those real diamonds?” he asked.

  She looked at the watch face, the little sparkling aurora of jewels around it, and said, “Yes. Of course.”

  “I’d rather have that,” he said, and handed the jade earrings back to her.

  Jiselle took off the watch and gave it to him, and he carried four bottles of milk, two bricks of butter, and a wheel of cheese into the house for her.

  She had paid, she realized, what might have been seven or eight hundred dollars for a few groceries, what might have cost twenty dollars in another time—but she didn’t need the watch, and Sam looked thin to her, and she’d been thinking about Tara Temple’s warning about vitamin D.

  That night she made everyone—even Bobby and Paul, even Diane Schmidt—drink a large glass of milk and eat a huge piece of cheese with the bean soup she made for dinner.

  She slathered the bread she’d baked for them with butter.

  Now what was left of it, eight hours after the electricity had shut down, already smelled of bacteria, decay. She took the milk out of the dark refrigerator and set it aside. She took the butter and leftover cheese outside to the deck in a sack, which she tied to the highest branch of the oak tree she could reach, hoping the height would keep animals away and the cool air would keep it fresh a little longer.

  Then she went back inside and gathered up the things to make tea—the kettle of water, the matches to make a fire in the grill—and wrapped her shawl around her.

  It was a damp morning after the rain of the night before, but a clear morning—the sky a pale blue overlaid with thready clouds, as if spider webs had been carefully draped over a dome. The leaves of the trees in the ravine were wet and shining in the sunrise. The b
ranches appeared to be wrapped in black velvet against the bright sky. She put the kettle down, opened the box of matches, and was about to strike one against the side of the box when something in the side yard caught her eye, and she turned.

  “Bobby?”

  He was standing over the woodpile with an ax. Not swinging it, just holding it.

  Despite the chill, he had his shirt off, and he was naked to the waist. He appeared to be soaked with sweat.

  “Bobby?” she asked again. “What are you doing here?”

  He didn’t answer. The ax dropped from his arms, and he made no sound when he fell into the long grass beside it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  After neither the Mazda nor the Cherokee would start, Camilla ran the two miles to the Temples’ house and returned in the Saab with Paul—who, jumping out of it, loped in long strides around the house to the backyard and, without asking any questions at all, bent down and scooped up his son, cradling him in his arms as if he were a child instead of the large man he was and carrying him to the car. Jiselle ran behind them, and after Paul placed Bobby carefully in the backseat, she slid in with him, still in her nightgown, without asking if she should. Behind her, she saw Camilla, weeping, trying to break loose of her sister, who was holding her back.

  Over Paul’s shoulder, Jiselle watched the speedometer inch past eighty, past ninety, and then to a hundred, while Bobby lay with his head in her lap. The boy breathed steadily, but there was an oddly hollow sound when he exhaled, as if the air, instead of coming out of his lungs, were rattling through a wooden box. A wooden box on fire. His head was damp and burning at the same time, and his breath, too, seemed strangely hot. His mouth stayed open, and although his eyes were closed, Jiselle saw, in the corner of one, a tiny teardrop of watery blood.

  For as far as Jiselle could see, there was no one else on either side of the freeway—not another car, or cab, or truck—so when they pulled into the St. Sophia Mercy Hospital parking lot, she thought, at first, they must have accidentally pulled off at a stadium or a mall. Except that those places were no longer open, those sorts of gatherings no longer occurred. Paul squealed past the hundreds of parked cars, leaving the smell of his tires burning against the parking lot tar, pulling up at the Emergency Room entrance. He jumped from the car then and ran inside, without saying anything to Jiselle or closing the car door, and was back in only a few seconds, followed by a woman in a white lab jacket. She had a nametag that read DR. STARK on the pocket, and a stethoscope around her neck, but otherwise she was dressed as if she’d just been called in from a picnic—jeans, tennis shoes, a University of Illinois hockey team T-shirt. Her hair was wispy and blond. She looked no older than Camilla, Jiselle thought.

  Paul opened the back door for her, and Dr. Stark leaned in.

  Bobby’s eyes were closed. His torso was naked but still sweat-soaked. Dr. Stark appeared curious but not alarmed. She took his arm and pressed his wrist with two fingers. After a few other things—feeling the glands in his neck, asking Jiselle what his name was and then saying the name, slapping her hands in front of his face and then sighing as if he’d disappointed her when he didn’t respond, Dr. Stark backed out of the car and stood in front of Paul in the parking lot.

  “I’m sorry,” she told him, not sounding sorry. “There’s nothing we can do for him here except have him lie around in the hallway all day, until we send him away. I can’t tell you what to do, sir, but if this were my son, I’d take him home and get some sleep in case he needed me in the night. He’s probably in no immediate danger. No more so than any of us.” She gestured around—to the parking lot, herself, Paul, the sky.

  Paul just stared at her as if he were waiting for her to say something else, to go on. His tongue was working over the sore molar, as it did all the time now, and then he began to shake his head in little snaps, and reached out to touch the doctor’s arm, but she stepped away and turned toward the hospital. When he said to her back, “But—” She turned once more and seemed to scan the parking lot behind him. Without emotion, she said, “If you’re up for the drive into Chicago, you might hear a different story, but the word we’re getting from there is that they won’t even look at anyone with the Phoenix flu. Still,” she said more softly, “you have to do what you have to do.”

  “Medicine?” Jiselle called out the car window to Dr. Stark’s back.

  Dr. Stark turned again, shrugged, and said, “Got any?”

  Some people fell ill and recovered. Some lingered, it seemed. Some died quickly within a few terrible days.

  Bobby Temple died quickly and terribly.

  Weeping blood. Coughing blood. His sheets soaked with blood. His pillow.

  The power was on, but Camilla went through the Temples’ house and turned the lights off one by one. They watched Bobby die by candlelight, and when it was over, although the phones were working again, Paul said there was no point calling the funeral home, no point notifying anyone. Who could help them? They would stay with the body until the sun rose—no one could go anywhere until it was light out anyway—and then he wanted Jiselle and Camilla to leave. He wanted to burn the body of his son in his own backyard, and he wanted to be alone.

  But Jiselle and Camilla washed Bobby’s body before they left—carefully wiping the dried blood out of his eyes, swabbing the blood out of his mouth with a washcloth. Camilla clipped his fingernails, kissing each finger after she did. Jiselle went through his closet and found his best shirt and slacks. Paul knotted the tie around his neck, folded the collar of his shirt down over the tie. In the candlelight, Bobby’s eyelids appeared to flicker as if he were dreaming, but there was a look of such relaxation on his face that Jiselle knew he wasn’t.

  They sat back in their places around the bed, Jiselle holding Paul’s hand in one of hers and Camilla’s in the other. Paul and Camilla each held one of Bobby’s hands. When the sun finally broke into the darkness, and the warm light of it seeped over the windowsills and cast the shadows of the bare tree branches against the shades, Paul said, “You need to go.”

  Jiselle looked up at him.

  The swelling on the side of his face had gone down in the night, and he looked more like the man she remembered, making that brick path with Bobby and Sam in the backyard in the sun. He was not in physical pain. The afternoon before, after Bobby had finally fallen quiet—the screaming and the clawing having subsided into an awesome silence—Paul had left the room and returned with a pair of pliers.

  “Please,” he said to Jiselle. “I can’t have this distraction while my boy dies.”

  Jiselle followed him into his bedroom, where he’d already spread a towel over the pillows. He’d brought two tennis rackets in from the back porch to hold on to. He said to Jiselle, handing her the pliers, “I sterilized them.” He swallowed. “I passed them through a fire, and I just had a shot of whiskey. I’ll try to be quiet.”

  When it was over, Jiselle wiped the blood from the side of Paul Temple’s face with a towel, and the tears out of his eyes with her fingertips, and as she did, he reached up and pulled her down next to him on the bed.

  She put her head on his shoulder.

  For the first time in two days, for a few minutes there in Paul Temple’s arms, Jiselle fell asleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  She was reading to Sam the morning the National Guard came to the door. It was the end of November, and it had been snowing all night.

  The walls of the palace were formed of drifted snow, and the windows and doors of cutting winds. There were more than a hundred rooms, all lighted up by the aurora, and so large and empty, so icy cold, so—

  Everyone else was still asleep.

  Four men—boys, really, wearing army-green fatigues, stood outside the front door. Although they were taller and more muscular than Sam, they did not look much older. The same clear eyes, poreless skin.

  They’d parked their Jeep in the driveway, and behind them, it looked strangely mechanical to Jiselle, out of place in the snow—
primitive, like something cobbled together by a creative but unimaginative people. Prehistoric. They wanted to know if she had a vehicle, too, and, if so, did the vehicle have any fuel?

  Jiselle pulled her shawl around her shoulders. A hard wind was blowing across the yard, bending the bare tree branches to the east. One of the boys was wearing gloves without fingers, and Jiselle saw that his fingernails were tipped with blue. There were matching blue circles under his eyes. Looking at that one, Jiselle invited them in, and then she stepped out of the way as they passed, one by one, through the door. She’d just added another log to the fire, and it was pouring warmth into the living room. The soldiers moved toward it as if magnetized.

  The power had gone out the week before and hadn’t come back on. Still, Bobby and Paul had stacked enough wood behind the house that Jiselle was hopeful that if she was conservative with it, she could keep the house heated until March, when the weather would surely get warmer, whether or not the power came back on.

  She’d stopped assuming that it would.

  The boys sat next to one another across from the fire, squeezing together to fit themselves on the couch, and apologized for their boots, which were wet but not dirty—huge black boots laced halfway up their calves, tightly, over olive-green pants. The snow on the soles was melting in clear and shallow puddles around them on the wood floors, but Jiselle said not to worry about it. She’d mop up when they left.

  Along with the snow, a scent had been tracked in with them—the smell of burning oil, tarnished brass, old coins and canvas left in a trunk in an attic, taken out again. Industry, travel, commerce, the world. Nothing like the ordinary smells of the house—soap, candle wax, kindling, tea. It would take longer, Jiselle knew, to get that smell of the world out of the house than to mop up the melted snow on the floor around their boots.