“I’m Mrs. Dorn,” she said.
The soldiers nodded to her but didn’t introduce themselves. They seemed stunned into speechlessness by the warmth of the fire.
Sam stood beside Jiselle, staring in appreciative wonder at them. The soldiers nodded at him in unison, kindly—the understanding of soldiers for the great reverence they were held in by boys. Jiselle put her arm around Sam, pulled him closer to her, her shawl around his shoulders, too—although she wasn’t afraid of these soldiers. In her house, in a row on her couch, these were just shivering boys in wet boots.
If they had rifles, they’d left them behind in the Jeep.
Answering their question, she said, “I have two vehicles. But no fuel,” and then, “Would you like some tea?”
Three of the boys glanced for an answer to the one on the end of the couch, who looked no different from the others except that his green cap had two small black stripes glued to the brim. He shrugged at the others, and then at Jiselle. He said, “Sure.”
So Jiselle went to the kitchen, poured water into the kettle, brought it back, hung it on a hook from the tripod over the fire. Back in September, Sam had rigged up the tripod, made from the legs of an old aluminum lawn chair. He’d gotten the idea from an illustration in the Hans Christian Andersen book, in which an old crone had been pictured stirring a pot hanging over a fire from just such a tripod.
“What are the vehicles, ma’am?” the boy with the black stripes on his cap asked.
“A Jeep Cherokee,” Jiselle said, “and a Saab. And also a little Mazda. You’re welcome to them—but, as I said, there’s no gas.”
The morning after Bobby’s death, Paul had insisted that Jiselle take the Saab.
“I filled it up with the last can of gas I had in the garage. It can’t get me to Virginia with one tank of gas,” he said. “And you might need it, in an emergency. If you won’t take it for yourself, think of your children.”
“But we have the Mazda,” Jiselle protested. “And the Cherokee.”
Paul shook his head. “This has gas, and it runs,” he said. He pressed the key into her hand. Its little teeth shone in the sunrise.
“What will you do?”
“I’m walking,” he said, shifting the satchel he was carrying from one shoulder to the next. “I’d be walking before long one way or another.”
“I could drive you as far as—”
He held up a hand, shaking his head. “You might never make it back, whether you had any gas or not.” He didn’t continue, and Jiselle didn’t try to say anything else.
She took the car but had driven it only one time before it too was out of gas. That time had been the morning Diane Schmidt died.
Together, Jiselle and Sara had wound the sheet around her body and carried her to the car, placing her carefully in the backseat. Jiselle drove to the funeral parlor in town, where two ugly women—sisters, surely, with the same fierce jaws and close-set eyes, one of them with a wart on her nose from which a black hair sprouted—demanded two thousand dollars in cash. When Jiselle said she had no cash at all, they reluctantly took her wedding ring and pulled Mrs. Schmidt’s body, without any grace or care at all, out of the back of the car.
From there, Jiselle had gone to find her mother. She had not been able to reach her by phone for a long time. Only once she’d gotten through and heard her mother answer, “This is Anna Petersen,” before the connection was lost again.
What else could Jiselle do? Her mother might have been fiercely independent, but how independent could an older woman, alone while the world crumbled around her, be?
Jiselle had found herself having to drive straight through Chicago because there were roadblocks, looking unofficial, homemade, thrown together by mobs without machinery or organization, on the freeway—walls of cinderblock, and even a few places where old school buses had been parked to keep traffic from traveling from one state to another.
She’d had no choice but to wind her way through downtown, and so Jiselle had seen for herself the blocks of burned houses. The vandalism. The fountains clogged with garbage. The broken-down door of Duke’s Palace Inn. The smoldering darkness inside it. The smoke pouring out of the highest floors of the Sears Tower. The debris littering Millennium Park. Windows of stores smashed all along the Magnificent Mile. Snowflakes falling peacefully and sparsely over all of it. On a few corners were boys like the ones in her living room now, wearing camouflage (why camouflage, she’d wondered, in the city?) with surgical masks, holding automatic rifles, and beyond them ashes everywhere.
It seemed possible to Jiselle that those boys had, themselves, set the fires—who else was there to do it?—but her mother had told her that it had been boys like those, with the National Guard, who’d stood outside B.C. Yu’s dry cleaning business, weeks earlier, after the rumors began that a Korean scientist had created the bacteria that caused the Phoenix flu.
The rumors weren’t quelled fast enough to keep the Korean-owned businesses in large cities and small towns alike from being destroyed. EVIL was spray-painted over the dry cleaner’s sign, and the door was boarded over, and someone had thrown what must have been a bucket of red paint over that. But the windows weren’t smashed, and the building had not been burned. The National Guard had prevented that. B.C. Yu himself had died of the Phoenix flu before the rumors even began.
Jiselle’s mother had brought nothing with her but a large box from her sewing room filled with what looked like rags, her tea set, some clothes, and the Little Mermaid statuette from the mantel, which sat on Mark’s mantel now, and they’d managed to drive back to the house in Paul’s Saab, although the gas gauge was on E for the last forty miles.
Jiselle knew that the National Guard couldn’t take the vehicles with them, that the possibility that they had some stash of gasoline with them was low. If they did, there were cars littered all over town—keys still in the ignition, thousands of dollars’ worth of chrome and upholstery. Why would they have come all the way out here?
But she meant it, too. They could have the cars. They were welcome to the cars, which meant nothing to her now in their silence, in their huge weight and useless gravity.
Jiselle poured the water into her mother’s teapot, over the dried mint, and the room was suffused with the scent of spring and fresh air, and the four boys seemed to lift their chins to it, as if to information they hadn’t come in search of but were happy to receive.
After the tea had steeped, and Jiselle had poured it, they sipped gratefully from her mother’s delicate cups.
“You’re sure there’s no gas left in either tank, ma’am?” the one with the stripes asked.
“None,” Jiselle answered.
The soldiers finished their tea and handed the cups back to Jiselle carefully, one by one. They stood in a row in front of the couch. “Do you mind my asking, ma’am,” the one with the stripes said, looking around the room, “do you have a plan? Do you have a weapon? Is your husband home?”
“Yes,” Jiselle said, although none of these things was true.
“Good,” the soldier said. “There’s a lot of looting, you know. And illness. And rumors.”
“I know,” Jiselle said.
She did.
She had seen what had happened in the city.
“What are the latest rumors?” she asked anyway.
The boys looked at one another as if deciding among themselves, in silence, whether or not to tell her.
“Well,” the boy with the stripes said after clearing his throat, “it’s all over the world now, you know. One in three, they’re saying. But this could just be the beginning. They’re saying it’s a bacteria. Biological warfare? It could be something as simple as a bit of some anthrax-like agent, sprinkled on the floor of a restroom, in an airport, maybe. Something entirely new. Someone could have stepped in it, worn the contaminated shoe all over the world. It could be potent enough that the spores—”
“Thank you,” Jiselle said.
She held up a hand
, glanced at Sam. She was sorry she’d asked. Somehow—how?—she’d hoped for something good.
The soldier nodded, understanding. He said, “But you need to understand, and so does your son. There are groups, gangs, on the roads. You’re set back here in the trees, and without lights maybe they won’t see you, for now. But we did. And there’s a lot of desperation. And trust me, they’ll figure a new way to travel without gasoline. They’ll find a way, and they’ll find you, too, eventually. There are—”
“The garage is open,” Jiselle said, nodding toward the door, “and the keys are in the cars.”
“Thank you, ma’am. And good luck.”
They filed out then, back into the snow, turning once, in unison, to wave goodbye. They spent only a few minutes in the garage with the Cherokee, and then peering into the windows of the other two cars, before trudging back out to their Jeep and driving away, and Jiselle and Sam went back to the couch in front of the fire to finish the story they’d started.
It ended happily, with the witch vanquished. The spell broken. The children returned safely to their mother, whom they’d feared was dead.
Only later did Jiselle go to the bedroom closet and pull out of the shadows the one shoe left from Madrid.
That lovely black shoe. Its mate had never been found.
The high, narrow heel. The way the arch fit her foot perfectly. The leather polished to a glossy shine.
She remembered again the salesman on his knees in front of her in that old-fashioned shoe store in Madrid. How he’d cradled her foot in his hands, as if it were a precious gift. How he’d slid the shoe on. “Perfecto,” he’d said.
And it was. That shoe had fit her as if it had been made for her by elves, by fairies, by angels.
How many millions of places had she worn those beautiful shoes?
She’d walked through a thousand streets in a hundred countries. She had stood in lines, sat in theaters, strolled down cobbled paths, occasionally bending down to pet a cat, admire a baby in a bassinet. Years before, in Phoenix, Arizona, she’d stopped by a booth at a street fair and admired a silver bracelet, slipping it over her wrist, holding it up in the bright desert sun to look at it.
She’d handed it back to the jewelry maker, an old man with a windburned face, with an apologetic smile.
She could no longer remember why she hadn’t bought it.
Now, she held up the one shoe, turned it over, ran her fingers over the sole, looked at her fingertips.
Nothing.
Not even dust.
She put the shoe back down in the shadows at the bottom of her closet, and when she turned around, she saw that Sam was standing in the doorway, smiling.
He said, “Jiselle,” shaking his head, “it wasn’t your shoe.” Smiling. “It’s nobody’s shoe.”
“But what if it was?” she asked him.
Still smiling, Sam shrugged. “What if it was?” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The beginning of December was warmer, although the sky, day after day, was a deep purple. The clouds scudding across it looked ink-stained, seeming perpetually to threaten snowstorms that never came. In the afternoons, Jiselle played chess with Sam, read with him in the evenings. Mornings, there were dried beans to sort and soak. There were a few novels left from Camilla’s English Lit course to read. The fire had to be made and stoked. The ashes had to be swept up and thrown out the back door. They’d forgotten about Thanksgiving, so when Jiselle finally remembered, she gathered them all together and surprised them with a dinner of Swanson turkey and dressing from a can. She’d planned to save the turkey for Christmas, but by then, perhaps, she knew, there might be an entirely new plan.
The fire in the living room kept the house warm. There was still food in the cellar: soups, tuna fish, pasta in boxes, powdered milk. Fresh water still poured out of the faucets. But Jiselle knew they needed fruits and vegetables. There were only a few boxes of raisins and cans of peaches left. There was enough toilet paper in the linen closet to last for months, and tampons—although Jiselle and Camilla had both stopped menstruating. (Sara said it was because they weren’t drinking enough water. “You’re not getting enough iron. You can get it in the water, you know.”) They’d stopped using paper towels and napkins at the table, using rags instead, which could be rinsed out and hung up near the fire to dry with the underwear and socks.
How wasteful, Jiselle marveled now, they’d been, and for so long! She wished now she had just one of the large plastic bags she’d thrown away in the last year. So many things she could think of to do with that now. With only one notebook left in the house she realized that soon the only place they would have to write would be on the walls, in the margins of the books on the shelves.
She’d given that notebook to Sara, who had filled up all the pages of her black diary.
“You’re the chronicler,” Jiselle had said when Sara protested that there was no reason she should get the precious notebook. “Take it.”
For the future, Jiselle took down a few books she knew they wouldn’t be needing, in preparation. Some had wide margins, blank pages between chapters. Aviation Through the Ages. Light Aircraft Navigation Essentials.
The days passed so slowly they might have been lifetimes. Jiselle tried to impose a shape on each one:
The Day of the Spider in the Bathroom, The Day of Split Pea Soup, The Day the Wood Seemed Wet and Would Not Light, The Day of Paging Through an Old Copy of The New Yorker and Marveling at the Ordinariness and the Advertisements, The Day We Thought We Heard a Horse Whinny in the Distance, The Day the Lights Flickered, The Day We Might Have Heard Shots Fired in the Ravine, The Day Sam Invented Mint Toothpaste from Baking Soda and Tea…
Because, if she failed to do this, she would go to bed at night and feel as if she were on a drifting ship with no idea where in the world, or in time and space, she might wake up.
Now, every night, the hounds in the ravine howled longer and louder, sounding closer, hungrier. Twice, Jiselle had glimpsed one wandering in the backyard through the snow. Some scrawny blond thing. Was it a dog, she wondered, as Paul had thought—someone’s pet, altered by events? Or a coyote—something wild that no longer sensed danger from the human world it had once shunned?
It didn’t matter. There was such a feral emaciation about the animal that there was no way to tell what else it might, at one time, have been. The creature itself might not have remembered whether it had once been something tame, someone’s pet, or a dangerous predator. When Jiselle came to the glass doors to watch it, it would lift its muzzle to the air, seeming to smell her, and then slip back into the ravine.
After she was sure it was gone, she would go outside to see if Beatrice was still in the little wooden house Sam had built for her—carefully, ambitiously, nailing together some wood planks he’d found in the garage.
Each time, Jiselle was ready for the worst, but Beatrice was always still there, sitting on a nest of Mark’s old uniforms they’d piled up for her, ruffling her feathers.
But the next week the goose quit eating. Jiselle no longer had vegetable oil to mix into the feed, and it became a sticky mess, unconsumed, on the ground around the nest Beatrice never left.
Then, one morning, Jiselle saw a small rabbit in the snow, running like a vivid rag from one end of the backyard to the other. A few hours later, there were animal tracks in the snow, and blood, and the next afternoon, Jiselle saw another animal—something she didn’t recognize, an animal with a long black body, pointed ears—low to the ground, sliding across the deck, disappearing under the Schmidts’ hedge.
An enormous mink?
A wolverine?
Or an entirely new kind of animal?
Was it stalking Beatrice?
That night she woke to the sound of something like a fight between creatures in the dark—a yelping bark against a mewling scream, and she knew instantly that this was an animal, not human, scream, but still Jiselle jumped from the couch with her flashlight and checked the roo
ms where the children and her mother were soundly sleeping. Afterward, she went back into the family room and sat on the couch with her hands over her ears. The violence of those noises was terrible. There were teeth involved, she could tell, and claws, and blood, and when the silence came, swelling up around the house, she knew there had been a death.
In the morning, she found a dark path worn away around Beatrice’s shack. Something had circled it in the night more than once looking for a way to get in. But when Jiselle pushed open the little makeshift door, Beatrice was still there, alive. Jiselle stepped in, knelt down, ran her fingers along the white feathers, and Beatrice shifted her wings beneath Jiselle’s hand.
In the middle of December, Jiselle’s mother decided that since they could not know if or when the schools would reopen, the children had to be home-schooled, and she would do it.
So, the long afternoons of chess with Sam were replaced by lessons carefully planned out by Jiselle’s mother for the children. She’d sit up at the kitchen table in the flickering candlelight long after everyone else had gone to sleep, using the schoolbooks the children had at home, the encyclopedia, the dictionary, an atlas Mark had kept tucked into the glove compartment of the Cherokee, a medical handbook, and a book of baby names, which must have belonged to Joy.
The children were eager for the lessons, sitting down at the kitchen table in the mornings, thumbing through the books.
During “school,” Jiselle would pick up one of Camilla’s novels and read. She was halfway through Anna Karenina, but it was getting harder to concentrate. She’d find her mind returning again and again to Bobby. Those final hours.
In a Perfect World Page 21
