In a Perfect World

  As with the birds, there was a barrage of public service announcements about the rodents. They were not carriers of Yersinia pestis, just as hemorrhagic zoonosis was not the bubonic plague. The stories of corpses found in abandoned buildings and in ditches gnawed to pieces by rats could certainly have been true, but this did not link any particular illness to the presence of rodents. Rats had always eaten dead bodies. The usual care was needed to keep rats and mice out of homes and businesses, but panic was unnecessary and unproductive, and even un-American. Some of the announcements on television showed a flag waving at full mast against a blue sky, while the voiceover cautioned the public against panic.

  A decision to use poison or traps, the exterminator told Jiselle, would depend on whether or not anyone in the house would be willing and able to empty the traps—live or otherwise. The poison was slower, he said, and less predictable, but the mice would usually go elsewhere to die. You didn’t have to see them or dispose of them. The traps, however, required “cleaning” and maintenance. Clearly, he’d noticed the absence of a man in the house.

  “I’ll take care of it!” Sam insisted. “I want to do it!”

  “We’re not going to kill them, are we?” Sara called from her room.

  Jiselle hadn’t realized Sara was listening to the exterminator talk to her and Sam at the kitchen table, but when Sara shuffled out wearing her black Saturday morning pajamas—already (or still) in her black makeup—it would have been impossible for the exterminator not to notice her resemblance to a rodent.

  Sara said, “I’m not going to live here if we’re going to kill innocent creatures.”

  Jiselle held up a hand to try to keep Sara from saying anything else, but it might also have looked as if she were waving goodbye.

  The exterminator looked at Jiselle.

  “Live traps?” she asked.

  “I can do live traps if you can do live traps,” he said.

  As it happened, Sam was perfectly happy to hear that the traps would fill up fast, that some of the mice might be diseased, or “biters,” and that he would have to wear mesh gloves so he could grab the ones that refused to vacate their cages. Over the next few weeks, like an apprentice exterminator, he took complete responsibility for the mice, for the cages and their maintenance, for the whole operation of trying to keep the mice from taking up permanent residence in the house, or taking it over. Jiselle would wait in the living room as Sam ran through the family room each morning and out the back door with a cage full of mewling and fur. He quit sharing the details with her—their numbers, the state of their health, their attitudes toward their captor—after the first tale of an albino mouse “the size of a baseball” that had bled from its nostrils and—“Stop,” Jiselle had said, trembling, placing her coffee spoon down on the kitchen counter.

  “I’m sorry,” Sam said, looking apologetic but smiling at the same time.

  “I hope you’re burning them,” Brad Schmidt said, and Jiselle decided there’d be no point in arguing with him about why she would have live traps if she was going to burn the mice, except to be sadistic.

  “Can I ask you a question?” she said instead.

  “Go ahead,” Brad Schmidt said.

  “So. You were here when…?” Jiselle looked toward the road, unable to finish the question.

  “When Mrs. Dorn was killed? Sure! We took care of those children until Mark got back.”

  “Did she—how did it happen?”

  “He never told you?” Brad Schmidt’s eyebrows shot up as if he’d caught someone in a fantastic crime.

  “Well, he told me of course about the bus, but of course he doesn’t like to talk about it.”

  “That little Sam,” Brad Schmidt said, “he tried to dash away from her, into the road; the bus had just started up, and she went after him.” He slammed his left fist then into his right hand to show the impact. “She was a saint, that woman. Not just because of that. Because of everything. If there was ever a mother who would have wanted to die taking care of her children, that was Joy Dorn. It’s the only comfort any of us can have.”

  “Thank you,” Jiselle said, “for telling me.”

  Before she went to pick up the children at school that day, Jiselle stood for a long time at the front door, looking out.

  There, she thought, looking to the end of the driveway, is the place where Joy died.

  There.

  There was nothing there.

  Why, she would ask Mark when he got back, hadn’t he told her that part of the story? The part of the story in which his first wife had run in front of a bus to save his son?

  But would knowing have changed anything?

  If not, why had he left the details so purposely…fuzzy?

  Perhaps, Jiselle thought, she should try to call her therapist again. She’d left several messages in the last two months, but he hadn’t returned her calls. She turned from the front door and went to the telephone and dialed Smitty Smith’s number, which she knew by heart.

  After several rings, a woman answered. “Yes,” she said when Jiselle asked if she’d reached Dr. Smith’s office.

  “I’m calling to make an appointment,” she said.

  “That’s too bad,” the woman said. Her voice sounded full of bitter irony. “He died three weeks ago.”

  “What?”

  “Dr. Smith died three weeks ago. This is his wife. I’m just here cleaning out the office. If you’d like a memento—say, a paperweight, or the Phoenix flu—I can send you something. But you won’t be having any more talks with Dr. Smith. I suggest you try solving your own problems for a change.”

  Jiselle heard the woman laugh—loudly, unhappily, sounding nearly insane—before the line went dead, and then she stood looking at the phone in her hand for a long time before she put it back in the cradle.

  Impossible.

  There was some mistake.

  Some sort of horrible joke was being made. She would try the number again in a few days.

  Surely, if your therapist died—a therapist you’d seen regularly for over a decade—there would be some sort of official notice. A telegram? Perhaps no one would expect his patients to come to his funeral—after all, how many patients must Dr. Smith have had?—but surely, there would be something shared with her, expected of her. The man was the receptacle of her whole life. He could not simply have died.

  Perhaps she’d dialed the wrong number, or his number had changed. Had he ever told her, anyway, that he had a wife? It had somehow never occurred to Jiselle that he might. Thinking back now of his hands on his knees as he listened to her, she was sure there had never been a wedding ring there.

  She went to the front door again, squinted toward the end of the driveway, and past that to the other side of the road—the place Sam must have dashed to, the place Joy never made it. From her side of the screened-in door, the silence and the stillness out there seemed accusatory, like the nail above the mantel where the wedding portrait had been—that protected square of wall that had stayed pristine through all the years that had passed while the portrait hung over it, while the rest of the wall darkened and faded at the same time around it.

  Greater than nothing. That empty space made Jiselle feel like a voyeur, an interloper, a rubbernecker, a nosy neighbor:

  If you’re so curious, come out here yourself and see.

  What choice did she have?

  Jiselle walked out of the house in her bare feet, down to the end of the driveway, where she stood very still before she stepped into the road, thinking, Here.

  She looked down at her feet and then behind her.

  No one.

  Nothing.

  She seemed, herself, not even to be casting a shadow in this place. In this shaft of space and light, she seemed to cease to exist. She turned around, and then turned around again, looking for that shadow, but if it was there at all, it was managing to stay behind her, to sneak away when she turned to look, shifting out of sight when she tried to find it. She turned around so
many times she finally grew dizzy, and felt foolish—what if Brad Schmidt was watching from next door?—and went back into the house.

  Part Four

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The night before Valentine’s Day, Jiselle took the children, for the second time, to meet her mother for dinner at Duke’s Palace Inn. Mark was in Munich, but he was scheduled to be home in time to take Jiselle out for a romantic Valentine’s dinner the next night. They had reservations at the Chop House. She’d seen, in his sock drawer, a small package wrapped in red tissue with her name on it. For him she’d bought cuff links—gold, simple squares with his initials.

  An ice storm was predicted for the evening, but by the time Jiselle left with the children for downtown Chicago, the sky, although dense with dark blue clouds, was spitting out only a bit of thin snow. It glazed the windshield of the Cherokee, glistened in the bare branches of the trees, shone palely in the light of the early moon, but it melted by the time it hit the pavement.

  Sara wore a plaid skirt, like a Catholic schoolgirl, except that the skirt was so short it barely covered her panties. White knee socks. There was a black garter around her right thigh. Jiselle had asked her to wear something “appropriate” when she’d come upon her lounging on the couch in a T-shirt that read, Fuck You, Justin Timberlake, but when she came out of her room in the plaid skirt, her white blouse unbuttoned down to the snap at the front of her black bra, Jiselle had not had the energy to ask her to change. There was, she felt certain, nothing Sara would find to wear that would not horrify her mother, but if Sara did not come along to dinner at all, her mother would note the absence, taking it as proof of Jiselle’s impossibly foolish choice, marrying a man with such a daughter.

  “You can wear my shoes,” Jiselle had said, looking at Sara’s bare feet.

  Sara had rolled her eyes but didn’t object when Jiselle brought out the beautiful shoes she’d bought in Madrid. They slid perfectly onto Sara’s feet. Even Sara looked down at the shoes in appreciation.

  They’d driven about forty miles from the house and were still ten miles from their freeway exit to downtown when Camilla, in the passenger seat beside Jiselle, pointed out how dark it was, except for the moon’s white light bleeding between cracks in the clouds. “Why aren’t the streetlights on?” she asked.

  Jiselle leaned forward to scan the distance beyond her windshield.

  Yes. The streetlights were completely dark against an ever-darkening sky. The signs that usually lit up the billboards were off. The only light besides the shredded bits of moon overhead came from the headlights streaming toward them on the other side of the freeway.

  Why?

  Then Jiselle noted not only the absence of streetlights but also the absence of traffic headed into the city. It was all headed out.

  “Weird,” Jiselle said, more to herself than to Camilla.

  She kept driving until they reached their exit, ten miles later, and pulled off the freeway to find that the city streets were nearly empty. No pedestrians. All the store and restaurant windows were dark.

  Jiselle was just slowing down outside Duke’s Palace Inn, noting the unlit sign outside, when her cell phone rang. The Caller ID read, MOTHER.

  “Don’t tell me you drove all the way into the city. For God’s sake, Jiselle, don’t you listen to the radio?”

  No, she didn’t. It was impossible, in one car with Camilla, Sam, and Sara, to find a station, or even a CD, they could agree on. They always rode in silence.

  “No,” Jiselle said. “I’m here.”

  “Well, go home, and hope your power’s on. I’m on my way back. Unlike you, I heard it on the radio and turned around.”

  “Oh,” Jiselle said. “Should I—?”

  “You should go home,” her mother said. “All the sane people are on their way home. Nothing will be open in the city.”

  Jiselle said goodbye then, and Happy Valentine’s Day, and that she would call in the morning—by which time the power would be back on, surely, and she and her mother would, perhaps, make plans to meet somewhere for lunch. She flipped her phone closed, cleared her throat. “Okay, kids,” she said, looking first to Camilla, who’d rested her head with her eyes closed against the fogged window, and then into the backseat, where Sam was twiddling his thumbs across his Game Boy, utterly absorbed. Sara was scowling. “Power outage,” Jiselle said. “I guess we’re heading back. Let’s hope we have power at home.”

  But getting out of the city was nothing like getting into it had been. Everyone was headed out, back to the suburbs and the small towns beyond them, where they lived. Hundreds, thousands, of cars were idling in a line that began a mile or two away from the ramp.

  The frozen rain had begun to fall even harder, ticking and snapping onto the windshield and roof of the Cherokee. The traffic was a confused jumble of vehicles driving less than a mile an hour, but in a frantic rush, like a marathon for snails, nearly unmoving or moving imperceptibly. The squeaking of bad brakes. The impatient revving of motors. Emergency lights blinking.

  Jiselle kept the defroster blowing, because her breath, mixed with that of the children, was beginning to condense on the windows, fogging everything. She glanced behind her. Only Sara was awake now. She was still staring out the window with an angry smirk. Sam was slumped against her shoulder. Beside Jiselle, Camilla was breathing steadily, eyes closed, rosebud lips parted, oblivious.

  It took a full hour to get to the freeway. By then, Sara was asleep, too, her eyeballs twitching back and forth beneath her black-painted eyelids.

  Jiselle rubbed her own eyes, trying to stay awake herself, finally passing that red Yield triangle at the entrance to the freeway, and spilling with the other cars out of the congested queue. Although the traffic here was also backed up for miles, at least it was moving.

  As she drove, Jiselle could see to the left and right that the streets sprawling out around the freeway were completely dark. The windows of the houses were black, causing her to waver a bit in her hope that the power outage had affected only the city, that they would reach home to find heat, lights, television. How long, if the power was out, might it stay out?

  Jiselle closed her eyes briefly, and then snapped them open when a truck pulled up next to her and blew its bullhorn—impotently, furiously—waking the children. Sara sputtered to life, coughing. Camilla blinked, looking around as if she had been peacefully asleep for many years. Sam, still holding his Game Boy, sat up and said, “This scares me.”

  Jiselle reached behind her, patted his knee. “Nothing to be scared of, Sam,” she said. “People just don’t know how to behave when something unexpected happens. The power will be back on soon. And your dad will be home tomorrow.”

  Sam nodded, as if Jiselle knew what she was talking about.

  She tried to speed up then, but she had only just managed to bring the Cherokee up to twenty miles per hour when she had to come to a full stop again, when the traffic got too thick, too slow, merging into two lanes from three to avoid a lane of orange cones. She drove a few more miles slowly until Camilla said, “What if the power’s out at home?”

  “Well,” Jiselle said, trying to sound optimistic, “we’ll have to light some candles. Do you kids have any flashlights?”

  “No,” Camilla and Sara said in unison.

  “There’s a Wal-Mart,” Sam said, pointing into the distance.

  Jiselle looked in the direction of his index finger, and saw it. Somehow, surrounded by darkness, the Wal-Mart sign had remained lit. Its prisonlike cinderblock had faded into the night, but the parking lot was crowded with cars, and there was no mistaking the brilliance pouring through its automatic glass doors for anything but business as usual.

  “There’s always a Wal-Mart,” Camilla said, “and it’s always open.”

  Jiselle glanced over at her. Like so many things Camilla said, it was completely noncommittal, completely lacking in emotion or judgment. A statement of fact.

  “We’ll get off here,” Jiselle said.


  “Good thinking,” Camilla said.

  Camilla and Sara waited in the Cherokee while Sam and Jiselle went into Wal-Mart, where flashlights and candles were being sold faster than they could be hauled out of the stockroom. The workers in their red vests were harried and troubled looking. No one understood, it seemed, how the generator that kept the store lit up and operational worked, or how long it would last. A few of the employees seemed to feel cheated.

  “Damn,” a pregnant girl in one of the red vests said. “Every store closed for miles around, and Wal-Mart’s still up and running.”

  “It can’t last,” an older woman said as Sam and Jiselle stood waiting for the teenage boy who’d gone to the stockroom for more flashlights. “Power’s out from here to the city.”

  “I know,” Jiselle said. “We just came from the city.”

  The woman continued. “I have a salt-water fish tank at home. Tropicals. They’ve got to have just the right temperature to survive. When I get home, they’ll all be dead.”

  “My sea monkeys died,” Sam said sympathetically.

  “Oh, poor little boy,” the woman said. “What’s a sea monkey?”

  Sam didn’t have time to explain. The lights overhead surged. The cash registers all bleeped and buzzed at the same time. A cheer, and a sigh, and the pregnant girl’s audible groan went up through the store: The real electricity, not the generated electricity, had come back on. The fish tank woman turned away from them, back to the rack of bungee cords she’d been arranging, as if the electricity had flipped a switch somewhere inside her, too. No more time to waste. In fact, the whole celebratory strangeness of the atmosphere of Wal-Mart ended abruptly. The hubbub subsided, and with it the sense of rush and excitement. The crisis was over. Sam said, “Can we still get some flashlights?”