In a Perfect World
At the same time there came in the door the funny old man who lived all alone on the top floor of the house—
As if on cue, there was a knock on the front door.
Sam and Jiselle both sat up fast, and Jiselle instinctively snapped the flashlight off and let the book fall closed on her lap. She was surprised to find her heart beating hard. She’d told everyone—Bobby and Paul Temple, Mark, her mother, the children, Annette, Brad Schmidt—that she wasn’t scared in the house, in the dark, alone with the children, without a gun, and she’d believed it.
But now she couldn’t move.
Sam whispered, “Who could it be?”
Jiselle shook her head. She put her finger to her lips. Another knock. Three times. More insistent. She felt every muscle in her body tense, as if her limbs were ready to take action, whether or not her mind agreed to it. A host of images flashed in front of her: Throwing herself over Sam to shield him. The ravine. Thrashing with his hand in hers through the brush and trees. The girls, in their nightgowns, running ahead of them. She wished that her feet weren’t bare, that Sam was wearing long pants and sleeves, that the girls did not sleep so deeply. She’d just begun to form the terrible question of how loudly she would have to scream to wake them, and felt herself inhale, and sensed the instinctive, welcome rush of what could only have been called courage beginning at the base of her brain, readying her to stand, to make some kind of decision, although only her body knew yet what that decision would be, when a voice she recognized as Diane Schmidt’s called through the crack in the door, which she had opened, because Jiselle hadn’t even locked it, “I am a little old woman.”
“Mrs. Schmidt!” Jiselle said, opening the door all the way. “What is it?”
“I am a little old woman,” Mrs. Schmidt said again. She was wearing a white nightgown.
“Oh, dear,” Jiselle said. “I’ll go find your husband. You stay here with Sam.”
As Jiselle ran across the yard to the Schmidts’ house, she wrapped her arms around herself, shivering suddenly, although she wasn’t cold. The moon lit up the backyard, and she hurried up the back steps, holding her flashlight in front of her. She knocked on the door. “Mr. Schmidt? Mr. Schmidt? Brad?”
There was no answer. Jiselle tried to look through the screen door and the kitchen window, but the shades were drawn, the curtains pulled. There were no lights on inside. Maybe he was asleep. She knocked harder on the door, and then stood waiting on the steps. She cupped her hands around her mouth and called to the window, “Mr. Schmidt?”
Certainly, if he were in there, he would have heard her by then. But still there was no answer.
She turned the knob on the back door.
It was unlocked.
She pushed it all the way open and stood in the threshold.
“Hello?” she called to the darkness, shining her flashlight into the tidy kitchen before stepping in.
Jiselle had never entered the Schmidts’ house from the back door before. With her flashlight, she could make out checkerboard curtains on the windows. The cupboards were painted pastel green. There was a throw rug with a rooster embroidered on it beneath a Formica table. A little yellow rag was folded neatly over the edge of the sink. Jiselle walked through the kitchen toward the hallway that led to the living room, leaving the back door open behind her.
“Hello?” she called, but quietly.
The hallway was even darker, but when she shone her light on the walls, Jiselle could see photographs of Brad and Diane in younger days: Holding hands at the edge of a canyon. Standing with their backs to a waterfall. Diane Schmidt waving from a lounge chair at the side of a pool, wearing a two-piece bathing suit, her skin tanned and smooth, her hair still dark and pulled back, tied with a bright scarf.
“Brad?”
She peered into what must have been their bedroom.
The bed was carefully made, the white bedspread without a single crease.
He was not in the bed.
She walked past that room and what must have been the family room, and then the bathroom, which smelled of air freshener and floral soaps.
She stepped into the living room, which was darker than any of the other rooms had been. The television was off, of course, although Mr. Schmidt was sitting in front of it with his feet propped up on an ottoman, staring straight ahead with eyes that appeared to have melted deep into his skull, or fallen from it.
“Hello?” Jiselle said, although she knew he wouldn’t answer.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Very little had been said about what actually happened to victims of the Phoenix flu. The only person who’d spoken of the suffering—the Surgeon General—had been criticized for fear-mongering and replaced by a quieter Surgeon General. But his words—“I’ve seen people die of cancer and seen them die of AIDS, and had no idea God could come up with even worse ways to die”—had been quoted and repeated a hundred thousand times before they could be suppressed.
But after Brad Schmidt died, the paramedics wouldn’t, or couldn’t, answer Jiselle’s question about what had happened to his eyes, so she was left to wonder. Had he scratched them out? Had they somehow swollen? Burst?
The paramedics said only that she shouldn’t touch any of his things and that they were going to board up the house.
After they’d taken Brad Schmidt’s body away, the officer in charge wanted to take Mrs. Schmidt to the Grove Home in the city, but Jiselle had heard such terrible things about the place—completely overcrowded, since so many nursing homes and halfway houses and mental institutions had been closed down, and also without staff. One of the Grove Homes had been investigated for euthanizing some of its patients when the generator failed and their oxygen was cut off.
“I suppose you think we should have just sat by and watched them strangle to death, flap around like fish for an hour until they suffocated in their beds?” the nurse in charge said as she was being handcuffed and taken away. “Well, I invite anyone who believes that a death like that would be more compassionate than a sedative and a lethal injection to come and volunteer at the nearest Grove Home.”
Paul Temple had said, shaking his head, “During the Black Death, parents abandoned their children, children abandoned their parents.”
Apparently, the Schmidts had never had children. If there were any living relatives, they could not be located.
“No,” Jiselle told the police officer, who stood on the front porch in his biohazard suit looking like a visitor from space. “She can stay with us.”
“It’s irregular,” he said, but objected no further. He seemed to make a note on a pad of paper, but when Jiselle glanced at the page, she saw nothing on it. There was, apparently, no ink in the officer’s pen. Still, he’d wanted to give the appearance of being official, of following a procedure.
Sara moved into Camilla’s room so that Mrs. Schmidt could sleep in Sara’s bed—but in the warm late weeks of the month, Mrs. Schmidt often fell asleep on the deck outside and could not be persuaded to come in.
Sometimes Jiselle would rise in the middle of the night, go to the windows, and see her standing in the backyard, grass almost to her hips, looking up at the moon. Sometimes she saw what must have been Beatrice at Diane Schmidt’s feet, looking like a smaller moon, buried in grass, reflecting that reflection.
Once, when Jiselle rose and went to the windows, she found that Diane Schmidt had taken off all her clothes and was standing completely naked in the backyard, arms spread wide. The power had been out again for a week, and without light pollution, the whole sky above Mrs. Schmidt seemed to fizz with stars—some of them falling, arcing through the dark—and it looked as if Diane Schmidt might be trying to catch them in her arms, and as if she might be able to do so if she waited long enough.
Having her in the house was no more trouble than having a cat. She spent most of her time outdoors. She ate whatever was offered to her, politely. She took her medicine—which Jiselle found in the Schmidts’ bathroom cabinet—without complain
t. She was clean. She wiped the bathroom sink with a tissue after she used it and even went through the house once a day with the feather duster, whistling to herself as she dusted. When she slipped in and out at night, it was in complete silence, but she never left the yard. And some of the things she had to say struck Jiselle as deeply wise.
“‘We are put on this earth but a little space,’” Diane Schmidt said one afternoon at lunch, “‘that we might learn to bear the beams of love.’”
“That’s lovely,” Jiselle said.
“That’s Blake,” Diane Schmidt replied, and returned to eating her bowl of rice without dropping a single grain. “Once upon a time I was an English teacher.”
Paul Temple said, “You know you’re going to need wood. To burn. For heat. A lot of it. We all need to think about winter without electricity.”
Jiselle nodded. She told him, however, that she supposed, really, he should be chopping and stacking wood for himself, and for Bobby, for the winter. Tara Temple had never returned from her week-long visit to her mother, and Jiselle had quit asking Paul if she had or would.
He said, “If you wouldn’t object, it would be easier, if there’s no power, for us to spend the worst of the cold spells here. Better to heat one house than two, and you have more people to move than we do.”
“Of course,” Jiselle said. She felt her pulse quicken and was hoping she hadn’t blushed. They held each other’s eyes for a few seconds before they both looked up at the emptiness of the sky.
“That is,” Paul said, not meeting her eyes, “if…”
Jiselle held up a hand to keep him from saying anything else.
Paul Temple cleared his throat, ignoring—or not noticing—her hand. “That is, if Mark…”
“I haven’t heard from Mark since…” She couldn’t even say it. It had been a week. A woman answered the phone every day at the Gesundheitsschutzhaus and said, with a heavy German accent, “We have no phone service to the quarantine. You must stop calling here. Captain Dorn is perfectly well, and he will call you when he calls you.”
The airline had said nothing, would say nothing.
“I’ll get Bobby going on the wood. God knows the kid’s got nothing to do.”
Paul’s face was tanned and lined in the sun. His beard had grown out through the summer, and it was full now, gray and sandy-blond. With the ax over his shoulder, in jeans and a flannel shirt, he looked like a woodsman: muscular, rustic. His eyes, however, were watery and tired. He’d had that toothache now for weeks—the dull throbbing of a molar, which kept him up at night, pacing around his house. Of course there were no dentists doing business in St. Sophia. No drugstores were open; nor would there have been any aspirin left on the shelves if they were. Paul had agreed to take the bottle of Advil Jiselle offered him only after she assured him that she had several bottles stored in the cellar. He’d refused it at first: “Who knows when you might need this, or when or where you’ll be able to buy more?” But he took it when she insisted.
That week, Paul and Bobby repaired the chimney, too, and swept out the fireplace.
They shooed the swallows out and put a screen over the chimney so the birds couldn’t come back.
The birds circled the roof for hours afterward, but finally they flew off for good, built their nest somewhere else, it seemed. Jiselle knew their departure was a good thing, although, after their eviction, she looked up, watched them circle in gray and feathered confusion, and felt sorry that they couldn’t stay. “You don’t think,” she said to Paul, watching beside her, “that it could be…you know, bad luck, to send them away?”
Paul shook his head. He said, “No, Jiselle. Try not to think like that. When these superstitions start, and start being taken for truth, it’s a kind of final bell tolling for civilization. We can’t start believing in luck.”
Jiselle was playing chess after midnight with Sam when Mrs. Schmidt came out of Sara’s bedroom, held up a finger, and said, “Listen.”
In the candlelight, she looked more than ever like a wraith. Her white nightgown was full of shadows, and her face was obscured by darkness. Jiselle assumed at first that she was in one of her sleepwalking states: Sometimes Mrs. Schmidt would wake from dreams and wander out of Sara’s room with something important to say, unable to recall what it was.
But Sam and Jiselle stopped their game to listen anyway.
Sam heard them first, and his eyes widened, and then Jiselle heard them, too.
At first, a distant yelp.
A womanish moan, far away, singular.
But then came a whole chorus of bawling and ululating cries, whines, plaintive and angry at the same time—and as if she were the first person to hear such a sound, as if she were a woman in a cave, a woman born before language, listening, Jiselle felt the fine blond hairs on her limbs rising away from her flesh in a feathery wave of foreboding, traveling up her body, her neck, and she stood and reached out instinctively for Sam, pulling him to her.
“Who is that?” Sam asked.
“We don’t know,” Jiselle said.
When Paul and Bobby arrived in the morning, Paul told her they had heard them, too, from their own house.
“Were they coyotes?” Jiselle asked. “Wolves?”
Paul Temple said no, he didn’t think so. He believed they might simply be the hungry pets of St. Sophia residents who’d died or fled without their dogs.
Jiselle thought then of the first day that Mark had driven her into St. Sophia—the brick façades of the buildings downtown, the little boy on his red bicycle, the shining fire engine outside the station.
ST. SOPHIA—AMERICA’S HOMETOWN.
But like so many towns in America, St. Sophia was no one’s hometown. Their families were elsewhere, as were their jobs. It looked like a town, but in the months Jiselle had lived there, even after the plague began, the Temples were the only people she’d gotten to know, and they were not from St. Sophia, either.
When trouble came here, people went somewhere else.
They went back.
They left their schools behind, their shining fire engine, their quaint downtown, their pets.
St. Sophia was just a town on a list given to people who needed a town, a town that could just as easily be crossed off the list and cease to exist.
After that, Jiselle heard them every night, and no matter how deeply asleep she was, the cries always woke her with her heart pounding and sent her hurrying to the doorway of Sam’s room to check on him, and then past the girls’ and Mrs. Schmidt’s rooms, to see that they were in their beds, and then to the window, to stare into the darkness draped over the ravine, imagining those pets, lost and changed, calling out for the ones who had abandoned them.
That week, Paul and Bobby stayed each night for dinner. Jiselle would make whatever she could from the cans and boxes she had. If the electricity was out, she would cook on the grill. Sometimes Diane Schmidt would sit with them, and sometimes Jiselle had to take a plate to her room or out to the yard, where she might be sitting beside Beatrice, watching the sun set. After dinner, Paul and Jiselle sat on the deck with their cups of tea. They said nothing about Mark, who had not called, but Paul confided in her that when Tara had not come back from Virginia, he’d felt mostly relieved. There had been trouble between them for years, but the Phoenix flu and the power outages had forced some things to the surface—like the fact that he and Tara had nothing in common, except for Bobby, who was getting older, getting on with his life.
He said that after Tara called to tell him she was going to stay longer, didn’t know when she’d be back, he couldn’t even find it in himself to feel surprised.
“She’d been ready to go for a long time.”
Jiselle thought then of Tara Temple in the line at the bank that day but said nothing.
“And all this hocus-pocus stuff she got into. I couldn’t stomach it. You know, during the Black Plague, these charlatans used to go door to door selling Abracadabras and charms and knots. People would give their
last crust of bread for some worthless amulet. She wanted me to believe in her positive thinking and read her books, and I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”
Bobby was the one who was grief-stricken. “He misses his mother, and he’s worried about her, of course. He’s afraid she’ll get sick in Virginia, and with no mail service and if the phone lines go completely—the way the electricity’s been going—how will we ever know?”
Jiselle nodded and bit her lip.
“Shit happens,” Paul said. “Look at Schmidt.” He nodded in the direction of Brad and Diane’s house, which had been covered by the county in yards and yards of yellow tape marked BIOHAZARD. Brad Schmidt had been gone only one week, and already the hedge between their houses had grown into a tangled thicket, a wild wall. Fat pink flowers bloomed on a few of the branches.
“Jesus Christ,” Sara said. “It’s a flowering hedge. Is that why he kept cutting it up? He was trying to keep the flowers from blooming?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
It seemed like a minor problem compared to the many other problems, but how could they simply watch her die? There was no more Fowl Feed Deluxe left in the can, and Beatrice would touch nothing else.
“Jiselle?” Sam said. “Can we go to the pet store? Please?”
He stood at the sliding glass doors shivering in the damp morning breeze, his arms wrapped around his stomach. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, but he’d grown so much in the last few months that the sleeves ended between his elbows and his wrists. Soon, if they couldn’t go shopping, he would look like Huck Finn, a boy grown out of homespun clothes, barefoot.
“We have to get some goose food,” he said. He looked at Jiselle. His eyes were wide and beseeching. “What if she starves?”