In a Perfect World

  Already, at the end of May, when she and Sam had last made a special trip to the pet store and bought the last bag of Fowl Feed Deluxe off the shelf, there had not been any of the usual things. No gerbils. No fish. No rabbits snuffling around in their cages. Certainly no parakeets or parrots. The pet shop owner had told them he thought he was going to close down until normal shipments could resume. That couldn’t be too far off, he’d said hopefully. Truckers would have to be allowed to cross state lines before too long, and if the economy improved, it would sway the tide of world opinion in the direction of resumed trade.

  Jiselle was trying to knock the last few ashes out of the can of goose feed. She stepped inside, shaking the rain off her hair. Her hair, which she’d always kept long, had grown several inches in the months without a trip to the salon. Now it nearly reached her waist.

  “I don’t know, Sam,” Jiselle said. “Gas. If we waste it, and the store’s not open…”

  She had gone by herself into town three weeks earlier and found that even the stores that hadn’t been closed before—the office supply store, the hardware store—had dark windows, padlocked doors. Certainly, she thought, none of these would have reopened.

  “But we have to see,” Sam said of the pet store. “We have to try.”

  “No, Sam. We—”

  But as Sam stood looking out at Beatrice, Jiselle could see the ravine reflected in his eyes and also the rain falling in staticky gray light over it all. In the dampness, everything shone. Slippery. Slick. She imagined Sam imagining Beatrice retreating into the ravine, never returning to them, disappearing.

  What, Jiselle wondered, did farm geese eat if there wasn’t any Fowl Feed Deluxe? She wished she’d asked the pet store owner the last time she and Sam had gone there. How wrong had it been to feed her from the beginning? She’d grown dependent on them, and now they had nothing for her.

  Jiselle inhaled. She was having trouble looking into Sam’s deep, tear-filled eyes.

  “Please?”

  “Oh Sam,” she said.

  There was, she knew, plenty of gas—for now. They’d siphoned the Cherokee’s tank, but what they had in the Mazda would have to last, and she did not know for how long. She hesitated, but then she said, “All right. Well. I guess we could at least go see. And if the pet store’s still closed, I’m sure we could find something at the grocery store. I’m sure Beatrice eats something besides”—she could find no words to describe the oil and ash of the food Beatrice ate—“and I have to go to the bank anyway.”

  It was true. She was out of cash, and although there was really nothing she needed to spend cash on anyway, it made her nervous to have none. The idea of an “emergency” was still alive in her, even now that she realized how few emergencies could be averted with cash. You could not eat cash. You couldn’t use it to heat your house, reduce a fever. Still, Jiselle had stayed in the habit of going to the bank once a month to make sure Mark’s check had been deposited. So far, it had.

  “You have to stay here, though, okay?” she said to Sam.

  In the last week, Jiselle had heard from Paul Temple and on the radio about carjackings and violence in cities—particularly on the West Coast—over gasoline and batteries. She’d begun to worry about her mother, living alone. Her mother had been fine through the power outages, making her own fires, cooking over them. (“I grew up in worse conditions than this,” she’d said. “You have no clue, Jiselle, what life on a real farm is like.”) But if there were violence, if there were thieves?

  Her mother had said, as she had said before, “Don’t worry about me, Jiselle. You’re the one with the problems.”

  That things would deteriorate—slowly but certainly—seemed to be what most people believed. There would be more illness, more violence, before things got better—although most people also believed that the Midwest would fare better than the coasts. The last time Jiselle had been in town, the fountain was still bubbling at the center of the park and the flag was still flying (never again at half-mast) outside the post office, even after it had been closed down. Until mid-July they’d even kept the pool open. “We will not participate in Doomsday thinking!” a spokeswoman for the town was quoted in the newspaper as saying.

  The newspaper, which had been a weekly, was now coming out only sporadically, but when Jiselle had bought it the month before, it was full of uplifting stories about canned food drives and Boy Scouts cleaning up the streets. There was no longer any obituary section at all.

  When she went to the kitchen table to pick up her car keys, Jiselle found Sara standing there. She’d overheard Jiselle telling Sam she would go into town, and she said, “Well, you’re not going by yourself. I’ll go with you.”

  “No,” Jiselle said. “I’ll be fine. You stay, and—”

  “I want to go,” Sara said and turned into the bedroom, as if that were the end of the conversation.

  “Will you be okay here alone?” Jiselle asked Sam. Camilla and Bobby were gone, helping Paul deliver firewood to some of his elderly neighbors.

  “Sure,” he said. “Besides, I’m not alone.”

  They were quiet for a minute and could hear, in Sara’s old room, the light voice of Mrs. Schmidt singing some old, familiar song.

  The drive into St. Sophia was accompanied by the radio’s static-filled starts and stops. Jiselle turned it first to the oldies station, but there was nothing there but a series of beeps. Morse code? The only other station they could find that wasn’t religious sounded as if it were being transmitted from the moon—a few memorable bars of a song (“Miss American Pie,” “Tea for the Tillerman”) interrupted by fuzz.

  Finally, they turned the radio off.

  After the early morning rain, the sky had turned a dazzling white, and Jiselle took the Mazda’s top down before they left. The air felt soft, and although there was less light, and the sun seemed to have crept farther away from the earth, a radiance was draped over everything. Summer cast its last, bright shadow on the ground. In the previous weeks, there had been a strange influx of hummingbirds, and also sandhill cranes. Paul thought that these species were stopping by from some more northern place, or that they were confused, detoured, blown off track, or had miscalculated and were headed south too soon.

  For the hummingbirds, Sara had concocted her own recipe for nectar, melting down some stale cotton candy she’d found in the back of her closet, left over in a plastic bag from a carnival a million years before, and she left little saucers of it out on the railing around the deck. One night at dusk, there’d been masses of them swarming those saucers, glistening and iridescent and beating their wings in a supernatural blur. They zigzagged through the air around the house as if they were working together to sew an elaborate net, tying the house to the ground.

  Sara managed to stand still long enough with a saucer of nectar held up in her palm that two of the hummingbirds—ruby-throated, soft, and motorized gems—landed on her fingers, dipping their long beaks into the dish, and stayed that way for several seconds before humming away, chasing one another off with angry stabs.

  “Oh my god!” Sara said, turning to the doorway, where Sam and Jiselle and Camilla stood watching, holding their breaths.

  Sara rested her elbow on the car door. Her fawn-colored hair flew around her face in a shining blur as they passed through the outskirts of town and into St. Sophia. It had been less than three weeks since Jiselle had been there, but the town looked strange to her. Had she simply not noted, then, the gradual changes that had resulted in this more complete change?

  The lawns, which had been so neatly trimmed and bordered with petunias and impatiens, and the gardens dotted with pansies, seemed to have overgrown in crazed and unexpected ways. The grass and weeds in the lawns were hip high. The petunias in the gardens were tangled in poison ivy. The domesticated faces of those pansies were entwined with wildflowers—sweet pea, thistle. She slowed down to the twenty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit in town and saw a rocking chair on a front porch completely cover
ed in vines that bore a kind of spiky purple flower she’d never seen. Windowboxes spilled their contents—long ropes of blossoms and leaves flowing out of them down the sides of houses. All the cars were parked, and no one was on the sidewalks or coming in or out of the houses. A thin black cat sat on the hood of a pickup truck parked next to the post office, licking its paw. It looked up when Jiselle and Sara drove by, seeming to watch them with distaste as they passed.

  Farther into town, in the business district, no stores at all were open. The jewelry store where Jiselle had bought the bracelet for her mother, and outside of which she’d seen the reindeer, appeared to have been vandalized. The plate glass was shattered, and the shards and diamonds of the destruction glittered in the sunlight.

  The bank was closed, too—the lobby windows dark—but Jiselle was happy to see that the drive-up appeared to be open. A little sign reading PULL FORWARD was illuminated over one of the lanes. She did. Behind the Plexiglas, a young woman was sitting very still, barely visible in the glare. Either the young woman was very deep in thought, or she was listening carefully to something. When she didn’t move or look in their direction, Jiselle pressed the green button for service, and the bank teller jumped, snapped to attention. “Yes?” she said into her intercom.

  “I just need some cash,” Jiselle said. “And to check my balance.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  Jiselle could see the young woman more clearly now. Really, she was a girl. No older than Camilla. Maybe closer to Sara’s age. Jiselle put her bank card and her driver’s license into the metal tube, hit the Send button, and in seconds the tube had shot across the empty parking lot and into the darkened bank.

  “I go to school with that girl,” Sara said. “Or went to school with her. Her father manages this bank. I wonder where he is.”

  Jiselle looked toward the bank. It did not look like a place that needed a manager. It was impossible, really, even to think of it as the same place where she’d stood in a long line the day she’d seen Tara Temple. Or, before that, the professional-looking men and women in their glass offices, signing papers, fingers flashing over keyboards, the appearance of important transactions taking place, official forms needing to be filled out. After what seemed like a long time, the girl came back and said, over the intercom, “Mrs. Dorn?”

  “Yes?” Jiselle said.

  “This account has been closed. There’s nothing in it.”

  “What?” Jiselle asked.

  “The account’s closed,” the girl said. “Someone closed it.”

  Beside Jiselle, Sara shook her head. “Asshole,” she said under her breath, and then to Jiselle, touching her shoulder gently, “Let’s just go. We don’t need money. There’s nothing to spend it on anyway.”

  Jiselle said nothing. She was too stunned to speak. The girl raised her hand, as if in apology. She said, “Bye, you guys.”

  At the pet shop, Jiselle didn’t even bother to slow down. The biohazard tape was draped across the front window and wound around the entrance.

  “He did this to my mom, too,” Sara said. “He was always fucking around, of course. Captain Cliché. He cut her off completely just before she died. We were eating nothing but peanut butter. My dad was pretty much out of our lives until she died. I mean, he loved you, Jiselle, I’m sure. But. I’m sorry. My dad is—with women. My dad is a—”

  “Fool for love,” Jiselle whispered after a long silence between them. She was trembling, and tears fell in large drops from her eyes and onto her bare arms. She pulled over outside the smashed glass of the pharmacy and turned the car off to save gasoline. She got out, walked around to the passenger side, and asked Sara to drive. She’d turned sixteen the month before, and although, with the secretary of state’s office closed down, Sara had been unable to get a license, she’d known how to drive for years.

  Why, Jiselle thought, looking down at her empty hands in her lap, was she surprised? What kind of fuzzy logic had made her think that he would keep the money in the bank account for her, that he would not find some new love of his life, on a plane, in a foreign city, in the back of a taxi careening through narrow European streets, or quarantined at the Gesundheitsschutzhaus?

  She heard her mother’s voice:

  Don’t be even more of a fool than you’ve already been, Jiselle.

  She remembered what she’d said in the car on the way to the wedding:

  Look, your father was fucking Ellen since the two of you were fifteen years old.

  Before starting up the Mazda, Sara said, “We understand. We understand if you want to go.” She turned her face to the windshield and began to pull the car into the road. Jiselle reached over and grabbed Sara’s hand so quickly she hadn’t realized she’d done it. Sara didn’t turn to look at her, but let Jiselle’s hand rest on her own on the steering wheel, and Jiselle saw a tear slip down her perfect nose and drip from the end of it, disappear onto the upholstery.

  In the oncoming lane, a figure on a red bicycle wobbled past them. He didn’t look at their car as he pedaled past. He was bent over his handlebars, legs moving wildly, propelling himself forward, staring straight ahead, like someone on whom, recently, a terrible spell had been cast.

  Jiselle thought of the little boy she’d seen so long ago, when Mark drove her through St. Sophia for the first time.

  This was, she felt sure, the same boy.

  “Did you get something for Beatrice to eat?” Sam asked.

  Jiselle swallowed before she said, “No.” She had to look away when she saw the expression on his face. “But Sara has some ideas,” she said, “about how to make food that Beatrice will like.”

  After the bank, on the way out of town, they had stopped at the Safeco, surprised to find it open and with a few modest things still on the shelves—the kinds of things no one ate because they didn’t know how to prepare them or didn’t want to eat them. Lentils. Wheatberries. Bulgar. Dried seaweed. A few burlap bags full of raw chestnuts. From what was there, Sara had been able to gather up the three ingredients she thought might mimic those listed on the commercial bag of fowl feed: vegetable oil, corn meal, chestnuts.

  “We’ll crush up the chestnuts,” she said, “and just mix the rest of it so it’s about the same consistency as the other stuff. There’s plenty of protein. If Beatrice doesn’t mind the taste, she should be okay.”

  “How do you know so much about birds?”

  Sara smiled, shrugged. “I’ve thought a lot about birds,” she said.

  As it happened, Beatrice loved what they came to call Sara’s Fabulous Fowl Feed.

  That night Jiselle stayed up long after the children and Diane Schmidt had gone to bed. She paced for a while, and then she simply sat in the family room looking out the window at the dark ravine, and then she made her way in the dark to Mark’s room. Instinctively, she hit the light switch when she entered—an old habit that, it seemed, would never die—and was surprised when the overhead light came on. They’d made a new habit during the outages of being sure that all the appliances and light switches were off before they went to bed because it was so alarming to wake up in the pitch darkness to the sudden blazing of overhead lights, or the blare of the television, or the microwave beeping, or the stereo—or all of them at once—when the power came back on unexpectedly.

  She rubbed her eyes in the bright, surprising light and saw, draped across the foot of the bed, an exquisite triangle of fawn-colored yarn spread on the bed: the shawl Sara had been working on.

  Jiselle ran her hand over it.

  It was fringed with silk thread.

  She picked up the edge of it.

  Soft and warm but also exquisitely light.

  Finished.

  She sat on the bed, still running her hands over it and then saw the note beside it:

  Finally, I got my act together to give something to you.

  Happy Birthday.

  xoxo Your Wicked Stepdaughter Sara

  Her birthday. Jiselle herself had completely forgotten.
How had Sara remembered?

  She brought the shawl to her face and breathed it in for several seconds before she wrapped it around her shoulders.

  It was light, like standing in summer air.

  Then, on second thought, Jiselle slipped it off her shoulders and removed her wedding ring. She slid the narrowest corner of the shawl into the ring, and then, in a swift and elegant flourish, pulled the whole thing through.

  Part Six

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The power returned mysteriously after two solid weeks without it, long enough for them to get dangerously used to the convenience of the furnace in the first cool days of autumn and to watching the news. The reporters were circling the story of the Princess Cruises liner that had disappeared in the Caribbean ten months earlier—a ship sailing from Fort Myers to Tierra del Fuego, with brief stops at all the small islands between them, before such cruises had been entirely proscribed.

  This particular ship had never arrived in Tierra del Fuego, but, these many months later, had run aground on the shores of the Isla Mujeres, Mexico, instead.

  PLAGUE SHIP: AN UPDATE!

  Jiselle and Mark had been on a ship like it—perhaps even this very ship, she realized, the name of which was being withheld until the next of kin had been notified, although surely those kin must have noticed that their loved ones hadn’t returned from the cruise they’d set out on nearly a year before.

  Jiselle remembered the buffet table, every night—mounds of shrimp, oysters glistening in their half-shells, crystal bowls of cold crab and lobster meat, caviar on French bread, tropical fruit sliced into anchors and swans spread across yards and yards of crushed and sparkling ice. She remembered dancing with Mark, her head on his shoulder, the white silk shirt she’d bought for him against her cheek.