In a Perfect World

  Or Paul. Where was he now?

  She’d try to imagine him, but the image that came to her was always the same: Paul walking down the center of a freeway littered with cars.

  Since the day after Bobby died, and Paul left, none of them had spoken of it again. Every night, Jiselle could hear Camilla weeping in her bedroom, but in the morning she was dry-eyed. She studied at the kitchen table with Sam and Sara. She helped Jiselle around the house. In the evenings, she read while Jiselle and Sam played chess.

  They kept busy.

  Jiselle’s mother and Sara were involved in a sewing project together that required hours of counting and concentration. Jiselle would overhear them bickering—“Did you count these?” “Yes!”—but they seemed on friendly terms. Sara had begun to call her “Anna,” something Jiselle had known only her mother’s best friends to do.

  This forgetting, this continuing—how heartless was this, Jiselle sometimes wondered, and she would close her eyes and see Bobby, and Annette, and Dr. Smith, and Diane Schmidt—a dark line of familiar silhouette against the sky, each holding the other’s hand, and instead of looking harder, Jiselle would open her eyes. She would read ten pages and comprehend not one word. She’d put the book down and find herself wandering through the rooms of the house—through the family room, and the bedroom, where Mark’s slippers still waited under the bed. Like a ghost, she’d pass through the kitchen, overhear a few sentences: He led the Mongols into China…Ferdinand and Isabella…Alfred hid from the Vikings…

  But these fragments meant nothing to Jiselle. They were like fuzz, radio static.

  “Did you know,” Sara asked one afternoon as Jiselle passed back through the kitchen, pointing to a place on a page in Joy’s book of baby names, “that your name means—?”

  “Hostage,” Jiselle said.

  “Princess,” her mother corrected.

  Sara looked up and smiled. “No,” she said. “It means ‘pledge.’” Reading aloud: “Jiselle. Danish. Definition: She who keeps her promise. Pledge.’”

  Jiselle went to the book and looked over Sara’s shoulder. Her finger was on the name. Jiselle read the entry silently to herself. Sara was right.

  Jiselle looked up at her mother, who shrugged and said, “Who knows? I always thought it meant ‘princess.’”

  Sara flipped the pages to her own name then, and looked up, laughing. She said, “Sorry to break the news to you ladies, but my name means ‘princess.’”

  One night, Sara insisted they play charades. The evenings were so long. The snow had been falling steadily for days, and it made a silencing moat around the house and the world. Even the hounds stayed away, or couldn’t be heard over the insulating white.

  Sam and Jiselle were playing chess by candlelight at the kitchen table, but they looked up from their game when Sara came in and announced charades. Jiselle shrugged. “Why not?”

  They went into the living room, where Camilla and Jiselle’s mother were listening to some distant station they’d found on Brad Schmidt’s transistor radio. They’d had to put the radio on the windowsill, on its side, with the antenna pointed toward the fire, but behind the snowy crackle was the unmistakable sound of an orchestra playing something bright and rhythmic, full of exuberance, vibrant with possibility. The future, it seemed, was hinted at in every note. Even the static, which seemed to rise and fall with the wind through the dark night outside, couldn’t drown that out.

  When the radio finally died completely, they turned it off and started their game.

  Camilla was first.

  As soon as she waved her elegant hands around in the air, they all shouted, “Mozart!” at the same time.

  “Jiselle,” her mother said one morning while the children were still in bed, “Sam needs to get more to eat.”

  Jiselle nodded. She knew. It had been a growing sense of dread for weeks. She looked through the kitchen into the living room, where Sam and the girls were decorating the little tree they’d cut down at the edge of the yard. They’d found Joy’s box of beautiful Christmas decorations in the basement—sugary angels, little gingerbread houses, gilded fruit—and they were hooking them onto the tree’s bright branches.

  In his T-shirt (one Mark had brought home for him: HARD ROCK CAFÉ TOKYO), which was at once too small and too large, he looked like a stick figure. The shirt rode up on his waist, and Jiselle could see his ribs, but it also hung too loosely off his shoulders, and she could see the blades of those jutting out of his back, too skeletal.

  This was a boy who was starving.

  It had been only a week since Jiselle had opened the cupboards and counted what she had left in them—the cans, the packages—and peered into the last box of powdered milk to assess how much was left, and then put a hand to her eyes to do the math. How long did she need to make what they had last?

  Surely there would be enough food left for another month.

  Or two, if she was careful.

  But only if she was careful.

  So she began to divide two cans of soup instead of three among them for dinner. She added an extra cupful of water. If they ate Ramen noodles for lunch, she saved the water she’d boiled them in and added it to that night’s canned stew. There was always some flavor left in it. Surely there were some nutrients, too?

  She started pushing her own bowl away before she finished her soup, asking Sam if he was hungry. Her mother did the same. But if Camilla or Sara tried to offer anyone else their food, Jiselle’s mother snapped, “Finish your own food.”

  Although the girls quit offering Sam their food at the table, Jiselle had seen them taking their napkin rags away with them from their meals suspiciously heavy.

  Once, she overheard Sam say to Sara in his bedroom, “Thanks, Sara, but I’m not hungry.”

  “Eat it anyway,” Sara whispered back.

  Now, in the bright winter light coming in through the family room windows, it was clear that Sam was a child who was not getting enough to eat. For how many decades had Jiselle looked at photographs of such children in newspapers and magazines, and how far away had those children seemed?

  “I’m going to go look around the Schmidts’ house,” Jiselle said to her mother. “To look again. To see if there’s anything stored we didn’t find.”

  Jiselle hadn’t been inside the Schmidts’ house since a few days after Brad Schmidt died, when she’d gone over with Camilla and taken what appeared to be the only useful things—a few sharp knives, some cans of anchovies, the radio, Saltines, a sack of flour, and a canister of brown sugar—and had boxed up Diane Schmidt’s clothes and medicines and brought them home.

  But they hadn’t been hungry then.

  Had she looked in the basement? The attic? Brad Schmidt had spoken of being prepared. Why hadn’t it occurred to Jiselle before now that he might have a cellar full of provisions?

  The yellow biohazard tape had torn away from the doors and windows, and it fluttered like party streamers in the snowy wind. The hedge was white with snow, and the paving stones were buried under it, but Jiselle could feel them beneath her boots, and she followed the path to the back door, which was open. The threshold had warped and split. She stepped in.

  “Hello?” she called.

  Old habits. She couldn’t help it. She even flipped the light switch next to the door, but of course the kitchen light did not come on, and there was no answer to her greeting.

  Still—could she be imagining things? Jiselle sensed some movement somewhere deeper inside the house and instinctively stepped backward, and then stood quietly, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness, holding her arms protectively across her chest.

  If it hadn’t been that there had been no mice or rats around for so long, Jiselle would have expected the house to be full of them. Or squirrels. Swallows. A family of raccoons. They would be wild, unfamiliar with human beings.

  What she hadn’t expected to encounter—like a wild ghost, padding out of the bedroom and into the hallway, and then, barely bothering to glanc
e in her direction before slipping into the hallway, and then into the living room—was this sleek and tawny cat, as long as a man, with enormous shoulder muscles, dark ears bristling with fur.

  An enormous, magical cat.

  Jiselle stood frozen in the doorway for several seconds, hand over her mouth, trying to breathe and not to scream, before backing out into the snowy light, running across the yard and around the hedge, home, heart pounding cou-gar, cou-gar.

  Cougar.

  How? In Wisconsin? In the Schmidts’ house near the edges of St. Sophia, seventy miles from the heart of Chicago?

  Jiselle knew, now, what had been making the tracks around Beatrice’s shed. Now she recognized the paw prints in the snow for what they were. Whose. The pads and claws. She hurried in the front door of the house, as excited as she was alarmed. “Sam?” she called.

  Where had it come from?

  North?

  West?

  And how had it come to live in the Schmidts’ house?

  Was there so little of the usual human activity that the big cats had come back now after a century of hiding in remoter places?

  Or was this someone’s exotic pet, escaped? Abandoned?

  Would there be more?

  Were there more?

  Sam would know. He would have a book, an idea.

  “Sam?” Jiselle called out to the house, but the girls and her mother were no longer at the kitchen table. “Sam? You won’t believe this. Sam? Where are you?”

  Jiselle’s mother stepped out from behind the curtain to Sam’s bedroom then. “He’s sick,” she said.

  As soon as Jiselle stepped into Sam’s room herself, she could smell it: The physical humidity of that sickness, the way it rose off him like a damp fire.

  Outside the room, Camilla had collapsed at the kitchen table with her head bowed into her tightly folded hands. Sara paced in the family room, making circles around the half-decorated Christmas tree.

  “Sam,” Jiselle said, kneeling beside his bed, putting a hand on his cheek, and then on his forehead. “Sammy. Sweetheart. My baby.”

  There was once a princess…

  There was once a mermaid…

  There was once a king…

  There was once a kingdom…

  They’d finished the book weeks before, so Jiselle started over again at the beginning.

  That first night, there were sounds all around the house. Animals. And something else. Wind, but as if the wind were marching in circles.

  “Jiselle, you need to sleep.”

  No.

  The boy in the bed appeared to have been taken away and tossed back, bones beneath blankets. He did not open his eyes, and he’d eaten nothing—not a sip of water, not a cracker, not a spoonful of soup.

  “Jiselle, what are we going to do?”

  She closed the book.

  In the morning she opened the door to the little shack, and the goose looked up.

  Clearly, Beatrice had expected some animal other than Jiselle, bare-limbed, holding a long knife.

  Did she understand that it was only a matter of time?

  The path around the shack had been worn down to dirt, and now Jiselle knew what was making those tracks.

  Had Beatrice also known? Was it why, before Jiselle cut the white throat, the goose let Jiselle gather her, stroke her pure and bristling neck, the gleaming wings, the elegant strangeness of the beak, and even closed her eyes as Jiselle drew the sharpened blade across the throat, and the blood poured over her bare arms and legs?

  Afterward, Jiselle sat holding and rocking the beautiful goose in her arms.

  Jiselle’s mother brought the kettle full of scalding water into the kitchen. “We had to do it,” she said, taking the bird out of Jiselle’s arms, plunging it into the water, going to work right away, hands coming up full of feathers, pulled off the body, tossed out the kitchen window and into the snow, “if it could save our little boy.”

  It was clear to Jiselle, looking on, that this was something her mother had done a hundred times. Anna Petersen must have watched her own mother do it, and her father, and she had done it herself as a child on that farm, had done it in her dreams every night since then. She had, perhaps, been waiting her whole life, knowing that someday she would need to do it again.

  Her mother boiled the goose soup in a pot that hung from the tripod Sam had made, and the whole house filled up with the warm smell of it, and then they brought a cup of the broth to Sam, who sat up long enough to take a sip of it, and then another.

  Jiselle’s mother had given the feet and the bones to Jiselle, sifting them out of the pot with a slotted spoon, and Jiselle took those along with a handful of feathers back to the shack, and put them in the nest of Mark’s old uniforms, and left the door to Beatrice’s shack open behind her.

  That night, while her mother sat with Sam, Jiselle sat on the deck in the moonlight, watching, wearing an old coat of Mark’s. She shivered as the snow fell around her, but she didn’t feel cold, breathing as quietly as she could until the sun began to rise and she finally saw the cougar slip through the hedge—slow and low on its sinewy haunches, with nightmarish glamour, an elegance made of stealth—to the shack, and as soon as Jiselle saw that the cat was there, inside, busy with the feet and the feathers, which it must have believed to be the goose that it had been stalking for so long, she leaped to her feet and ran across the backyard and into the Schmidts’ house, slamming and locking the door behind her.

  “Jiselle,” her mother said, a hand to her chest, when she returned an hour later with the rifle. “You did it.”

  The girls and her mother stood around Jiselle, running their hands down the gloss and wood.

  “Thank God,” Sara said.

  “Thank Jiselle!” Camilla said.

  “It’s all I could find,” she said. “He didn’t have any food. Not even any water. All he had were boxes of seeds and ammunition and this.”

  There was once a king…

  There was once a kingdom…

  There was trouble in the kingdom…

  There was a little boy…

  A little mother sat beside the boy…There was a knock at the door…A strange little man…An old woman in black rags…There was a woman in white, her arms full of white flowers…“Have you not seen Death go by with my little child? I have to fetch him back.”

  Another night passed, and then another.

  “It’s not the flu,” her mother told Jiselle, standing in the threshold. “He’s sick, but not with that,” and Jiselle stood and went to her mother, put her arms around her, and sobbed into her shoulder for a little while, like a child.

  On Christmas Eve, Sam drank a cup of mint tea in little sips on the couch beside the Christmas tree. Camilla sat at his feet, her hand on his knee. Sara fussed with the decorations.

  Jiselle could do nothing but stand in a corner of the room and stare at the miracle of Sam. The December afternoon light shone through the window and over the snowy trees in the ravine, which seemed, also, to shine inward—breathing, botanical—with nearly unbearable brilliance. She went to the window and saw, for the first time, the potential beyond it. How little they might need that wasn’t there waiting for them.

  There was wood to cut down, and in the spring there would be berries in the ravine. Now that Jiselle knew she could kill an animal, and that her mother could clean it and cook it, the world could start all over again, full of possibilities. The whole house seemed radiant with these possibilities. With the seeds she’d found in the Schmidts’ cellar, there would be vegetables, and with the rifle and the boxes of ammunition they would be able to hunt for small game and deer. Sara had found a handbook on the shelf, something of Mark’s, that explained the gutting and tanning of antelope. Surely a deer would be no different from an antelope. Only that morning, Sara had come into the kitchen with the hunting book open like a hymnal in her hands, and said, “It says here that it’s much less messy if you can string the antelope up, and bleed it before you clean i
t. See—”

  She held up the book for Jiselle, open to an illustration of a man standing beside the carcass of an antelope hanging by its neck from the branch of a tree.

  “Do we have any nylon rope, do you think, in the garage?” she asked.

  Then Sara took Brad Schmidt’s rifle off the mantel and held it in her hands, weighing it.

  “You’ll have to let me be in charge of this,” Sara said, “since we don’t have enough ammunition for target practice. I was the BB gun champion at Camp Newaygo three summers in a row. There isn’t anyone else here who can claim that, is there?”

  Jiselle pretended to consider it, and then shook her head. “No,” she said.

  The cougar had disappeared only two days before, and already the yard was full of rabbits again.

  On Christmas Day, there was snow. A sparkling carpet of it over everything. The radio picked up some station—from where, they had no idea—that played carols all afternoon, until the signal finally faded away. For Christmas presents, Jiselle gave Sam the brass wings she used to wear above her heart. Camilla and Sara got the bracelets Mark had bought and hidden for her for Valentine’s Day. She gave her mother the jade earrings, which looked beautiful on her—exotic and lost in her hair, which had grown wild and white in the last few weeks.

  “I want to give you your present now,” her mother told her. “It’s been a long time in the making. I don’t want to wait.”

  Jiselle turned from the fireplace, where she’d been stirring the stew for dinner, and said, “Okay.”