In a Perfect World

CHAPTER FOUR

Far more people are not going to die of the Phoenix flu than die of it!” one television doctor said on a special news report. “We’d better keep attending school, paying our bills, and floating the economy. Otherwise, when the hysteria dies down, we’ll have something to be hysterical about.”

Healthy people, it was said, could withstand this rather minor infection. Drug users could not, of course. Nor the children of drug users. It was true that medical professionals and the depressed were at special risk. People who did not have the right attitude often succumbed, and that was why the Wholeness books and tapes, which could easily be bought off the Internet, were so helpful. Even if you weren’t sick, ordering and listening to the tapes, reading the books about how to strengthen your character, alleviate stress, clean yourself of unhealthy thought patterns could ward off the disease.

Jiselle was given one such book by the mother of Camilla’s boyfriend, Bobby Temple.

“Honestly,” Tara Temple said, “it changed my life.”

Jiselle had almost never spoken to the woman before that evening, although she had met Bobby’s father, Paul Temple, once or twice when he came by to pick Bobby up for some sort of lesson or sporting event.

Paul Temple was a tall man with the same sand-colored hair as his son. He taught history at the local high school, and Jiselle thought he looked knowledgeable and sheepish about being knowledgeable. When the subject of current events came up on the front steps as he waited for his son, Paul Temple referred to the thirteenth century as if it had been last week—but then looked embarrassed to have slipped it into the conversation, like the smart boys Jiselle had known in high school, who would rather have walked straight into walls than worn glasses.

His wife, Tara, seemed his opposite. Whatever she had, she had on display. That day, her hair was dyed a metallic blond, and she was wearing large silver-and-turquoise earrings and a sheer blue blouse. She said she was just stopping by to drop off Bobby’s track shoes, and Jiselle was surprised that she would think to give her anything at all—and especially surprised by the bright, lightweight book Tara Temple handed over.

Its cover was slick, shiny. A whiteness at the center of more whiteness. CURE YOUR SELF! was written in gold letters across it. It was no longer than fifty or sixty pages, and holding it in her hands, Jiselle had the feeling that if she didn’t hold on to it tightly, it might float away.

“Thank you,” she said, “but are you sure? I could get my own copy.”

“I want you to have it,” Tara Temple said.

Only later, turning the book over at the kitchen table, did Jiselle understand. On the back was written, Buy a copy of this book for everyone you know! Give this book away! It will increase your good fortune, and CURE YOUR SELF! This book—it was a kind of chain letter, spread from one person to another to another, mystically, like a virus.

“What we need are better vaccines and antibiotics, not good fortune,” Mark said, picking up the book and tossing it back down on his way out the door.

“It’s not my book,” Jiselle said to his back.

“Well, that’s reassuring,” he said.

“It’s Tara Temple’s.”

“Oh God,” he said. “That woman.”

“Mark,” Jiselle asked, “Do you think this is going to be a big thing?”

“The Phoenix flu?” he asked, and then shrugged. “That depends on what you mean by ‘big thing,’ I guess. But aren’t you glad you’re not flying?”

The media connected the fears of the flu, the war, global warming, and the end of the world to the number of women who were dropping out of the workforce.

What was the point of two incomes if your money couldn’t buy you the luxuries you worked for? If you couldn’t even afford to put gas in two cars, let alone install a hot tub, why not have someone at home watching the children, folding the laundry, making nice dinners during the day?

A stay-at-home mother was even one of Dr. Springwell’s secrets—number five or six on the famous list of “Immune Boosters” promoted by the portly physician whose popular show was devoted entirely to advice on avoiding an illness, which he never called the Phoenix flu but which was, of course, the Phoenix flu.

Jiselle had watched the show only once, in a hotel room in Minneapolis. “We are like fish in a small bowl,” Dr. Springwell was saying. He had two goldfish in a glass bowl on a table in front of him. Behind him was a painted sky, heavenly blue, in which a few cottony clouds sat motionless and serene. The doctor wore a white shirt unbuttoned at the neck. His bald head gleamed. “The slightest shift changes everything.”

Dr. Springwell tipped the bowl a little to the left then, and the camera closed in on the two bright fish, who had been floating in it peacefully, seemingly asleep, but who were now trying frantically to swim, with their tiny, fluttering fins, against the current. Those fins looked as if they were made of the thinnest tissue. Useless.

“See?” Dr. Springwell said. “This is the barely perceptible change in our climate, but it alters everything. The fish have to learn to swim all over again in this new world. Like us! What we experience in our fishbowl is the gradual shift in our resources, our economy, our way of life, and, most important, our immune systems.”

Here, the words Dr. Springwell’s Secret and the cover of his bestselling book began to flash against the blue sky behind him. Dr. Springwell righted the bowl, and the fish, disoriented, began to swim in what appeared to be hopeless, exhausted circles.

“Do it,” Annette had said. “Quit. Stay home. Just think, no more puke. No more pretzels. I love being home.”

Annette was four months pregnant by then, and there were complications, but luckily she was married to a doctor. She watched television all day. She made phone calls. She kept a bucket beside the bed and threw up in it every half hour. She jokingly called her husband Dr. Williams and said that Dr. Williams said not to be concerned. Many women had morning sickness all three trimesters, and she must just be one of the lucky ones.

“I don’t know,” Jiselle said. “Sara, the younger daughter—I think she hates me.”

“So what? Does she hate you more than those old ladies who can’t get their bags stuffed into the overhead compartment hate you? Does she hate you more than terrorists hate you?”

“But,” Jiselle asked Annette on the phone, “won’t I feel like I’m trying to—?”

“Take their mother’s place? Forget about her!” Annette said. “She’s dead! I mean, it’s not like you were never with any other men.”

True.

But Jiselle had never been married. She’d never had a child with a man. She’d never been widowed.

His first wife’s name had been Joy, and it was amazing how many times a day one heard that name or saw it in the form of the word. On a card, followed by an exclamation point. On the lips of the president nodding over a lectern on television: It is with great joy that I am announcing today that seven thousand troops will be returning to the United States next month. On the lips of the president’s opponents when it didn’t happen: What happened to all that “joy”?

The Joy of Cooking.

The Joy of Sex.

Joy to the world…

No Joy in Mudville.

Cultivating a sense of inner joy in troubled times…

Mark had told Jiselle the basics of their meeting (college), and their courtship (two years), and their decision to marry, to move to Wisconsin, to have three children, and then he ended with “and then she was hit by a school bus. In front of our house. In front of our children. What else can I say?”

“That’s horrible,” Jiselle said to him, holding her head with one hand and covering her mouth with the other. “Just horrible.”

Mark shook his head. It was a tired and resigned gesture. His wife, he seemed to be saying, how could she have done it to them?

“You know,” Jiselle’s mother said. “I Googled that. It sounded fishy to me, and I started wondering if you might be getting involved with a serial killer. But there it was in the St. Sophia News: PILOT’S WIFE STRUCK BY BUS IN FRONT OF HOUSE.

“This is just the beginning,” their neighbor, Brad Schmidt, told Jiselle one afternoon when they met at the end of their driveways after having dragged out their trash cans for the garbage truck. “It’s the tip of the iceberg,” he said.

By then Jiselle had already spoken to Brad Schmidt several times—always over the hedge or with the garbage cans at the end of the driveway—and he always said something about the Phoenix flu.

“It’s hairs,” he said that afternoon. “They import hair for wigs and extensions, you know. From Pakistan. Korea. And those people they cut the hair off of died of the Phoenix flu.”

Jiselle tried to smile politely. She said, lifting one shoulder, “Who knows?”—although she briefly considered pointing out that the flu had started in the United States, that other countries were outlawing imports of all kinds from America—blankets, food, clothes, books. Outside the United States, everything American was suspect.

But what would have been the point of arguing with him? Brad Schmidt was elderly. He was pleased with his theory. A week earlier, he’d had to bring his wife, who had Alzheimer’s, back from the group home in which she lived. Several of its employees had fallen ill, and they’d closed down. Since then, Jiselle had seen her only once, when Mrs. Schmidt had wandered across their lawns to the front door. Before she’d had time to knock on the door, Jiselle had opened it, and this seemed to startle the old woman, who asked, “How did you know about me?”

“I saw you from the window,” Jiselle said.

“You watch me?”

“Well, no,” Jiselle said. “This is where I live, and I was looking out the window.”

“Oh.”

Mrs. Schmidt’s eyes remained wide, an expression of puzzled alarm on her face, and Jiselle was surprised how much like a ghost she was—thin, white-haired, nearly translucent, like someone who had been snatched back from the other world but who did not quite understand that she was back, or why. The old woman reached out and took Jiselle’s hands in her own, and asked, “So, do you know me, young lady?”

“Now I do,” Jiselle answered as brightly as possible.

“Then, who am I?”

“You’re Mrs. Schmidt.”

“Very nice,” Diane Schmidt said, nodding, as if Jiselle had passed a test. Just then, her husband came panting around the hedge—clearly he’d been searching for his wife—and took her home.

That morning at the end of their driveways, Brad Schmidt snorted and said, “Britney Spears. All this bullshit about Britney Spears. Britney Spears isn’t even the first of millions.”

Jiselle nodded. “Still,” she said, “it’s very sad.”

“Sad, sure,” Brad Schmidt said. “Better get used to it.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Mark chose an afternoon when the children were on a field trip to Chicago with the public schools to bring Jiselle to the house for the first time. He drove downstate and into Illinois to pick her up in his ice-blue sports car. (“A Mazda RX-8. The only midlife crisis car I could pile three kids into.”)

Jiselle heard the engine in her driveway before she looked out the window. The car sounded like an enormous cat purring as it pulled in. The top was down.

Mark had been to her house only once, and Jiselle knew he’d been unimpressed. (“Kind of boxy, isn’t it? And the neighbors, too many, too close. But I guess what’s the point of having a nice place if you never stay in it anyway?”) This time, he didn’t even bother to step inside. He took her overnight bag out of her hand at the door, walked back to his car, tossed it in his trunk, and then turned to watch as she locked the front door and descended the little cement stoop. After she’d crossed the front lawn to him, he took her in his arms, pulled her to him, and kissed her. For a second, Jiselle let her eyes flutter open. Over his shoulder and across the street, she saw a teenage girl in cutoffs and a T-shirt watching them dreamily, but intensely, from her own front yard.

Of course.

How many times had Jiselle herself fantasized this scene when she was a teenager—a handsome man, a fast car in the driveway, the passionate kiss, the way he would sweep her into the car, drive her away?

In one of Jiselle’s earliest memories, she and Ellen had stuffed one of their Barbies into the passenger seat of a Barbie-Mobile, stretching out her long legs stiffly on the dashboard as Ken drove her wildly across the shag carpet in Ellen’s basement.

Clearly, that had been Ellen’s fantasy, too—except that the driver had been Jiselle’s father, who’d driven her drunk in his Roadster straight into oncoming traffic, and the next day Jiselle was called to the wrecking service, shown the car. The blood-soaked upholstery. The collapsed roof. A single high-heel shoe on the floor of the passenger side.

The wrecking yard workers had stood around her, telling her the car was still worth at least ten thousand dollars.

“You can’t just junk it,” one of them had said. “It’s a classic.”

But Jiselle had walked away from it with only a few coins she’d found scattered on the driver’s seat, believing that they had fallen from her father’s pocket and that she should keep them. But she had put them in her purse, where they were scattered among the other coins, and she finally spent them on a parking meter, maybe, or a package of gum.

After she settled into the passenger seat beside Mark, she put a clip in her hair, and as they drove off, Jiselle waved to the teenage girl, who looked away, pretending she hadn’t been watching.

They drove for miles without talking. Without needing to talk. Mark kept one hand on Jiselle’s knee, the other on the steering wheel. His house was seventy miles north of Jiselle’s town, on the diagonal. Like Jiselle, he was required by the airlines to live less than an hour away from O’Hare. His town, St. Sophia, had been one of those on the suggestion list Jiselle had been given when she’d taken her job, but she’d decided against it because she’d thought it was too small. There would be no single men to date.

How many flight attendants, she now wondered, had made the same mistake? Who among them might have been beside this pilot in his sports car today if it had been otherwise?

Mark drove the sports car the way he flew a plane, with total confidence, in deep concentration. Ahead of them, the highway wound blackly through green hills. For a while, they followed the river, which was smooth and dotted with stone-white ducks and seemed to have stopped moving altogether. After a while they came up behind a pickup truck carrying several large birdcages, each cage full of silky white doves. Hundreds of doves. The driver was an elderly woman, who glared at Mark and Jiselle as they passed her in the no-passing lane.

Mark and Jiselle smiled at each other.

They passed a few more cars. An empty school bus. An ice-cream truck. Another pickup—this one hauling a horse trailer out of which a horse’s amber tail swished the air.

They crossed rickety covered bridges spanning rocky little streams that bubbled and frothed below them, and then they were crossing the boundary to his town, St. Sophia, where a red-white-and-blue sign stated simply: ST. SOPHIA—AMERICA’S HOMETOWN.

They slowed down.

“We’re here,” he said. He took his hand off her knee and placed it on the steering wheel. Jiselle nodded and smiled over at him, but he was looking straight ahead, so she looked around.

Gingerbread Victorians lined the shady Main Street. There were brick and clapboard storefronts. The library had Greek columns. The fire station had one shining red truck parked out front and a Dalmatian lounging under an oak tree beside it.

“We moved here to have the kids,” Mark said, gesturing around him at his town. “It seemed so old-fashioned. So out of the way. Of course, it’s changed a lot since then.”

A flag flew from the yard of the school, which was a red brick two-story building with a few gothic flourishes around the doors. The post office had a cupola on the roof, a blue mailbox outside. There was a tidy park with a swing set and a merry-go-round and a wishing well. There was another flag flapping from a pole beside the courthouse.

Jiselle couldn’t imagine how St. Sophia had changed.

There was about it a sense of time having stopped at some idealized moment—the sun at the highest point in the sky, the season stalled perfectly between spring and summer, the population poised between too few and too many. The happiest hours chiming from a clock tower. The sweetest period of American history reflected in the most romantic of American architecture. Peace, following a war. The kindest politics. A time of prosperity, but not materialism. An era during which people believed in things but were not fanatical.

A little boy riding a red bicycle too large for him waved excitedly as Mark and Jiselle drove by. Jiselle waved back, and Mark saluted. “A school chum of Sam’s,” he said.

They took Main Street from one brief end of town to the other, and then kept on going, until the Victorians slipped away and the trees grew up around them. The road to Mark’s house turned to gravel, and then to dirt, and then to clay.

Jiselle had known it was in the woods, at the edge of a ravine, but she was surprised by how deep into the woods it was, how alive the woods seemed to be—fluttering with leaves, and wings, and the fragile airy progress of butterflies.

They pulled into his driveway, and there it was—a small log house, the house Mark had described to her so well that the one in her imagination matched this one perfectly: The covered wraparound porch. The brick chimney. All of it pushed up to the edge of a ravine full of pines and white birches. There were lace curtains in the windows. A chipmunk sat on the front porch, cheeks stuffed with something, munching. It looked up as they pulled in, as if it had been expecting them, and when they stepped out of the car, it didn’t run away but waited until they’d reached the mossy cobblestone walk to the front door before slipping into the rock garden.

“Here it is,” Mark said. “Your home, if you’ll have it.”

He took her by the arm and guided her through the rooms to the kitchen, where he presented her with a bouquet of tulips he said the children had picked for her themselves. They were carefully arranged on the kitchen table in a white vase—three black-cupped blooms, each one seeming to burn with a small electric light at its center.

“Here,” Mark said.

When she woke up next to him in his log house on the afternoon of her first visit, in his big four-poster bed under a Navajo blanket after making love, Jiselle slipped out of his arms to wander into the rooms of his house, and felt as if she recognized them from somewhere deep inside herself, as if the place had grown up like a shell around her dream.

The sun was high in the sky, streaming through the lace curtains and the window shades, making a dappled splash at the foot of the bed, pooling on the wooden floorboards. Jiselle picked Mark’s shirt out of that pool of light, slid her arms into it, stepped through the curtain in the doorway into the other rooms, and she saw that all the thresholds were draped with colorful silk cloth instead of doors. It was such a beautiful gesture, those silk curtains stirring peacefully in the doorways to every room.

The house was small and cluttered but very clean. The walls were made of raw logs and planed boards trimmed with brick. The windows were old-fashioned, too—the kind you cranked open. Verdigris iron rimmed the panes. There were real wooden shutters on the outside.

Jiselle walked down the hallway between the bedrooms to the family room, with its comfortable tweed couch, two overstuffed chairs, a coffee table spilling magazines. A big TV took up one wall, and there was a sliding glass door against the other, opening onto a cedar deck.

Mark had told her about the deck—how it was built around an oak tree, how the tree looked, from the family room, as if it grew straight out of the house. Jiselle went to the sliding glass doors and saw that this was true.

The trunk of the oak poured upward through the cedar slats of the deck, and then it branched overhead, gloriously green—an enormous, ancient, tree. She slid the door open and stepped out. She touched the trunk. It was rough and warm.

Mark had also told her that he and Joy had built the house as close to the ravine as they could without having to worry about the house falling into it after forty years of rainfall and erosion. Jiselle stood on the deck and looked into that beautiful abyss. The air smelled pure. She inhaled so deeply it made her feel a little dizzy, and she steadied herself with a hand to the trunk of the oak before turning back to the house. She wanted to see the children’s rooms.

First, she peeked around the silk curtain in the doorway and into Sam’s room. A stuffed tiger on the floor. A cowboy hat on the desk. The bed was unmade, and the sheets had pirates on them—skulls and crossbones and tall-masted ships. There was a photo of Sam himself on the nightstand. From Halloween? His curly strawberry-blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail. He wore a patch over one eye.

Camilla’s room was spotless. Just a row of slim hardcover books on a white shelf. A round green rug on the floor. The clover-covered bedspread was pulled up carefully over the pillows. A dustless desk with a stapler, a laptop, a small bowl of thumbtacks, and a few pencils lined up.

Sara’s room, on the other hand, was the typical adolescent disaster. Clothes tumbled out of the closet and onto the floor. There was a half-full bottle of Diet Coke open on the nightstand. Books and notebooks were scattered across the desk. On the wall was an enormous poster of a wild-haired man with a naked torso, holding the neck of an electric guitar with one hand, the other pointed at the camera, middle finger raised. The bedspread was black, as were the silk sheets rumpled on the mattress, which had been pulled off the bed frame and onto the floor.

Jiselle stepped out of the room and back into the hallway quickly, but she wasn’t alarmed. Although she herself had kept a tidy teenage room under her mother’s vigilant administration, she remembered how teenage girls could be. She remembered Ellen’s room. The piles of dirty laundry. The books and magazines scattered across the floor. Having to wade though the debris to get to the bed, where you had to push away more debris to sit down.

She wandered to the kitchen then, where a bowl of red apples sat on the butcher-block countertop. She took one and smelled it before biting into it. Orchards and sunlight in that mouthful of apple. It was crisp. Tart and sweet at the same time. She stood and ate it down to the core in Mark’s kitchen, her bare feet on the ceramic tile, before finding the garbage pail under the sink and dropping it in.

Then she made her way to the living room, where she went first to the bookshelf, studied the titles on the spines lined up neatly:

Aviation Through the Ages. Light Aircraft Navigation Essentials. Memoirs of an African Big-Game Hunter. The Art of Chess. The Sibley Guide to South American Birds. Woodcraft.

They were books that spoke of masculine hobbies—large, heavy books with glossy dust jackets, smelling of their own clean pages—and Jiselle thought with some shame of her own shelves, overstuffed with paperbacks. The broken spines and the pages folded over to mark a place to which she’d never returned. The library books were mixed in with the books she owned, so that she was always searching, and her books were always overdue.

She would, she vowed, clear the shelves when she got back, dispose of those books, return the library books, donate all the others to someone, something (a homeless shelter? an orphanage?) before she moved into this perfect house with Mark. She would let someone less fortunate have them. She would clean up her act, as her mother used to tell her to do.

She was thinking about that—about her fortune, and her worthless books, and her mother—when she turned and saw it hanging above the fireplace:

A framed photograph.

A full-length portrait.

A wedding portrait.

More than anything in that first moment of recognition, Jiselle was startled that it hadn’t been the first thing she’d seen when she walked in the door.

It took up half of an entire wall.

Framed in filigreed silver, it was perfectly centered over the mantel.

In it, Mark looked so much younger that she might not have even recognized him if it hadn’t been for his eyes, deep set and dark, and the playful lift of the eyebrows, an expression she recognized—one he’d make boarding a plane, saying, “Howdy, folks,” to the flight crew before the passengers boarded and one of the flight attendants, always a woman, came up behind him to help him slide out of his coat. His eyebrows would rise in that casual, inverted V, and he’d say, sighing theatrically, “Ah. A good day to die.”

But in this portrait he was only a prop. He was an afterthought. Jiselle stepped closer to look more carefully, although her heart was already beating hard. The center of this large photograph was the bride, of course, wearing a wedding gown, holding a blindingly white piece of cake up to the photographer. She was offering that piece of cake to the future, it seemed, on a wide silver knife. Her strawberry-blond hair cascaded over her shoulders in ringlets. She did not wear a veil but, instead, a ribbon of ivory velvet in her hair, wound through a strand or two, tied in a loose knot. Jiselle put her hand to her mouth.

“Oh, dear,” Mark said, coming up behind her.

He’d startled her, but she didn’t turn around. She couldn’t, transfixed as she was by that first bride’s gaze.

“Oh, Jiselle,” Mark said. “I just keep that up so the children will feel, you know, as if their mother’s here. Of course, now I’ll take it down.”

He took Jiselle’s shoulders in his hands and turned her around to look at him.

He pulled her to him and kissed her then with so much gentle longing that her knees would have buckled beneath her if he hadn’t been holding her so steadily in his arms.

CHAPTER SIX

The spring passed in a blur of anticipation. When Jiselle wasn’t flying, she was busy with preparations—the catering, the flowers, the invitations.

She still hadn’t met the children, but she’d sent the girls opal necklaces to wear with their bridesmaid dresses, and Sam (not for the wedding) a pirate’s three-cornered hat with a red feather. Mark would be bringing her to the house for a week prior to their marriage, and he said, “You can see for yourself then that they’re great kids, and they’ll adore you. But you’ll still have time to back out!”

Until after their honeymoon in Puerto Rico, he would continue to employ the nanny. Afterward, they would “see what the next step should be.”

“If you want to quit, to be home with the children, of course that’s fine. If not—”

If not, Jiselle knew, they would need to find another nanny.

She had not met the present nanny, but when she’d called Mark’s house once, a bright-sounding young woman had answered and called out to Mark in singsong, “The phone’s for you!”

“Where does she sleep?” Jiselle asked.

“When I’m here,” he said, “she sleeps at her apartment in town. When I’m gone, I don’t know. The couch? Why would I care? I hope you’re not jealous. I’m not one of those widowers who’s so desperate he sleeps with his children’s nanny.”

“Of course not!” Jiselle had said.

Who knew better than she that Captain Mark Dorn could have any woman he wanted?

Still, twice in two weeks, Jiselle had tried to make an appointment with her therapist to discuss the issue of quitting her job to take care of Mark’s children. She knew she could afford no fuzzy logic here, with her wedding only weeks away, but when she called Dr. Smitty Smith’s office, she got only his answering machine, on which he’d left a recording saying that his patients should leave a message, which he would return when he was over his illness.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The chapel in which Jiselle had been baptized, the one they’d reserved for the wedding, was damaged by the flooding that started the first week of July, after the long week of relentless rain at the end of June, so Jiselle quickly reserved the small garden behind the restaurant, where the reception was to be held as well.

Both events had to take place outdoors due to the new Health Department regulations requiring at least three months’ notice for an indoor gathering of more than thirty people. But the weather was terrible. After the rains, a thick humidity cloaked everything in more gray and stench. Some afternoons, the air was so thick and motionless that it felt like trying to breathe inside an aquarium. Mark and Jiselle decided to be married at twilight.

The afternoon before the wedding, around four o’clock, Jiselle and her mother arrived at the garden behind the restaurant to check on the flowers and the tables and chairs, to make sure everything was in order and had arrived, along with the cooler of champagne.

Jiselle had tried to call Mark earlier from her cell phone, but she couldn’t get a signal. She’d wanted to know how the children were. The night before, they’d gone out to dinner after the rehearsal, and Sam had thrown up at Jiselle’s mother’s feet. He’d been drinking 7-Up. Gallons of it. Every time he finished a large glass of it, the waitress had brought him another. Only Jiselle’s mother had been watching this, and later she said, “What do you expect, letting a child drink all that soda? Of course he’s going to throw up.”

But when Jiselle spoke to Mark that morning, Sam seemed fine. Camilla, however, was lying down, complaining of menstrual cramps, and Sara had not yet broken the Vow of Silence, as Mark had begun to refer to it. She’d begun it the week Jiselle came to stay, and Jiselle knew, from sneaking a look at her diary, that she planned to continue:

After they’d supervised the raising of the canopy over the garden by Perfect Party Rentals, Jiselle and her mother went back to the house together to get dressed. Jiselle’s wedding dress, freshly laundered at BC-YU Cleaners, hung on the back of the door of her childhood bedroom, now her mother’s sewing room. It was draped in a clear plastic sheet emblazoned with a black cartoon caricature of a ninja soldier with the face of B.C. Yu, the laundry’s owner and operator, a sword held high over his head.

Jiselle had known B.C. for years. She’d driven into town with her mother to drop off their clothes at his establishment a thousand times. He’d dry-cleaned Jiselle’s prom dresses, steam-ironed her graduation gown, laundered the black dress she’d worn to her father’s and Ellen’s funerals. He’d cleaned those and wrapped them in the same clear sheet with his face and the sword. It was a perfect caricature, and Jiselle could never decide whether it was, for B.C., a joke (playing off stereotypes—the mild-mannered Korean dry cleaner turned ninja?) or a fantasy.

She was exhausted and closed the sewing room door. The film of humidity and drizzle that had coated her during the wedding preparations had mixed with the smell of her own sweat. She was too tired to take a shower just yet. She had to rest for a minute or two first.

Because there was no longer a bed in her old room, Jiselle lay down on the floor beside the sewing table and closed her eyes. She heard the shower begin in the bathroom, and the sound of the shower doors sliding open and closed, and then she fell asleep to the music of water pelting the naked flesh of her mother, and then she was dreaming—dreaming that she was under the Perfect Party Rentals tent, waiting for a wedding to begin. It was a dream within a dream, and the feeling was so peaceful that it didn’t matter to Jiselle whether or not anything ever happened to her again. There was water running somewhere, and the sounds of doors opening and closing politely, and then, “Oh my God, Jiselle!”

Her eyes snapped open. She sat up, finding herself in the sewing room again, with her mother standing over her wearing the salmon-pink linen dress she’d bought for the wedding—her ice-blond hair carefully clipped behind her head; her white summer shoes, her matching purse over her arm—and an expression of horror on her face.

“What the hell are you doing?” she shouted. “You’re getting married in thirty minutes.”

“How long have I been asleep?” Jiselle asked. She looked at the gold watch Mark had given her for her birthday and saw that an hour had passed. The hour she’d allotted for dressing, and makeup, and arranging her hair.

“For God’s sake,” her mother said, “get your dress on!”

And then, still stinking, stripped down to her underwear, having only enough time to drag a brush through her hair, Jiselle was ripping the ninja off her wedding dress, pulling it up over her hips, hearing the fabric rip with a terrible, permanent sound, and realized that she was stepping on the hem of the dress at the same time that she was yanking it on, and then she was in the passenger seat of her mother’s car.

“Oh Mom,” Jiselle said. She was trying not to cry.

“Don’t talk,” her mother said.

But Jiselle couldn’t help it.

“I just can’t believe—”

“I said, don’t talk, Jiselle. It’s just going to make it worse if you start crying now. This whole thing is a fiasco anyway.”

Jiselle bit her lip, which tasted like salt, and willed herself not to cry, not to speak, but then, it seemed, her mother’s floodgates burst:

“Why exactly, Jiselle, do you think I kicked your father out when you were fifteen?”

“Because…” Jiselle said, but then realized she had nothing to say. Somehow, in her mind, she’d connected the dog, Bingo, with her parents’ divorce. Her father had come home with the dog, and the next day he was gone. But, surely, the dog could not have been the last straw. Her parents had been married for twenty years by then.

“Because he was sleeping with that little slut already. I caught them in our bed in the middle of the afternoon while you were at school. Your little friend was playing hookie.”

“No,” Jiselle said. “Mom, they didn’t start—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Jiselle, be quiet.”

Be quiet.

Jiselle’s mouth was still open, but she couldn’t speak. It was as if her mother had cast a spell over her. Jiselle saw that her mother’s hands were holding the steering wheel so tightly that the knuckles had gone from white to red, and she was shaking her head in little snaps. Her lips were pursed, but she was also grinding her teeth.

“I have been keeping my mouth shut about this for the last eighteen years, but didn’t it ever cross your mind? Do you ever remember your father taking an interest in anything about your life except for your friend Ellen?”

Jiselle put her hand on the door handle, as if she might be able to simply step out of the car.

“Well? Why do you think he was always so eager to give darling little Ellen a ride home or pick her up for you?”

Jiselle didn’t move or swallow. She couldn’t.

“And now my daughter’s about to make the same mistake I made, marrying a man because he’s charming and handsome, without knowing another damn thing about him.”

Jiselle had to unroll her window despite the air-conditioning in her mother’s car, and still she could hardly breathe. She had to close her eyes. She let the air rushing past her pummel her face like ghosts in boxing gloves. Finally, her mother pulled over, brakes squealing, wheels thumping up against the curb. “Get out,” she said to Jiselle as she jumped out herself, in her salmon-pink suit, and disappeared around the corner of the restaurant.

When Jiselle finally managed to get out of her mother’s car—carefully, she did not want to risk ripping the hem of her dress even more—and closed the car door, someone behind her called out, “Lady?”

She turned to look. It was the man from Perfect Party Rentals. “Lady,” he said again, “there’s a problem with your tent.”

“What?” Jiselle asked, but he’d already stepped past her to the garden. She followed him, holding her dress off the damp pavement with one hand, trying to hold the hastily tied ribbon in her hair with the other.

The guests were already gathered, murmuring in a blur of colorful clothes. Mark was there. He stepped toward her, and then she saw it—the tent, collapsed onto the buffet table and the folding chairs and the ground. It looked as if a parachute had fallen to the earth with alarming speed, from a great height, directly onto Jiselle’s wedding. Her mother’s arms were crossed, her jaw set. She was standing in the shadows beside Pastor Gillingham, who had changed so much since Jiselle last saw him that she recognized him only by the way his bushy eyebrows, white now, took up so much of the surface of his face. His left arm dangled limply at his side. He looked back at Jiselle and did not register any recognition at all.

“Jiselle?” Mark said quietly.

He took her arm, peering into her face. His dark hair glittered with silver in the dusk. He appraised her, taking in the ripped seam, the safety pins, her hair wild around her face, the ribbon slipping out of it. Looking from her to the sky, he said, “If we do this before it starts to thunderstorm, Jiselle, we don’t need a tent.”

She nodded weakly.

She looked around.

Her guests had circled the collapsed tent, and they were smiling apologetically at her. Sam, in his little blue suit, with his long strawberry-blond curls glistening in the hazy sun, had picked up an edge and was looking under it. Camilla, radiant in the yellow satin dress Jiselle had chosen for her, with her long elegant arms shining, brushed her blond hair out of her eyes and smiled. Sara, in a black lace dress, black tights, and black combat boots, stood with her arms crossed, staring at the ground, at her own shadow, it seemed.

“All is well, sweetheart,” Mark said, cradling her elbow in his palm. “Nothing to worry about.” He motioned with his arm, then, to his children, calling them over, and they gathered behind him—Sam bouncing over, Camilla gliding, Sara shuffling reluctantly behind them.

“Doesn’t Jiselle look lovely?” Mark asked them.

“Pretty!” Camilla said. She was still smiling brightly, not a shred of sarcasm revealing itself on her face.

“Jesus,” Sara said, breaking her vow. “You stink.”

Somehow, the storm waited to explode overhead until after Pastor Gillingham had pronounced them man and wife. It was no longer dusk, but actual dark. Still, the sky, starless and clouded, reflected the lights of the town and glowed over them, and when Mark leaned down to “kiss the lovely bride,” as Pastor Gillingham instructed him, Jiselle opened her eyes wide, realizing that she was the lovely bride.

The kiss went on and on. The guests laughed and clapped and stayed long enough under the darkening sky to raise a toast. They gathered around Mark and Jiselle. Even her mother looked peaceful, pleased, by then. She took Jiselle’s hands in hers, leaned into her, and whispered, “I’m sorry, Jiselle. You’re a lovely bride, and he’s probably nothing like your father.”

“Thank you,” Jiselle said.

“And what I said about—”

“It’s okay,” Jiselle said.

The guests stepped gingerly around the collapsed tent and raised their glasses, just as the warm rain began to fall in fat drops on their heads and arms, and said in unison, as if it had been planned, “To the perfect couple!”

CHAPTER EIGHT

In Puerto Rico, their plane skidded to a stop in the midst of a driving storm. Thunder, sounding like far-off artillery, rolled in off the Caribbean in one unbroken wave of sound. They’d flown through the night, and Mark was still heavily asleep beside Jiselle. His small airline-issued pillow had fallen onto her lap.

On the flight from Newark to Ponce, there had been only a dozen other passengers, and these all seemed to be native Puerto Ricans, going home, speaking Spanish. The flight attendants never bothered to give their announcements in English, except for the standard warning that North American travelers who displayed suspected symptoms of the Phoenix flu could be turned away at their ports of entry without forewarning.

Mark and Jiselle were alone in first class, separated by twenty rows from the rest of the passengers.

When they deplaned, the flight attendants didn’t smile.

While Mark went to fetch the rental car, Jiselle waited inside the little terminal and watched the baggage carrousel lurch in circles, bearing its suitcases and bags—an eternal loop slipping through and under the fringed rubber curtain, returning from that mysterious beyond with a new bag every few minutes. She watched as bag after bag passed by but didn’t see theirs. Finally, Mark came up beside her and said, “There’s no car for us, and apparently there’s not one fucking vehicle for rent on this entire fucking island.”

They decided to make the best of it.

It was their honeymoon!

What else could they do?

They laughed in the empty airport terminal. Mark made some calls to airline personnel, who said not to worry, they’d find the bags. The bags would be on the next flight. They’d be delivered to the resort.

After numerous cell phone calls, a driver was procured who was willing to drive them to their resort, and Mark and Jiselle sat together on a bench outside the airport waiting for him. The air was warm, sultry. It smelled of seawater and the rot of weeds in seawater, but it was pleasantly pungent—a kind of necessary and utterly natural decomposition taking place offshore under turquoise waves. Eventually a rusted white van that read NORTH AMERICAN TRANSPORTER on the side, in stenciling that looked far newer than the van, pulled up.

“Hola.”

The driver was an elderly man. He bowed to them and said in a heavy Spanish accent what sounded to Jiselle like “Welcome to Purgatory” but must have been “Welcome to Puerto Rico.” Then he held out a wet towel and said, “Por favor, you must wash your hands.”

Mark looked at Jiselle, amused. They shrugged, smiled at each other, and passed the towel between them, wiping their hands. It was warm and sodden and smelled of bleach. When they tried to hand it back to the driver, he only shook his head at it, and nodded toward a trash can. Mark stepped over and dropped it in, and they followed the driver to his van.

The drive to the resort was quick. The freeway followed the seashore, which was lapped by azure water. The sky was radiant. The old man turned on the radio, and someone seemed to be reading poetry, in Spanish, in a monotone. The words washed around Jiselle with the breeze through the van windows. She put her head on Mark’s shoulder, closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, she found that she was no longer resting on Mark’s shoulder but had her temple pressed to the armrest between them, and Mark was outside of the parked van arguing with the driver, whose thin empty hand was held out.

“No one takes North Americans in a van now! No one but me!”

“It was a thirty-minute drive!” Mark said.

“Well, it would have been a longer walk, señor. Two. Hundred. Dollars.”

Mark stared at the old man in disbelief, and then looked into his open hand. After a few slow seconds, he reached around for the wallet in his pocket, took it out, counted ten twenty-dollar bills, and placed them in the open hand, where they disappeared instantly into the old man’s pocket.

The Hotel Paradiso—which Jiselle and Mark would begin, over their seven-day honeymoon, to refer to jokingly as the Hotel Limbo—was nearly deserted except for another couple from the United States, also there on a honeymoon, and a family from New Jersey with three small children named Cato, Caitlin, and Calli.

Except for those three occupied suites, the rest of the rooms seemed to be empty. The whole resort had the feel of something that had been abandoned abruptly. There were empty lounge chairs placed carefully around the pool. The hot tub bubbled forsakenly.

Their luggage never arrived, so they bought bathing suits, shorts, and T-shirts in the dive shop on the beach.

The other honeymooning couple from the United States was younger than Mark and Jiselle and spent much of their time strolling along the beach. By the middle of the week they were both sunburned almost beyond recognition. Their faces were red and swollen—eyelids, lips, bloated with burn.

“I think they sold us phony sunblock in the dive shop,” the young woman said. “We were both slathered in SPF forty-five, and this happened.” She gestured to her face. “Joe can’t even lie down,” she said, nodding at her husband.

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” said the mother of the three Cs from New Jersey, sauntering over to their table. “They hate us here. Have you seen all the buttons and bumper stickers?” She was referring to the red circles with slashes through the outline of the United States—similar to the ones Jiselle had seen in Denmark months before and in every country outside the United States she’d been to since.

“Our kids wanted to snorkel,” the father of the three Cs said, scratching his large, hairy stomach, “so we asked about it in the dive shop, and the old woman said, ‘Well, you have killed our coral reef, so there can be no snorkeling.’ And I said, ‘Hey, señora, I’m not responsible for your coral reef…’ I mean, you can’t blame Americans for everything.”

“But they do,” the honeymooning wife said. “They blame us for the coral reefs, and the fish, and the hurricanes, and the flu. All of it. A plane crashes, and it’s our fault. Some species of bird dies out, and we did it. You name it, they blame it on us.”

There was a moment of silence.

A bird high in a palm tree made a screeching sound, but otherwise there was just the white noise of waves washing onto sand.

The mother of the three Cs agreed, nodding vehemently. She said, “You know, that witch at the front desk gave me the evil eye. She accused me of stealing my children.”

“What?” all the others, including Mark and Jiselle, cried out at once.

“Yes,” the woman said. “She said, ‘Look, you stole them all from different countries. They aren’t your children.’ I said, ‘We adopted our children from different countries—poverty-stricken countries. We didn’t steal them.’”

“What did she say then?” Jiselle asked.

The mother shrugged.

“Well, I tell you,” the honeymooning wife said, “that’s unforgivable. And so is this.” She pointed to her sunburned neck.

“And look at this,” her husband said, holding out his arms. “If they did this to me, it’s tantamount to attempted murder.”

“That’s true,” his wife said. “This much sun can kill you. I tell you, I’m not coming back to Puerto Rico in this lifetime.”

Jiselle looked out at the ocean. The undulating turquoise, and cobalt, and indigo. A pelican was riding an air current just over the water, looking black and prehistoric. It plunged into a wave, emerged with something silver and wriggling in its beak.

Still, the days of Mark’s and Jiselle’s honeymoon were full of quiet luxuriating in each other’s company. They strolled alone along the ocean. They swam alone in the pool. They sat alone in the swirling vortex of the hot tub. They rented a kayak and stroked their way in perfect coordination out to the dead coral reef, where they snorkeled side by side.

Just beneath the surface of the Caribbean, wearing that snorkel mask, Jiselle could hear only her own steady breathing. The sunlight turned the pale blue water on the ocean floor to dancing, electric brainwaves. And the ghosts of the coral, like a white forest, were spread out beneath her for what seemed like miles and miles of serenity. The rictus of cacti, bleached to bone. Or the bare branches of winter trees, coated in snow—blameless, voiceless, motionless peace. She cast her own floating shadow down on it, as if she were a cloud passing over the shared dream of a million vanished people. Mark, beside her, fluttering in his fins, reached out and caressed her through the water. She was so happy she shed a tear or two, but the tears simply slipped out of her snorkel mask and joined the salty, abiding tears of the sea.