In a Perfect World

CHAPTER NINE

It seems your son has head lice,” the woman on the other end of the line said.

At first, no part of the sentence registered.

Head lice.

Your Son.

But when Jiselle leaned down to look at the Caller ID, she saw that the woman was phoning from Marquette Elementary, where she’d dropped Sam off a few hours before.

“You need to come and get him, I’m afraid. School policy.”

When Jiselle arrived at the school, Sam was sitting alone in a corner of the main office. He was scratching his head, pulling the fingers of both hands through the long strawberry-blond curls. The secretary looked up at Jiselle with what seemed to be skepticism or disapproval. “Are you the nanny?” she asked.

“No,” Jiselle said. “I’m the stepmother.”

The secretary raised her eyebrows.

“Here,” she said, sliding a piece of paper over to Jiselle gingerly, as if she, too, might be infested. “You need to sign him out.”

Jiselle signed her name Jiselle McKnight—and then remembered, scratched it out, and wrote Dorn over the last name. The secretary took the clipboard, looked at it, and then looked up at Jiselle again, as if trying to see through her, to read something on the other side of the room, something Jiselle was blocking her view of. She said then, “You know, no one knows, but my thinking is that this virus could just as easily be spread by lice as by anything else. If he were my son, I’d shave his head right away.”

Jiselle nodded at the woman and mouthed the words thank you, although no sound came out of her mouth.

In the parking lot, Sam slid onto the passenger seat of Mark’s Cherokee, slouched over the backpack in his lap, and said, “This sucks.”

Jiselle nodded at him, started up the car. “Yeah,” she said, and then, as an afterthought, quietly, “Sam, I think you’re not supposed to say ‘sucks.’” Wasn’t that one of the admonitions she’d heard Mark give him?

Sam nodded with the infinite weariness of a very old child.

They drove to the drugstore. The school receptionist had given Jiselle what looked to be a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a handout on head lice, and a list of the products you could buy to rid your child of them. Sam held that list in his hand beside Jiselle as she drove.

It had rained hard the night before, and the weather—still like early autumn although it was the first week of November—had the feel of the tropics, although the leaves had fallen from most of the trees. Humid, bright air lingered over everything. Blue puddles of rain and oil dotted the drugstore lot. After she parked and picked up her purse, Sam said, “I don’t want to go in.”

“No one can see them, Sam,” Jiselle said.

“Mrs. Hicks saw them.”

“No, she didn’t see them. She just—figured. Because you were itching.”

“No,” Sam said. “She saw them.”

Jiselle looked at Sam’s head.

In truth, she thought perhaps she could see something black, and maybe moving, in the silky part in the hair at the top of his head.

She said, “Okay. You can wait here if you want.”

Inside the drugstore, Jiselle scanned the shelves for a few minutes for something with the word lice on it, until, finding nothing, she had to ask the girl behind the counter, who called across the store to the pharmacist, “Where’s the head lice stuff?” She felt relieved that Sam had waited outside.

It took a minute or two, but the pharmacist came out from behind his glass cage and led Jiselle to the shelf for “pests and critters.” To get to it, they had to walk past the cardboard displays of flu “cures.” Life-size cut-outs of healthy-looking men and women holding bottles of Immune Master. Pink-cheeked children running across a green field overlaid with the words Dr. Springwell’s Secret!

They made their way through the leftover Halloween costumes and candy and decorations displays, and a variety of gags, such as battery-operated plastic hands that scooted across the floor, tarantulas and bats on strings. That year had been like no Halloween Jiselle ever remembered, festive and commercial beyond anything she would have imagined for what had, at one time, been the simplest, briefest of holidays.

Mark had been home Halloween weekend. He’d donned a top hat, Jiselle had worn one of his trench coats, with black sunglasses, and they’d walked door to door with Sam, who had dressed as a soldier. Red vest over a white T-shirt. White pants and black boots. A tall red hat with a blue feather in it. He’d carried a pillowcase. By the end of the night, it weighed forty pounds.

Not only were the children out trick-or-treating that night, but adults were, too. Alone and in crowds, with their children and without, wearing elaborate costumes—beggars, prostitutes, Abe Lincolns, Grim Reapers—they were swigging from flasks, passing the flasks to strangers, exactly the kind of germ-sharing they were constantly warned against. But they were happy, friendly. Raucous with laughter and polite at the same time. Some of the houses in town had absurdly elaborate Halloween displays. Enormous inflatable cartoon animals on their front lawns. Hundreds of them. Pranksters had taken to stabbing them with screwdrivers and box cutters. All over town, deflated decorations littered lawns. Their owners, playing along with the pranks, erected tombstones over them. R.I.P. SCOOBY-DOO. HERE LIES SNOOPY, STABBED THROUGH THE HEART BY A HEARTLESS KILLER.

There were light displays, too, and someone had strung naked baby dolls from telephone poles all along one street. Someone else had built a scaffold in the elementary school parking lot and hung an effigy of the president wearing a witch’s hat. One family had dangled hundreds of plastic bats from the birch tree in their front yard.

The regular codes of conduct were being pleasantly broken or ignored that night. People walked in the middle of the street, unwrapping candy and discarding the trash on sidewalks. Despite the public service announcements about not eating candy the origins of which you were uncertain, children and their parents were gobbling it down even as they collected it. Teenagers were handed cans of beer by homeowners. A few macabre revelers wore zombie masks and nurse uniforms in reference to the Phoenix flu. One tall, frightening boy sauntered alone, without bothering to collect candy, from door to door in a black cloak and a long-beaked bird mask. People smiled at him, and he nodded somberly back.

The pharmacist joked about the lice—“How big are these bugs? Can you fry ’em up for supper?”—but when Jiselle was apparently too flabbergasted to respond, he explained to her soberly what she needed to buy and what she needed to do, and she left the store with a small comb and a bottle of something called Nix, with a horrifying cartoon of a beast with eight legs on the label.

“You okay?” she asked Sam when she got back into the Cherokee with her paper bag.

He was staring straight ahead. “Look,” he said when she was behind the wheel, and he pointed to something in the parking lot.

She put on her sunglasses to see what it was through the glare on the windshield. She leaned forward, squinting.

There, in the middle of the nearly empty drugstore parking lot, was a small group of dark furred things. Moving but not scurrying. Milling.

Animals, clearly. But what kind?

She rubbed her eyes and leaned forward to see them better. There were eight or nine of them. Tails. And paws. Black.

“Listen,” Sam said.

Jiselle held her breath and listened, and even through the rolled-up windows she could hear them making a quiet high-pitched sound, like childish chuckling, or singing. She turned to Sam and asked, whispering the question to him, “What are those?”

“Rats,” he said.

“Oh my God,” Jiselle said, putting a hand to her mouth and seeing them, then, clearly. Their naked tails. Their sharp pink ears. Her heart sped up. She started up the engine of the SUV, and the rats, seeming to have heard it, turned their horrible faces in its direction but didn’t run off. They simply stared at Jiselle and Sam in the SUV. As she drove out of the parking lot, she was careful to make a wide loop around the rats, which did not leave their tight circle but seemed, instead, to stand their ground even more stubbornly, watching them drive away.

Back at home, Jiselle read the directions on the bottle of Nix, while Sam ate the grilled cheese sandwich she’d made for him. It was the one thing she’d mastered in the kitchen since moving into Mark’s house. The only thing. She’d gone so long in life without learning how to cook, it seemed that she had lost the capacity to learn. She’d burned omelets and served up pink-centered chicken breasts a few times before the girls took to cooking for themselves, Lean Cuisines and pot pies.

(“None of the other nannies could cook, either,” Sam said to her once, and then stammered an apology when he saw the look on her face.)

The few dinners she’d made that had actually succeeded—lasagna, seafood manicotti, chicken and dumplings, an enchilada casserole—had displeased the girls as much as the ruined ones. Too spicy. Or not spicy enough. Sara would say she was a vegetarian some days. Camilla would claim to have allergies she’d failed to mention until a certain meal was served. And although Sam was always willing to eat anything she made, all he really wanted was grilled cheese, and that, at least, Jiselle had finally figured out how to make exactly as he liked it.

Browned but only slightly. The cheese soft and warm but not gooey in the center.

She’d put the sandwich in front of him on his favorite plate—pale blue with a faded picture of Scooby-Doo in the center—and poured him a glass of milk. She unscrewed the top of the bottle of Nix and sniffed it, and realized she must have made a face when Sam said, “Is it super bad?”

“Well,” Jiselle said softly, “it’s not great.”

In truth, it smelled like tar and also formaldehyde.

“We’ll do this a little later, okay?” she offered.

“Okay,” Sam said, tearing parts of his sandwich off before eating them. Jiselle put the bottle of Nix on the table and folded her hands. Sam was going to hate this. This boy who squirmed away from his father when he simply tried to wipe some ketchup off his face—who, once, when Jiselle had suggested cleaning out his ears with a Q-tip, had looked at her with wide, horrified eyes and said, “Are you kidding?”

She watched him eat. She tried not to stare at his hair—all those beautiful curls, and what might be crawling among them—but she leaned a little to the left, considering the shape of his skull. He had beautiful cheekbones. A pleasing jaw and brow. She said, “Have you ever considered having your head shaved?”

Sam looked up brightly from his Scooby-Doo plate. “Wow,” he said. “You mean, like a total skinhead?” Sam knew about skinheads. They’d been the latest bad news. Burning down Chinese-owned businesses. Burning crosses on the lawns of Jews, African Americans, Muslims—anyone they chose to blame at the moment for the Phoenix flu.

“Well, yeah,” Jiselle said. “I guess. Like a skinhead—but nice.”

“That would be so cool,” Sam said, holding a piece of his grilled cheese aloft. His eyes were wide. In them, Jiselle could read the clock on the microwave behind them blinking 11:11, 11:11, 11:11.

Jiselle told herself she was not shaving Sam’s head because of the advice of the hysterical secretary at his school, but what could it hurt?

It was just hair. It would grow back.

So, after lunch, she stood behind him at the kitchen sink. First, she used scissors to cut the strawberry-blond curls off his head—soft, beautiful handfuls—and then she shook the satiny strands off her fingers into the trash can. They clung to her arms, her shirt, her jeans, and the static electricity actually crackled when she brushed them off in little jumping sparks. She wet what was left of his hair by leaning him forward over the sink, filling her hands with lukewarm water, splashing it over his hair, and then she patted shaving cream onto his head. Finally, she used Mark’s razor to carefully smooth the last of it from his scalp, and afterward they both went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror so Sam could see.

The skin on Sam’s scalp was pale, but it looked healthy—and without hair, it was possible to really see how handsome his features were. The nose was Mark’s, but the eyes were deep set and olive-brown. At his temples were subtle and delicate blue veins just under the surface. The head was a beautiful shape, and the back of his skull felt solid and satisfying in her palm. Touching it—the weird, beautiful, wonderful nakedness of it—Jiselle could imagine what it had been like for Mark, and for Joy, to bring him into the world for the first time, the way the skin of a newborn might really feel like the organ that skin is: breathing, alert, warm and cool at the same time. She had the impulse to kiss his head, but she had never actually kissed Sam before, except for the kind of air-blown kiss to the cheek her mother had always given her, and she had no idea how he’d react, so she settled for smoothing her fingertips along the beautiful ridge behind his ear, tickling him a little. He laughed. He moved his head around so he could inspect himself from both sides in the mirror, and asked, “How do I look?”

“You look perfect,” Jiselle said.

Because of head lice and the public school’s policy on them, Sam and Jiselle had the whole day free, and it wasn’t even noon.

A hike? Monopoly? A trip to town to the hobby shop?

Since the children had started school in September, Jiselle had mostly spent her afternoons alone in the house, moving through its rooms, feeling baffled as to how to begin to clean them up.

The dust she’d dispersed a few days before would have either settled again or redistributed itself with maddening genius. Sam’s plastic action figures would be everywhere. The girls’ shoes, jewelry, magazines were scattered across every flat surface, and Jiselle knew that if she picked those up and moved them there would be shrieking later—Where the hell’s my bandana? What did you do with my magazine?

And the floors.

The floors seemed magnetized—eternally capturing or creating long clouds of lint and hair held together with dust, which were spirited into corners when Jiselle turned her back. She would have just finished with the broom, turned around, and there those clouds would have gathered again.

On the phone from upstate New York, Annette said, “Get a fucking housekeeper. For God’s sake. You’re not his maid, Jiselle.”

But how, Jiselle thought, could she justify her days to herself or to anyone else if she had a housekeeper, if someone else were coming in to do the few things she had to do?

And what would she do while the housekeeper did these things? And what would she do with the time left over?

Sometimes the vacuum cleaner sounded like the dual engines of a jet starting up. Or Jiselle would hear, overhead, an actual jet—a distant needle in the sky—and she’d imagine her past still taking place up there. The metal cart. The drawer of ice. The faces looking up at her. The way turbulence or exhaustion, or simply being thirty-five thousand feet in the air, could turn even the most self-satisfied businessmen and women into needy children.

They were scared.

They did not have wings. They did not know how to fly. They were incredibly grateful for the calm smile, the foil packet of pretzels.

But of course there had been the other sort of passenger. Drunk on miniature bottles of Jack Daniel’s. Punching their flight attendant buttons for more. There had been the woman who’d said to Jiselle once, when she’d had to rouse her from a drooling sleep to put her tray table back up for landing, “I hope you burn in hell.” She didn’t miss that.

But, since quitting, the days could last so long. Sometimes Jiselle would sit down at the kitchen table and will the phone to ring. Call me, Mark. When it did ring, she’d jump, heart racing, but it usually wasn’t Mark. Once or twice, it was Brad Schmidt calling from next door, asking if Jiselle had heard this or that bad piece of news on the radio. Although their houses were separated by a long, tall hedge, Brad Schmidt seemed able to see through it, to know when Jiselle was sitting by the phone.

No, she would not have heard the news. She didn’t listen to the news. Why would she? Whales washing up on beaches. Chickens being burned alive, and some man who called himself Henry Knighton killing prostitutes in Seattle to “cleanse the earth.”

The news had to happen to her before she knew about it—and even then she wasn’t always sure what it was, like the afternoon when, while folding laundry in the bedroom, she heard a crash in the kitchen.

No one was home. Mark was flying; the children were at school. Jiselle stepped cautiously out of the bedroom and went to the kitchen, where she found that the cupboards had all swung open. A broken dish lay on the ceramic tiles. A coffee cup had rolled off the counter and into the sink. She stood with her hand to her chest for what must have been several minutes, feeling her heart beat hard, trying to get used to this new order of things, this unfamiliarity, the idea that the kitchen cupboards could open on their own and spill their contents. Then she heard Brad Schmidt shout, “Hey!” from the other side of his hedge, and she hurried to the kitchen window and looked out to see him standing in the side yard, his arms parting the branches, looking through them. “You know what that was, Mrs. Dorn?”

“No,” Jiselle called back, opening the window to hear his answer.

“That was an earthquake!”

Indeed, a rare Midwestern earthquake had shaken the whole region. Gently but surely, it had registered itself with a few framed photographs falling off walls, some cracks in a freeway overpass, that dish Jiselle had to pick up off the kitchen floor, and the cup out of the sink. Not terribly damaging, just surprising.

“This is just the beginning,” Brad Schmidt said to her later at the end of their driveways. “Tip of the iceberg. Tornadoes. Tsunamis. Hold your hat on. Ever read about the Black Death? It was all there. Before the plague did its worst work—the floods, the winds, the earthquakes. You wait.” There was no mistaking the tone in his voice for anything but excitement.

After considering his options for his free afternoon, Sam decided on a hike into the ravine behind the house.

He loved a hike. Loved the ravine. He and Jiselle had already taken a few hikes together since she’d moved in. There was a good trail, and Sam knew every inch of the ravine and liked to dispense his knowledge. Jiselle was the ingénue. Everything surprised her. Rabbits surprised her. Ferns surprised her. The occasional deer crashing away through the trees. Raccoons.

That afternoon, the pine trees pulsed with light under a blank white sky. Following the path into the ravine, Jiselle had the sense of entering a vast emptiness. Something abandoned. Many species of birds had migrated south. Animals were hibernating. The only sound was the watery, distant call of a pigeon. There was not a plane in the sky, as far as Jiselle could see. Not even a contrail fraying above them.

Sam walked ahead of her on the path. She’d made him wear one of his father’s fishing caps—a smashed khaki thing that was too big for him—because the exposed flesh on his freshly shaved head looked so pale. Now, trudging ahead of her in the cap, he looked comical, top-heavy, like some cartoon character, with his bony shoulders, his long gait, that hat.

She was looking from Sam’s back to the treetops, thinking what a perfect day it was (warm but not hot, the whole afternoon ahead of them) when it ran across the path only a few inches in front of her.

A warm-blooded darkness. A sneaky, wild, black furred thing, slipping between herself and Sam.

If she hadn’t frozen instinctively, Jiselle would have tripped over it. But after freezing, she jumped backward, screamed, and Sam turned just in time to see the rat scurry off, and Jiselle’s boot (which was all wrong for hiking, she realized at that moment, the heel of it too smooth and high) and the path slide out from under her. And suddenly she was slipping backward into the muck, arms windmilling ridiculously around her as she tried to regain her balance, not regaining it, propelling her instead farther and farther off the path until she finally fell with a thud, and then was simply sitting in the muck, on her butt, the dampness seeping in. She looked up.

The expression on Sam’s face was bright with shock. His eyes were wide, his mouth an exaggerated zero.

“Ji-selle?”

They stared at each other for a few seconds before they both started to laugh, laughing until they were gasping with it. Sam, holding his stomach, doubled over, finally managing to ask, “Are you okay?”

“Well,” Jiselle said, wiping the tears from her eyes, “my pride is a little wounded.”

She tried to push herself up, but her hands slid out from under her, and then, when she slid through the muck again, she just gave up and lay back laughing. What difference did it make now? She was covered by then with the stuff.

Sam reached down to offer her a hand, and Jiselle said, taking it, “This sucks,” as Sam pulled her to her feet, and her body emerging from the muck made a genuine sucking sound, and they started to laugh so hard again that Sam lost his grip on her hand, and she was lying on her back in the muck again.

“What were you thinking?”

She looked up. She hadn’t heard Mark pull in the driveway, although she’d known he was on his way home. She and Sam were sitting beside each other on the couch, reading from the Hans Christian Andersen collection, “The Happy Family,” in which a family of naive snails foolishly envy their cousins, the escargots. Mark stood in the center of the family room holding his bag in his hand as if he might not bother to set it down.

Jiselle tried to keep her voice from trembling as she said, “He had head lice, Mark.”

She had already told Mark this news over the phone. Camilla had gotten home from school, seen Sam’s shaved head, and gasped, “Does Dad know about this?” She let her mouth hang open, staring at her brother, and then looked at Jiselle.

Jiselle had flushed. Hot. Sweaty. Except for the most casual criticism (“Our mother used to squeeze the orange juice herself”), Camilla had never said anything before to Jiselle’s face that wasn’t full of sugary approval—Great! Thank you! How cool!—and Jiselle felt now, seeing her look of deep disapproval, that something shameful was being exposed. Dirty underwear, smelly feet. That shameful thing was, she realized, her own willful naiveté. Jiselle had known (how could she not?) that the girl hated her, had overheard what she had to say to her sister from behind the curtains of their rooms, but she had let herself pretend it was something it wasn’t, anyway, and that determined ignorance had made her even more detestable, she realized now as Camilla walked swiftly out of the room.

Sara had simply come in, looked at Sam, and turned around. Her shoulders, Jiselle thought, seemed to be shaking. With laughter?

A few minutes later Jiselle heard Camilla whispering from her bedroom on her cell phone, “She just totally shaved Sam’s head, Dad. She’s gone crazy.”

A few minutes after that, Mark called Jiselle on the house telephone, pretending he didn’t know. He started by telling Jiselle that he was in an airport lounge in Newfoundland. That there was so much wind that a corporate jet had been tipped over on the runway. He asked her how she was, how the kids were, how the weather was, and finally she couldn’t stand it anymore and just blurted out, “I shaved Sam’s head because he had head lice.”

There was a sigh, and then a clearing of the throat, and then, “You’re kidding, right? Jiselle? Tell me you’re kidding?”

“No,” Jiselle said, and even to herself, it sounded like pleading. “He would have hated the shampoo.”

She did not, and never would, tell Mark about the secretary, and what she’d said. If he were my son, I’d shave his head. She knew what Mark would say about that—about superstition, about hysteria, about the flu.

He said, sounding weary, “I guess, Jiselle, we’ll have to discuss this when I get home.”

Now, still holding his black leather bag, Mark walked over to Sam, took his son’s chin in his palm, moved his head around, inspecting, and then he looked over at Jiselle, and said, “There are ways to get rid of head lice without shaving the kid’s head, Jiselle. Jesus Christ.” He shook his own head. “Surely,” he said, “you must have thought…” He trailed off.

“Thought what?” Jiselle asked, but no sooner had the words come out of her mouth than she realized, suddenly, clearly, what.

Joy.

Her curls.

Those cascades of strawberry-blond ringlets ribboned with satin on her wedding day. What that hair must have looked like beside Mark, stretching from her pillow to his in the mornings. The smell of it after she’d washed it. Rain. There was a rain barrel in the backyard, and Camilla had pointed it out one day and said, “Our mother used to wash her hair with rainwater.”

Maybe she used to let the girls brush it. Like handmaidens. In the evenings. Sitting at the little vanity table. The sparks flying off the brush into the air. Maybe Mark used to gather it in his hands and kiss it. Maybe Sam, still a baby, would have taken it in his cereal-sticky fists and shoved it into his mouth.

Oh my God, Jiselle thought, full of understanding:

Sam’s hair had belonged to Joy.

She could feel her lips quivering. She couldn’t speak.

Mark exhaled.

“Look,” he said, seeing the expression on her face. “It’s okay. It’s okay, Jiselle. You just…didn’t think. What’s done is done. It’s just hair. It’ll grow back.” He shrugged, but then he turned away. It was the first time he’d ever come home without taking her in his arms.

“Daddy!” Camilla called then from her bedroom, dancing out from under the cloth in the doorway. She threw her arms around her father. He lifted her up off her feet, swung her around. “How’s my princess?” he asked.

Jiselle watched them from the couch. The light from the sliding glass doors shone on Camilla’s golden hair, and a kind of pure white light flashed from it. Her cheeks were flushed. The little pearl studs in her ears looked damp, iridescent, freshly plucked from the sea.

“It was my idea!” Sam shouted then, loudly.

Jiselle looked down at him, startled, and Sam pressed his eyebrows together, elbowed her sharply.

Mark turned to look at him, and then at Jiselle. How was it that the tears sprang up so instantly, so unbidden, into her eyes, as if they’d been there all along, waiting?

“Sweetheart,” Mark said to Jiselle. “I’m sorry. I know you only did what you thought was best.”

Camilla stepped away, disappeared back into her room, as Mark came over to Jiselle on the couch and kissed the top of her head, as if she were one of the children. Still one of his children, if not his favorite.

“But,” he said softly, “it was a bit thoughtless.”

Over his shoulder, Jiselle saw Sara, who’d been absent for the whole homecoming scene between Camilla and Mark, standing in the shadows of the hallway, looking back at Jiselle, a half-smile on her face.

CHAPTER TEN

Jiselle suggested to Mark that, before the holiday season started, maybe they should all go down to Florida so that she could meet his mother.

“Jesus,” he’d said. He was lying on the couch reading a magazine called Aviation Today. He put the magazine down, open on his chest, and said, “Why would you want to do that?”

“Because she’s your mother?” Jiselle offered.

Sara in her bedroom had overheard them and shouted out, “She’s my grandmother, and I’ve never met her.”

Jiselle, blinking, looked down at Mark on the couch. He shrugged and said, “She’s a drunk, Jiselle. Completely out of her mind. She lives in a trailer with ten cats and a pet alligator. I would never subject you or my children to her.”

He was wearing a black T-shirt. His uniform was laid out on the bed. He was leaving for the West Coast in five hours.

“So—”

Jiselle sank into the plaid chair across from him, about to say it—So, the children did not have a grandmother who could have taken care of them?—when Mark stood. He said, “As soon as we have a chance, I’ll take you somewhere wonderful, sweetheart,” and knelt down and held her face like a precious object in his hands.

For the three days he was gone, Jiselle rehearsed in her mind what she would say when he returned:

So, there never was a grandmother?

So, you always knew you wanted me to take care of the children?

So, would you have married me if there had been no children?

But Mark was delayed for twenty-four hours, his plane grounded at the gate at LAX. One of the ticket-holding passengers, it seemed, was exhibiting symptoms of the Phoenix flu, according to an airline employee at the kiosk where he’d checked in—coughing, broken blood vessels on his cheeks, a watery-bloody discharge from the eyes.

But the passenger was a lawyer, traveling with his wife, who was also a lawyer. He said he had pinkeye, a severe case, and that without evidence to the contrary it was illegal, discriminatory, to refuse to let him on the plane.

Mark called Jiselle off and on from the airline lounge during the first six hours of the stand-off, but then his cell phone died. The whole thing went on for hours before the security guards ushered the passenger out of the airport and into a waiting police van and drove him away. By then, the flight crew had been dismissed, and Mark called her from the hotel. “I miss you, sweetheart,” he said. “All I want is to hold you in my arms tonight. To have to wait until tomorrow seems like torture.”

By the time he finally got home again and stepped through the door in the dark, a shadow of beard on his jaw, a bouquet of roses in one hand and his leather satchel in the other, Jiselle had forgotten what she’d planned to say about his mother, or why, and in the morning he had to leave again.

“Well, things will get better,” Annette said over the phone when Jiselle told her about the haircut and also about Sara’s diary.

“Don’t read the diary if you don’t want to know what she thinks of you,” Annette went on. “Or, I guess you could say, would you really not know what she thinks of you if you quit reading the diary?”

“She leaves it out,” Jiselle said, “like I’m supposed to read it. She leaves it open.”

In fact, the day after their bedroom door was installed, Sara had left the diary on Mark’s and Jiselle’s bed.

She thinks she can ruin everything. She thinks she can erase my mother. She can’t!!!!

“Mark? Can we install a door?” Jiselle had asked him in a whisper one night after they made love in such total silence and darkness that Jiselle had felt briefly bodiless, and disoriented, under him.

“Well.” Mark hesitated at first, and then said, “Sure. I guess.”

Jiselle had suspected that the girls might not like it, but she’d had no idea how angry it would make them until they came home and stood in front of it—Camilla with a hand covering her mouth, and Sara with her fists balled at her waist. “Is this so you guys can make noises while you fuck?” she’d shouted at the door.

“Well,” Mark had said later to Jiselle. “It’ll take them a while to get used to it. They liked the curtains. Their mother put those up.”

Why? Jiselle had wondered. Admittedly, she, too, had liked the curtains when she’d first seen them. Those flimsy pieces of silk draped in the doorways had seemed like a sweet, strange, new kind of privacy—a privacy made out of fabric woven in Asia, some land where the air hung too heavy, was too precious to restrain with anything as cumbersome as a door.

But she soon realized that you could not be an American newlywed in a small house full of children without a bedroom door.

But neither could you be an adolescent girl making the kind of final, smashing accusation that the slamming of a door accomplished until you actually had one. Even if it was not the door to your own bedroom.

“Nothing’s perfect,” Annette said, and then laughed.

The holiday season began with a blizzard the day before Thanksgiving—but Mark, stranded in Minneapolis, rented a car and was home before Jiselle had put the turkey on the table.

Her first turkey. Ever. She’d spent the whole morning peeking in at it. Covered in its crinkled tinfoil, it made sizzling sounds, but it was deathly pale, and every time she saw it again through the glass in the oven door, she felt her heart sink—literally felt it sink, as if her torso were filled with water and her heart were a sodden sponge. Sinking. What was in that oven did not look like the turkey of her fantasies, which would have been browning, plumping with juices, somehow generating its own golden gravy in the roaster.

This turkey looked, instead, like a very large, very dead, bird. It had cost eighty-seven dollars because of the turkey shortage. So many had been killed (senselessly, it was said, because they were not carriers of Yersinia pestis, but killed nonetheless), and no one had anticipated that Americans would stick so stubbornly to their traditions, that millions more turkeys would be demanded than would be available, and that the price of a turkey, when one could be found, would be whatever a person was willing to pay.

Jiselle’s mother had gone to visit a sister in Albuquerque for the holiday. She’d done it, Jiselle knew, to avoid the new arrangements. It was the first Thanksgiving since her parents’ divorce that she and her mother had not gone to Duke’s Palace Inn together, except for one time when Jiselle had been flying. But when Jiselle invited her to the house for Thanksgiving dinner, her mother was utterly silent for several long seconds on the other end of the phone before she said, “No. Thank you. I’m going to New Mexico.”

Right beside her relief, Jiselle had felt a surge of panic. She had, she realized, no idea how to make a Thanksgiving dinner, and although her mother hadn’t made one herself in decades, surely she knew more about it than Jiselle.

She did her best. She read an article in a magazine suggesting she put sage and walnuts in the dressing. So she did. She boiled cranberries for cranberry sauce according to the directions on the plastic package of cranberries, and marveled at the way the skins of the berries split and spilled their deep burgundy syrup into the saucepan. Who, she wondered, had first thought to do that? They were such tough little berries, and so sour. Who would have guessed that sugar and boiling would change them so completely? Jiselle tried to picture the inventor of cranberry sauce—some woman not unlike Jiselle but wearing a pilgrim’s black dress and white apron, hair pulled back in a bun, peering into a pot with grim determination.

Jiselle was just pulling the turkey out of the oven when Mark stepped in the front door. His hair and the shoulders of his black leather pilot’s jacket were dusted with snowflakes, and he was holding a bouquet of orange tiger lilies.

“Happy Thanksgiving!” he said.

He didn’t even take the jacket off before standing at the head of the table and carving the turkey, which was somehow miraculously browned on the outside, steamily moist as he sliced into it. Outside, the snow continued to fall, and except that Sara was wearing black lipstick and a ripped T-shirt, and Camilla had said she wasn’t hungry and so was lying on the couch in the other room watching MTV, they were, Jiselle thought, a kind of Norman Rockwell painting—a healthy American family gathered around the Thanksgiving table.

The Christmas season came fast on the heels of Thanksgiving, faster than Jiselle ever remembered it coming. For weeks the newscasters had been announcing that there had never been such a lavish holiday season. Money was being thrown to the wind, credit cards maxed out. Shelves were being emptied. Some said the cause was a renewed confidence in the economy. Others said it was fear of a coming depression, or a fatalism brought on by the flu, or the anticipation of the end of the war or the start of a new one. One historian Jiselle heard interviewed on NPR said, in a voice so low it sounded like the source of gravity itself, that a return to traditions often preceded the complete collapse of a culture.

Jiselle had driven into St. Sophia one Saturday afternoon. It was a week until Christmas, and she needed to mail something to her mother, because her mother again had made other plans. This time she was going to visit an old high school friend in Maine. Jiselle decided to buy her a bracelet at the local jewelry store and FedEx it to her.

She parked Mark’s Cherokee outside the store, and was surprised to see how many shoppers were strolling through St. Sophia’s tiny downtown. They wore expensive parkas and sunglasses and carried shopping bags. A fluffy snow, looking like feathers, was falling from a few marble-gray clouds in a blue sky. The air was so still that the flakes seemed to hang, weightless with patience, before drifting down in long pendulum arcs through the air, resting on the branches of the trees and the ground, sometimes surging upward again before settling. She looked up at the sky, where she thought she could see, up near the clouds, a few white balloons traveling overhead. But they were too far away to be sure. She saw them so often now that she might have been imagining them.

Jiselle had to wind her way carefully down the sidewalk crowded with shoppers. Surely they were tourists from Chicago (visitors who wanted to be part of an old-fashioned small-town Christmas scene for a few hours on a Saturday) because there were more people downtown today than there were houses in St. Sophia.

And the town did look like the quaintest of villages in the snow that afternoon. Garlands hung from the brick façades of the stores. Tinsel and lights were strung in the trees, swaying between the street signs. When Jiselle reached the jewelry store, she was surprised to find a real reindeer tied by a red velvet ribbon to a lamppost outside. Beside the reindeer stood an old-fashioned Santa—thin, wearing a maroon robe and hood—with an antique sleigh. Children had crowded around, petting the reindeer, which raised and lowered its head with such dignity it seemed as if it might address the crowd: I’m honored to be here with you today…. A garland of silver beads and cranberries was strung over its antlers and draped down its shaggy flanks, and a red velvet blanket covered its back.

Jiselle stopped, too, and gazed at the strange sight. The reindeer’s antlers looked so heavy she wondered how he held his head aloft. She imagined what it might be like to feel the first stirring of those bones growing out of your skull—the ache, the itching, the excitement. And this St. Nicholas, Jiselle could tell, had a real beard—long, gray, and authentic. His eyes were startlingly blue. He looked Old World and serious, nothing like the mall Santa Clauses of Jiselle’s childhood, who’d been the kind of Santas you might glimpse later in their red felt costumes smoking cigarettes in the parking lot.

No, it seemed impossible to her that they’d ever been fooled by those, but they had. Somehow they’d managed to believe that each one of those costumed men was Santa despite the impossibility—the identical red felt and plastic and the tin buckles of their belts. As children, they’d whispered their secrets to him. They were sure he’d grant their wishes, even when he didn’t.

The jewelry store was crowded. Customers in their parkas elbowed one another politely out of the way. A teenage girl went from glass case to glass case with a bottle of Windex and a paper towel wiping off fingerprints. Under the glass counters, row upon row of diamond rings flickered with their tiny, cold fires. Strand after strand of gold was laid out on a black velvet tray. Loose gems were scattered around in the display case—rubies and emeralds and sapphires. Some perfect pearls glowed in a half-shell.

Jiselle picked out a slim, bright silver bracelet for her mother. She held it against the underside of her own wrist to look at it. It was like a silver vein traced against the skin there. A man and his wife looked at it, too, waiting, it seemed, for Jiselle to put it down.

“Are you buying that?” the woman asked impatiently. “If you’re not buying that, I’d like it.”

Jiselle ignored them, signaled the woman at the cash register, and said, “I’ll take this one,” holding it up. The couple huffed and walked over to another display case.

The saleswoman wrapped the bracelet for Jiselle in pale purple tissue paper, tying it with a scarlet ribbon. By the time Jiselle was back on Main Street, outside Starbucks, St. Nicholas and his gathering of children were gone. A dwarf in a green velvet elf costume, bells jingling on his cap, was sweeping the reindeer’s droppings into a paper bag.

Christmas morning, Sam was up first. At daybreak, he came to Mark’s and Jiselle’s door and knocked until they got out of bed. “Presents!” he shouted. “Now!” When he was certain that Jiselle and Mark were up, he went into his sisters’ rooms, pulling them by their arms, groaning, yawning, into the living room.

While Jiselle went to the kitchen and made coffee, Mark started a fire in the fireplace, and the smell of the Christmas tree mixed with the coffee and the sulfur smells of the fire, which roared up quickly—a few black ashy stars from the newspaper drifting among the dancing flames.

Sam was wearing his thermal underwear. Camilla, a long white gown with lace at the sleeves. Mark had his black velvet robe pulled around him, socks on with his plaid slippers.

Sara wore a black slip. Dime-store satin. She perched herself on the arm of the couch, and from where Jiselle sat on the floor, she could see that Sara was again wearing that pair of panties trimmed in black lace that Jiselle had bought for herself in Paris.

“I have to warn you,” Mark had said after Thanksgiving. “Christmas. It was Joy’s favorite holiday. She was very elaborate about Christmas. As you can imagine, for the children, well, it can be a difficult day. For the girls, at least. Sam was so young. I’m sure he doesn’t even remember those years, but…”

Jiselle didn’t speak as he shared this information with her, but later she tried to get more details. What had Joy done for Christmas? How had she decorated? What did she cook? But Mark dismissed the questions, saying, “Joy’s been gone a long time by now, Jiselle. It would be worse if you tried to…” He didn’t have to say it: Be Joy. Behind him Jiselle could hear the kitchen clock ticking like a little hidden bomb.

But if the children were thinking of their mother on Christmas Eve, they didn’t show it. Bobby Temple came over and watched TV with Camilla, and Sara listened to her iPod, sprawled on the family room rug. Sam helped Jiselle frost cookies, and they ate together what was left of the frosting, sitting at the kitchen table with spoons and bowls until Jiselle’s teeth ached with the sugar and Sam’s face and hands were sticky with it. Mark arrived, like Santa Claus, in the middle of the night. He slipped into bed beside Jiselle, smelling of snow and sky. She fell back to sleep in his arms, and then Sam was pounding on the door, and it was Christmas morning, and they were unwrapping presents.

For Jiselle, there was a clay mug from Sam with her initials drawn into it. It had been a class art project. It was a beautiful, solid, turquoise mug, the kind of thing you might find in a museum. Circa 800 BCE. Jiselle held it up for everyone else to see and said, “I love this, Sam!”

She did.

From Camilla, a paperweight with a daisy captured—floating, immortalized—at the center of the heavy globe. As Jiselle looked at it, Camilla said, “You said they were your favorite flower,” smiling.

Jiselle didn’t remember saying that daisies were her favorite—truly, roses were—but she was touched. “Thank you,” she said, “so much,” holding the satisfying weight of it in her palm.

From Mark she received a pair of jade earrings from China—exquisite, breathtaking, something an empress might wear, and she said, “Oh my,” holding them up to her earlobes. “Oh. Mark.”

“Do you like them?”

“Of course!”

And then there were the gifts for the children.

Mark had left the buying of their presents to Jiselle. (“Oh, you know what kids like better than I do,” he’d said. “It’ll be easier for you. I’ll just pick up a few things at the airport if you don’t mind doing the rest.”)

Sam had been easy. He’d happily made a very specific list for Jiselle, all the details, down to the manufacturer of the plastic toys he longed for. On Christmas morning, he ripped the boxes open, exclaiming over each one, shouting out the names, the model numbers.

The girls, however, had not been easy.

Jiselle had shopped for them for weeks, and every time she picked up a sweater, a book, a board game, she imagined the look of exasperation on Sara’s face, or the cool acceptance on Camilla’s. In the end, she decided to shop by material. Cashmere. Linen. Pure silk. How, she’d hoped, could anything made of the right material be scorned?

But the girls’ reactions to Jiselle’s presents were perfunctory. “Thanks,” they said, and then exclaimed brightly over the perfume their father had picked up for them at the Duty Free shop the day before. But that little injustice, Jiselle felt, was to be expected. She herself remembered the thrill of the small afterthoughts her father would sometimes pick up a few days before a holiday—the way the exotic wrapping paper, no doubt chosen for him by a woman at the store, outshone her mother’s dependable efforts. She could still smell the sweet watery little-girl’s perfume he’d bought for her the Christmas she was sixteen, and the way the soft bristles of the vanity brush had felt in her long hair when she pulled them through it, and the weightless feel of the matching gilt-handled mirror in her hand—although she remembered, too, that the gold of it had flecked off on her hands within a few weeks. Still, it had been her favorite gift, and it did not matter that her mother had given her a stereo, the best one at the store.

“This is for you,” Sara said after everything else had been opened. She handed Jiselle a small box.

It was the size of a ring box or a box for a pendant. Beautifully wrapped, in silver. A large white bow. A little glittery tag hanging from it. For: Mommy. From: Sara.

“What is it?” Mark asked. He was sitting on the couch pulling up the wool socks Camilla had knitted for him. Jiselle was still on the floor, her flannel nightgown spread out around her.

The tape along the wrapping seams was gummy. She had to shake it off her thumb and forefinger. She took off the white ribbon, peeled away the silver paper, and opened the box.

Sam leaned over to look. He said, “Huh?”

“Well?” Mark asked, looking up from his socks. “What is it?”

Sara started to laugh then. A high, cackling laugh at first, and then a deep wild hiccupping. She slid off the arm of the sofa and onto the floor, holding her stomach with one hand, covering her face with the other, laughing and gasping as Mark and Camilla watched. Gently, Camilla kicked her sister with the toe of her slipper and said, “So what is it, idiot?”

Jiselle stood up fast, snapped the lid of the box shut. She tried to swallow, but her mouth had gone so dry she had nothing to force down her throat.

“What?” Mark asked, and then looked down at Sara, writhing on the floor. She was still laughing, but it was silent laughter now. Her mouth was open. Jiselle could see her tonsils. The wet red entrance to a cave. “What’s up here, Jiselle?” Mark asked, but Jiselle still could not speak and could not take her eyes off Sara.

“Sam?” Mark asked then. “What’s going on here, Sam? What was in the box?”

Sam shrugged. He cleared his throat. He said, “It looked like a big booger to me.”

Jiselle walked quickly out of the room then, took the box to the kitchen, and tossed it into the trash under the sink. She stood, holding tightly to the edge of the sink for a minute or two, and then she started to run water into it, rinsing the dishes they’d left there the night before. A high ringing started in her ears, as if she were at the end of a long metal tunnel and someone outside of it was pounding on it with a metal spoon.

“Honey?” Mark said, coming up behind her. “Honey?” he said again, burrowing his face in her hair. “Oh, Jiselle. Jiselle. I’m sorry.”

Jiselle said nothing. She continued to rinse the dishes. After a few seconds, she had to break free of his embrace to put a rinsed dish—Sam’s Scooby-Doo plate—into the dishwasher.

“Sweetheart,” Mark said into her hair, and then into her neck. “Sweetheart, you know Sara’s just a mixed-up kid. She’ll be so ashamed of herself in a few days. But this is a tough time for her. Having a stepmother. Christmas. All the adjustments.”

Jiselle continued to rinse dishes.

Camilla’s ice-cream bowl. Sara’s orange juice glass. Then she let a few pieces of silverware slip out of her hand, clatter into the sink, and let her hands rest at her sides. She drew a trembling breath. She opened her mouth but closed it again. She cleared her throat. Finally, with her back to Mark, she was able to say, in a tone she wanted to snatch back even as it traveled out of her into the air above the sink, “Of course, it’s so easy for me.”

“Oh,” Mark said. “Oh, of course. I know, my darling. My darlingest. Of course. Of course! It’s hardest of all for you.”

Jiselle swallowed but could say nothing more, and Mark said nothing but kept his head on her shoulder as she began to rinse dishes again, moving with her as she went from the sink to the dishwasher, keeping his arms around her waist. He had to shuffle to stay attached to her, and it was ridiculous, comical. On the way back from the dishwasher, holding her waist as she moved in front of him, he stumbled, and when Jiselle started to laugh, reluctantly, he whirled her around, pulled her to him. She let go against him then, kissing, and being kissed, and laughing and shedding a few hot tears at the same time, while outside, the actual sound of sleigh bells seemed to jangle somewhere close by.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

One morning, Camilla leaned over the bowl in which Sam’s sea monkeys were swimming in languid, microscopic circles for the first, and only, week of their lives, and stated, both casually and profoundly, “They’re dead.”

It was the second week of January, and the sky was deep purple now every day. Low clouds, looking like steel wool, skimmed over the tops of the trees in the ravine. There was no snow on the ground, but the wind blew it in hard little flakes sideways past the windows. Jiselle, eating Cheerios at the kitchen table, looked up when Camilla spoke.

“No,” she said. “They’re not dead. They’re just—”

“Yeah, they are,” Camilla said. “They’re dead.”

Jiselle stood up from her Cheerios and walked toward the counter, still shaking her head.

No.

Only an hour had passed since Sam had so carefully changed the water, taking a clean bowl from the cupboard, rolling up his sleeves, gently tipping the dirty water into the bowl. Jiselle watched as he did it. He bit his lip. He rinsed out the dish—the green scum swirling around in the sink before it disappeared—and tested the water from the faucet with the tips of his fingers, and then filled the plastic dish, and then scooped the sea monkeys out of the dirty water with a teaspoon, and put them in the fresh dish.

She went to it. Sam stepped into the kitchen then. He’d overheard. He walked straight to the dish, and he and Jiselle both looked down.

“Oh, Sam,” Jiselle said, rubbing his back in tiny, nervous circles.

“Camilla’s right,” he said. “They’re dead. The change in water temperature killed them.”

“Oh,” Jiselle said. “It’s—”

“It’s my fault,” he said. He shrugged.

“No!” Jiselle said.

But Sam walked out of the kitchen to the living room, and Jiselle listened to his footsteps cross the wood floors to his room.

“Jesus,” Camilla said. “They were just sea monkeys.”

When Mark was gone for more than a few nights in a row, Jiselle began to pine. She had not, she realized, really known before what that word meant or the feeling of it—to long for something or someone to the point of physical suffering. She would close the door to their bedroom and lock it behind her, and go to his closet, where she would gather up his uniforms in her arms and breathe them in. The blood around her heart seemed to ache. She would close her eyes, and sometimes she had to get on her knees—doubled over with a pain in her stomach, as though she had been shot with a poisoned arrow.

It was even worse during the day, when the children were at school, and the hours seemed to hover around her like some sort of exquisitely heavy gown. When they were home, the girls barely spoke to her, but even their angry outbursts at each other were a distraction from the longing. Sara’s screaming music behind the curtain in the doorway of her room filled the house with a kind of ear-splitting clutter that was mind-numbing and, therefore, somehow comforting. Camilla’s boyfriend, Bobby, would come over sometimes, and if he wasn’t on the couch in front of the TV with Camilla, he might get on the floor with Sam, and the two of them would move action figures across the rug, sputtering out artillery noises.

There was Sam.

Sometimes Jiselle wasn’t sure if he was suggesting Monopoly or a walk in the ravine or a card game for his sake or for hers, but she never turned him down. Why would she? What else did she have to do? It had taken her these months in St. Sophia to learn that, despite the brick and clapboard storefronts and the shady streets of the town, no one really lived in St. Sophia. They slept there, and they dropped their children off at schools there before heading for the freeway ramps. People from the cities and suburbs nearby drove in for quaint small-town lunches and antiquing on the weekends, but Jiselle was, she realized, never going to make friends in St. Sophia. There would be no reading groups or knitting circles. She’d be invited to no tea parties. There was no one in the park or at the library during the day, and the only people she’d met so far had been the Schmidts, next door, and Camilla’s boyfriend’s parents, Paul and Tara Temple. Still, even in her loneliest hours, she could barely tolerate the television, and the radio was full of music she didn’t like, or paranoid ranting:

“Dr. Springwell has been broadcasting his show from the Canary Islands for the last three months,” the woman on the radio said. “That’s Dr. Springwell’s secret!”

Laughter followed from a small studio audience.

That morning they’d announced the resignation of the secretary of state, the suspension of interstate Amtrak service, the death of a basketball star, the president’s plans for military action against the Alliance of Nations embargo.

“We cannot allow our nation to be destroyed during this brief troubled period. We have been a friend to the nations that would turn their backs on us now, and we must now demand their friendship in return.”

But there were no more white balloons, and the federal government had ordered all flags to be flown at full mast. No more doomsday thinking. This had been a strategy that had helped the country survive two world wars—the careful manipulation of information to the public and the suppression of pessimism.

“These frauds,” the woman on the radio, sounding happy and full of excited energy, said about Dr. Springwell and his ilk, “should be executed when this is over and they try to get back into this country.”

One Friday afternoon, when Mark was flying to Australia, and then to Hawaii, and would not be back until Monday, Jiselle, on her knees in his closet, began to feel around on the bottom of it. If she was looking for something, she didn’t realize it, until she came upon a shoebox in the back, beyond his tennis shoes and snow boots and a pair of shower shoes she’d had no idea he owned.

She pulled out the box, brought it to the bed, and opened it.

On top were a dozen photographs. Mostly, they were of Joy. Jiselle recognized the curls, the tilt of her head, the slightly crooked smile. But there were others. A woman with a short blond bob standing with a surfboard at the end of a jetty. Another with brown tresses pulled back behind her head; this one had an arm thrown around a much younger Camilla, who wasn’t smiling. Another one Jiselle recognized as the nanny who’d come to the house to retrieve a pair of flip-flops she’d left on the deck. Jiselle had come out of the bedroom to be introduced to her but could not fail to recognize the girl’s coldness as anything but hostility. Mark hadn’t been home, and Sara was the one who handed over the flip-flops with a smug smile. “See ya!” she said, closing the door on the girl.

Jiselle had assumed the hostility was because the nanny had been displaced from her job by Jiselle’s marriage to Mark. But, looking at this photograph, Jiselle understood what she had found. The girl, lounging on the couch in the family room—her straight brown hair hanging down over her shoulders in a glossy cascade—had a smile of such radiant pleasure on her face as she stared into the camera that there was no mistaking what this box contained. And it didn’t surprise Jiselle to find, under that photograph, one of herself in a black silk blouse, in Copenhagen, outside the Round Tower.

Jiselle’s hands were trembling, and coolly damp—but why? If Mark had searched through her own things back at her old house, he could have found a similar stash of old images of boys and men Jiselle had been with. There was a Polaroid, she knew, of Stephen in her bathtub, with his wet hair streaming down his face. Aaron, just waking up in her bed. She could hardly complain that Mark had photographs of old girlfriends, or that he had old girlfriends. Could she?

She was about to close the box when she decided to look at the newspaper clipping at the bottom of it. It was yellowed and softened, and she opened it carefully. It was an account from the St. Sophia Gazette of Joy’s “untimely death.”

Jiselle folded the clipping up again carefully along the original creases, put it back in the shoebox, with the photographs on top of it, and put the box on the floor in the back of the closet where she’d found it.

That afternoon, Jiselle waited until she saw Brad Schmidt at the end of his driveway before she went, herself, to retrieve the empty trash can. “Hello!” she called out to him. He turned and waited for her to reach him.

He wanted, as always, to talk about the flu: “Don’t kid yourself that the rats don’t have it. And the mice. Protect yourselves.”

Jiselle nodded. She said, “Well, we’re doing what we can.”

“What kind of traps do you have?” he asked.

“Live traps.”

Brad Schmidt shook his head, as though at very bad news or at foolishness so vast there could be no other response.

The exterminator thought it might be the unusually mild winter, the early spring and summer weather, that was causing all the trouble with the rodents—a complaint across the Midwest and the eastern states. By the last week of May, you couldn’t cross a room without having a mouse dash in front of you. Every morning, when Jiselle came into the kitchen for her first cup of coffee, something small and dark and alive would flee from her. She’d scream—a high, unfamiliar yelp that seemed to come straight out of her subconscious—heart pounding, all her senses jolted to high alert.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The exterminator looked at Jiselle.

“Live traps?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“Go ahead,” Brad Schmidt said.

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

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

“Did she—how did it happen?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

There.

There was nothing there.

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

But would knowing have changed anything?

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

Impossible.

There was some mistake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What choice did she have?

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

She looked down at her feet and then behind her.

No one.

Nothing.

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