In a Perfect World

CHAPTER TWELVE

The night before Valentine’s Day, Jiselle took the children, for the second time, to meet her mother for dinner at Duke’s Palace Inn. Mark was in Munich, but he was scheduled to be home in time to take Jiselle out for a romantic Valentine’s dinner the next night. They had reservations at the Chop House. She’d seen, in his sock drawer, a small package wrapped in red tissue with her name on it. For him she’d bought cuff links—gold, simple squares with his initials.

An ice storm was predicted for the evening, but by the time Jiselle left with the children for downtown Chicago, the sky, although dense with dark blue clouds, was spitting out only a bit of thin snow. It glazed the windshield of the Cherokee, glistened in the bare branches of the trees, shone palely in the light of the early moon, but it melted by the time it hit the pavement.

Sara wore a plaid skirt, like a Catholic schoolgirl, except that the skirt was so short it barely covered her panties. White knee socks. There was a black garter around her right thigh. Jiselle had asked her to wear something “appropriate” when she’d come upon her lounging on the couch in a T-shirt that read, Fuck You, Justin Timberlake, but when she came out of her room in the plaid skirt, her white blouse unbuttoned down to the snap at the front of her black bra, Jiselle had not had the energy to ask her to change. There was, she felt certain, nothing Sara would find to wear that would not horrify her mother, but if Sara did not come along to dinner at all, her mother would note the absence, taking it as proof of Jiselle’s impossibly foolish choice, marrying a man with such a daughter.

“You can wear my shoes,” Jiselle had said, looking at Sara’s bare feet.

Sara had rolled her eyes but didn’t object when Jiselle brought out the beautiful shoes she’d bought in Madrid. They slid perfectly onto Sara’s feet. Even Sara looked down at the shoes in appreciation.

They’d driven about forty miles from the house and were still ten miles from their freeway exit to downtown when Camilla, in the passenger seat beside Jiselle, pointed out how dark it was, except for the moon’s white light bleeding between cracks in the clouds. “Why aren’t the streetlights on?” she asked.

Jiselle leaned forward to scan the distance beyond her windshield.

Yes. The streetlights were completely dark against an ever-darkening sky. The signs that usually lit up the billboards were off. The only light besides the shredded bits of moon overhead came from the headlights streaming toward them on the other side of the freeway.

Why?

Then Jiselle noted not only the absence of streetlights but also the absence of traffic headed into the city. It was all headed out.

“Weird,” Jiselle said, more to herself than to Camilla.

She kept driving until they reached their exit, ten miles later, and pulled off the freeway to find that the city streets were nearly empty. No pedestrians. All the store and restaurant windows were dark.

Jiselle was just slowing down outside Duke’s Palace Inn, noting the unlit sign outside, when her cell phone rang. The Caller ID read, MOTHER.

“Don’t tell me you drove all the way into the city. For God’s sake, Jiselle, don’t you listen to the radio?”

No, she didn’t. It was impossible, in one car with Camilla, Sam, and Sara, to find a station, or even a CD, they could agree on. They always rode in silence.

“No,” Jiselle said. “I’m here.”

“Well, go home, and hope your power’s on. I’m on my way back. Unlike you, I heard it on the radio and turned around.”

“Oh,” Jiselle said. “Should I—?”

“You should go home,” her mother said. “All the sane people are on their way home. Nothing will be open in the city.”

Jiselle said goodbye then, and Happy Valentine’s Day, and that she would call in the morning—by which time the power would be back on, surely, and she and her mother would, perhaps, make plans to meet somewhere for lunch. She flipped her phone closed, cleared her throat. “Okay, kids,” she said, looking first to Camilla, who’d rested her head with her eyes closed against the fogged window, and then into the backseat, where Sam was twiddling his thumbs across his Game Boy, utterly absorbed. Sara was scowling. “Power outage,” Jiselle said. “I guess we’re heading back. Let’s hope we have power at home.”

But getting out of the city was nothing like getting into it had been. Everyone was headed out, back to the suburbs and the small towns beyond them, where they lived. Hundreds, thousands, of cars were idling in a line that began a mile or two away from the ramp.

The frozen rain had begun to fall even harder, ticking and snapping onto the windshield and roof of the Cherokee. The traffic was a confused jumble of vehicles driving less than a mile an hour, but in a frantic rush, like a marathon for snails, nearly unmoving or moving imperceptibly. The squeaking of bad brakes. The impatient revving of motors. Emergency lights blinking.

Jiselle kept the defroster blowing, because her breath, mixed with that of the children, was beginning to condense on the windows, fogging everything. She glanced behind her. Only Sara was awake now. She was still staring out the window with an angry smirk. Sam was slumped against her shoulder. Beside Jiselle, Camilla was breathing steadily, eyes closed, rosebud lips parted, oblivious.

It took a full hour to get to the freeway. By then, Sara was asleep, too, her eyeballs twitching back and forth beneath her black-painted eyelids.

Jiselle rubbed her own eyes, trying to stay awake herself, finally passing that red Yield triangle at the entrance to the freeway, and spilling with the other cars out of the congested queue. Although the traffic here was also backed up for miles, at least it was moving.

As she drove, Jiselle could see to the left and right that the streets sprawling out around the freeway were completely dark. The windows of the houses were black, causing her to waver a bit in her hope that the power outage had affected only the city, that they would reach home to find heat, lights, television. How long, if the power was out, might it stay out?

Jiselle closed her eyes briefly, and then snapped them open when a truck pulled up next to her and blew its bullhorn—impotently, furiously—waking the children. Sara sputtered to life, coughing. Camilla blinked, looking around as if she had been peacefully asleep for many years. Sam, still holding his Game Boy, sat up and said, “This scares me.”

Jiselle reached behind her, patted his knee. “Nothing to be scared of, Sam,” she said. “People just don’t know how to behave when something unexpected happens. The power will be back on soon. And your dad will be home tomorrow.”

Sam nodded, as if Jiselle knew what she was talking about.

She tried to speed up then, but she had only just managed to bring the Cherokee up to twenty miles per hour when she had to come to a full stop again, when the traffic got too thick, too slow, merging into two lanes from three to avoid a lane of orange cones. She drove a few more miles slowly until Camilla said, “What if the power’s out at home?”

“Well,” Jiselle said, trying to sound optimistic, “we’ll have to light some candles. Do you kids have any flashlights?”

“No,” Camilla and Sara said in unison.

“There’s a Wal-Mart,” Sam said, pointing into the distance.

Jiselle looked in the direction of his index finger, and saw it. Somehow, surrounded by darkness, the Wal-Mart sign had remained lit. Its prisonlike cinderblock had faded into the night, but the parking lot was crowded with cars, and there was no mistaking the brilliance pouring through its automatic glass doors for anything but business as usual.

“There’s always a Wal-Mart,” Camilla said, “and it’s always open.”

Jiselle glanced over at her. Like so many things Camilla said, it was completely noncommittal, completely lacking in emotion or judgment. A statement of fact.

“We’ll get off here,” Jiselle said.

“Good thinking,” Camilla said.

Camilla and Sara waited in the Cherokee while Sam and Jiselle went into Wal-Mart, where flashlights and candles were being sold faster than they could be hauled out of the stockroom. The workers in their red vests were harried and troubled looking. No one understood, it seemed, how the generator that kept the store lit up and operational worked, or how long it would last. A few of the employees seemed to feel cheated.

“Damn,” a pregnant girl in one of the red vests said. “Every store closed for miles around, and Wal-Mart’s still up and running.”

“It can’t last,” an older woman said as Sam and Jiselle stood waiting for the teenage boy who’d gone to the stockroom for more flashlights. “Power’s out from here to the city.”

“I know,” Jiselle said. “We just came from the city.”

The woman continued. “I have a salt-water fish tank at home. Tropicals. They’ve got to have just the right temperature to survive. When I get home, they’ll all be dead.”

“My sea monkeys died,” Sam said sympathetically.

“Oh, poor little boy,” the woman said. “What’s a sea monkey?”

Sam didn’t have time to explain. The lights overhead surged. The cash registers all bleeped and buzzed at the same time. A cheer, and a sigh, and the pregnant girl’s audible groan went up through the store: The real electricity, not the generated electricity, had come back on. The fish tank woman turned away from them, back to the rack of bungee cords she’d been arranging, as if the electricity had flipped a switch somewhere inside her, too. No more time to waste. In fact, the whole celebratory strangeness of the atmosphere of Wal-Mart ended abruptly. The hubbub subsided, and with it the sense of rush and excitement. The crisis was over. Sam said, “Can we still get some flashlights?”

Jiselle looked at him. The rims of his ears were red. She could see his scalp through the soft hair that had grown back on his head. She said, “Of course.” There was nothing Sam liked more than a new gadget. A can opener would have sufficed, but Jiselle said, “Let’s get a whole bunch.”

“Cool,” he said.

When the stockroom boy emerged from behind the aluminum stockroom doors, bearing nothing, not even looking in their direction, Jiselle called out to him, “Excuse me!”

He turned. “Yeah?”

“Were there any flashlights back there?”

The boy looked at her blankly. “You still want ’em?”

“Yes,” Jiselle said.

Of course—for the next time, or just in case. Shouldn’t that be obvious? Wouldn’t anyone who’d come into Wal-Mart during a power outage, owning no flashlight, still want one?

No, it seemed. The boy in the red vest pointed to the shelf that had been empty of flashlights only moments before. They were back, returned by customers who’d decided they weren’t needed. The plastic packages had been shoved sloppily on to the hooks they’d been taken from or thrown down below the hooks. “Well, there you go,” the boy said. “Help yourself.”

Sam picked out two red ones, two blue ones, and a yellow one. Jiselle grabbed some matches and batteries on the way to the front of the store, to the register, where there was no line. The cashier was a small man, shorter even than Sam, with a long gray beard and a brilliant flash of gold in the center of his smile. “Somebody’s thinking ahead,” he said to Sam and Jiselle approvingly. He took the money, slipped it into the cash register, handed Sam the bag of flashlights. “Just you wait, folks. You’re going to be needing these.”

He said it with such authority that it crossed Jiselle’s mind that this little man in his red vest was the one in charge of the power grid. That he knew something they didn’t.

No sooner had they reached the electric doors to Wal-Mart, bearing their plastic bags, than the power surged, brightening strangely, before the lights went out again just as the door slid open, this time plunging Wal-Mart into total darkness.

Jiselle grabbed Sam’s arm, hurrying him away from the doors, which hesitated once and then closed with an electrical finality behind them. “Shit!” someone shouted from inside the store, and there were more shouts following it—curses, cries of dismay, protest, exasperation, disbelief muffled by the glass between the world and Wal-Mart.

At home, as Jiselle had feared, there were no lights. She used her flashlight to make Sam and herself some peanut butter sandwiches for dinner in the kitchen. Camilla and Sara both said they weren’t hungry and disappeared into the darkness of their rooms.

Jiselle lit a candle, put it on the table, and turned on the radio. Apparently the outage had swept the Midwest to the East Coast. A power grid problem. “The infrastructure of this country is collapsing!” a caller to WAVT shouted. “This isn’t the weather; this is a collapse of a culture!” On another station a caller blamed the outage on the flu. “People are dying! We’re not going to be able to keep the lights on!”

Jiselle snapped the radio off so Sam wouldn’t hear. In the flickering light across from her, he looked like a figment of a fevered imagination—the light leaping around on his face giving him the appearance of something made of fire, made of pure energy.

“Won’t it get cold?” he asked.

“I’ll build a fire,” Jiselle said, “after it gets cold, if the power doesn’t come back on. It’ll be cozy.”

She tried to sound like someone with a plan, but she was hoping that the power would come back on before she needed to build a fire, since she’d never built one before—and, in fact, Mark had warned her not to. “There’s something wrong with this flue,” he’d said one day, leaning into the fireplace, looking up. “I don’t want to risk the ashes or flames blowing back on you. Don’t use the fireplace if I’m not here, okay? Until I have a chance to get it fixed.” Obviously Mark hadn’t anticipated that there would come a time when a fire would be the only source of heat.

“Do I have to sleep in my room?” Sam asked, and Jiselle remembered then—his night-light: a frog plugged into the electrical outlet next to his bed. Sam couldn’t sleep without that.

“No,” she said. “We can camp out. On the floor. In the living room. Until the power comes back on.”

His eyes widened, and he smiled.

After Sam and Jiselle were done with their sandwiches, they took their flashlights to the linen closet and hauled out the spare blankets and a couple of pillows. Sam held the flashlight while Jiselle made pallets for them on the rug on the floor of the family room.

They didn’t bother with pajamas. Sam lay down on the floor in his khaki pants and green sweater, and Jiselle lay beside him in her black slacks. He’d brought the book of tales with him from his room, and Jiselle rolled over, opening it beside her, holding the flashlight on the page they’d marked the night before:

“Sam?” Jiselle whispered after another page or two.

No answer.

He was asleep.

She closed the book and snapped off the flashlight. It surprised her how total the darkness was. And how quiet. From the girls’ rooms there was no sound at all, and outside there was nothing but the tick-ticking of icy rain on the deck. She closed her eyes, and after what seemed like a long time listening to the sputter and hiss of rain on wood, she fell asleep, dreaming of sitting beside the old woman from the story, who was cooking a fish. The fish glowed with a kind of reflected light from the oil lamp beside the woman—silvery, like a moon in the shape of the fish—and she was leaning over it with a knife when a sudden, brilliant, digital, pealing music slammed into the silence, and Jiselle’s eyes snapped open, and she caught her breath and sat up fast, recognizing her cell phone theme, “The Blue Danube,” and found herself jumping, moving toward it instinctively, still mostly asleep—but where the hell was it?

Stumbling toward the music into the family room, she banged her shins against the coffee table. “Fuck.” She got on her hands and knees and scrambled toward the music, which was apparently coming from somewhere deep in the couch—a tiny technological box with a relentless orchestra stuffed inside it. “Shit.” Sara must have taken it when they’d gotten back to the house in the dark, talked on it in whispers in her room. This happened every few weeks, when, Jiselle suspected, Sara’s own monthly minutes were used up. Afterward, she’d stuff it into the cushions of the couch so Jiselle would think she’d misplaced it herself.

Jiselle felt around among the upholstery and crumbs until she touched something solid and cold, pulled it out, opened it, and held it to her ear. “Hello? Hello?”

“Jiselle?”

“Mark?”

“Jiselle, I—”

“Mark,” she said. “Where are you? The electricity’s gone out. Completely out. What do I do if…” She did not know how to finish the question, so she just listened, waiting for an answer, which didn’t come. In the silence, however, she thought she heard Mark sigh. She did hear him clear his throat, she was sure of that, but still he didn’t speak. Finally, to the silence, Jiselle said, “Mark?”

Crackling between them, she suddenly understood, was an ocean. She could hear the waves. There were ships on that ocean, she thought, listening to the silence. Ships bearing good news and bad. False documents. Stowaways. Silk flowers. Parrots in cages. Diamonds in felt sacks. But before the static of all that ocean was yanked away and replaced by the true silence of a connection gone completely dead, Mark said, “Jiselle, I don’t know when I’ll be back. They’ve got us detained here. We—”

“What?”

“Yes,” he said. “Detained.”

“Detained?”

“Well,” Mark said, “that’s what I just said, Jiselle. Detained. Don’t you know what detained means?”

There was an exasperated huff, and Jiselle felt tears spring into her eyes. Her heart rose into her throat. Of course she knew what detained meant, but it wasn’t like Mark to speak in jargon. If there had been mechanical problems, he’d have said, The fucking incompetents can’t get their plane put together. If it had been political, The fascists snatched our passports. If there had been a strike or a storm, We’re stuck on this toilet until tomorrow.

Detained? He was supposed to be home in twelve hours. He was going to take her out for Valentine’s Day. They had reservations. She’d pictured champagne and candlelight, and their knees touching beneath a white tablecloth, opening that small red package he’d spirited away in his sock drawer—a silver bracelet or gold. She could barely speak, but she finally managed to say, “Of course I know, Mark. But—Mark?”

He didn’t answer.

“Mark?”

Nothing.

Jiselle took the cell phone from her ear then and looked at it.

Dead.

Some kind of blind hope made her bring it to her ear again and say his name once more, but still there was no answer. Only the sound of her own ear.

And that ocean.

Ships going down in that ocean. Swallowed without a sound.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Jiselle didn’t sleep again that night. She tried over and over to call Mark at the number he’d phoned her from, but there was never any answer. She let it ring for what seemed like hours, and then she went into the bathroom and closed the door so she wouldn’t wake the children, and tried to call the airline.

“We don’t have that information,” she was told, and Jiselle knew the airlines well enough to know that, if this was what they’d been told to say, it was hopeless—that she could dial a hundred numbers, explain who she was, invent stories (His mother’s in the hospital, his children are missing, the house burned down, we have to get in touch with Captain Dorn…) and it would make no difference. They weren’t going to tell her anything whether they had anything to tell her or not.

She lay back down beside Sam on the floor, keeping her cell phone on her chest, and tried to go back to sleep, but the phone never rang again, and she never fell back asleep, and the power never came back on. When the sun finally rose high enough that she could see to make her way through the house without stumbling, she went to the bedroom and opened the little red package in Mark’s sock drawer.

She couldn’t help herself.

It was Valentine’s Day.

Inside the box, it turned out, were both the gold bracelet and the silver bracelet she’d imagined. Jiselle put them back in the box, wrapped it again, put it back in Mark’s sock drawer, and then stood for a moment practicing the bright smile she’d flash when he gave the gift to her.

The power was still out later that morning. Jiselle went to the refrigerator, somehow surprised when the light didn’t come on when she opened the door. She had spent most of her childhood believing that the light in the refrigerator was always on, until her mother explained it to her, showed her the darkness inside by opening the door only a crack and telling Jiselle to look in.

This time not only did the light not come on, but the smell of spoiled milk, bacteria, and lunch meat gone bad had filled up the darkness. Jiselle took out a garbage bag and started dumping the things she was sure couldn’t be salvaged.

She took the bag to the garbage can outside and marveled at how warm and bright the day had turned out to be after the rainy ice of the night before. What snow there was before the storm had been washed away by the rain, and the ice had melted. The lawn rolling toward the ravine, which had been covered in slush for a month, looked like a carpet of crushed green velvet.

Perhaps, Jiselle thought, she’d better go over to the Schmidts’ to see if they were okay over there without electricity. Who knew what kind of special needs the elderly might have that depended on electricity?

She went back in the house to get a sweater and saw that Sara was awake, standing barefoot in front of the refrigerator, with the door open, staring into its emptiness.

“Where did the food go?” she asked, and then, “Why isn’t the light on?”

Pulling on her sweater, Jiselle considered explaining to Sara, as her mother had to her, that the light in the refrigerator was not always on, but she felt sure this was something Sara, so full of her own inner darkness, would have been born knowing. She said, instead, “Well, no lights are on, and the food was rotten.”

“When’s Dad getting back?”

Jiselle decided to wait to say anything about that until she knew more. “Soon,” she said, and went out the sliding doors to see to the Schmidts.

Brad Schmidt opened the door wide enough to let Jiselle in, but he didn’t invite her to sit down. “Sure we’re okay,” he said, waving his hand in the air as if to wave her concern away. He said he’d grown up in a sod house in Nebraska. He was prepared for the inevitable. He’d always known the electricity was going to be the first thing to go. Gas was going to be next, then food, and then water. “When’s your husband getting back?”

“I don’t know,” Jiselle said. “He’s been”—for a few seconds she couldn’t think of the word—“detained.”

Brad Schmidt’s eyebrows leaped, as they always did when he heard bad news. “That right?” he said.

“Yes. I mean, I guess. He called last night, but I haven’t been able to get in touch with him since.”

“Where’s he at?”

“Germany,” she said, and Brad Schmidt snorted through his nose, a kind of knowing chuckle. “He’ll be back when—”

“When hell freezes over!” Brad Schmidt said. “They warned us! You gotta give ’em that. The Krauts aren’t like Americans, you know. They’re not just gonna let a bunch of foreigners in and tell them they can spread their disease all over the place.”

“Well, they’ll send them back in that case,” Jiselle said. “Why would they keep them?”

“It’s obvious!” Brad Schmidt said. “To teach us a lesson!”

“That would be against the law,” Jiselle said.

“Whose law? What law? You think the Europeans have any sympathy for us? Ha! We burned that bridge, and all the other bridges are burning as we speak.”

“I don’t think—”

But he cut her off, seeming to be gesturing to the door or to the world, suggesting with the gesture that she should go. “Good luck, Mrs. Dorn. I suggest you get yourself a rifle. I’ve got one, and enough water to last me a year.”

“I’m not worried about—”

“Of course you’re not,” Brad Schmidt said, smirking. “You don’t seem like the worrying type. But, in the meantime, you need a weapon.”

Jiselle was just turning in the doorway when Diane Schmidt wandered out of a back room wearing what looked like an old wedding dress and curtsied to Jiselle.

Before she realized she was doing it, Jiselle was curtsying back.

Back at the house, the children were gathered around the kitchen table eating peanut butter on bread and drinking warm Coke.

“What the hell is going on here?” Sara said when Jiselle slid into a chair at the table with them.

“I don’t know,” Jiselle said. She suggested that they listen to the radio. Did they own a radio that didn’t have to be plugged in? Sam and Camilla left the table to try to find one, but Camilla came back with the only thing they had, dangling it by its electrical cord.

“Call Dad,” Sam said.

“Well,” Jiselle said, trying to use the voice she’d needed so often (and so often failed to have) on planes, during turbulence, during lightning storms, during snowstorms, “everything is fine, but your father called last night, and he’s in Germany. He’s been”—again, the word escaped her for several heartbeats—“detained.”

“What’s that mean?” Sam asked, his mouth full of peanut butter sandwich.

“Well, they seem to be holding the crew—and, I don’t know, actually, maybe the passengers. I think it probably has to do with—”

“How long?” Camilla asked.

“We’ll find out,” Jiselle said. “Later. He’ll call. I’ll call. If I can’t reach him, I’ll call the airline.”

It seemed to her that, as she looked at them, the children were exchanging a look among themselves.

When it got lighter outside, the house was bright enough to clean it up a bit. Sam was playing with two small soldiers and a truck on the family room floor. Camilla was reading on the couch. Sara was in her bedroom, and it sounded to Jiselle as if her pen were scratching wildly across the pages of her diary, the pages flipping fast. She tried not to think about what Sara might be writing.

She picked Camilla’s sweater up off the floor.

Sara’s balled-up white knee socks.

She could find only one of the shoes from Madrid she’d let Sara borrow—lying abandoned on the floor of the family room, as if Sara had stumbled out of it.

Jiselle got on her hands and knees, looking under the couch, under the chairs, for the matching shoe, finding nothing.

“Sara?” she called.

“What?”

“Where’s my other shoe?”

“How the hell should I know?” Sara called back. “We were in the dark when we came home. Maybe it fell off outside.”

“Well, if it fell off your foot outside, wouldn’t you have noticed that you were wearing only one shoe when you came inside?”

“No,” Sara shouted, as if the question were absurd. “It wasn’t my idea to wear your shoes.”

Jiselle closed her eyes for a moment. There would be, she knew, no point in continuing the conversation. She held the one shoe in her hand before taking it to the bedroom and placing it carefully at the bottom of the closet. Afterward, she went to the front door and looked out to see if she might find the other shoe, discarded on the lawn.

No.

A little while later, when she heard the shower running and Sara complaining, “The water’s fucking freezing,” Jiselle hurried into Sara’s room, to her closet, and opened it.

Her heart was pounding with the thrill and anxiety of it, as if she were a safecracker or a cat burglar. She got down on her knees and moved her hands around through the shoes scattered on the closet floor, feeling for her own. It was too dark without the overhead light to see well, but each time Jiselle felt a shoe she thought might be hers, she picked it up and looked.

No. No. No.

They were all Sara’s.

Her sandals. Her flip-flops. Her combat boots and stilettos and slippers.

She was feeling around farther in the back of the closet when she heard the shower go off—and then, as if somehow it had been kick-started by the end of Sara’s shower, the lights blinked, and blinked again, and then blinked back on, and everything in the house seemed to come alive at once—the television, the stereo, Sam whooping with happiness, Camilla calling out in surprise, the clocks beeping, every light blazing, and Jiselle looked up from the shoes, seeing everything in Sara’s closet vividly and brightly at the same time, and she gasped, finding herself staring directly into the deep green eyes of Joy Dorn.

Who was smiling.

Who was dressed in white, holding up that piece of white wedding cake. Beaming. Lovely. Full of light, as if she’d been the source of it, or had absorbed it and was letting it back into the world now.

The portrait. Sara kept it in her closet.

“What the fuck are you doing in my closet?”

Jiselle turned to find Sara standing over her, wrapped in a towel, mouth open wide in astonishment and outrage, but just at that moment she heard “The Blue Danube” coming from the other room and hurried past Sara to answer her cell phone without trying to explain.

“Oh my God, Mark,” she said. She was crying before she could say anything else.

“Look, Jiselle,” he said. “I’m not going to be able to talk long. They’re holding the whole plane here, and not telling us how long. Quarantine. But the airline’s lawyers are on it like piranhas. This can’t go on for longer than a week without an international—”

“A week?”

“Jiselle. Please. I need you not to be hysterical, okay. This is bad enough. You need—”

Jiselle said, “I’ll come there.” The whole plan spun out around her as she held the phone to her ear. The children could stay with the Schmidts. She would fly to Munich. If they wouldn’t let him come out to her, she would go in to be quarantined with him.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Now, I love you. I have to go.”

“I love you, too. Mark. Please, don’t—”

But he was gone. She tried to call the number he’d called her from, but it rang a long time and no one answered.

She had just hung up the phone when she looked up to find Sara standing in the hallway. The bedroom door was open, and she was looking in at Jiselle. “So,” she said, “when are you leaving?”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on,” Sara said. “Just tell me. You think we didn’t know the second you realized how much Dad’s gone you were going to be outta here? You think you’re the first one who got fed up with Dad being gone all the time?”

Jiselle put the phone beside her on the bed. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“The hell you aren’t,” Sara said. “I thought you looked clueless enough that it might take you nine or ten months, but I guess this time Camilla won the bet—although, to be fair, Mommy, you pretty much set the record for the longest he’s managed to keep a girlfriend around. I guess he was right that getting married might be the way to go this time.”

“Sara?”

But she was gone.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Jiselle called Mark every day. On the other end of the phone, he always sounded no farther than a few yards away. He sounded as if he were in the other room, or as if he were out in the street, in the backyard—but when Jiselle went to the windows, holding the phone in her hand, listening to Mark’s voice on the other end, she’d see that the backyard was empty, as was the front yard, and, at the end of their driveway, the road.

He sounded close, but Mark was in Munich.

Mark was detained.

By the middle of March, he’d been detained for a month.

Some days, she nearly pined, lingering at their closet, trying to conjure the feeling she’d had that used to make her knees weak when she took his uniforms in her arms. But there was so much else to do. She certainly did not have the luxury of locking herself in the bedroom to cry now that the power, when it was on, could only be counted on to go out again. During these brief spells with electricity, Jiselle had to prepare for the much longer periods during which there would be no refrigerator, no lights, no outlets to use to recharge the little appliances one relied on. There were so many things to gather and prepare—and, at the same time, as always, the children needed the usual things they needed. The schools had closed early for spring break due to the power outages and fears of the Phoenix flu. But, after spring break, they did not reopen, and it was not made clear when they would open again.

“What is it like there?” Jiselle asked Mark.

“Efficient,” Mark said.

But she had meant the weather. At home, it was the kind of weather you would invent for a perfect early spring. On their walks into the ravine, Sam and Jiselle saw chipmunks under every leafy, unfurling fern. Their fat, cartoon cheeks looked full, and they were all but tame, scampering toward the two of them on the path, looking up expectantly. If Sam and Jiselle knelt down, the chipmunks would come right to them, seeming content to gaze into their eyes for as long as they liked. Sam and Jiselle started bringing bags of nuts along on their walks, and the chipmunks took them shyly, graciously, right from their hands.

When Jiselle told Mark about the weather at home, Mark told her it was dreamlike in Germany, too. The windows didn’t open in his room, but he could see that outside the Gesundheitsschutzhaus (which, he said, roughly translated to “Good Health House”), it was sunny, with a blue sky, day after day.

Jiselle tried to picture the scene he described. The distant snowcapped mountain, the foothills surrounding it. The way those hills appeared in the evenings to breathe slowly—sleepily, deeply, purple. There was a train track, Mark said, looking like a silver stream up the side of the mountain. He could see it shining sometimes in the early mornings, behind the pines. At four o’clock every afternoon the rushing glint of a train passed over the tracks.

“I’m learning patience,” Mark said. “And studying German.”

In the background she sometimes heard a woman say something—to Mark?—in German.

“It can’t be too much longer,” he told Jiselle. “Since not one of us has even shown symptoms, they’re not going to be able to justify quarantining us forever.”

“I love you,” she said. “I miss you.”

“My dearest,” he said. “My princess. My darling. Imagine I am kissing you.”

She closed her eyes.

She tried to imagine it, but the phone made an unnerving humming in her ear.

“Herr Dorn?” someone called in the distance.

The woman.

“I have to go now,” Mark whispered. “It’s morning here. Time for breakfast.”

Bobby’s father, Paul Temple, gave Jiselle the extra generator he kept in his garage, and if Bobby wasn’t already there, he would come over during the longer outages, hook it up, fill it with gas, start it.

“Feel free to call on my son for anything you need,” Paul Temple said. “There’s nothing worse than a population of young men without enough to do. It’s the reason they launched the Crusades.”

As always, Paul Temple, the high school history teacher, seemed unable to keep himself from sharing his knowledge, and was embarrassed to have shared it. He looked away from Jiselle and scratched his sandy hair.

“Thank you,” she said.

Except for the mechanical purr under the kitchen window and the darkness of the neighbor’s house, it was as if nothing were different.

Every few days Jiselle would go over to the Schmidts’ to see how they were faring, but Brad Schmidt always waved her away.

She called her mother, who said, “Don’t worry about me, Jiselle. You’re the one with the problem.”

One morning, the first week of April, a flock of thousands of blackbirds flew out of the ravine behind the house, over the roof. The sound of them woke Jiselle, and even Sara roused herself to come onto the deck, look out. The sky was dark but shivering—all wings and fretful energy, as if the morning had been peeled back to expose its nervous system.

“Whoa, whoa!” Sam called, waving his arms over his head as if trying to stop them.

Sara said, “Holy shit.”

“Where are they going?” Jiselle wondered aloud, and the children looked from the birds to her as if they were surprised that she didn’t know.

As it turned out, they didn’t go anywhere. They flew from one end of the ravine and back again, and then they dispersed.

On the radio it was said that people in Chicago had reported the same thing. The birds went from park to park, circled, flew over the lake, and then were gone.

This incited some panic.

The birds looked healthy, but who knew what sort of secret viruses they carried, or what their circling and disappearance portended? Parents kept their children indoors and out of the parks—although flyers were posted all over the city and delivered door to door explaining that fear of birds was superstitious, not scientific.

But who was delivering these flyers, people wanted to know.

The government?

And why? To keep people from panicking or because there was something to hide?

The movie The Birds became the number one movie download of all time, and television psychologists had a hard time explaining its popularity. You would think no one would want to see a movie that so closely paralleled the fears of the time. But they did.

A week after the blackbirds, a white goose took up residence in the backyard—some escaped farm fowl, it seemed. At first, Jiselle considered shooing it away. It could be diseased. But it looked harmless and lost in the backyard. Its orange beak matched its orange feet, and it came and went from the ravine without flying, just waddling. When Jiselle and the children went out on the deck to watch it, the goose would look up and honk.

Sam wanted to make a pet of it, but whenever he stepped off the deck to try to approach it, the goose turned and headed down the slope into the ravine, disappearing in the shadows. Once or twice, Jiselle heard it outside in the middle of the night, honking right under the bedroom window as if it wanted something, but when she went to the window to look out, the goose seemed only to be wandering in awkward circles in the dark—a bright patch of reflected moonlight.

Within a few days of the blackbirds and the arrival of the goose, a small flock of swifts took up residence in the chimney, and they whirled and screamed, glistening blackly, like living ash, from the roof of the house to the leafy trees, coming and going all day long. And some finches built a nest in the oak that grew out of the deck in back. Soon there were eggs in the nest, which seemed to have been pieced together with twigs and toilet paper and also hair—Camilla’s? Golden strands of it glistened when sunlight hit the oak in the mornings.

Jiselle ignored Brad Schmidt’s advice to clear the birds out. He stood at the edge of his own yard, looking up. “They might as well be living in your house,” he said. “Whatever diseases they’ve got, you’ve got.”

But Jiselle could not bring herself to be worried about the birds. There were stories every day on the news now about celebrities who’d fled the country, entering other countries illegally. Jodie Foster was living with a long list of fellow celebrities in the Canadian wilderness. No one had seen the wife of the governor of California for months, so she was presumed to be dead of the flu. Reportedly there were hygienic bunkers built under Washington, D.C., in which the Supreme Court justices were being housed.

Closer to home, it was said that thousands of people had started an encampment at Millennium Park in Chicago to get out of the apartment buildings where there was illness and where the air was presumed to be infected, and that the Beluga whales at the Shedd Aquarium were refusing to eat. Marine biologists all over the world had been consulted, without success. Nothing could be done. A twenty-four-hour candlelight and prayer vigil was being held outside the aquarium, which had been closed to the public for weeks, for the whales, who were said also to be singing whale songs that had never been heard before. “They know what’s ahead for us,” one Chicago evangelist had told a television reporter, “and they are calling out to God.”

This theory was widely repeated, as if it were a fact, and poets and popular song writers had banded together in a movement called the Whale Prayer Project, which was dedicated to expressing in human language what the whales were trying to sing to God in their own language.

In the morning, the swifts sounded like wind chimes in the chimney, and Beatrice (the goose—Sara had named it, and the name stuck) heralded morning with a discordant squawk, and then waddled off across the yard into the ravine, disappearing in the dark foliage for the day and coming back after the sun set to walk in circles in the backyard. They never saw her fly.

In truth, they had no idea if Beatrice was female or male, but Camilla pointed out that the goose had a kind of feminine posture. She held her head high, as if proud of her neck, as if she thought it was much longer than it was. She had a habit of holding her wings away from her body an inch or two, shivering them in the sunlight. It seemed coquettish. Obviously, Beatrice couldn’t fly or she would have, but she enjoyed having wings nonetheless.

After Jiselle and Sam did some research on what geese liked to eat, they learned that the bread crumbs they’d been leaving were no good. The bread swelled up in the goose’s stomach, making her feel full without actually giving her enough nutrition to survive, so they went to the pet store and bought a sack of something that was supposed to be better: Fowl Feed Deluxe. In the morning, Sam hurried out of bed when the goose honked, ran out to the backyard, sprinkled the feed on the ground, and although the ingredients listed on the side of the bag seemed to be mostly oil and ash, Beatrice pecked happily at it before strolling back to the ravine.

On Tuesday, Mark sounded wistful. “Do you remember Paris, my love? Zurich? Copenhagen? Will we ever see places like that again?”

Indeed, those places seemed far away, impossibly remote, charming villages from another time.

It was hard to hear him over the noises of the household. Camilla and Bobby were starting up the generator again, and it made high whining noises outside the kitchen window. Sara was listening to her music in her bedroom—a man shouting obscenities over the sounds of guitars and garbage can lids being smashed together. Sam was waiting in the family room for Jiselle to get off the phone so they could go for a hike in the ravine. Mark told Jiselle not to tell the kids that she was talking to him. He said he didn’t want to hear their voices, that it only depressed him.

But Wednesday he was angry. “The world’s going to hell. I could be stuck here forever.”

“No!” Jiselle said. “Don’t—”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But you don’t understand. Every fucking day here seems to last a week.”

“I love you,” Jiselle said.

He said, “I know that.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

For Easter, Jiselle and Sam dyed hard-boiled eggs, and stuffed candies into plastic eggs, and hid them all around the house and the front and backyards, all the way to the edge of the ravine. It took Sara and Camilla two hours to find them all—wandering barefoot through the bright green grass in the late morning sunshine, languid, but laughing.

That afternoon, Jiselle took them in to the city to meet her mother at Duke’s Palace Inn. The power had been on for a week without interruption, and the weather was glorious.

The restaurant was decorated in pastels for the holiday. There were pots of hibiscus and paperwhites everywhere, and pale green and pink papier-mâché eggs were strung from the ceilings. The brunch tables circled the entire dining room. Crystal bowls overflowed with sweet rolls. There was a fresh fruit platter—melon balls and mango, gigantic strawberries. At the center of it all, a chocolate fountain bubbled: three tiers of melted chocolate spilling over, gathering in a rich, dark pool.

The fragrance of that fountain wafted through the whole restaurant like a decadent, delicious pall, while a young woman in a yellow chiffon dress floated from table to table with a white cloth and an ever-replenishing bottle of champagne. She poured champagne into Camilla’s glass, and Sara’s, and even tried to fill Sam’s glass, until Jiselle’s mother fixed first Jiselle and then the woman in the yellow dress with an outraged stare. “You’re going to let the boy drink champagne? He can’t keep root beer down.”

“Of course not,” Jiselle said, putting her hand over Sam’s champagne glass. The woman shrugged noncommittally and sashayed to another table.

The rest of the brunch was uneventful. The girls, perhaps a little tipsy, laughed out loud at the story Jiselle told of the woman on the flight to Scotland who’d grabbed her hand and told her fortune. Sara had agreed that morning, grudgingly, to wear a white T-shirt with her black leather miniskirt, and because her bare legs in fishnet stockings were under the table, from the waist up she looked like a girl dressed for Easter brunch, if informally.

They took the back roads and highways home instead of the freeway, which was congested with all the post-Easter brunchers (the lights at Duke’s Palace Inn had flickered twice during brunch, and Jiselle presumed this had happened all over the city, and people were worried, heading for home), and Sam and the girls laughed at the enormous inflated bunnies in front yards as they passed through each small town. There were neon-bright plastic eggs strung from trees. Plastic rabbits hanging from clotheslines. Pink and yellow streamers waving from telephone poles. Newscasters had linked the serious outbreaks of the flu in California and the rumors of war on a second front to the extra significance given this year to the Lenten season. Believers weren’t just giving up candy; they were giving up sex. They were giving up cell phones. They were giving up pleasures and conveniences of all kinds. The police had been called in to end a parade of flagellants in San Francisco on Ash Wednesday. In New Mexico, three men had been roped to crosses outside a church and left there overnight. The nation was looking forward to Easter and to the end of this nonsense.

They passed through one town at the Illinois-Wisconsin border where there had apparently been a parade earlier in the day. It had left shredded pink and purple paper all over the road. A few Easter baskets rolled, lost, along the sidewalk. A kind of throne had been built outside the courthouse for, it seemed, the Easter Bunny—a trellis decorated with tissue roses and green crêpe paper and a chair draped in pink and purple velour. It was empty now, but there was still a trail of crushed candies and pale blue candy wrappers where the children must have stood in line waiting for a chance to sit on the Easter Bunny’s lap.

Driving through that little town with the pastel trash and the spring flowers in bloom—the daffodils and tulips and all the flowering trees in their whites and pinks—reminded Jiselle of the sugar Easter eggs her mother used to buy for her when she was a child. You would look inside the bright sugar cave to find a perfect little village with emerald green grass and cozy bungalows for rabbits and ducklings made of more sugar.

Usually, Jiselle had kept those on a shelf until her mother, around the Fourth of July, would point out that they were attracting ants. But, one year, she’d decided to taste the egg.

Although the first broken-off bit of the bric-a-brac on the eggshell had tasted stale, Jiselle couldn’t resist another nibble, and another, until eventually she’d managed to nibble away the whole exquisite egg and the peaceful scene inside it, too.

As the length of his detainment dragged on, Jiselle began to call Mark several times a day. If he didn’t answer, she left long messages on his voice mail:

“I’m sitting on the deck. The kids are inside. Sam’s been building a tower in his room out of Legos. Sara and Camilla have been downloading songs, now that the power’s back on. I baked a loaf of bread and washed the sheets. Every night I hold your pillow in my arms and pretend it’s you.”

“Sweetheart,” Mark said. “It’s important not to ramble on the voice mail. It costs just as much as talking to me in person, and I think we should be as conservative as we can. Who knows how long this will go on.”

“But…what about the lawyers? I thought you were sure—”

“What’s sure in this life, Jiselle? I love you, and I know this is hard for you, but it’s harder for me.”

“Of course,” she said. “I know that, Mark. It’s—”

“Shhh,” he said. “I love you. You are the love of my life. I have to go.”

Summer came in early, mild and sweet. The air smelled of cake, yeasty and moist. There was the usual seasonal sense of something new beginning again, except that with the weather growing warm and humid so early, it was as if a step in the process of the seasons had been skipped. By the middle of May, teenage girls and their mothers had taken equally to wearing what looked like lingerie in the middle of the day—to the grocery store, to the bank. Black camisoles. Satin halter tops. Short shorts.

Seeing them in St. Sophia, with its tulips lined up in straight rows outside the public buildings and its flags flapping overhead, those girls and women looked to Jiselle as if they’d stumbled on to the wrong set—parading their call girl costumes through the filming of a 1950s TV show.

The power outages, it seemed, and the shortages, and the fears of the flu had inspired a portion of the population to toss off its old morality and to live for the moment. Drug use and promiscuity were said to be at an all-time high among teenagers. Small communes were forming, in the Western states especially—enclaves devoted to free love, spiritual growth, and the pleasures of the flesh. It was said that Dr. Springwell was not, after all, in the Canary Islands but on a ranch in Wyoming, where he led a cult of young people who were devoted to sexual experimentation.

But other groups formed, too.

After it was noted in the press how few Phoenix flu deaths had been reported among the Amish, the New Amish groups sprang up. They blamed cell phones for the power outages and the flu: the radiation emitted by the towers was blanketing the country in poisonous, invisible vibrations that disrupted the environment, driving the birds into a frenzy. This was also the reason for the visibility in recent months of so many rodents. They had been driven out of the ground. They had lost all sense of direction because of the effect of the vibrations on their inner ears.

The radiation was causing the human immune system to go haywire, the New Amish said. They lived in sod houses and made their own clothes and utensils from found materials.

But most of the people Jiselle saw around town simply seemed bored. There had never been so many people in St. Sophia. Stuck in St. Sophia. Spending their days in St. Sophia. Without school, without sports, without work, without the malls in the city and suburbs open, they were wired with energy and exhausted at the same time. They actually sat on the park benches, which had seemed to be merely decorations to Jiselle until then. Mothers pushed children on the swings in the park. They walked on the sidewalks.

One morning, as she stood in line at the St. Sophia Credit Union (Mark had told her to go, to make sure the airline was still depositing his checks and to get some cash “in case”), she saw ahead of her in the line, which snaked out the door and around the corner of the bank’s brick façade, Bobby’s mother, Tara Temple. She was wearing patent leather high heels. Black, they glinted in the sun bouncing off the sidewalk and sent thin beams of light straight up the insides of her long, tanned legs. She was wearing shorts so short that Jiselle could see the fold between her thigh and her buttocks, and, on the inside of one sleek thigh, a little rose, which looked like either a temporary tattoo or a brand-new one.

Tara Temple had met Jiselle only those two or three times (the last time was when she’d brought over the Wholeness book) and didn’t appear to recognize her. Between them, a man in a necktie and Bermuda shorts stood very close to Tara, and Jiselle watched as, saying nothing, he reached behind Tara and smoothed three fingers down the small of her back to the place where her tailbone clefted into her tight shorts.

Jiselle looked quickly away. Bobby’s mother had to have been at least ten years older than she, but standing behind her in that line, wearing flat black sandals and one of Mark’s baggy T-shirts over a pair of worn-out khaki shorts, Jiselle felt old, and maternal, and disapproving. She liked Paul Temple, Bobby’s father, who had stopped by several times recently to help Bobby with the yard work, which Bobby had agreed to take on for forty dollars a week. (He’d wanted to do it for free—because “I eat like five meals a day here!”—but Jiselle had insisted on paying him.) Because Paul Temple taught history at St. Sophia High, he’d had nothing to do since the schools closed down. A week earlier, he and Bobby had spent the whole day cutting down dead brush between the lawn and the ravine for her, and then they’d burned it in a barrel in the backyard. It had been an especially great day for Sam, who adored Mr. Temple, who liked to punch Sam in the shoulder and call him Bud.

A bank teller came out then and announced that the computers had frozen, and the wait could be “days.” She strongly suggested their leaving and coming back another time.

Jiselle watched as Tara Temple turned to look at the man behind her.

They smiled sleepily at each other and left the line together.

GOODBYE TO THE NECKTIE was a news bulletin for days. Men were being encouraged to go without them. The “New Businessman” had an open collar and short sleeves. He wore cargo pants or shorts, carried a satchel instead of a briefcase. There was some joyful speculation that the days of eight-to-five were over forever, replaced by siestas, long vacations—an entirely different way of life having been glimpsed in this brief, strange period. It was a side benefit to the collapse of the economy, the devastation wrought by the Phoenix flu. The rules for behavior of all kinds had changed overnight—or changed while Jiselle had been making grilled cheese sandwiches for Sam and reading novels at home.

Camilla had hauled out all the books she’d been assigned in her Advanced Placement English course that year, lining them up in the order she thought would be most educational and appealing. Jiselle had just finished Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which had left her weeping in the bathtub the night she’d finished it. Now, she was halfway through Mrs. Dalloway, which kept her in a kind of dreamy reverie long after she put it down.

“I can’t believe you didn’t read this stuff in high school,” Camilla said, and Jiselle felt the familiar prickle of her skin at one of Camilla’s seemingly harmless observations. “Or at least in college.”

Jiselle looked up at her. Camilla was looking at her curiously from the couch. For the first time, perhaps, Jiselle noticed that the girl had a very fine, blond down on her shoulders and arms. She was wearing a sundress with thin straps, and no makeup, and Jiselle felt as if she were looking at a stranger.

“I never finished college,” Jiselle said. She opened her mouth again and realized that she was about to tell Camilla about her father, about Ellen, about the accident, as if that explained why she’d left college, but then she closed her mouth again and gave a little apologetic smile.

“That’s no biggie,” Camilla said. “Some of the dumbest people I know finished college.”

The second week of May, there were the first officially confirmed reports of massive outbreaks of hemorrhagic zoonosis in Arizona, Nevada, and Idaho. Some newscasters used the word hundreds. Others said thousands. All nonessential government services nationwide were closed down by executive order, although there was grumbling about this in the Midwest and on the East Coast. Wasn’t this clearly, mostly, a Western disease? Wouldn’t the most prudent thing be to limit travel over and across the Mississippi until the cause of the illness, the source of the contagion, could be determined? Why shouldn’t people in Ohio be allowed to keep their post offices and libraries open if they wanted to? They weren’t infected with hemorrhagic zoonosis.

People in the Western states thought the same things about the East.

“During the Black Plague the English called it the French disease, the French called it the Italian disease, and so on and so on. People blaming other people for the plague is nothing new,” Paul Temple said. He’d started coming by most days around five o’clock, if he wasn’t already there working on the yard, walking the two miles from his own house. He’d knock politely on the door and wait for Jiselle or one of the children to open it for him, although Jiselle had told him it was fine just to come in. When she opened the door, he’d smile apologetically and say he was “just looking for something to do. With the schools closed, not a big demand for history teachers in St. Sophia.”

When the power was on and there was cold beer, Jiselle would offer him one. Often, sitting across from her on the deck in his T-shirt and jeans—looking rugged, Jiselle thought, like an outdoorsman, not a historian—he’d seem as if he were about to tell Jiselle something or ask her for advice, but he never did.

There was no denying now that people were dying in large numbers, all over the country—and that even if it was not being called a plague, it was a plague. The suppression of information until recently had not been a conspiracy, the public was assured, but rather a complexity that had kept those numbers from being interpreted and disseminated in an accurate manner. And although no one had called it the Phoenix flu or hemorrhagic zoonosis, there had been deaths in St. Sophia as well—a child who’d gone to Sam’s school, a woman who’d worked at the library, an elderly couple and their disabled son. When Jiselle and Sam went into town for the goose food, she had seen graves being dug in the St. Sophia Cemetery, and then the fresh dirt mounded over them. Despite the ban, a white balloon had managed somehow to snag itself in one of the tallest trees in the center of town. It blew around there erratically in a high breeze for a couple of days before the Fire Department came with a truck and ladder and took it down. Apparently, it had been upsetting residents of St. Sophia.

“It’s hype,” Mark said over the phone. “The whole thing. The pharmaceutical companies and the European Union have a lot of money to make over this hype.” He no longer sounded anxious on the phone. “The airline is paying my salary, right? As long as the checks don’t bounce, everything’ll be okay.”

The checks were not bouncing. They continued to be deposited directly into Mark’s and Jiselle’s shared account every week. So, Mark pointed out, there had been no hardship, really, had there? The Gesundheitsschutzhaus was clean, comfortable, he said. The food was good. They were allowed to go outside into a small fenced garden. There was a gym for exercise. No one had gotten sick. They would soon be allowed to leave. He might even miss it. Germany was an amazingly efficient and beautiful place.

“I miss you,” Jiselle said. “I can’t tell you how much—”

“Keep yourself busy,” Mark said. “That’s what I’m doing. This’ll be over before we know it.”

Sam taught Jiselle how to play chess.

It took her days to learn and memorize the fundamentals, only to find that she was the kind of player who might make a fine move that set in motion a long series of self-defeats, unable as she was to think more than one move ahead. But Sam was patient, and Jiselle was learning from her mistakes. When she made a good move, he was delighted: “Yeah!” he’d shout when she took his pawn.

For her part, Jiselle could not believe that after a lifetime of looking down at the mystery of a chessboard (all of her previous lovers, and her father, had played, and none had ever suggested teaching her), she understood now what was being enacted on it. For the first time, she understood what checkmate meant and what it meant to be a pawn.

They played some nights at the kitchen table by candlelight when the power went out, and, those nights, Jiselle sometimes had the feeling that she was a woman from another era, another life. That she had gone back to some step she’d skipped in a process she hadn’t recognized as a process:

Candle flickering. The child’s face, deep in concentration over a wooden board and its simple wooden pieces. Through the open windows, the crickets’ excited confessions to the dark. Next door, she might hear Diane Schmidt singing folk songs to herself in a high, girlish voice.

One day, Sara put down her leather-bound black diary, in which she sometimes spent hours writing in tiny letters (“I’m trying to save space”) and took up one of Jiselle’s half-finished afghans and finished it. After that, she began and finished another. Then, a flowing winter scarf, and then she started to crochet a shawl with the exotic yarn Jiselle had bought in Rome but never used—gossamer, fawn-colored. Sara sat for hours on the couch in the family room, intent on the task of pulling the fine, pale stuff through the silver eye of her crochet hook, spinning it out on the other side as an intricate orderliness spilling softly around her.

Jiselle picked up the edge of the shawl and smoothed her hand over the downy floss and lace of it. The stitches were perfect.

“Sara,” Jiselle said, “you’re so good at this.”

Sara looked up. She said, “I heard you reading that story to Sam, the one about the girl who had to make a shawl so thin it could be pulled through a wedding ring before the prince would marry her.”

Jiselle said, “Are you looking for a prince?”

Sara snorted, rolled her eyes, went back to work. She alternated between the careful crochet work and the tiny printing in her journal. When she wasn’t doing one, she was working on the other.

Camilla took up jogging.

Mornings, she’d head out the front door in her running shoes and silky shorts, come back an hour later soaked with sweat, scarlet-cheeked, panting. Her legs began to look stronger, the calves chiseled, defined by the muscles in them. Bobby might be waiting for her in the family room. Sometimes Jiselle would find him moving Sam’s action figures across the arm of the couch even when Sam wasn’t around. He’d laugh when she caught him at it, and say, “The boredom’s making me regress.” His father was spending more and more time on the lawn than it required, mowing it into a perfect chessboard pattern of crisscrosses and squares while Bobby, displaced, sat on the couch with the action figures or on the deck drinking lemonade.

“I could make a nice brick path for you,” Paul suggested to Jiselle one afternoon. His T-shirt was soaked with sweat, and Jiselle could see how physically fit he was. His muscles were different from Mark’s, which were hotel-gym muscles, and more defined. Paul’s body was solid, sinewy. His hair was damp around his forehead. “From the deck down to the ravine. I’ve got the bricks left over from a project. It would give me something to do, and it wouldn’t hurt Bobby to keep a bit busier, if you know what I mean.” He nodded up to Bobby, who had fallen asleep in a lawn chair while Camilla was out running. “Keep our kids out of trouble.”

He showed Jiselle where he would lay the bricks. He said he thought that at the end of the path he could even make a few steps down the bank and into the ravine. “What do you think?” he asked.

“Well, a path would lovely,” Jiselle said. “I’ll need to ask Mark, but I think—”

“Oh, of course,” Paul said. “Ask Mark. See what Mark has to say.”

They walked back across the lawn together. That day, the backyard was a riot of midsummer flowers and leaves, and overhead in the sky the contrail of a jet had dissolved across the clear blue. Planes were still flying sporadically, despite the restrictions and the drastic diminishment in flight offerings, the lack of fuel. Passengers were required to produce a statement of purpose to be approved thirty days in advance of travel, and even some of the most desperate were being denied. A woman in Oregon was trying to get to her son in New Jersey. The boy was twelve years old and had gone to visit his father and stepmother, both of whom had fallen ill and died within a week of his arrival. The boy was in the hospital in Newark now, also ill, and although she was willing to pay up to ten thousand dollars for a one-way flight, the mother could not get a seat on any airline. The last report Jiselle heard on the news was that Tom Cruise had arranged a private plane to take the woman to her son. There was footage of the woman on a tarmac climbing the stairs to a small jet, her hair whipping behind her in the wind.

Now a jet was flying over the house, and the stream behind it looked like a white ribbon that had frayed and then been pulled to pieces.

It was impossible, she thought, but Jiselle considered briefly that the jet held that mother. She was alone up there, looking down, hands clasped in her lap. Behind her, a plume of desperation and relief. Soon that disintegrating path behind her would be invisible overhead.

When Jiselle spoke to Mark about the brick path, he said, “Tell him I said that was fine.”

“You’re sure?” Jiselle asked.

She could hear what sounded like a party taking place behind Mark’s voice. Ice dropped into glasses. A violin. Mark said that they’d been bringing in entertainment, catering nice meals paid for by the airline, subsidized by the European Union, which was insisting on their continued quarantine. Sometimes Jiselle thought he sounded drunk. He slurred the occasional word. Zhizelle.

“Why not? Brick path,” he said. “Sounds great.”

So, the next week, one morning, Paul and Bobby arrived with a load of bricks and stacked them neatly at the side of the yard while Jiselle watched from the deck—Sam running between Paul and Bobby, a blue jay shrieking down from a tree branch, the sweat on Bobby’s and his father’s T-shirts soaking through the cotton. A cross of sweat on Bobby’s back. The dark silhouette of a Victorian widow on Paul’s.

For three days in a row, the midafternoon heat had topped ninety-nine degrees. The power had come back again, and Jiselle turned on the air-conditioning when it grew so uncomfortable that she felt she couldn’t stand it. The sweat pooled on her eyelids and onto her eyelashes.

But the heat didn’t dampen Bobby’s and Paul’s and Sam’s enthusiasm for working on the brick path.

“They’re bored,” Camilla said. “They’re going nuts. They’re not like us.”

She’d come back into the house from her run. Jiselle had implored her not to run in the heat. (“You’ll pass out. Heatstroke. You’ll get dehydrated.”) But Camilla just shook her head, smiling. “It’s nice of you to worry, but I’ll be fine.”

And she did seem fine. Flushed, glowing. After her shower, Camilla lay on the couch in the family room in the air-conditioning with her hair wrapped in a towel, watching CNN. Jiselle sat down beside her.

Usually now, when she watched it, the news was good. No one expected severe power outages since the government had intervened. China was backing down. The war in the Mideast was all but over. The oil embargo would not last, but new developments in alternative fuel sources were being made every day. Researchers were on the verge of finding the cause of hemorrhagic zoonosis, and although this wasn’t a cure or a vaccine, it was the first step in that direction. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt had been married on a boat in the middle of the ocean so that the wedding could be attended by guests from every corner of the globe—the many foreign dignitaries who loved them but who could not have flown in to the country for it because of the travel restrictions. According to CNN, thousands of large and small boats had crowded around the Angelina for the occasion. There were fireworks. There were photographs of the couple wearing white, waving to helicopters circling them on a calm ocean in a perfectly blue sky.

One afternoon Jiselle was both shocked and strangely gratified to hear a CNN reporter mention, almost offhandedly, that there’d been some speculation that the Phoenix flu was being caused by the importation of hair from developing countries, and Jiselle looked forward to telling Brad Schmidt the next time she went over to their house to see if they needed anything. She would congratulate him on his prescience. He would be pleased, especially if he’d made a believer out of her—and, in truth, suddenly this theory seemed no more farfetched than some of the other things being blamed: Herbal supplements. Global warming. Contaminated grapes. Germ warfare. Bad Karma. Infected cats. Infected dogs. Teenage sex.

On CNN, it was Britney again, dancing on a hilltop in the sunlight wearing a spangled bikini top, blond hair flowing behind her. Sara walked into the room. “Jesus,” she said. “Like, how many people have died since her, and they’re still going on about this?”

Camilla turned the television off, pointing the remote at it like a handgun. The screen went black. “Really,” she said. “It’s pathetic.”