In a Perfect World

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

He had been quarantined in Germany for twenty-two weeks, and Jiselle was having trouble picturing Mark’s face.

Every night, she’d stare at his photograph on top of their dresser—the photo in which he, in his pilot’s uniform, had his arm around her, in her flight attendant’s uniform, and the Pacific Ocean was an infinity of gray containing only one small sailboat behind them.

But as soon as she closed her eyes and tried to call up the features of her husband’s face without the help of the photograph, they would melt in her imagination, as if he were a runner, blurring by. Or on that speeding train up the side of the mountain in Germany.

“Well, Jiselle, you barely knew him before you married him, and he’s been gone most of your marriage anyway,” Annette said.

It felt like a slap across the face—some thin, feminine hand made of air and disapproval smacking her cheek. Annette made a sound on her end of the line, something like air being snorted out of her nose. She’d had a difficult delivery—hours of labor followed by a C-section—but the baby was healthy, a little girl named Paulette, who was three months old. Annette was still so weak from her pregnancy problems that they’d had to hire a nanny to look after the baby, but Annette had been able to get out of the house a few times in the last couple of months.

“Don’t worry,” she said when Jiselle’s silence went on long enough that it was clear she wasn’t going to say anything else, “it’ll all work out when Mark gets back.”

“I need you,” Jiselle said to Mark one evening when the phone connection was unusually crisp over the ocean between them, and when he responded, she could hear every consonant, perfectly pronounced. She could even hear what sounded like swallowing, and the sound of his tongue passing over his teeth when he paused.

“I don’t want to hear that right now, Jiselle,” he said. “I’m helpless over here. I have to believe you’re okay there, and that you’re up to the job of taking care of the kids and yourself. I can’t deal with any soft-minded stuff.”

“What?” Jiselle instinctively put a hand to her throat, pressed the phone closer to her ear.

“You know what I’m talking about, Jiselle. Try to rise to the occasion, okay? This isn’t Disneyland for any of us anymore. Now, I have to go. It’s the middle of the night here. Goodnight, my darling.”

Jiselle mouthed the word goodnight, but Mark hung up before she could say it aloud.

She stood looking at the phone in her hand for a long time.

After it became clear that there would not be time left in the school year for schools to reopen before September, the children had begun to stay up until well into the early hours of morning—1:00 AM, 2:00—and to sleep until noon, even during the week, which had, without the routine of school, become indistinguishable from the weekends. Often, Bobby Temple did not leave for his own house until the sun came up. Those nights, Jiselle fell asleep to the low murmur of his and Camilla’s voices on the other side of the wall.

She thought that, perhaps, as the stepmother, as the adult in the house, she was supposed to ask Bobby to leave, but he was so polite, so helpful—emptying the garbage and then hauling the can to the end of the driveway on Fridays, playing with action figures on the floor with Sam, emptying the rodent cages with him. It was a comfort and a relief having a nearly grown man in the house. When the county stopped garbage pickup, Bobby helped Jiselle burn what couldn’t be composted. (He’d started the compost himself, behind the garage.) When the electricity went out, he would go through the house gathering up the flashlights they’d left lying around since the last power outage, and then he’d start up the generator.

In the middle of April, Bobby drove Jiselle to the airport in his father’s car to pick up Mark’s Mazda from airline employee parking, where it had been since Mark’s fateful flight to Germany. Jiselle drove the Mazda back, and Bobby followed in the Saab.

They parked the Cherokee in the garage and closed the garage door.

“Do what you have to do,” Mark had said disapprovingly over the phone when she told him that she was going to start driving the Mazda instead of the Cherokee now because of the SUV attacks. “Let the thugs run the world,” he said. “But be careful with my Mazda.”

Jiselle didn’t respond. His disapproval didn’t change her mind. She had responsibilities—his children. She had to take precautions. The attacks were becoming more and more common, moving inexorably from the city to its fringes. Drivers were being hauled out of their big vehicles and beaten. The SUVs were toppled, smashed with baseball bats, set on fire.

“We’ve got to blame something for the Phoenix flu,” Paul Temple said. “We’re like the flagellants during the Black Death. What we’re whipping is ourselves. We’re not a God-fearing society, so if it isn’t God who’s punishing us for our sins, it must be the environment punishing us for our gas-guzzling vehicles.”

That afternoon, Paul had walked over to get his Saab back, but Bobby and Camilla had already taken it out again to pick up some things for dinner, so Jiselle invited him in, offered him a beer. The electricity had been on solidly and without interruption for four days, so the beer was cold. He took the bottle gratefully and settled into a chair on the deck, gazing out at the ravine, which was still glistening and dripping from the rainstorm earlier. The air was warm and humid. Paul Temple was flushed. His forehead was beaded with sweat. He leaned on his elbows with the bottle of beer on the table between his arms and held his head in his hands.

“It’s a secular society,” he went on, “so it’s not God; it’s global warming. But it’s the same idea. The idea is that we brought this on ourselves. That cult in Idaho, the one where they all killed themselves to erase their carbon footprint—that could be straight out of the Middle Ages.”

Jiselle had seen photos of the cultists—more than a hundred dead men, women, and children in rows in their compound outside of Boise. They had all had white sheets pulled up to their chins, and their bare feet dangling from the ends of their cots. Such organized mania, she’d thought, looking at the photographs on CNN. How had they managed it?

Paul looked up at Jiselle and said, “These are strange times.”

Jiselle nodded. She saw bewilderment and despair in his expression, which she felt sure had to do with his wife, Tara. That day at the bank returned to her. She was afraid she might betray her own knowledge then, and looked away. Overhead, she heard a plane and looked up to see a pinwheeling bit of silver in the haze. Not a commercial airliner. Those had been grounded for good in the last two weeks. It was, instead, one of the small, fast military or corporate jets that had been crisscrossing the sky lately—quiet and suspiciously high, gone in a blink, although Jiselle continued to stare at the silver spinning place it had been until the sun in the haze over the treetops appeared to double itself.

That afternoon, Jiselle realized they were low on everything. The milk was gone. One of the children had used the last of it and put the empty carton back in the refrigerator. The peanut butter was mostly gone, and there was a green spot of mold on the last slices of bread in the Wonderbread bag.

Outside, Bobby and Paul were hauling bricks, placing them in careful rows beside one another, while Sam ran back and forth from the deck to the edge of the ravine, occasionally flapping his arms. Jiselle called to Sara and Camilla, “Anyone want to go to the store?”

They both did. It had already become a rare treat to go into St. Sophia. Gas was eleven dollars a gallon, and they were trying to conserve what was in the car for emergencies.

They drove in Mark’s Mazda—Camilla beside Jiselle, Sara in the backseat. Jiselle put the top down, for the hard breeze of it, and turned the radio on to the oldies station—happy, stupid songs about being a teenager in a perfect world. Even the car crashes in that world seemed safe, predictable. There were never any special announcements on the oldies station. The only chatter was about a contest in which the naming of a songwriter could win you a thousand dollars. Sara and Camilla nodded along to the songs, seeming content enough. “Take a Letter, Maria.” “Hey There, Lonely Girl.”

Although it had been dry, the rains had been relentless the month before, so the flowers were as vivid as Jiselle ever remembered them. Along the side of the road the wildflowers waved their caution-yellow faces at the sun. Red-winged blackbirds darted among the blooms and grasses, landing on long blades, not even bending them, appearing to be weightless. Butterflies and moths swarmed around the purple-blue of cornflowers. The Queen Anne’s lace made a webby froth in the ditches.

Sara let her elbow rest on the car door and opened and closed her fingers in the wind as the car flew through it, as if she were trying to hang on to the air. Camilla leaned her head back on the seat and closed her eyes, her face lit up by the sun. Jiselle watched the road in front of her spinning out like a black ribbon. There were almost no other cars on the road.

“If you don’t want to hear the bad news out there, folks, you’ve finally found the right station!” a man with a deep voice, which managed to sound girlish in its excitement, shouted over the radio. “We’re just playing music and telling really stupid jokes!”

When Jiselle finally reached the edge of St. Sophia and pulled up to the Safeco, the parking lot was nearly empty. There were just a few small cars parked at the edges—employees’ cars? A couple of motorbikes were on the sidewalk outside the store, and an empty wheelchair, looking abandoned, sat by itself next to the Dumpster. There was one truck parked out front, and a man in a blue shirt was tossing crates out of the back of it onto the pavement. He didn’t look at Jiselle and the girls when they passed by, but after they’d already started to pass through the automatic doors, Jiselle heard him mutter, “Hot babes,” as if it were an accusation. When they were on the other side of the doors, which had closed, Jiselle looked back.

The man had a wild black beard and bright blue eyes. He was staring at her with his chin lifted. She turned away again fast.

Inside the supermarket, Sara and Camilla parted, heading down different aisles, pushing their separate carts. Jiselle took a red plastic basket and said, “Let’s not forget to get Saltines and 7-Up for the Schmidts.”

Saltines and 7-Up seemed to be all Mr. and Mrs. Schmidt ate. It was the only item from the store they ever requested when Jiselle offered to pick something up for them.

What were they living on otherwise?

They never took their car out of the garage anymore, but they looked healthy enough. Like the water Mr. Schmidt said he had, did he also have a stockpile of food? Was he setting traps—eating possum, squirrel? There were apple trees in his backyard, but they had only just begun to grow small, hard fruit. Even if he’d managed somehow to plant a vast vegetable garden, not much could have come up there yet either.

Jiselle would buy them, she decided, some cans of tuna and sardines, if there were any, but she went to the cracker aisle first to get the Saltines, which were plentiful and light to carry in her basket. She took two boxes and moved on.

Freshly mopped, the floors of the grocery store were wet and streaked, but there seemed to be no one working there except for one girl behind one cash register. Many of the things Jiselle wanted—eggs, fresh vegetables, and fruit—lay behind the glass doors of the padlocked freezers or under the heavy yellow contamination cloths. Still, there seemed to be more things on the shelves that afternoon than there had been the week before, when they were still cordoning off the bakery aisle. Now, some of the bread was moldy, but Jiselle found the best loaf she could and put it in her basket. And she was glad to see that there was milk. Many gallons of it. And cheese. And even yogurt, which she’d been learning to live without but still loved. She was happy, passing the displays of canned soup and stuffing mix, to see the plenty. There was still more than enough in the grocery store to feed them for months—years—if need be, until the energy crisis ended and normal shipping routes were reopened.

She tracked down peanut butter for Sam, Frosted Flakes. She shook the box just to hear the flakes inside. Sam would be so happy about the Frosted Flakes. She took the last box of Raisin Bran off the shelf, too, but put it back when she saw that the bottom had been ripped and the waxy pouch inside was open. She picked up a box of Pop-Tarts instead.

At the checkout line, they stood and waited for the girl behind the cash register to finish a phone conversation before scanning their purchases.

“That’s none of her business,” the cashier hissed and whispered. “She can kiss my ass.”

She had her back turned to them, as if they would not be able to hear her words if they couldn’t see her mouth, so they waited in the lane, surrounded by the usual magazines and tabloids, which were covered with the usual headlines:

Every one of those magazines was at least two months old. Sara picked up a People and put it back down, shaking her head.

Finally, the girl behind the cash register got off the phone and rang up their purchases wearily. Each time she scanned an item she seemed to also glance at her watch. She looked pregnant and was wearing a green apron over her protruding stomach and, under the apron, a dress with yellow tulips on it.

Was it possible that she smelled a bit like whiskey? Could that sweet, hot scent be her perfume, or did the smell drift over only when the girl opened her small, glossy red mouth?

When she’d finally scanned the last item, the cashier looked at her watch for several seconds, as if timing something internal before she looked up, sighing, and asked, “That it?”

“Yes,” Jiselle said, and paid in cash.

The man who had been unloading boxes from the semi was sitting now, unmoving, behind the wheel of his truck in the parking lot. He blared his horn when they passed in front of him, and it felt physical, that noise—Jiselle and the girls stumbled a bit, their cart veering slightly out of control. Sara was pushing, Camilla was walking beside her, and Jiselle quickly stepped between the two of them, linking their arms through hers, hurrying to the Mazda. “Fucking asshole,” she said, and she saw the girls exchange amused looks. It crossed Jiselle’s mind to say something to them then—about men, about being careful, now that they were a house without a man in it, but when she began to form the first part of the first sentence, she could not find the words. Instead, she kept their arms hooked around hers.

Jiselle turned the radio back on to the oldies station. She was about to turn right into the road when she realized that the long stream of vehicles passing the Safeco exit was a funeral procession. “Shit,” she said before she could keep herself from saying it. The procession was, of course, going in her direction. Who knew how long they’d have to wait? Sara took a fingernail file out of her purse and began to file her nails. Camilla opened a months-old Elle she’d bought at the store and began to page through it. Jiselle took a deep breath and listened to the song on the radio until she realized that it was—maybe loud enough for those slow-moving mourners to hear—“Na Na, Hey Hey, Kiss Him Goodbye.”

She snapped it off.

She bit her lip.

When she looked over, Camilla was also suppressing a smile, and then they all three started to laugh at the bad joke of it, the morbid coincidence, as car after car continued to pass, headlights shining garishly in the bright sun, little funeral parlor flags snapping from their antennas, until finally the last one, a Mazda just like Mark’s, passed, and the driver, a middle-aged man in a black suit, waved to them as if to let them know the procession was over. He was smiling brightly, not like a mourner. Still, Jiselle hesitated before following him into the road, joining the procession.

“Oh, forget it,” she said, turning left instead of right. “Let’s take the long way, or we’ll be behind them for days before they turn off at the cemetery.”

“Definitely,” the girls agreed.

“Can we turn the radio on again?” Sara asked from behind her.

Jiselle turned it on again. The song was, “Baby, It’s You.”

The long way home took them past the car dealership—where a salesman was sitting in a lawn chair, seeming to be staring up at the sun—and past the library, closed down with the other nonessential public services, and then past the high school, where the flag had been taken down. Nothing flapped there but a loose gray piece of rope.

Then they passed Sam’s school, Marquette Elementary, where the statue of Father Marquette stood in an overgrown garden with his arms open. A white plastic grocery bag was snagged around one of his wrists. The bronze plaque below the statue appeared to have been hacked away from the base, a gouged square in its shape left behind. (Was it simple vandalism, Jiselle wondered, or was there some value in bronze?) She remembered, months before, getting out of her car while waiting for Sam after school to read that plaque. She had learned that Jacques Marquette had stopped in the area during his explorations, due to poor health, and had written his journals there.

She thought, then, of Sara’s journal. All those hours she spent now hunched over, when she wasn’t crocheting, the tiny little letters spilling out of her furiously across the pages.

“Maybe that girl will be the great chronicler of these times,” Paul Temple had said. “Keeping a record of it all. You’ve heard of Brother Clynn, during the Black Plague in Ireland? He was the last monk alive in his cloister, writing a letter to the future he assumed no one would live to see. The last sentence of his journal was ‘Waiting among the dead for death to come,’ and then, written in another hand, ‘And here it seems the author died…’”

“Oh, Paul,” Jiselle had said, “don’t tell me that.”

“I’m sorry,” he’d said, laughing as he apologized. “But at least talking doesn’t make anything happen.”

They drove home along the ravine, dark and leafy-green at the same time. When they were only a few miles from home, they came upon several police cars and a fire engine idling and, along with them, a double row of parked cars. A small crowd of people had gathered, standing in a little huddle, almost as if they were posing for a photograph but looking down into the ravine instead of at a camera.

“Stop,” Camilla said. “Shouldn’t we see what it is?”

“I don’t know,” Jiselle said, but she was slowing down as she said it. “I mean, do we—”

“We have to see,” Sara said. “We can’t just drive by. Something’s going on.”

Jiselle pulled the Mazda over. She put the car in park, and she and the girls got out and walked over to the little gathered group.

No one was speaking. The only sound was the raspy call of a crow overhead and the sound of the fire engine idling, wasting fuel.

Jiselle and the girls came up behind the small crowd and stood on their tiptoes but still could see nothing, so they walked beyond them to the edge of the ravine and looked down.

At first, Jiselle thought she was looking down on flowers—a blurred garden, a wall of flowers built around a heap of flowers—roses and peonies, perhaps covered with a thin sheet of frost so that the flowers shimmered. An enchanted garden. Then she blinked.

No.

This was something else.

Down there in the shadows and among the foliage, she recognized first the face of a goat turned up to her. Its hollow eyes. Its jaw hanging open. Its implacable expression. And then others came into focus:

A bloated cow and what seemed to be a lamb tossed onto its side. Kittens, curled into a mass—or were they rabbits? A scrawny dog or a coyote. A small horse, which seemed to be bowing on its knees like a circus animal performing a trick.

The smell of it, also flowery, overpoweringly sweet and rotten, drifted up to her on the breeze, and Jiselle put her hand over her face and mouth but didn’t gasp until she saw movement—the black shadow of a rat darting under the horse’s pale corpse.

“What the hell is it?” Sara asked, holding on to Jiselle’s upper arm. Her hand was cold. She was breathing hard. Jiselle couldn’t speak. A woman in front of them answered.

“Animals,” she said. “Dead. You know, they dump them. The diseased. Farmers, I guess. Or someone. Or a bunch of someones.”

“Jesus,” Camilla said, backing away.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Back at the house, Jiselle and the girls unloaded the groceries in silence. From the glass doors, Jiselle saw that Sam, Bobby, and Paul were filling a narrow black dirt path with bricks. They had their shirts off now, and their backs were shining in the sun. Sam was holding a brick, waiting for Paul or Bobby to take it from him.

Unlike the other two, he wasn’t sweating. He’d taken off his shirt only in imitation. When Bobby or Paul wiped his own brow, Sam did the same.

Jiselle made lunch from what she’d bought at Safeco. Bread, canned ham. She made lemonade from powder and bottled water, poured it, set out a glass for each of them, and called them in for lunch.

The conversation around the table concerned trips they’d taken. The Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon. The time Jiselle’s plane to Sweden had been rerouted to Iceland.

Nothing was said about the animal dump. The girls ate heartily. They seemed to have forgotten the shock of it.

Back near the Mazda, Sara had vomited. Camilla had held her hair. They’d opened the trunk and gotten out one of the dozens of bottles of water they’d bought, and Jiselle had poured some of it onto a paper towel, wiped Sara’s face for her, given her the rest to rinse out her mouth, spit, drink. When they were back in the car, Camilla said, “What the hell is going on? Did those animals get the flu? Is something going to happen to us?”

“Of course not,” Jiselle said. “Humans and animals don’t get the same diseases. It’s just—like the woman said. Farm animals. It’s convenient. Like people who dump old refrigerators in the woods. You don’t have to pay to—”

“They weren’t all farm animals,” Sara said. “How did they get there? Why were all those people standing around? Why were the cops there?”

Jiselle said nothing. She could not think of any explanation for the animal dump that was not completely absurd. There was no explanation. Finally, she said, “We should have asked the fireman or the police.”

But then she recalled the look on the fireman’s face—stern, unapproachable, the expression the guards at the queen’s palace wore. An expression that forbade the asking of questions.

Now Sara was eating, looking pink-cheeked again. Sam told a joke about a monkey on a bicycle. There was laughter. They lingered long enough for Jiselle to make a second pitcher of powdered lemonade, and when they were done eating, Bobby and Camilla sat down on the couch to watch television together, and Sara went to her room, where Jiselle could hear one of her own old Joni Mitchell CDs playing. She’d told Sara weeks before to feel free to borrow anything she liked but hadn’t really imagined she owned any CDs Sara would like. Apparently, she did.

Jiselle and Paul took their glasses of lemonade to the deck, along with Sam, and they sat for a while looking out at the ravine, at the half-laid path down the lawn to the edge of it. Not until Sam went back inside for a cookie did Jiselle tell Paul about what they’d seen—the animal dump.

He nodded. He bit his lower lip. He didn’t speculate but said, “I wish I could say I’m more surprised. Something’s headed in our direction. The year before the Black Plague did its worst damage, people said they saw herds of horses in the sky. Whole crowds would gather together to stare up at them.”

Jiselle was about to protest that this hadn’t been a hallucination, that there were actual animals—dozens of them—dead and dumped at the side of the road, but Sam came back out then with a cookie for each of them on a small white plate, and Paul and Jiselle each took one and ate them in the sunshine.

“Jiselle,” Paul said to her when she stood to go back in the house.

“Yes?” she said.

But there was a look in his eyes that she understood to mean he had only been saying her name, not asking anything of her.

“Mark?” Jiselle asked.

“Yeah?”

These days he simply sounded distracted when she spoke to him. He said there’d been no progress whatsoever made on their release. “No one’s going anywhere,” he said. “Anywhere. For God knows how long.”

“I love you, Mark,” she said.

“Love you, too.”

“The children are doing fine,” she said.

“Good.”

Everything must have seemed so far away to him, she realized. What was there to talk about? What were the mice, the birds, the animal dump, the weather in St. Sophia, or even the children, to Mark, detained on the other side of the ocean? When she could think of nothing to say, she said, again, “I love you.”

“I love you, too.” He said the words as if she’d badgered him into saying them.

By the end of the week, they’d finished the path.

“Do you like it?” Paul asked her. He was standing a few feet ahead of Jiselle. He crossed his arms over his sweaty T-shirt. He worked his tongue around near his back molar, the one that had been bothering him for a few days, and waited for her to answer.

It was a perfect path, straight down the back of the lawn into the leafy distance. It divided the backyard into two interlocking halves. It meandered a little, but it was a clear path. Already a bit of moss was growing in the cracks. “It’s beautiful,” she said.

It was.

Nights, under a full moon, it glowed. There was something in the bricks—ground glass?—that couldn’t be seen in daylight but that became luminous in moonlight.

Standing on the path ahead of her, Paul Temple said, as if it hurt him to say it, “You’re so good to his children. And so lovely. I hope he appreciates you.”

Jiselle inhaled and put a hand to her mouth, before turning back to the house.

“Jiselle!” he called after her. “I’m sorry…”

The weather had been so warm and sunny and so wet so early that all the flowers were already at the height of their blooming, and then starting to die already by the beginning of July. The magnolias looked soggy, littering the grass with petals. The branches of the rose bushes sagged with roses. The daffodils lay prone on the earth, their stems having slumped over under the burden of their enormous flowers.

That day, Tara Temple came to the door. Jiselle opened it, surprised to see how plump she was—certainly she’d gained fifteen pounds since Jiselle had seen her in line at the bank—and how scantily clad. She was wearing a silvery sundress, and it plunged between her large, loose breasts, even revealing a shadow of the aureolae around her nipples. The dress floated over her thighs in the breeze, threatening, it seemed to Jiselle, to fly right off.

Yes, she said to Jiselle as she stepped through the door, she’d love to step in and have a cup of coffee. She’d stopped by to tell Bobby she was going to need to go to Virginia for a week. “Grandma’s sick.”

But Bobby and Camilla had taken Mark’s car into town, on Jiselle’s request. The electricity had gone out for three days, spoiling everything, but it had been back on for a day now, and the refrigerator was working, and it seemed to Jiselle that if there was milk and butter at the Safeco, they could risk a few things in the refrigerator again, and that it would be worth the gas to stock up while they could.

While Tara Temple sat at the kitchen table, Jiselle made coffee, poured it into mugs, and, after punching holes in the top, handed the can of evaporated milk to Tara, who added it to her cup.

“It’s so important, you know,” Tara said, pouring the milk into her coffee. “Vitamin D.”

“Oh,” Jiselle said, but she had never liked evaporated milk and did not want it in her coffee, which was now a rare enough treat that spoiling it seemed like a crime. Like so many other things, coffee had become harder and harder to come by. Luckily, Jiselle had thought to buy several cans before the shortages, and now she limited herself to one cup every other day, because who knew how long it would have to last?

She looked disapproving when Jiselle set the can back down on the counter without pouring any into her cup, and Tara picked the can back up herself before following Jiselle out to the deck.

They sat together with the evaporated milk between them, both women holding their coffee to their noses, taking deep breaths of it.

“It’s not a healthy addiction,” Tara said, but she closed her eyes when she sipped.

So did Jiselle.

“My,” Tara said, and rested the cup on her knee, “that tastes good.”

She sat with her legs crossed, swinging one over the other, and her dress was so short that Jiselle could see her black lace underwear as she rested her head on the back of the chair, her face to the sun.

“Dairy products,” Tara said. “And sunlight. This disease preys on people who aren’t getting enough vitamin D, which is almost impossible to get in sufficient quantities because of the diminished sun function. Did you know that?” She looked at Jiselle.

“Really?” Jiselle asked. It was all she could think of to say. Tara Temple had delivered this news with such an air of authority that Jiselle found herself both intimidated and comforted by it. Someone, she thought, at least thinks she knows what’s going on here.

Tara reached over and handed Jiselle the can of evaporated milk, urging it on her. “You really must,” she said.

Obediently, Jiselle poured some into her cup. The coffee was strong—stronger than she would usually have made it back when she’d taken coffee for granted—and the evaporated milk made a little mushroom cloud in her cup. “Thank you,” she said, placing the can back down between them.

“That’s why the quarantines are so shortsighted,” Tara Temple went on. “It only keeps people indoors, when the problem in the first place is not enough sunlight.”

“Oh,” Jiselle said.

“We’re not catching this,” Tara Temple continued. “We’re developing this. The subtle changes in the environment are signaling changes in our bodies, our nutritional needs, and it’s happening too fast to adapt.”

This was something Jiselle had heard Dr. Springwell say, back when he was still broadcasting his show.

“Do you meditate?” Tara asked, leaning toward Jiselle, looking directly at her.

“No,” Jiselle said, sipping from her cup, avoiding those eyes. So blue. So full of certainty.

“You should,” Tara said. “Clarity in a time like this is extremely important.” She paused and looked at Jiselle as if she were inspecting her for disease. “What are you eating at least?” she asked.

“Well,” Jiselle said. “I’m just trying, you know, to keep us all fed.”

Tara Temple shook her head. “You need to be very conscious of what you’re eating,” she said.

“Yes,” Jiselle said. She nodded as if she understood, as if she would try to be more conscious of what she was eating. But how? It was so much harder than Jiselle had ever guessed it would be, keeping her small family fed. All those years, dashing from kiosk to kiosk, drive-thru to convenience store, she’d never once imagined how much time it would take to make a meal, to serve it. Without a stove. With a refrigerator that couldn’t be counted on. No gas in the car, and the grocery store closed half the time, ten miles from home.

The good decisions she’d made had nothing to do with her consciousness, as it turned out. They’d been lucky guesses. She’d somehow known that flour would be important and so, before the shortages, had bought twelve pounds of it. And sugar. Baking powder. A can of Crisco, a thing she’d never even seen up close before she bought it. Now, late mornings, when the power was on and she could use the oven, Jiselle would make enough muffins to last a week. She’d gotten the recipe out of an old Good Housekeeping magazine she’d found in the garage.

She’d learned, too, how to take care of fresh food. Potatoes and onions lasted an amazingly long time in the cool dark. Bouillon cubes. Cabbage. Apples. She’d torn out an article from the same Good Housekeeping magazine on how to soak beans so long that they needed to be boiled for only an hour to make soup. After all those years of relying on frozen dinners and packaged bread, it amazed Jiselle that she could prepare a meal out of beans and water and a single carrot that was so delicious even Sara would ask for seconds.

She’d stocked the cupboards and filled boxes in the cellar with canned food and dried fruit after hearing a woman on the radio say one day, “I’m stocking up on food. I know we’ve been warned not to ‘hoard,’ but protecting your family is not the same as ‘hoarding.’”

The woman’s voice sounded like a sober and practical Martha Stewart’s, but it couldn’t have been. Martha Stewart had died of the Phoenix flu two weeks before. In any case, Jiselle had taken the woman’s advice. She and Camilla had driven into town to the Safeco three times, loading the car each time with all the canned and dried goods they could buy. Ramen noodles. Crackers. Pop-Tarts. Broths. Powdered milk. The flour and sugar.

“Well, I have to go, but tell Bobby I stopped by and that I said I’d call in a couple of days, and I’ll be home next week. By the way,” Tara Temple said, stopping, turning to look at Jiselle, “how is Mark?”

“Well,” Jiselle said. “Still in the quarantine, of course. He’ll be in Germany still, for a little while, I’m afraid.”

Tara Temple smiled, wistfully it seemed. She said, “Ah, Mark.”

Jiselle said nothing. She waited for Tara Temple to go on.

“We’ve known him, you know, for a long time. Since long before the—” Here she paused and looked toward the road. “Since long before Joy, and all the years since. We were happy, I suppose, to hear he’d gotten married again. But not surprised. He was always such a—” She moved her hand through the air, as if trying to snatch the right phrase out of it. There was a look of unmistakable pleasure on her face as she said, “Mark was always such a fool for love.” She shook her head. “Such a hopeless romantic. In and out of love, always rescuing some damsel in distress or being rescued by one.” She let the hand dash back and forth in front of her for a few seconds before she went on, “And everyone put up with it because, as you must know better than anyone, he was so…attractive. It was a relief, and such a surprise, to imagine him settling down. There were not a few of us in this little town who were…” She looked, then, up to the sky and said, “Oh, never mind! I’m sure this isn’t something you want to hear about, my dear!”

Tara Temple turned back around, and Jiselle watched her descend the steps.

Had she been trying to tell Jiselle what Jiselle thought she might? Had she and Mark…?

Tara Temple was already opening her car door when Jiselle noticed that she was still holding on to the can of evaporated milk. (Absentmindedly? Or had she come to think of it as hers? Had she thought it was wasted on Jiselle, who would never take her advice about vitamin D or meditation, and so just die of the Phoenix flu anyway?) In any case, Tara Temple carried the can with her out the front door, and she still had it in her hand when she got behind the wheel of her car and called out her open window, “Goodbye!”

Jiselle said nothing about the milk. She had another can in the cupboard.

In the morning, Sara wandered into the family room where Jiselle and Camilla were reading together. She held up a pair of scissors in her hands. Jiselle instinctively sat up straighter, inhaling. The combination of Sara and a sharp instrument seemed full of dangerous potential.

But that morning Sara was wearing a white nightgown with yellow smiley faces on it—something Jiselle had never seen before and had not known that Sara owned. She said, handing the scissors to Jiselle, “Will you cut my hair? So it’s all one color?”

“Of course,” Jiselle said, taking the scissors from her, hoping she didn’t sound as breathless to Sara as she did to herself, and stood to follow her into the bathroom.

Since school had been closed, Sara’s hair had started to grow out of its ebony dye-job, and what had emerged were several inches of a sandy and reddish blond that reminded Jiselle of the color of fawns. The black fringe around her shoulders, contrasted with her natural color, made her look even more fearsome than when her hair was all one color, but Jiselle had assumed she liked it that way.

“This is so ugly,” Sara said, flipping the ends of her hair with her fingers. “Get rid of it. Please.”

“Sure,” Jiselle said.

She got a towel out of the linen closet and spread it over the sink, and then put her hand between Sara’s shoulder blades, pushed her forward gently. She rarely touched Sara on purpose—just accidentally when they reached for the salt shaker at the same time or when she found Sara’s elbow pressed against her own as they tried to walk through a door at the same time—and Jiselle was surprised how thin, almost fragile, Sara’s back felt, and her neck. She could feel the knobs of her vertebrae, and when Sara tilted her face to the side, Jiselle could see the pulse beat in a fluttering vein at her temple.

“Okay,” Jiselle said, taking a bit of the hair between her fingers. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” Sara said.

So Jiselle snipped at Sara’s hair until the black fringe had fallen either onto the towel in the sink or around their feet on the bathroom floor. It took a long time. Jiselle wanted to do a perfect job. “Okay,” she finally said, and Sara straightened up.

Jiselle stared at Sara’s reflection staring at herself in the bathroom mirror, and it was as if she were seeing this girl for the first time.

Sara, without the unnaturally black hair, seemed to have skin the color of peaches. She wasn’t, Jiselle realized, wearing her lip ring or her black makeup. Without these things she looked like an awkward adolescent—a young girl with a round face, wide eyes, soft hair, which Jiselle could not stop herself from touching.

It felt like rabbit fur, she thought, running her hand over the top of her stepdaughter’s head.

It felt like infant hair.

The next night they heard, in the distance, what sounded like either fireworks or gunfire.

The sun had just set, and Sam, who was playing with his action figures in the candlelight, looked up. He said, “Shouldn’t we be celebrating?”

“Celebrating what?” Camilla asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Independence?”

It was the Fourth of July?

Sara was crocheting by candlelight, and Jiselle was trying to read Far from the Madding Crowd with a flashlight balanced on her shoulder. Next door, Diane Schmidt could be heard humming a vaguely familiar tune, something Jiselle thought she might recognize from a documentary about the Civil War she’d watched on PBS in what seemed like another lifetime, a century before.

Again, they heard what might have been fireworks or gunfire. When Sam said, “See?”—as if the sound were evidence of their call to celebrate—they all started to laugh, and Jiselle said, “Okay,” and they headed outside, where they set the brush pile on fire, and Sara, Camilla, and Sam marched around it singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

During the march, Jiselle suddenly remembered a trick from Girl Scout camp—how, if you boiled a closed can of evaporated milk long enough, somehow it turned to caramel. She went back into the kitchen for a can of milk and a pan of water.

When she came back out, Jiselle boiled the can over the fire, watching Sam and Camilla and Sara march around her. They looked beautiful and feral in their strange clothes—the girls in mismatched summer skirts and tops, their hair long and wild, like pagan princesses, forest creatures, flushed in the firelight, bare arms and legs glowing orange.

And laughing between his sisters in the circle, Sam, in his cutoffs, bare-chested, appeared to be half-human and half-elf.

They looked like children from a time before civilization, before television and computers, vaccinations and fast food and jets—or children after these things, singing a patriotic song written so long ago she was surprised they knew the words.

Later, when she opened the can of evaporated milk, and it was miraculously caramel, they went back into the kitchen and stood around, eating the dense sweetness with spoons.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

It was two o’clock in the morning, but they had gotten used to going to sleep later and later. They were wearing their nightclothes—Jiselle, her long summer nightgown, and Sam, his Star Wars T-shirt and checkered boxer shorts—but it didn’t seem past midnight to her, and Sam was wide awake, although the girls had gone to bed after Bobby left, an hour before, riding his bicycle off into the dark.

For eight days straight, the power had been out, so Jiselle and the children waited each night until ten or eleven o’clock to eat dinner by candlelight—a meal of bread, peanut butter, raisins, and canned soup she could heat up outside on the grill they’d bought at Wal-Mart the first week of March, before there were no more grills for sale anywhere, at any price. The charcoal was gone, and the lighter fluid, but Jiselle had the kindling that Bobby had broken up for her and left in a neat pile under an old plastic tarp on the deck.

If they ate earlier, the dark nights seemed to stretch on even longer.

Most days, until the sun set, they managed to keep busy reading, playing chess, Sara crocheting or writing in her journal, Sam throwing the Frisbee with Bobby, Jiselle trying to organize the pantry, dust the bookshelves. They had burned what trash had to be gotten rid of in the fire pit. Afterward, it was a perfect ashy black circle at the center of the brown lawn, but while it was burning, the fire there would glow in hundreds of shades of blue and orange. Watching it, you might have thought it was something magical, something biblical, if you didn’t know it was burning trash.

Jiselle was still able to charge the battery in her cell phone off the battery in the Cherokee, but only occasionally could she pick up a signal. When she could, she called her mother, who answered the phone, “This is Anna Petersen,” as if her office might be calling—but why would they? No one could be selling real estate now. When Jiselle asked how she was, and how she was going to be, and if she needed to come stay with them in St. Sophia, her mother would only chat about the weather, ending with a few last words about Jiselle’s “impossible situation.”

Mark hadn’t called in two days—or if he’d tried, he hadn’t been able to get through—and then it had been only to say hello and that he couldn’t talk long. There were German officials coming to speak to the detainees that afternoon, and he had paperwork to fill out. He told her, “Don’t get excited about a homecoming anytime soon. But I have a feeling we will, at least, be seeing a large monetary settlement from the German government when this is over.”

“I just want you home,” Jiselle said. “I don’t care about the money.”

“Of course you don’t care,” Mark said.

Jiselle was about to object—she felt a warmth spreading across her chest as though a hot soaked cloth had been placed there—but by the time she finally was able to open her mouth to speak, Mark said, “This is it. They’re here. Gotta go,” and hung up.

Jiselle did the laundry outside in the rain barrel and hung it on the line Paul had stretched for her between the deck and a tree at the end of the yard. That chore alone could sometimes take an entire afternoon before Jiselle even realized how long she’d been outside. The ravine seemed empty and completely quiet behind her as she twisted the shirts and socks until they were dry enough to hang. Occasionally, Beatrice might waddle up out of the ravine for a surprise midday visit.

The grass, which they’d had to let grow since the mower ran out of gas, had grown a foot in only a few weeks. Returned to what must have been an earlier, wilder state, there were long pale grasses mixed in with the green ones, and wildflowers Jiselle didn’t know the names of—orange, ruffled cups swaying on thin stems, delicate white frills, purple beads and pearls on long straw-colored stalks—mixed in with those.

Now it was very unusual to see a plane, and when she did, it was almost always a military jet flying fast and high. The trees and sky seemed strangely empty even of birds. It was only the end of July. Could they have flown south early this year?

There had been news reports of dead birds, numbering into the hundreds, in yards and parks and in the streets of Chicago, but Jiselle had found, a few weeks before, only a single dead sparrow—a soft gray ball of feathers—in the backyard. One of its wings looked broken, spread out at a strange angle, and there was blood on its breast.

A cat?

She took a shovel out of the garage and buried the sparrow at the edge of the ravine.

The rodents, like the birds, seemed to have fled. Every morning, Sam’s traps were empty, and he and Jiselle never saw mice or rats on their walks into the ravine any longer. Their absence was not reassuring. Jiselle felt more abandoned by their disappearance than relieved.

It was one of so many disconcerting things. Wave after wave of disastrous statistics on the news were being made human now by a few familiar faces:

Donald Trump’s son. Brad Pitt’s brother. The woman who’d founded Mrs. Fields cookies, and her entire family.

All of these cases proved what they’d already been telling people for months—that no amount of money, specialized medicine, private planes, or island hideaways could spare you.

The Fieldses, it was said, had retreated together to a house in Idaho, thinking it was an escape from the infected areas with higher populations—but they were found there by a UPS man delivering blankets, which they’d had shipped to them from Denmark because they were unwilling to use blankets that had spent any significant amount of time within U.S. borders.

“These people did everything ‘right,’” a man who was identified by a caption on the television as “Health Expert” said, making elaborate quotation marks in the air, raising his bushy eyebrows knowingly, “which goes to show that you can’t flee from a virus that’s already circulating in your body. People need to keep themselves fit, mind their nutrition, and stay close to health experts who can help them at the first sign of illness.”

But the story that completely eclipsed the others was “A Mother, a Saint, in Maine.”

In Portland a mother of four had left a note on the kitchen table that read, “I know I have the Phoenix flu. I’m going away until it’s passed, so I won’t infect you.”

Her husband and children and the local authorities had mounted a massive search. They’d posted flyers and bought a billboard on the interstate: MOMMY. WE NEED YOU TO COME HOME. WE LOVE YOU. PLEASE. But she was found dead and alone a few days later by a maid at a Holiday Inn in Concord, New Hampshire—her bed surrounded by photos of her family.

Now the family was suing the local authorities because they’d had her remains cremated before the family had a chance to identify her, to say goodbye.

That night, on the couch in the dark, Sam was a warm weight at her side, his head on her shoulder, and Jiselle could feel both the steadiness of his breath and the depth of his concentration. The flashlight was a bright zero on the page they were reading together. His hair was a little longer now, and it tickled the side of her face. Occasionally she’d rub her cheek against the top of his head. He snuggled closer to her when she did.

As if on cue, there was a knock on the front door.

Sam and Jiselle both sat up fast, and Jiselle instinctively snapped the flashlight off and let the book fall closed on her lap. She was surprised to find her heart beating hard. She’d told everyone—Bobby and Paul Temple, Mark, her mother, the children, Annette, Brad Schmidt—that she wasn’t scared in the house, in the dark, alone with the children, without a gun, and she’d believed it.

But now she couldn’t move.

Sam whispered, “Who could it be?”

Jiselle shook her head. She put her finger to her lips. Another knock. Three times. More insistent. She felt every muscle in her body tense, as if her limbs were ready to take action, whether or not her mind agreed to it. A host of images flashed in front of her: Throwing herself over Sam to shield him. The ravine. Thrashing with his hand in hers through the brush and trees. The girls, in their nightgowns, running ahead of them. She wished that her feet weren’t bare, that Sam was wearing long pants and sleeves, that the girls did not sleep so deeply. She’d just begun to form the terrible question of how loudly she would have to scream to wake them, and felt herself inhale, and sensed the instinctive, welcome rush of what could only have been called courage beginning at the base of her brain, readying her to stand, to make some kind of decision, although only her body knew yet what that decision would be, when a voice she recognized as Diane Schmidt’s called through the crack in the door, which she had opened, because Jiselle hadn’t even locked it, “I am a little old woman.”

“Mrs. Schmidt!” Jiselle said, opening the door all the way. “What is it?”

“I am a little old woman,” Mrs. Schmidt said again. She was wearing a white nightgown.

“Oh, dear,” Jiselle said. “I’ll go find your husband. You stay here with Sam.”

As Jiselle ran across the yard to the Schmidts’ house, she wrapped her arms around herself, shivering suddenly, although she wasn’t cold. The moon lit up the backyard, and she hurried up the back steps, holding her flashlight in front of her. She knocked on the door. “Mr. Schmidt? Mr. Schmidt? Brad?”

There was no answer. Jiselle tried to look through the screen door and the kitchen window, but the shades were drawn, the curtains pulled. There were no lights on inside. Maybe he was asleep. She knocked harder on the door, and then stood waiting on the steps. She cupped her hands around her mouth and called to the window, “Mr. Schmidt?”

Certainly, if he were in there, he would have heard her by then. But still there was no answer.

She turned the knob on the back door.

It was unlocked.

She pushed it all the way open and stood in the threshold.

“Hello?” she called to the darkness, shining her flashlight into the tidy kitchen before stepping in.

Jiselle had never entered the Schmidts’ house from the back door before. With her flashlight, she could make out checkerboard curtains on the windows. The cupboards were painted pastel green. There was a throw rug with a rooster embroidered on it beneath a Formica table. A little yellow rag was folded neatly over the edge of the sink. Jiselle walked through the kitchen toward the hallway that led to the living room, leaving the back door open behind her.

“Hello?” she called, but quietly.

The hallway was even darker, but when she shone her light on the walls, Jiselle could see photographs of Brad and Diane in younger days: Holding hands at the edge of a canyon. Standing with their backs to a waterfall. Diane Schmidt waving from a lounge chair at the side of a pool, wearing a two-piece bathing suit, her skin tanned and smooth, her hair still dark and pulled back, tied with a bright scarf.

“Brad?”

She peered into what must have been their bedroom.

The bed was carefully made, the white bedspread without a single crease.

He was not in the bed.

She walked past that room and what must have been the family room, and then the bathroom, which smelled of air freshener and floral soaps.

She stepped into the living room, which was darker than any of the other rooms had been. The television was off, of course, although Mr. Schmidt was sitting in front of it with his feet propped up on an ottoman, staring straight ahead with eyes that appeared to have melted deep into his skull, or fallen from it.

“Hello?” Jiselle said, although she knew he wouldn’t answer.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Very little had been said about what actually happened to victims of the Phoenix flu. The only person who’d spoken of the suffering—the Surgeon General—had been criticized for fear-mongering and replaced by a quieter Surgeon General. But his words—“I’ve seen people die of cancer and seen them die of AIDS, and had no idea God could come up with even worse ways to die”—had been quoted and repeated a hundred thousand times before they could be suppressed.

But after Brad Schmidt died, the paramedics wouldn’t, or couldn’t, answer Jiselle’s question about what had happened to his eyes, so she was left to wonder. Had he scratched them out? Had they somehow swollen? Burst?

The paramedics said only that she shouldn’t touch any of his things and that they were going to board up the house.

After they’d taken Brad Schmidt’s body away, the officer in charge wanted to take Mrs. Schmidt to the Grove Home in the city, but Jiselle had heard such terrible things about the place—completely overcrowded, since so many nursing homes and halfway houses and mental institutions had been closed down, and also without staff. One of the Grove Homes had been investigated for euthanizing some of its patients when the generator failed and their oxygen was cut off.

“I suppose you think we should have just sat by and watched them strangle to death, flap around like fish for an hour until they suffocated in their beds?” the nurse in charge said as she was being handcuffed and taken away. “Well, I invite anyone who believes that a death like that would be more compassionate than a sedative and a lethal injection to come and volunteer at the nearest Grove Home.”

Paul Temple had said, shaking his head, “During the Black Death, parents abandoned their children, children abandoned their parents.”

Apparently, the Schmidts had never had children. If there were any living relatives, they could not be located.

“No,” Jiselle told the police officer, who stood on the front porch in his biohazard suit looking like a visitor from space. “She can stay with us.”

“It’s irregular,” he said, but objected no further. He seemed to make a note on a pad of paper, but when Jiselle glanced at the page, she saw nothing on it. There was, apparently, no ink in the officer’s pen. Still, he’d wanted to give the appearance of being official, of following a procedure.

Sara moved into Camilla’s room so that Mrs. Schmidt could sleep in Sara’s bed—but in the warm late weeks of the month, Mrs. Schmidt often fell asleep on the deck outside and could not be persuaded to come in.

Sometimes Jiselle would rise in the middle of the night, go to the windows, and see her standing in the backyard, grass almost to her hips, looking up at the moon. Sometimes she saw what must have been Beatrice at Diane Schmidt’s feet, looking like a smaller moon, buried in grass, reflecting that reflection.

Once, when Jiselle rose and went to the windows, she found that Diane Schmidt had taken off all her clothes and was standing completely naked in the backyard, arms spread wide. The power had been out again for a week, and without light pollution, the whole sky above Mrs. Schmidt seemed to fizz with stars—some of them falling, arcing through the dark—and it looked as if Diane Schmidt might be trying to catch them in her arms, and as if she might be able to do so if she waited long enough.

Having her in the house was no more trouble than having a cat. She spent most of her time outdoors. She ate whatever was offered to her, politely. She took her medicine—which Jiselle found in the Schmidts’ bathroom cabinet—without complaint. She was clean. She wiped the bathroom sink with a tissue after she used it and even went through the house once a day with the feather duster, whistling to herself as she dusted. When she slipped in and out at night, it was in complete silence, but she never left the yard. And some of the things she had to say struck Jiselle as deeply wise.

“‘We are put on this earth but a little space,’” Diane Schmidt said one afternoon at lunch, “‘that we might learn to bear the beams of love.’”

“That’s lovely,” Jiselle said.

“That’s Blake,” Diane Schmidt replied, and returned to eating her bowl of rice without dropping a single grain. “Once upon a time I was an English teacher.”

Paul Temple said, “You know you’re going to need wood. To burn. For heat. A lot of it. We all need to think about winter without electricity.”

Jiselle nodded. She told him, however, that she supposed, really, he should be chopping and stacking wood for himself, and for Bobby, for the winter. Tara Temple had never returned from her week-long visit to her mother, and Jiselle had quit asking Paul if she had or would.

He said, “If you wouldn’t object, it would be easier, if there’s no power, for us to spend the worst of the cold spells here. Better to heat one house than two, and you have more people to move than we do.”

“Of course,” Jiselle said. She felt her pulse quicken and was hoping she hadn’t blushed. They held each other’s eyes for a few seconds before they both looked up at the emptiness of the sky.

“That is,” Paul said, not meeting her eyes, “if…”

Jiselle held up a hand to keep him from saying anything else.

Paul Temple cleared his throat, ignoring—or not noticing—her hand. “That is, if Mark…”

“I haven’t heard from Mark since…” She couldn’t even say it. It had been a week. A woman answered the phone every day at the Gesundheitsschutzhaus and said, with a heavy German accent, “We have no phone service to the quarantine. You must stop calling here. Captain Dorn is perfectly well, and he will call you when he calls you.”

The airline had said nothing, would say nothing.

“I’ll get Bobby going on the wood. God knows the kid’s got nothing to do.”

Paul’s face was tanned and lined in the sun. His beard had grown out through the summer, and it was full now, gray and sandy-blond. With the ax over his shoulder, in jeans and a flannel shirt, he looked like a woodsman: muscular, rustic. His eyes, however, were watery and tired. He’d had that toothache now for weeks—the dull throbbing of a molar, which kept him up at night, pacing around his house. Of course there were no dentists doing business in St. Sophia. No drugstores were open; nor would there have been any aspirin left on the shelves if they were. Paul had agreed to take the bottle of Advil Jiselle offered him only after she assured him that she had several bottles stored in the cellar. He’d refused it at first: “Who knows when you might need this, or when or where you’ll be able to buy more?” But he took it when she insisted.

That week, Paul and Bobby repaired the chimney, too, and swept out the fireplace.

They shooed the swallows out and put a screen over the chimney so the birds couldn’t come back.

The birds circled the roof for hours afterward, but finally they flew off for good, built their nest somewhere else, it seemed. Jiselle knew their departure was a good thing, although, after their eviction, she looked up, watched them circle in gray and feathered confusion, and felt sorry that they couldn’t stay. “You don’t think,” she said to Paul, watching beside her, “that it could be…you know, bad luck, to send them away?”

Paul shook his head. He said, “No, Jiselle. Try not to think like that. When these superstitions start, and start being taken for truth, it’s a kind of final bell tolling for civilization. We can’t start believing in luck.”

Jiselle was playing chess after midnight with Sam when Mrs. Schmidt came out of Sara’s bedroom, held up a finger, and said, “Listen.”

In the candlelight, she looked more than ever like a wraith. Her white nightgown was full of shadows, and her face was obscured by darkness. Jiselle assumed at first that she was in one of her sleepwalking states: Sometimes Mrs. Schmidt would wake from dreams and wander out of Sara’s room with something important to say, unable to recall what it was.

But Sam and Jiselle stopped their game to listen anyway.

Sam heard them first, and his eyes widened, and then Jiselle heard them, too.

At first, a distant yelp.

A womanish moan, far away, singular.

But then came a whole chorus of bawling and ululating cries, whines, plaintive and angry at the same time—and as if she were the first person to hear such a sound, as if she were a woman in a cave, a woman born before language, listening, Jiselle felt the fine blond hairs on her limbs rising away from her flesh in a feathery wave of foreboding, traveling up her body, her neck, and she stood and reached out instinctively for Sam, pulling him to her.

“Who is that?” Sam asked.

“We don’t know,” Jiselle said.

When Paul and Bobby arrived in the morning, Paul told her they had heard them, too, from their own house.

“Were they coyotes?” Jiselle asked. “Wolves?”

Paul Temple said no, he didn’t think so. He believed they might simply be the hungry pets of St. Sophia residents who’d died or fled without their dogs.

Jiselle thought then of the first day that Mark had driven her into St. Sophia—the brick façades of the buildings downtown, the little boy on his red bicycle, the shining fire engine outside the station.

ST. SOPHIA—AMERICA’S HOMETOWN.

But like so many towns in America, St. Sophia was no one’s hometown. Their families were elsewhere, as were their jobs. It looked like a town, but in the months Jiselle had lived there, even after the plague began, the Temples were the only people she’d gotten to know, and they were not from St. Sophia, either.

When trouble came here, people went somewhere else.

They went back.

They left their schools behind, their shining fire engine, their quaint downtown, their pets.

St. Sophia was just a town on a list given to people who needed a town, a town that could just as easily be crossed off the list and cease to exist.

After that, Jiselle heard them every night, and no matter how deeply asleep she was, the cries always woke her with her heart pounding and sent her hurrying to the doorway of Sam’s room to check on him, and then past the girls’ and Mrs. Schmidt’s rooms, to see that they were in their beds, and then to the window, to stare into the darkness draped over the ravine, imagining those pets, lost and changed, calling out for the ones who had abandoned them.

That week, Paul and Bobby stayed each night for dinner. Jiselle would make whatever she could from the cans and boxes she had. If the electricity was out, she would cook on the grill. Sometimes Diane Schmidt would sit with them, and sometimes Jiselle had to take a plate to her room or out to the yard, where she might be sitting beside Beatrice, watching the sun set. After dinner, Paul and Jiselle sat on the deck with their cups of tea. They said nothing about Mark, who had not called, but Paul confided in her that when Tara had not come back from Virginia, he’d felt mostly relieved. There had been trouble between them for years, but the Phoenix flu and the power outages had forced some things to the surface—like the fact that he and Tara had nothing in common, except for Bobby, who was getting older, getting on with his life.

He said that after Tara called to tell him she was going to stay longer, didn’t know when she’d be back, he couldn’t even find it in himself to feel surprised.

“She’d been ready to go for a long time.”

Jiselle thought then of Tara Temple in the line at the bank that day but said nothing.

“And all this hocus-pocus stuff she got into. I couldn’t stomach it. You know, during the Black Plague, these charlatans used to go door to door selling Abracadabras and charms and knots. People would give their last crust of bread for some worthless amulet. She wanted me to believe in her positive thinking and read her books, and I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

Bobby was the one who was grief-stricken. “He misses his mother, and he’s worried about her, of course. He’s afraid she’ll get sick in Virginia, and with no mail service and if the phone lines go completely—the way the electricity’s been going—how will we ever know?”

Jiselle nodded and bit her lip.

“Shit happens,” Paul said. “Look at Schmidt.” He nodded in the direction of Brad and Diane’s house, which had been covered by the county in yards and yards of yellow tape marked BIOHAZARD. Brad Schmidt had been gone only one week, and already the hedge between their houses had grown into a tangled thicket, a wild wall. Fat pink flowers bloomed on a few of the branches.

“Jesus Christ,” Sara said. “It’s a flowering hedge. Is that why he kept cutting it up? He was trying to keep the flowers from blooming?”

CHAPTER TWENTY

It seemed like a minor problem compared to the many other problems, but how could they simply watch her die? There was no more Fowl Feed Deluxe left in the can, and Beatrice would touch nothing else.

“Jiselle?” Sam said. “Can we go to the pet store? Please?”

He stood at the sliding glass doors shivering in the damp morning breeze, his arms wrapped around his stomach. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, but he’d grown so much in the last few months that the sleeves ended between his elbows and his wrists. Soon, if they couldn’t go shopping, he would look like Huck Finn, a boy grown out of homespun clothes, barefoot.

“We have to get some goose food,” he said. He looked at Jiselle. His eyes were wide and beseeching. “What if she starves?”

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

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

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

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

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

“No, Sam. We—”

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

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

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

“Please?”

“Oh Sam,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, they turned the radio off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay,” she said.

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

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

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

“Yes?” Jiselle said.

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

“What?” Jiselle asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She heard her mother’s voice:

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was, she felt sure, the same boy.

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

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

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

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

“How do you know so much about birds?”

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

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

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

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

Jiselle ran her hand over it.

It was fringed with silk thread.

She picked up the edge of it.

Soft and warm but also exquisitely light.

Finished.

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

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

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

It was light, like standing in summer air.

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