In a Perfect World

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The power returned mysteriously after two solid weeks without it, long enough for them to get dangerously used to the convenience of the furnace in the first cool days of autumn and to watching the news. The reporters were circling the story of the Princess Cruises liner that had disappeared in the Caribbean ten months earlier—a ship sailing from Fort Myers to Tierra del Fuego, with brief stops at all the small islands between them, before such cruises had been entirely proscribed.

This particular ship had never arrived in Tierra del Fuego, but, these many months later, had run aground on the shores of the Isla Mujeres, Mexico, instead.

PLAGUE SHIP: AN UPDATE!

Jiselle and Mark had been on a ship like it—perhaps even this very ship, she realized, the name of which was being withheld until the next of kin had been notified, although surely those kin must have noticed that their loved ones hadn’t returned from the cruise they’d set out on nearly a year before.

Jiselle remembered the buffet table, every night—mounds of shrimp, oysters glistening in their half-shells, crystal bowls of cold crab and lobster meat, caviar on French bread, tropical fruit sliced into anchors and swans spread across yards and yards of crushed and sparkling ice. She remembered dancing with Mark, her head on his shoulder, the white silk shirt she’d bought for him against her cheek.

Now when she tried to call Mark, there was no answer at all.

By the time the cruise ship ran aground on the Isla Mujeres, all the passengers were long dead.

“A macabre scene greeted Red Cross workers on this small Mexican Island yesterday—”

Jiselle imagined the passengers in their lounge chairs on the deck, wrapped in their plush white velvet robes. Dancing on the parquet floor in their shiny shoes, the brass instruments of the band glittering under the slowly revolving disco ball suspended from the ceiling.

The volunteers had boarded the ship in their biohazard suits and returned from it with faraway looks on their faces, captured in photographs as they disembarked in the hours before the island was evacuated entirely of rescuers, of journalists, of residents, while decisions were made about what to do with the ship.

In the meantime, planes owned by American television networks flew over and around it, videotaping the great silence of that ship stalled on the coast of the Isla Mujeres, which Jiselle remembered as a pale and nearly treeless expanse of white in the middle of the turquoise dream of the Caribbean.

“Are you giving me this so I won’t steal it again?”

Jiselle shook her head. She said, “No. I’m giving it to you because you love it.”

“Thank you,” Sara said as she slipped onto her finger the onyx ring Mark had bought for Jiselle on Isla Mujeres. “I do love it.”

On Sara’s finger, it sparkled darkly, absorbing their reflections as they looked into it. Jiselle took Sara’s hand and kissed the ring goodbye.

That night, Jiselle woke in the dark to a sound in the hallway and sat up in bed fast. She looked to the threshold of the door, which was open. “Camilla?”

There was no answer, but the shape of a woman in a white gown was there.

“Mrs. Schmidt?” Jiselle tried to focus her eyes, but the figure seemed to be made of shadows, waving rather than standing. She swung her legs off the edge of the bed and stood. Her heart was beating hard—in her chest, in her ears, all along her arms and neck. She was holding her breath. She stepped toward the door. “Sara?”

The figure seemed to float away from her then, and then float back, and then rise, and recede, and then flash in the threshold, and Jiselle gasped when she saw who it was.

“Annette?” she whispered to the doorway, before sinking to her knees.

There was a beam of light glowing on Annette’s pale face, which was changed but familiar, and the light spilled down her chest to the place where she held a baby to her breast.

Jiselle looked from the baby and back up to Annette, and just before she vanished, Jiselle saw the look of pain and anguish on her face, and she reached toward her, touching nothing. She continued to reach toward the vanished figure long after she knew what she knew, and then she got back into bed.

The power came on for four days again the next week, and although there was nothing on television or on the radio, they kept music playing all day on the stereo, as if they might never hear music again if they turned it off—Joni Mitchell, Bach, Britney Spears, Kool Moe Dee, the Muppets, whatever CDs they could find, one after another, without a pause between them beyond what it took to take one off and put another one on. Bob Dylan was crooning “Jokerman” when the power went out again.

They went to bed early, and the sun came up bright, but the power was still out, so Jiselle went through the house resetting the electric clocks. It was a silly, optimistic gesture, she knew, but whenever the power was out, Jiselle reset the electric clocks every few hours. To see them frozen on the counters and on the walls disoriented her. Could it still be two o’clock? she’d think five times in a row before realizing it couldn’t be.

“Why don’t we just get rid of the clocks?” Sam asked. He pointed out that Jiselle’s watch still worked—although the battery in his own was dead, and there was no way to replace it. “Anyway,” he pointed out, “what difference does it make what time it is?”

Jiselle smiled a little apologetically and shrugged as she reset them.

After the clocks, she went to the refrigerator—the now-familiar routine of scouting through it for what had spoiled, what could be salvaged.

A few days earlier, a man in a white truck had pulled into the driveway. There had been no lettering on his truck, but Jiselle felt confident he was a farmer as soon as he stepped out. He was older, with a gray beard. He wore overalls and a straw hat, as if it were a farmer’s costume or a uniform.

“Howdy!” he’d called to her when he saw Jiselle standing at the front door. “I’ve got dairy!” Jiselle walked around to the back of the truck with him.

The farmer smelled reassuringly of manure—pleasant, authentic: earth, and animals, and work. His cheeks were rosy, his smile warm, although one of his front teeth was missing. He opened the back of the truck, and Jiselle gasped when she saw it.

At least a hundred beautiful glass bottles of milk. Old-fashioned, dusty wheels of cheese. What must have been another hundred golden bricks of butter wrapped in waxed paper. “Where did you get all this?” she asked.

The farmer laughed, putting one hand on his round belly as he did. He looked at her, amused, and said, “Well, ma’am, I made it. From cows. That’s where dairy products come from!”

Jiselle laughed, too, at herself. Farms. Animals. Had she forgotten? She said, “Well, I’m impressed.”

“What would you like?”

Jiselle looked at the bottles, the waxed bricks, the wheels of cheese. She said, “I’m short on cash, will you take—?”

“I’ll take gas, valuables, or cash, and that’s my order of preference,” the farmer said, counting them off on his fingers, which were dirty but plump. He’d been ready with the answer, as if he’d been asked it often. “I’ll consider other things, such as canned goods, tools, and the like. But I sure as hell ain’t takin’ a check.” Again, he put a hand to his belly as he laughed.

Jiselle went into the house and came back out with the jade earrings Mark had given her for Christmas. She held them up for the farmer.

In the sunlight, they looked paler than they did in the house. Green teardrops. Seadrops. The farmer held them in his hand, as if to weigh them. He held them up. He looked at her, and at the gold watch on her wrist. Mark had given that to her as well. “Those real diamonds?” he asked.

She looked at the watch face, the little sparkling aurora of jewels around it, and said, “Yes. Of course.”

“I’d rather have that,” he said, and handed the jade earrings back to her.

Jiselle took off the watch and gave it to him, and he carried four bottles of milk, two bricks of butter, and a wheel of cheese into the house for her.

She had paid, she realized, what might have been seven or eight hundred dollars for a few groceries, what might have cost twenty dollars in another time—but she didn’t need the watch, and Sam looked thin to her, and she’d been thinking about Tara Temple’s warning about vitamin D.

That night she made everyone—even Bobby and Paul, even Diane Schmidt—drink a large glass of milk and eat a huge piece of cheese with the bean soup she made for dinner.

She slathered the bread she’d baked for them with butter.

Now what was left of it, eight hours after the electricity had shut down, already smelled of bacteria, decay. She took the milk out of the dark refrigerator and set it aside. She took the butter and leftover cheese outside to the deck in a sack, which she tied to the highest branch of the oak tree she could reach, hoping the height would keep animals away and the cool air would keep it fresh a little longer.

Then she went back inside and gathered up the things to make tea—the kettle of water, the matches to make a fire in the grill—and wrapped her shawl around her.

It was a damp morning after the rain of the night before, but a clear morning—the sky a pale blue overlaid with thready clouds, as if spider webs had been carefully draped over a dome. The leaves of the trees in the ravine were wet and shining in the sunrise. The branches appeared to be wrapped in black velvet against the bright sky. She put the kettle down, opened the box of matches, and was about to strike one against the side of the box when something in the side yard caught her eye, and she turned.

“Bobby?”

He was standing over the woodpile with an ax. Not swinging it, just holding it.

Despite the chill, he had his shirt off, and he was naked to the waist. He appeared to be soaked with sweat.

“Bobby?” she asked again. “What are you doing here?”

He didn’t answer. The ax dropped from his arms, and he made no sound when he fell into the long grass beside it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

After neither the Mazda nor the Cherokee would start, Camilla ran the two miles to the Temples’ house and returned in the Saab with Paul—who, jumping out of it, loped in long strides around the house to the backyard and, without asking any questions at all, bent down and scooped up his son, cradling him in his arms as if he were a child instead of the large man he was and carrying him to the car. Jiselle ran behind them, and after Paul placed Bobby carefully in the backseat, she slid in with him, still in her nightgown, without asking if she should. Behind her, she saw Camilla, weeping, trying to break loose of her sister, who was holding her back.

Over Paul’s shoulder, Jiselle watched the speedometer inch past eighty, past ninety, and then to a hundred, while Bobby lay with his head in her lap. The boy breathed steadily, but there was an oddly hollow sound when he exhaled, as if the air, instead of coming out of his lungs, were rattling through a wooden box. A wooden box on fire. His head was damp and burning at the same time, and his breath, too, seemed strangely hot. His mouth stayed open, and although his eyes were closed, Jiselle saw, in the corner of one, a tiny teardrop of watery blood.

For as far as Jiselle could see, there was no one else on either side of the freeway—not another car, or cab, or truck—so when they pulled into the St. Sophia Mercy Hospital parking lot, she thought, at first, they must have accidentally pulled off at a stadium or a mall. Except that those places were no longer open, those sorts of gatherings no longer occurred. Paul squealed past the hundreds of parked cars, leaving the smell of his tires burning against the parking lot tar, pulling up at the Emergency Room entrance. He jumped from the car then and ran inside, without saying anything to Jiselle or closing the car door, and was back in only a few seconds, followed by a woman in a white lab jacket. She had a nametag that read DR. STARK on the pocket, and a stethoscope around her neck, but otherwise she was dressed as if she’d just been called in from a picnic—jeans, tennis shoes, a University of Illinois hockey team T-shirt. Her hair was wispy and blond. She looked no older than Camilla, Jiselle thought.

Paul opened the back door for her, and Dr. Stark leaned in.

Bobby’s eyes were closed. His torso was naked but still sweat-soaked. Dr. Stark appeared curious but not alarmed. She took his arm and pressed his wrist with two fingers. After a few other things—feeling the glands in his neck, asking Jiselle what his name was and then saying the name, slapping her hands in front of his face and then sighing as if he’d disappointed her when he didn’t respond, Dr. Stark backed out of the car and stood in front of Paul in the parking lot.

“I’m sorry,” she told him, not sounding sorry. “There’s nothing we can do for him here except have him lie around in the hallway all day, until we send him away. I can’t tell you what to do, sir, but if this were my son, I’d take him home and get some sleep in case he needed me in the night. He’s probably in no immediate danger. No more so than any of us.” She gestured around—to the parking lot, herself, Paul, the sky.

Paul just stared at her as if he were waiting for her to say something else, to go on. His tongue was working over the sore molar, as it did all the time now, and then he began to shake his head in little snaps, and reached out to touch the doctor’s arm, but she stepped away and turned toward the hospital. When he said to her back, “But—” She turned once more and seemed to scan the parking lot behind him. Without emotion, she said, “If you’re up for the drive into Chicago, you might hear a different story, but the word we’re getting from there is that they won’t even look at anyone with the Phoenix flu. Still,” she said more softly, “you have to do what you have to do.”

“Medicine?” Jiselle called out the car window to Dr. Stark’s back.

Dr. Stark turned again, shrugged, and said, “Got any?”

Some people fell ill and recovered. Some lingered, it seemed. Some died quickly within a few terrible days.

Bobby Temple died quickly and terribly.

Weeping blood. Coughing blood. His sheets soaked with blood. His pillow.

The power was on, but Camilla went through the Temples’ house and turned the lights off one by one. They watched Bobby die by candlelight, and when it was over, although the phones were working again, Paul said there was no point calling the funeral home, no point notifying anyone. Who could help them? They would stay with the body until the sun rose—no one could go anywhere until it was light out anyway—and then he wanted Jiselle and Camilla to leave. He wanted to burn the body of his son in his own backyard, and he wanted to be alone.

But Jiselle and Camilla washed Bobby’s body before they left—carefully wiping the dried blood out of his eyes, swabbing the blood out of his mouth with a washcloth. Camilla clipped his fingernails, kissing each finger after she did. Jiselle went through his closet and found his best shirt and slacks. Paul knotted the tie around his neck, folded the collar of his shirt down over the tie. In the candlelight, Bobby’s eyelids appeared to flicker as if he were dreaming, but there was a look of such relaxation on his face that Jiselle knew he wasn’t.

They sat back in their places around the bed, Jiselle holding Paul’s hand in one of hers and Camilla’s in the other. Paul and Camilla each held one of Bobby’s hands. When the sun finally broke into the darkness, and the warm light of it seeped over the windowsills and cast the shadows of the bare tree branches against the shades, Paul said, “You need to go.”

Jiselle looked up at him.

The swelling on the side of his face had gone down in the night, and he looked more like the man she remembered, making that brick path with Bobby and Sam in the backyard in the sun. He was not in physical pain. The afternoon before, after Bobby had finally fallen quiet—the screaming and the clawing having subsided into an awesome silence—Paul had left the room and returned with a pair of pliers.

“Please,” he said to Jiselle. “I can’t have this distraction while my boy dies.”

Jiselle followed him into his bedroom, where he’d already spread a towel over the pillows. He’d brought two tennis rackets in from the back porch to hold on to. He said to Jiselle, handing her the pliers, “I sterilized them.” He swallowed. “I passed them through a fire, and I just had a shot of whiskey. I’ll try to be quiet.”

When it was over, Jiselle wiped the blood from the side of Paul Temple’s face with a towel, and the tears out of his eyes with her fingertips, and as she did, he reached up and pulled her down next to him on the bed.

She put her head on his shoulder.

For the first time in two days, for a few minutes there in Paul Temple’s arms, Jiselle fell asleep.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

She was reading to Sam the morning the National Guard came to the door. It was the end of November, and it had been snowing all night.

Everyone else was still asleep.

Four men—boys, really, wearing army-green fatigues, stood outside the front door. Although they were taller and more muscular than Sam, they did not look much older. The same clear eyes, poreless skin.

They’d parked their Jeep in the driveway, and behind them, it looked strangely mechanical to Jiselle, out of place in the snow—primitive, like something cobbled together by a creative but unimaginative people. Prehistoric. They wanted to know if she had a vehicle, too, and, if so, did the vehicle have any fuel?

Jiselle pulled her shawl around her shoulders. A hard wind was blowing across the yard, bending the bare tree branches to the east. One of the boys was wearing gloves without fingers, and Jiselle saw that his fingernails were tipped with blue. There were matching blue circles under his eyes. Looking at that one, Jiselle invited them in, and then she stepped out of the way as they passed, one by one, through the door. She’d just added another log to the fire, and it was pouring warmth into the living room. The soldiers moved toward it as if magnetized.

The power had gone out the week before and hadn’t come back on. Still, Bobby and Paul had stacked enough wood behind the house that Jiselle was hopeful that if she was conservative with it, she could keep the house heated until March, when the weather would surely get warmer, whether or not the power came back on.

She’d stopped assuming that it would.

The boys sat next to one another across from the fire, squeezing together to fit themselves on the couch, and apologized for their boots, which were wet but not dirty—huge black boots laced halfway up their calves, tightly, over olive-green pants. The snow on the soles was melting in clear and shallow puddles around them on the wood floors, but Jiselle said not to worry about it. She’d mop up when they left.

Along with the snow, a scent had been tracked in with them—the smell of burning oil, tarnished brass, old coins and canvas left in a trunk in an attic, taken out again. Industry, travel, commerce, the world. Nothing like the ordinary smells of the house—soap, candle wax, kindling, tea. It would take longer, Jiselle knew, to get that smell of the world out of the house than to mop up the melted snow on the floor around their boots.

“I’m Mrs. Dorn,” she said.

The soldiers nodded to her but didn’t introduce themselves. They seemed stunned into speechlessness by the warmth of the fire.

Sam stood beside Jiselle, staring in appreciative wonder at them. The soldiers nodded at him in unison, kindly—the understanding of soldiers for the great reverence they were held in by boys. Jiselle put her arm around Sam, pulled him closer to her, her shawl around his shoulders, too—although she wasn’t afraid of these soldiers. In her house, in a row on her couch, these were just shivering boys in wet boots.

If they had rifles, they’d left them behind in the Jeep.

Answering their question, she said, “I have two vehicles. But no fuel,” and then, “Would you like some tea?”

Three of the boys glanced for an answer to the one on the end of the couch, who looked no different from the others except that his green cap had two small black stripes glued to the brim. He shrugged at the others, and then at Jiselle. He said, “Sure.”

So Jiselle went to the kitchen, poured water into the kettle, brought it back, hung it on a hook from the tripod over the fire. Back in September, Sam had rigged up the tripod, made from the legs of an old aluminum lawn chair. He’d gotten the idea from an illustration in the Hans Christian Andersen book, in which an old crone had been pictured stirring a pot hanging over a fire from just such a tripod.

“What are the vehicles, ma’am?” the boy with the black stripes on his cap asked.

“A Jeep Cherokee,” Jiselle said, “and a Saab. And also a little Mazda. You’re welcome to them—but, as I said, there’s no gas.”

The morning after Bobby’s death, Paul had insisted that Jiselle take the Saab.

“I filled it up with the last can of gas I had in the garage. It can’t get me to Virginia with one tank of gas,” he said. “And you might need it, in an emergency. If you won’t take it for yourself, think of your children.”

“But we have the Mazda,” Jiselle protested. “And the Cherokee.”

Paul shook his head. “This has gas, and it runs,” he said. He pressed the key into her hand. Its little teeth shone in the sunrise.

“What will you do?”

“I’m walking,” he said, shifting the satchel he was carrying from one shoulder to the next. “I’d be walking before long one way or another.”

“I could drive you as far as—”

He held up a hand, shaking his head. “You might never make it back, whether you had any gas or not.” He didn’t continue, and Jiselle didn’t try to say anything else.

She took the car but had driven it only one time before it too was out of gas. That time had been the morning Diane Schmidt died.

Together, Jiselle and Sara had wound the sheet around her body and carried her to the car, placing her carefully in the backseat. Jiselle drove to the funeral parlor in town, where two ugly women—sisters, surely, with the same fierce jaws and close-set eyes, one of them with a wart on her nose from which a black hair sprouted—demanded two thousand dollars in cash. When Jiselle said she had no cash at all, they reluctantly took her wedding ring and pulled Mrs. Schmidt’s body, without any grace or care at all, out of the back of the car.

From there, Jiselle had gone to find her mother. She had not been able to reach her by phone for a long time. Only once she’d gotten through and heard her mother answer, “This is Anna Petersen,” before the connection was lost again.

What else could Jiselle do? Her mother might have been fiercely independent, but how independent could an older woman, alone while the world crumbled around her, be?

Jiselle had found herself having to drive straight through Chicago because there were roadblocks, looking unofficial, homemade, thrown together by mobs without machinery or organization, on the freeway—walls of cinderblock, and even a few places where old school buses had been parked to keep traffic from traveling from one state to another.

She’d had no choice but to wind her way through downtown, and so Jiselle had seen for herself the blocks of burned houses. The vandalism. The fountains clogged with garbage. The broken-down door of Duke’s Palace Inn. The smoldering darkness inside it. The smoke pouring out of the highest floors of the Sears Tower. The debris littering Millennium Park. Windows of stores smashed all along the Magnificent Mile. Snowflakes falling peacefully and sparsely over all of it. On a few corners were boys like the ones in her living room now, wearing camouflage (why camouflage, she’d wondered, in the city?) with surgical masks, holding automatic rifles, and beyond them ashes everywhere.

It seemed possible to Jiselle that those boys had, themselves, set the fires—who else was there to do it?—but her mother had told her that it had been boys like those, with the National Guard, who’d stood outside B.C. Yu’s dry cleaning business, weeks earlier, after the rumors began that a Korean scientist had created the bacteria that caused the Phoenix flu.

The rumors weren’t quelled fast enough to keep the Korean-owned businesses in large cities and small towns alike from being destroyed. EVIL was spray-painted over the dry cleaner’s sign, and the door was boarded over, and someone had thrown what must have been a bucket of red paint over that. But the windows weren’t smashed, and the building had not been burned. The National Guard had prevented that. B.C. Yu himself had died of the Phoenix flu before the rumors even began.

Jiselle’s mother had brought nothing with her but a large box from her sewing room filled with what looked like rags, her tea set, some clothes, and the Little Mermaid statuette from the mantel, which sat on Mark’s mantel now, and they’d managed to drive back to the house in Paul’s Saab, although the gas gauge was on E for the last forty miles.

Jiselle knew that the National Guard couldn’t take the vehicles with them, that the possibility that they had some stash of gasoline with them was low. If they did, there were cars littered all over town—keys still in the ignition, thousands of dollars’ worth of chrome and upholstery. Why would they have come all the way out here?

But she meant it, too. They could have the cars. They were welcome to the cars, which meant nothing to her now in their silence, in their huge weight and useless gravity.

Jiselle poured the water into her mother’s teapot, over the dried mint, and the room was suffused with the scent of spring and fresh air, and the four boys seemed to lift their chins to it, as if to information they hadn’t come in search of but were happy to receive.

After the tea had steeped, and Jiselle had poured it, they sipped gratefully from her mother’s delicate cups.

“You’re sure there’s no gas left in either tank, ma’am?” the one with the stripes asked.

“None,” Jiselle answered.

The soldiers finished their tea and handed the cups back to Jiselle carefully, one by one. They stood in a row in front of the couch. “Do you mind my asking, ma’am,” the one with the stripes said, looking around the room, “do you have a plan? Do you have a weapon? Is your husband home?”

“Yes,” Jiselle said, although none of these things was true.

“Good,” the soldier said. “There’s a lot of looting, you know. And illness. And rumors.”

“I know,” Jiselle said.

She did.

She had seen what had happened in the city.

“What are the latest rumors?” she asked anyway.

The boys looked at one another as if deciding among themselves, in silence, whether or not to tell her.

“Well,” the boy with the stripes said after clearing his throat, “it’s all over the world now, you know. One in three, they’re saying. But this could just be the beginning. They’re saying it’s a bacteria. Biological warfare? It could be something as simple as a bit of some anthrax-like agent, sprinkled on the floor of a restroom, in an airport, maybe. Something entirely new. Someone could have stepped in it, worn the contaminated shoe all over the world. It could be potent enough that the spores—”

“Thank you,” Jiselle said.

She held up a hand, glanced at Sam. She was sorry she’d asked. Somehow—how?—she’d hoped for something good.

The soldier nodded, understanding. He said, “But you need to understand, and so does your son. There are groups, gangs, on the roads. You’re set back here in the trees, and without lights maybe they won’t see you, for now. But we did. And there’s a lot of desperation. And trust me, they’ll figure a new way to travel without gasoline. They’ll find a way, and they’ll find you, too, eventually. There are—”

“The garage is open,” Jiselle said, nodding toward the door, “and the keys are in the cars.”

“Thank you, ma’am. And good luck.”

They filed out then, back into the snow, turning once, in unison, to wave goodbye. They spent only a few minutes in the garage with the Cherokee, and then peering into the windows of the other two cars, before trudging back out to their Jeep and driving away, and Jiselle and Sam went back to the couch in front of the fire to finish the story they’d started.

It ended happily, with the witch vanquished. The spell broken. The children returned safely to their mother, whom they’d feared was dead.

Only later did Jiselle go to the bedroom closet and pull out of the shadows the one shoe left from Madrid.

That lovely black shoe. Its mate had never been found.

The high, narrow heel. The way the arch fit her foot perfectly. The leather polished to a glossy shine.

She remembered again the salesman on his knees in front of her in that old-fashioned shoe store in Madrid. How he’d cradled her foot in his hands, as if it were a precious gift. How he’d slid the shoe on. “Perfecto,” he’d said.

And it was. That shoe had fit her as if it had been made for her by elves, by fairies, by angels.

How many millions of places had she worn those beautiful shoes?

She’d walked through a thousand streets in a hundred countries. She had stood in lines, sat in theaters, strolled down cobbled paths, occasionally bending down to pet a cat, admire a baby in a bassinet. Years before, in Phoenix, Arizona, she’d stopped by a booth at a street fair and admired a silver bracelet, slipping it over her wrist, holding it up in the bright desert sun to look at it.

She’d handed it back to the jewelry maker, an old man with a windburned face, with an apologetic smile.

She could no longer remember why she hadn’t bought it.

Now, she held up the one shoe, turned it over, ran her fingers over the sole, looked at her fingertips.

Nothing.

Not even dust.

She put the shoe back down in the shadows at the bottom of her closet, and when she turned around, she saw that Sam was standing in the doorway, smiling.

He said, “Jiselle,” shaking his head, “it wasn’t your shoe.” Smiling. “It’s nobody’s shoe.”

“But what if it was?” she asked him.

Still smiling, Sam shrugged. “What if it was?” he said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The beginning of December was warmer, although the sky, day after day, was a deep purple. The clouds scudding across it looked ink-stained, seeming perpetually to threaten snowstorms that never came. In the afternoons, Jiselle played chess with Sam, read with him in the evenings. Mornings, there were dried beans to sort and soak. There were a few novels left from Camilla’s English Lit course to read. The fire had to be made and stoked. The ashes had to be swept up and thrown out the back door. They’d forgotten about Thanksgiving, so when Jiselle finally remembered, she gathered them all together and surprised them with a dinner of Swanson turkey and dressing from a can. She’d planned to save the turkey for Christmas, but by then, perhaps, she knew, there might be an entirely new plan.

The fire in the living room kept the house warm. There was still food in the cellar: soups, tuna fish, pasta in boxes, powdered milk. Fresh water still poured out of the faucets. But Jiselle knew they needed fruits and vegetables. There were only a few boxes of raisins and cans of peaches left. There was enough toilet paper in the linen closet to last for months, and tampons—although Jiselle and Camilla had both stopped menstruating. (Sara said it was because they weren’t drinking enough water. “You’re not getting enough iron. You can get it in the water, you know.”) They’d stopped using paper towels and napkins at the table, using rags instead, which could be rinsed out and hung up near the fire to dry with the underwear and socks.

How wasteful, Jiselle marveled now, they’d been, and for so long! She wished now she had just one of the large plastic bags she’d thrown away in the last year. So many things she could think of to do with that now. With only one notebook left in the house she realized that soon the only place they would have to write would be on the walls, in the margins of the books on the shelves.

She’d given that notebook to Sara, who had filled up all the pages of her black diary.

“You’re the chronicler,” Jiselle had said when Sara protested that there was no reason she should get the precious notebook. “Take it.”

For the future, Jiselle took down a few books she knew they wouldn’t be needing, in preparation. Some had wide margins, blank pages between chapters. Aviation Through the Ages. Light Aircraft Navigation Essentials.

The days passed so slowly they might have been lifetimes. Jiselle tried to impose a shape on each one:

The Day of the Spider in the Bathroom, The Day of Split Pea Soup, The Day the Wood Seemed Wet and Would Not Light, The Day of Paging Through an Old Copy of The New Yorker and Marveling at the Ordinariness and the Advertisements, The Day We Thought We Heard a Horse Whinny in the Distance, The Day the Lights Flickered, The Day We Might Have Heard Shots Fired in the Ravine, The Day Sam Invented Mint Toothpaste from Baking Soda and Tea…

Because, if she failed to do this, she would go to bed at night and feel as if she were on a drifting ship with no idea where in the world, or in time and space, she might wake up.

Now, every night, the hounds in the ravine howled longer and louder, sounding closer, hungrier. Twice, Jiselle had glimpsed one wandering in the backyard through the snow. Some scrawny blond thing. Was it a dog, she wondered, as Paul had thought—someone’s pet, altered by events? Or a coyote—something wild that no longer sensed danger from the human world it had once shunned?

It didn’t matter. There was such a feral emaciation about the animal that there was no way to tell what else it might, at one time, have been. The creature itself might not have remembered whether it had once been something tame, someone’s pet, or a dangerous predator. When Jiselle came to the glass doors to watch it, it would lift its muzzle to the air, seeming to smell her, and then slip back into the ravine.

After she was sure it was gone, she would go outside to see if Beatrice was still in the little wooden house Sam had built for her—carefully, ambitiously, nailing together some wood planks he’d found in the garage.

Each time, Jiselle was ready for the worst, but Beatrice was always still there, sitting on a nest of Mark’s old uniforms they’d piled up for her, ruffling her feathers.

But the next week the goose quit eating. Jiselle no longer had vegetable oil to mix into the feed, and it became a sticky mess, unconsumed, on the ground around the nest Beatrice never left.

Then, one morning, Jiselle saw a small rabbit in the snow, running like a vivid rag from one end of the backyard to the other. A few hours later, there were animal tracks in the snow, and blood, and the next afternoon, Jiselle saw another animal—something she didn’t recognize, an animal with a long black body, pointed ears—low to the ground, sliding across the deck, disappearing under the Schmidts’ hedge.

An enormous mink?

A wolverine?

Or an entirely new kind of animal?

Was it stalking Beatrice?

That night she woke to the sound of something like a fight between creatures in the dark—a yelping bark against a mewling scream, and she knew instantly that this was an animal, not human, scream, but still Jiselle jumped from the couch with her flashlight and checked the rooms where the children and her mother were soundly sleeping. Afterward, she went back into the family room and sat on the couch with her hands over her ears. The violence of those noises was terrible. There were teeth involved, she could tell, and claws, and blood, and when the silence came, swelling up around the house, she knew there had been a death.

In the morning, she found a dark path worn away around Beatrice’s shack. Something had circled it in the night more than once looking for a way to get in. But when Jiselle pushed open the little makeshift door, Beatrice was still there, alive. Jiselle stepped in, knelt down, ran her fingers along the white feathers, and Beatrice shifted her wings beneath Jiselle’s hand.

In the middle of December, Jiselle’s mother decided that since they could not know if or when the schools would reopen, the children had to be home-schooled, and she would do it.

So, the long afternoons of chess with Sam were replaced by lessons carefully planned out by Jiselle’s mother for the children. She’d sit up at the kitchen table in the flickering candlelight long after everyone else had gone to sleep, using the schoolbooks the children had at home, the encyclopedia, the dictionary, an atlas Mark had kept tucked into the glove compartment of the Cherokee, a medical handbook, and a book of baby names, which must have belonged to Joy.

The children were eager for the lessons, sitting down at the kitchen table in the mornings, thumbing through the books.

During “school,” Jiselle would pick up one of Camilla’s novels and read. She was halfway through Anna Karenina, but it was getting harder to concentrate. She’d find her mind returning again and again to Bobby. Those final hours.

Or Paul. Where was he now?

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

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

They kept busy.

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

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

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

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

“Hostage,” Jiselle said.

“Princess,” her mother corrected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Camilla was first.

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

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

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

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

This was a boy who was starving.

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

Surely there would be enough food left for another month.

Or two, if she was careful.

But only if she was careful.

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

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

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

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

“Eat it anyway,” Sara whispered back.

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

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

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

But they hadn’t been hungry then.

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

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

“Hello?” she called.

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

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

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

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

An enormous, magical cat.

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

Cougar.

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

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

Where had it come from?

North?

West?

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

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

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

Would there be more?

Were there more?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Jiselle, you need to sleep.”

No.

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

“Jiselle, what are we going to do?”

She closed the book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank God,” Sara said.

“Thank Jiselle!” Camilla said.

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

Another night passed, and then another.

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

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

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

There was wood to cut down, and in the spring there would be berries in the ravine. Now that Jiselle knew she could kill an animal, and that her mother could clean it and cook it, the world could start all over again, full of possibilities. The whole house seemed radiant with these possibilities. With the seeds she’d found in the Schmidts’ cellar, there would be vegetables, and with the rifle and the boxes of ammunition they would be able to hunt for small game and deer. Sara had found a handbook on the shelf, something of Mark’s, that explained the gutting and tanning of antelope. Surely a deer would be no different from an antelope. Only that morning, Sara had come into the kitchen with the hunting book open like a hymnal in her hands, and said, “It says here that it’s much less messy if you can string the antelope up, and bleed it before you clean it. See—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sara helped me,” her mother said. “I could never have finished it without her.”

Her mother and Sara dragged out the box Jiselle recognized from her mother’s sewing room—the one full of rags—into the kitchen and hoisted it up onto the table. Sam and Camilla pulled up chairs and waited for Jiselle to open the box. Sam’s cheeks were flushed with health. Both he and Camilla looked radiant. Camilla had been gaining weight since the gauntness of the fall, and her hair had grown down to her waist. It hung heavy and loose tonight around her bright, rounded face.

Jiselle hesitated, without knowing why.

“Well, aren’t you going to open it?” Sam asked, nodding at the box.

Jiselle pulled open the cardboard flaps and pushed them away, peering in. Then she looked up. “What is it?” she asked, looking around the table.

“A quilt!” Sam said. They were all nodding.

“But not just a quilt,” Sara said.

Jiselle began to pull it out then: an enormous patchwork of multicolored flowers. Little hand-stitches held the hundreds of pieces of it together.

“Your mother saved everything. Everything,” Sara said.

They all stood around Jiselle, watching. She ran her hand over the quilted flowers as they watched, until, slowly, the bits and pieces came into focus.

“Do you see?” Sara asked.

A scrap of bright green satin: Prom dress?

A polka-dotted flower: a blouse she had worn almost 305 every day the summer between fifth and sixth grade?

“This,” her mother said, “is from your costume, remember? The Nutcracker?”

Jiselle nodded.

“And this you couldn’t remember. This is a piece of your baptismal gown. And this”—she pointed out a soft pink scrap—“is what I was able to snip from your baby blanket, the one part you never managed to drag through the mud or throw up on. And here: your high school graduation gown. This is a bit of your first flight attendant’s uniform. This—”

Her mother went on and on.

Jiselle couldn’t speak. She ran her fingers over familiar lace and then a bit of suede. A purse, high school, which came back to her with a whole year of sights and sounds: Ellen tossing a French fry at her across the cafeteria. A carnival at the edge of town. A huge wheel of lights spinning slowly in the sky. Jiselle closed her eyes and saw that wheel again, and this time, spinning there, she was one of the lights.

They laughed at her when she opened her eyes again, still unable to speak, until finally she managed to say, “Thank you.”

It was the only thing she could say.

The rest of the day was like any other, taken up with chores. The stoking of the fire. The boiling of water. The sweeping of the floors. The hunting and skinning of the rabbit.

For Christmas dinner they ate a stew of that rabbit and a can of potatoes. It was delicious. Jiselle’s mother had spiced it with things she found in the cellar and things she found growing under melted snow in the backyard.

“Believe me,” she said, “when you grow up the daughter of a poor farmer, you learn how to cook a rabbit.”

After dark, they gathered in the living room to play charades by candlelight. Because Sam was too happy to sleep and the color was back in his cheeks, when he begged Jiselle to let him stay up (“It’s Christmas!”), she couldn’t refuse.

So Sam started the game, marching around the room staring straight ahead as a candle flickered on the coffee table and the others shouted wrong guesses at him, sidetracked by the idea that he was a chess piece, and then a knight, and then a sandhill crane.

“A soldier,” he told them when they finally gave up, and then it was obvious to all of them: the stiffness of his limbs, that weapon he’d had resting on his shoulders, the grim expression on his face.

“I’m the king of charades!” Sam shouted, and Sara threw a pillow at his head. Over them, Joy wore her beautiful gown. No one had said a word about the portrait, which Jiselle had taken out of Sara’s closet after Sam was well again and hung in its proper place from the nail over the mantel, above Brad Schmidt’s rifle and her mother’s Little Mermaid statuette. Now Joy smiled down at them, offering that bright piece of cake to the future, as if it were her life.

Jiselle was a coffee mug, which they all shouted out at once as soon as she put her hand on her hip.

When it was her turn, Camilla rowed a boat down a river. “That’s not fair!” she said when they guessed it after only a second of rowing. “Let me go again.” This time she put her arms together and rocked them back and forth.

“A mother?” Sam asked.

“A baby?” Sara asked.

“Both!” Jiselle’s mother called out. She looked around the room. “Am I the only one who can see that Camilla’s going to have a baby?”

Jiselle put a hand to her throat.

How had she not seen it? Camilla’s growing waist. Her breasts. Her face. Of course.

“Camilla—” she said, but Camilla waved her words away. She said, “We can talk about that later. It’s Anna’s turn.”

There was a quiet moment while Jiselle’s mother stood before them, seeming to be trying either to decide what she was or how to express it. She wore a silk kimono Jiselle hadn’t known her mother owned. Her shins and feet were bare. The candlelight on her legs made the sparse downy hair on them shimmer, and the flame made the sound of little insistent wings.

But there was another sound, too, in the distance. Something familiar, Jiselle thought, and also completely new, was out there in the dark. She looked around at the others, but they didn’t seem to hear it. She turned her face to the front door. When she held her breath, she could hear it more clearly.

A purring. A propulsion. She lifted her chin and listened.

Yes.

Whatever it was, it was moving steadily, inexorably, in their direction. The hum of an enormous cat or a gathering of winds—accumulating, approaching. A vast population, migrating. An army shuffling, shoeless, toward them, marching through high grass or over gravel.

Or a parade of children. In robes. Holding lanterns. Silk banners slapping at the darkness.

Or—could it be?

Was it some forgotten piece of machinery crawling toward them: its motor grinding closer, its small oiled teeth and gears, its wheels rolling over the earth, or its wings sailing over their heads?

Jiselle stood up.

She was holding a hand to her ear, trying to hear it when Sam and Camilla and her mother shouted at the same time, “A plane!”

Jiselle turned around quickly to see Sara before them now with her arms outstretched, soaring, and then shaking her head of shining, tangled, tawny hair with an exasperated, victorious expression on her face.

Jiselle sat back down.

Outside, there was silence again.

She’d imagined it, hadn’t she?

Or was it still far enough in the distance—just something picked up by the wind? Something that might never arrive. Or something that had already come and gone. Or something that was there, now, waiting for them outside as Sara stood with one arm held over her head in a graceful white arc—so clearly and beautifully the neck of a swan that Jiselle chose not to say a word as the others called out, “Question mark! Fishing rod! Coat rack!” so that she might prolong the mystery of that bird, the passing of that night, and the end of a perfect world.