In a Perfect World

off the damp pavement with one hand, trying to hold the hastily tied ribbon in her hair with the other.

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

“Jiselle?” Mark said quietly.

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

She nodded weakly.

She looked around.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank you,” Jiselle said.

“And what I said about—”

“It’s okay,” Jiselle said.

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

CHAPTER EIGHT

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

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

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

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

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

They decided to make the best of it.

It was their honeymoon!

What else could they do?

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

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

“Hola.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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