In a Perfect World

the pool. The hot tub bubbled forsakenly.

Their luggage never arrived, so they bought bathing suits, shorts, and T-shirts in the dive shop on the beach.

The other honeymooning couple from the United States was younger than Mark and Jiselle and spent much of their time strolling along the beach. By the middle of the week they were both sunburned almost beyond recognition. Their faces were red and swollen—eyelids, lips, bloated with burn.

“I think they sold us phony sunblock in the dive shop,” the young woman said. “We were both slathered in SPF forty-five, and this happened.” She gestured to her face. “Joe can’t even lie down,” she said, nodding at her husband.

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” said the mother of the three Cs from New Jersey, sauntering over to their table. “They hate us here. Have you seen all the buttons and bumper stickers?” She was referring to the red circles with slashes through the outline of the United States—similar to the ones Jiselle had seen in Denmark months before and in every country outside the United States she’d been to since.

“Our kids wanted to snorkel,” the father of the three Cs said, scratching his large, hairy stomach, “so we asked about it in the dive shop, and the old woman said, ‘Well, you have killed our coral reef, so there can be no snorkeling.’ And I said, ‘Hey, senora, I’m not responsible for your coral reef…’ I mean, you can’t blame Americans for everything.”

“But they do,” the honeymooning wife said. “They blame us for the coral reefs, and the fish, and the hurricanes, and the flu. All of it. A plane crashes, and it’s our fault. Some species of bird dies out, and we did it. You name it, they blame it on us.”

There was a moment of silence.

A bird high in a palm tree made a screeching sound, but otherwise there was just the white noise of waves washing onto sand.

The mother of the three Cs agreed, nodding vehemently. She said, “You know, that witch at the front desk gave me the evil eye. She accused me of stealing my children.”

“What?” all the others, including Mark and Jiselle, cried out at once.

“Yes,” the woman said. “She said, ‘Look, you stole them all from different countries. They aren’t your children.’ I said, ‘We adopted our children from different countries— poverty-stricken countries. We didn’t steal them.’”

“What did she say then?” Jiselle asked.

The mother shrugged.

“Well, I tell you,” the honeymooning wife said, “that’s unforgivable. And so is this.” She pointed to her sunburned neck.

“And look at this,” her husband said, holding out his arms. “If they did this to me, it’s tantamount to attempted murder.”

“That’s true,” his wife said. “This much sun can kill you. I tell you, I’m not coming back to Puerto Rico in this lifetime.”

Jiselle looked out at the ocean. The undulating turquoise, and cobalt, and indigo. A pelican was riding an air current just over the water, looking black and prehistoric. It plunged into a wave, emerged with something silver and wriggling in its beak.

Still, the days of Mark’s and Jiselle’s honeymoon were full of quiet luxuriating in each other’s company. They strolled alone along the ocean. They swam alone in the pool. They sat alone in the swirling vortex of the hot tub. They rented a kayak and stroked their way in perfect coordination out to the dead coral reef, where they snorkeled side by side.

Just beneath the surface of the Caribbean, wearing that snorkel mask, Jiselle could hear only her own steady breathing. The sunlight turned the pale blue water on the ocean floor to dancing, electric brainwaves. And the ghosts of the coral, like a white forest, were spread out beneath her for what seemed like miles and miles of serenity. The rictus of cacti, bleached to bone. Or the bare branches of winter trees, coated in snow—blameless, voiceless, motionless peace. She cast her own floating shadow down on it, as if she were a cloud passing over the shared dream of a million vanished people. Mark, beside her, fluttering in his fins, reached out and caressed her through the water. She was so happy she shed a tear or two, but the tears simply slipped out of her snorkel mask and joined the salty, abiding tears of the sea.

Part Three

CHAPTER NINE

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

At first, no part of the sentence registered.

Head lice.

Your Son.

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

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

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

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

The secretary raised her eyebrows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It had rained hard the night before, and the weather—still like early autumn although it was the first week of November—had the feel of the tropics, although the leaves had fallen from most of the trees. Humid, bright air lingered over everything. Blue puddles of rain and oil dotted the drugstore lot. After she parked and picked up her