In a Perfect World

purse, Sam said, “I don’t want to go in.”

“No one can see them, Sam,” Jiselle said.

“Mrs. Hicks saw them.”

“No, she didn’t see them. She just—figured. Because you were itching.”

“No,” Sam said. “She saw them.”

Jiselle looked at Sam’s head.

In truth, she thought perhaps she could see something black, and maybe moving, in the silky part in the hair at the top of his head.

She said, “Okay. You can wait here if you want.”

Inside the drugstore, Jiselle scanned the shelves for a few minutes for something with the word lice on it, until, finding nothing, she had to ask the girl behind the counter, who called across the store to the pharmacist, “Where’s the head lice stuff?” She felt relieved that Sam had waited outside.

It took a minute or two, but the pharmacist came out from behind his glass cage and led Jiselle to the shelf for “pests and critters.” To get to it, they had to walk past the cardboard displays of flu “cures.” Life-size cut-outs of healthy-looking men and women holding bottles of Immune Master. Pink-cheeked children running across a green field overlaid with the words Dr. Springwell’s Secret!

They made their way through the leftover Halloween costumes and candy and decorations displays, and a variety of gags, such as battery-operated plastic hands that scooted across the floor, tarantulas and bats on strings. That year had been like no Halloween Jiselle ever remembered, festive and commercial beyond anything she would have imagined for what had, at one time, been the simplest, briefest of holidays.

Mark had been home Halloween weekend. He’d donned a top hat, Jiselle had worn one of his trench coats, with black sunglasses, and they’d walked door to door with Sam, who had dressed as a soldier. Red vest over a white T-shirt. White pants and black boots. A tall red hat with a blue feather in it. He’d carried a pillowcase. By the end of the night, it weighed forty pounds.

Not only were the children out trick-or-treating that night, but adults were, too. Alone and in crowds, with their children and without, wearing elaborate costumes—beggars, prostitutes, Abe Lincolns, Grim Reapers—they were swigging from flasks, passing the flasks to strangers, exactly the kind of germ-sharing they were constantly warned against. But they were happy, friendly. Raucous with laughter and polite at the same time. Some of the houses in town had absurdly elaborate Halloween displays. Enormous inflatable cartoon animals on their front lawns. Hundreds of them. Pranksters had taken to stabbing them with screwdrivers and box cutters. All over town, deflated decorations littered lawns. Their owners, playing along with the pranks, erected tombstones over them. R.I.P. SCOOBY-DOO. HERE LIES SNOOPY, STABBED THROUGH THE HEART BY A HEARTLESS KILLER.

There were light displays, too, and someone had strung naked baby dolls from telephone poles all along one street. Someone else had built a scaffold in the elementary school parking lot and hung an effigy of the president wearing a witch’s hat. One family had dangled hundreds of plastic bats from the birch tree in their front yard.

The regular codes of conduct were being pleasantly broken or ignored that night. People walked in the middle of the street, unwrapping candy and discarding the trash on sidewalks. Despite the public service announcements about not eating candy the origins of which you were uncertain, children and their parents were gobbling it down even as they collected it. Teenagers were handed cans of beer by homeowners. A few macabre revelers wore zombie masks and nurse uniforms in reference to the Phoenix flu. One tall, frightening boy sauntered alone, without bothering to collect candy, from door to door in a black cloak and a long-beaked bird mask. People smiled at him, and he nodded somberly back.

The pharmacist joked about the lice—“How big are these bugs? Can you fry ’em up for supper?”—but when Jiselle was apparently too flabbergasted to respond, he explained to her soberly what she needed to buy and what she needed to do, and she left the store with a small comb and a bottle of something called Nix, with a horrifying cartoon of a beast with eight legs on the label.

“You okay?” she asked Sam when she got back into the Cherokee with her paper bag.

He was staring straight ahead. “Look,” he said when she was behind the wheel, and he pointed to something in the parking lot.

She put on her sunglasses to see what it was through the glare on the windshield. She leaned forward, squinting.

There, in the middle of the nearly empty drugstore parking lot, was a small group of dark furred things. Moving but not scurrying. Milling.

Animals, clearly. But what kind?

She rubbed her eyes and leaned forward to see them better. There were eight or nine of them. Tails. And paws. Black.

“Listen,” Sam said.

Jiselle held her breath and listened, and even through the rolled-up windows she could hear them making a quiet high-pitched sound, like childish chuckling, or singing. She turned to Sam and asked, whispering the question to him, “What are those?”

“Rats,” he said.

“Oh my God,” Jiselle said, putting a hand to her mouth and seeing them, then, clearly. Their naked tails. Their sharp pink ears. Her heart sped up. She started up the engine of the SUV, and the rats, seeming to have heard it, turned their horrible faces in its direction but didn’t run off. They simply stared at Jiselle and Sam in the SUV. As she drove out of the parking lot, she was careful to make a wide loop around the rats, which did not leave their tight circle but seemed, instead, to stand their ground even more stubbornly, watching them drive away.

Back at home, Jiselle read the directions on the bottle of Nix, while Sam ate the grilled cheese sandwich she’d made for him. It was the one thing she’d mastered in the kitchen since moving into Mark’s house. The only thing. She’d gone so long in life without learning how to cook, it seemed that she had lost the capacity to learn. She’d burned omelets and served up pink-centered chicken breasts a few times before the girls took to cooking for themselves, Lean Cuisines and pot pies.

(“None of the other nannies could cook, either,” Sam said to her once, and then stammered an apology when he saw the look on her face.)

The few dinners she’d made that had actually succeeded—lasagna, seafood manicotti, chicken and dumplings, an enchilada casserole—had displeased the girls as much as the ruined ones. Too spicy. Or not spicy enough. Sara would say she was a vegetarian some days. Camilla would claim to have allergies she’d failed to mention until a certain meal was served. And although Sam was always willing to eat anything she made, all he really wanted was grilled cheese, and that, at least, Jiselle had finally figured out how to make exactly as he liked it.

Browned but only slightly. The cheese soft and warm but not gooey in the center.

She’d put the sandwich in front of him on his favorite plate—pale blue with a faded picture of Scooby-Doo in the center—and poured him a glass of milk. She unscrewed the top of the bottle of Nix and sniffed it, and realized she must have made a face when Sam said, “Is it super bad?”

“Well,” Jiselle said softly, “it’s not great.”

In truth, it smelled like tar and also formaldehyde.

“We’ll do this a little later, okay?” she offered.

“Okay,” Sam said, tearing parts of his sandwich off before eating them. Jiselle put the bottle of Nix on the table and folded her hands. Sam was going to hate this. This boy who squirmed away from his father when he simply tried to wipe some ketchup off his face—who, once, when Jiselle had suggested cleaning out his ears with a Q-tip, had looked at her with wide, horrified eyes and said, “Are you kidding?”

She watched him eat. She tried not to stare at his hair—all those beautiful curls, and what might be crawling among them—but she leaned a little to the left, considering the shape of his skull. He had beautiful cheekbones. A pleasing jaw and brow. She said, “Have you ever considered having your head shaved?”

Sam looked up brightly from his Scooby-Doo plate. “Wow,” he said. “You mean, like a total skinhead?” Sam