In a Perfect World

knew about skinheads. They’d been the latest bad news. Burning down Chinese-owned businesses. Burning crosses on the lawns of Jews, African Americans, Muslims—anyone they chose to blame at the moment for the Phoenix flu.

“Well, yeah,” Jiselle said. “I guess. Like a skinhead—but nice.”

“That would be so cool,” Sam said, holding a piece of his grilled cheese aloft. His eyes were wide. In them, Jiselle could read the clock on the microwave behind them blinking 11:11, 11:11, 11:11.

Jiselle told herself she was not shaving Sam’s head because of the advice of the hysterical secretary at his school, but what could it hurt?

It was just hair. It would grow back.

So, after lunch, she stood behind him at the kitchen sink. First, she used scissors to cut the strawberry- blond curls off his head—soft, beautiful handfuls—and then she shook the satiny strands off her fingers into the trash can. They clung to her arms, her shirt, her jeans, and the static electricity actually crackled when she brushed them off in little jumping sparks. She wet what was left of his hair by leaning him forward over the sink, filling her hands with lukewarm water, splashing it over his hair, and then she patted shaving cream onto his head. Finally, she used Mark’s razor to carefully smooth the last of it from his scalp, and afterward they both went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror so Sam could see.

The skin on Sam’s scalp was pale, but it looked healthy—and without hair, it was possible to really see how handsome his features were. The nose was Mark’s, but the eyes were deep set and olive-brown. At his temples were subtle and delicate blue veins just under the surface. The head was a beautiful shape, and the back of his skull felt solid and satisfying in her palm. Touching it—the weird, beautiful, wonderful nakedness of it—Jiselle could imagine what it had been like for Mark, and for Joy, to bring him into the world for the first time, the way the skin of a newborn might really feel like the organ that skin is: breathing, alert, warm and cool at the same time. She had the impulse to kiss his head, but she had never actually kissed Sam before, except for the kind of air-blown kiss to the cheek her mother had always given her, and she had no idea how he’d react, so she settled for smoothing her fingertips along the beautiful ridge behind his ear, tickling him a little. He laughed. He moved his head around so he could inspect himself from both sides in the mirror, and asked, “How do I look?”

“You look perfect,” Jiselle said.

Because of head lice and the public school’s policy on them, Sam and Jiselle had the whole day free, and it wasn’t even noon.

A hike? Monopoly? A trip to town to the hobby shop?

Since the children had started school in September, Jiselle had mostly spent her afternoons alone in the house, moving through its rooms, feeling baffled as to how to begin to clean them up.

The dust she’d dispersed a few days before would have either settled again or redistributed itself with maddening genius. Sam’s plastic action figures would be everywhere. The girls’ shoes, jewelry, magazines were scattered across every flat surface, and Jiselle knew that if she picked those up and moved them there would be shrieking later—Where the hell’s my bandana? What did you do with my magazine?

And the floors.

The floors seemed magnetized—eternally capturing or creating long clouds of lint and hair held together with dust, which were spirited into corners when Jiselle turned her back. She would have just finished with the broom, turned around, and there those clouds would have gathered again.

On the phone from upstate New York, Annette said, “Get a fucking housekeeper. For God’s sake. You’re not his maid, Jiselle.”

But how, Jiselle thought, could she justify her days to herself or to anyone else if she had a housekeeper, if someone else were coming in to do the few things she had to do?

And what would she do while the housekeeper did these things? And what would she do with the time left over?

Sometimes the vacuum cleaner sounded like the dual engines of a jet starting up. Or Jiselle would hear, overhead, an actual jet—a distant needle in the sky—and she’d imagine her past still taking place up there. The metal cart. The drawer of ice. The faces looking up at her. The way turbulence or exhaustion, or simply being thirty-five thousand feet in the air, could turn even the most self-satisfied businessmen and women into needy children.

They were scared.

They did not have wings. They did not know how to fly. They were incredibly grateful for the calm smile, the foil packet of pretzels.

But of course there had been the other sort of passenger. Drunk on miniature bottles of Jack Daniel’s. Punching their flight attendant buttons for more. There had been the woman who’d said to Jiselle once, when she’d had to rouse her from a drooling sleep to put her tray table back up for landing, “I hope you burn in hell.” She didn’t miss that.

But, since quitting, the days could last so long. Sometimes Jiselle would sit down at the kitchen table and will the phone to ring. Call me, Mark. When it did ring, she’d jump, heart racing, but it usually wasn’t Mark. Once or twice, it was Brad Schmidt calling from next door, asking if Jiselle had heard this or that bad piece of news on the radio. Although their houses were separated by a long, tall hedge, Brad Schmidt seemed able to see through it, to know when Jiselle was sitting by the phone.

No, she would not have heard the news. She didn’t listen to the news. Why would she? Whales washing up on beaches. Chickens being burned alive, and some man who called himself Henry Knighton killing prostitutes in Seattle to “cleanse the earth.”

The news had to happen to her before she knew about it—and even then she wasn’t always sure what it was, like the afternoon when, while folding laundry in the bedroom, she heard a crash in the kitchen.

No one was home. Mark was flying; the children were at school. Jiselle stepped cautiously out of the bedroom and went to the kitchen, where she found that the cupboards had all swung open. A broken dish lay on the ceramic tiles. A coffee cup had rolled off the counter and into the sink. She stood with her hand to her chest for what must have been several minutes, feeling her heart beat hard, trying to get used to this new order of things, this unfamiliarity, the idea that the kitchen cupboards could open on their own and spill their contents. Then she heard Brad Schmidt shout, “Hey!” from the other side of his hedge, and she hurried to the kitchen window and looked out to see him standing in the side yard, his arms parting the branches, looking through them. “You know what that was, Mrs. Dorn?”

“No,” Jiselle called back, opening the window to hear his answer.

“That was an earthquake!”

Indeed, a rare Midwestern earthquake had shaken the whole region. Gently but surely, it had registered itself with a few framed photographs falling off walls, some cracks in a freeway overpass, that dish Jiselle had to pick up off the kitchen floor, and the cup out of the sink. Not terribly damaging, just surprising.

“This is just the beginning,” Brad Schmidt said to her later at the end of their driveways. “Tip of the iceberg. Tornadoes. Tsunamis. Hold your hat on. Ever read about the Black Death? It was all there. Before the plague did its worst work—the floods, the winds, the earthquakes. You wait.” There was no mistaking the tone in his voice for anything but excitement.

After considering his options for his free afternoon, Sam decided on a hike into the ravine behind the house.

He loved a hike. Loved the ravine. He and Jiselle had already taken a few hikes together since she’d moved in. There was a good trail, and Sam knew every inch of the ravine and liked to dispense his knowledge. Jiselle was the ingenue. Everything surprised her. Rabbits surprised her. Ferns surprised her. The occasional deer crashing away through the trees. Raccoons.

That afternoon, the pine trees pulsed with light under a blank white sky. Following the path into the ravine, Jiselle had the sense of entering a vast emptiness. Something abandoned. Many species of birds had migrated south. Animals were hibernating. The only sound was the watery, distant call of a pigeon. There was not a plane