In a Perfect World

Jiselle stood up from her Cheerios and walked toward the counter, still shaking her head.

No.

Only an hour had passed since Sam had so carefully changed the water, taking a clean bowl from the cupboard, rolling up his sleeves, gently tipping the dirty water into the bowl. Jiselle watched as he did it. He bit his lip. He rinsed out the dish—the green scum swirling around in the sink before it disappeared—and tested the water from the faucet with the tips of his fingers, and then filled the plastic dish, and then scooped the sea monkeys out of the dirty water with a teaspoon, and put them in the fresh dish.

She went to it. Sam stepped into the kitchen then. He’d overheard. He walked straight to the dish, and he and Jiselle both looked down.

“Oh, Sam,” Jiselle said, rubbing his back in tiny, nervous circles.

“Camilla’s right,” he said. “They’re dead. The change in water temperature killed them.”

“Oh,” Jiselle said. “It’s—”

“It’s my fault,” he said. He shrugged.

“No!” Jiselle said.

But Sam walked out of the kitchen to the living room, and Jiselle listened to his footsteps cross the wood floors to his room.

“Jesus,” Camilla said. “They were just sea monkeys.”

When Mark was gone for more than a few nights in a row, Jiselle began to pine. She had not, she realized, really known before what that word meant or the feeling of it—to long for something or someone to the point of physical suffering. She would close the door to their bedroom and lock it behind her, and go to his closet, where she would gather up his uniforms in her arms and breathe them in. The blood around her heart seemed to ache. She would close her eyes, and sometimes she had to get on her knees—doubled over with a pain in her stomach, as though she had been shot with a poisoned arrow.

It was even worse during the day, when the children were at school, and the hours seemed to hover around her like some sort of exquisitely heavy gown. When they were home, the girls barely spoke to her, but even their angry outbursts at each other were a distraction from the longing. Sara’s screaming music behind the curtain in the doorway of her room filled the house with a kind of ear-splitting clutter that was mind-numbing and, therefore, somehow comforting. Camilla’s boyfriend, Bobby, would come over sometimes, and if he wasn’t on the couch in front of the TV with Camilla, he might get on the floor with Sam, and the two of them would move action figures across the rug, sputtering out artillery noises.

There was Sam.

Sometimes Jiselle wasn’t sure if he was suggesting Monopoly or a walk in the ravine or a card game for his sake or for hers, but she never turned him down. Why would she? What else did she have to do? It had taken her these months in St. Sophia to learn that, despite the brick and clapboard storefronts and the shady streets of the town, no one really lived in St. Sophia. They slept there, and they dropped their children off at schools there before heading for the freeway ramps. People from the cities and suburbs nearby drove in for quaint small-town lunches and antiquing on the weekends, but Jiselle was, she realized, never going to make friends in St. Sophia. There would be no reading groups or knitting circles. She’d be invited to no tea parties. There was no one in the park or at the library during the day, and the only people she’d met so far had been the Schmidts, next door, and Camilla’s boyfriend’s parents, Paul and Tara Temple. Still, even in her loneliest hours, she could barely tolerate the television, and the radio was full of music she didn’t like, or paranoid ranting:

“Dr. Springwell has been broadcasting his show from the Canary Islands for the last three months,” the woman on the radio said. “That’s Dr. Springwell’s secret!”

Laughter followed from a small studio audience.

That morning they’d announced the resignation of the secretary of state, the suspension of interstate Amtrak service, the death of a basketball star, the president’s plans for military action against the Alliance of Nations embargo.

“We cannot allow our nation to be destroyed during this brief troubled period. We have been a friend to the nations that would turn their backs on us now, and we must now demand their friendship in return.”

But there were no more white balloons, and the federal government had ordered all flags to be flown at full mast. No more doomsday thinking. This had been a strategy that had helped the country survive two world wars—the careful manipulation of information to the public and the suppression of pessimism.

“These frauds,” the woman on the radio, sounding happy and full of excited energy, said about Dr. Springwell and his ilk, “should be executed when this is over and they try to get back into this country.”

One Friday afternoon, when Mark was flying to Australia, and then to Hawaii, and would not be back until Monday, Jiselle, on her knees in his closet, began to feel around on the bottom of it. If she was looking for something, she didn’t realize it, until she came upon a shoebox in the back, beyond his tennis shoes and snow boots and a pair of shower shoes she’d had no idea he owned.

She pulled out the box, brought it to the bed, and opened it.

On top were a dozen photographs. Mostly, they were of Joy. Jiselle recognized the curls, the tilt of her head, the slightly crooked smile. But there were others. A woman with a short blond bob standing with a surfboard at the end of a jetty. Another with brown tresses pulled back behind her head; this one had an arm thrown around a much younger Camilla, who wasn’t smiling. Another one Jiselle recognized as the nanny who’d come to the house to retrieve a pair of flip-flops she’d left on the deck. Jiselle had come out of the bedroom to be introduced to her but could not fail to recognize the girl’s coldness as anything but hostility. Mark hadn’t been home, and Sara was the one who handed over the flip-flops with a smug smile. “See ya!” she said, closing the door on the girl.

Jiselle had assumed the hostility was because the nanny had been displaced from her job by Jiselle’s marriage to Mark. But, looking at this photograph, Jiselle understood what she had found. The girl, lounging on the couch in the family room—her straight brown hair hanging down over her shoulders in a glossy cascade—had a smile of such radiant pleasure on her face as she stared into the camera that there was no mistaking what this box contained. And it didn’t surprise Jiselle to find, under that photograph, one of herself in a black silk blouse, in Copenhagen, outside the Round Tower.

Jiselle’s hands were trembling, and coolly damp—but why? If Mark had searched through her own things back at her old house, he could have found a similar stash of old images of boys and men Jiselle had been with. There was a Polaroid, she knew, of Stephen in her bathtub, with his wet hair streaming down his face. Aaron, just waking up in her bed. She could hardly complain that Mark had photographs of old girlfriends, or that he had old girlfriends. Could she?

She was about to close the box when she decided to look at the newspaper clipping at the bottom of it. It was yellowed and softened, and she opened it carefully. It was an account from the St. Sophia Gazette of Joy’s “untimely death.”

Local Mother Killed While

Attempting to Protect Her Child

Joy Dorn, of 1161 Forest Glen Road, was laid to rest today at the St. Sophia Cemetery, following services. Mrs. Dorn was killed on Monday after being struck by a school bus outside her home. Her older children had already boarded the bus when her two-year-old ran into the road. In an attempt to prevent him from being hit by the bus, Mrs. Dorn ran into the road after him. Paramedics who arrived on the scene told reporters that the mother was killed instantly.

Jiselle folded the clipping up again carefully along the original creases, put it back in the shoebox, with the photographs on top of it, and put the box on the floor in the back of the closet where she’d found it.

That afternoon, Jiselle waited until she saw Brad Schmidt at the end of his driveway before she went,