In a Perfect World

fireplace if I’m not here, okay? Until I have a chance to get it fixed.” Obviously Mark hadn’t anticipated that there would come a time when a fire would be the only source of heat.

“Do I have to sleep in my room?” Sam asked, and Jiselle remembered then—his night-light: a frog plugged into the electrical outlet next to his bed. Sam couldn’t sleep without that.

“No,” she said. “We can camp out. On the floor. In the living room. Until the power comes back on.”

His eyes widened, and he smiled.

After Sam and Jiselle were done with their sandwiches, they took their flashlights to the linen closet and hauled out the spare blankets and a couple of pillows. Sam held the flashlight while Jiselle made pallets for them on the rug on the floor of the family room.

They didn’t bother with pajamas. Sam lay down on the floor in his khaki pants and green sweater, and Jiselle lay beside him in her black slacks. He’d brought the book of tales with him from his room, and Jiselle rolled over, opening it beside her, holding the flashlight on the page they’d marked the night before:

They stopped at a little hut.

The roof sloped nearly down to the ground, and the door was so low they had to creep in on their hands and knees.

There was no one at home but an old woman, who was cooking fish by the light of a train oil lamp.

“Sam?” Jiselle whispered after another page or two.

No answer.

He was asleep.

She closed the book and snapped off the flashlight. It surprised her how total the darkness was. And how quiet. From the girls’ rooms there was no sound at all, and outside there was nothing but the tick-ticking of icy rain on the deck. She closed her eyes, and after what seemed like a long time listening to the sputter and hiss of rain on wood, she fell asleep, dreaming of sitting beside the old woman from the story, who was cooking a fish. The fish glowed with a kind of reflected light from the oil lamp beside the woman—silvery, like a moon in the shape of the fish—and she was leaning over it with a knife when a sudden, brilliant, digital, pealing music slammed into the silence, and Jiselle’s eyes snapped open, and she caught her breath and sat up fast, recognizing her cell phone theme, “The Blue Danube,” and found herself jumping, moving toward it instinctively, still mostly asleep—but where the hell was it?

Stumbling toward the music into the family room, she banged her shins against the coffee table. “Fuck.” She got on her hands and knees and scrambled toward the music, which was apparently coming from somewhere deep in the couch—a tiny technological box with a relentless orchestra stuffed inside it. “Shit.” Sara must have taken it when they’d gotten back to the house in the dark, talked on it in whispers in her room. This happened every few weeks, when, Jiselle suspected, Sara’s own monthly minutes were used up. Afterward, she’d stuff it into the cushions of the couch so Jiselle would think she’d misplaced it herself.

Jiselle felt around among the upholstery and crumbs until she touched something solid and cold, pulled it out, opened it, and held it to her ear. “Hello? Hello?”

“Jiselle?”

“Mark?”

“Jiselle, I—”

“Mark,” she said. “Where are you? The electricity’s gone out. Completely out. What do I do if…” She did not know how to finish the question, so she just listened, waiting for an answer, which didn’t come. In the silence, however, she thought she heard Mark sigh. She did hear him clear his throat, she was sure of that, but still he didn’t speak. Finally, to the silence, Jiselle said, “Mark?”

Crackling between them, she suddenly understood, was an ocean. She could hear the waves. There were ships on that ocean, she thought, listening to the silence. Ships bearing good news and bad. False documents. Stowaways. Silk flowers. Parrots in cages. Diamonds in felt sacks. But before the static of all that ocean was yanked away and replaced by the true silence of a connection gone completely dead, Mark said, “Jiselle, I don’t know when I’ll be back. They’ve got us detained here. We—”

“What?”

“Yes,” he said. “Detained.”

“Detained?”

“Well,” Mark said, “that’s what I just said, Jiselle. Detained. Don’t you know what detained means?”

There was an exasperated huff, and Jiselle felt tears spring into her eyes. Her heart rose into her throat. Of course she knew what detained meant, but it wasn’t like Mark to speak in jargon. If there had been mechanical problems, he’d have said, The fucking incompetents can’t get their plane put together. If it had been political, The fascists snatched our passports. If there had been a strike or a storm, We’re stuck on this toilet until tomorrow.

Detained? He was supposed to be home in twelve hours. He was going to take her out for Valentine’s Day. They had reservations. She’d pictured champagne and candlelight, and their knees touching beneath a white tablecloth, opening that small red package he’d spirited away in his sock drawer—a silver bracelet or gold. She could barely speak, but she finally managed to say, “Of course I know, Mark. But— Mark?”

He didn’t answer.

“Mark?”

Nothing.

Jiselle took the cell phone from her ear then and looked at it.

Dead.

Some kind of blind hope made her bring it to her ear again and say his name once more, but still there was no answer. Only the sound of her own ear.

And that ocean.

Ships going down in that ocean. Swallowed without a sound.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Jiselle didn’t sleep again that night. She tried over and over to call Mark at the number he’d phoned her from, but there was never any answer. She let it ring for what seemed like hours, and then she went into the bathroom and closed the door so she wouldn’t wake the children, and tried to call the airline.

“We don’t have that information,” she was told, and Jiselle knew the airlines well enough to know that, if this was what they’d been told to say, it was hopeless—that she could dial a hundred numbers, explain who she was, invent stories (His mother’s in the hospital, his children are missing, the house burned down, we have to get in touch with Captain Dorn…) and it would make no difference. They weren’t going to tell her anything whether they had anything to tell her or not.

She lay back down beside Sam on the floor, keeping her cell phone on her chest, and tried to go back to sleep, but the phone never rang again, and she never fell back asleep, and the power never came back on. When the sun finally rose high enough that she could see to make her way through the house without stumbling, she went to the bedroom and opened the little red package in Mark’s sock drawer.

She couldn’t help herself.

It was Valentine’s Day.

Inside the box, it turned out, were both the gold bracelet and the silver bracelet she’d imagined. Jiselle put them back in the box, wrapped it again, put it back in Mark’s sock drawer, and then stood for a moment practicing the bright smile she’d flash when he gave the gift to her.