In a Perfect World

The power was still out later that morning. Jiselle went to the refrigerator, somehow surprised when the light didn’t come on when she opened the door. She had spent most of her childhood believing that the light in the refrigerator was always on, until her mother explained it to her, showed her the darkness inside by opening the door only a crack and telling Jiselle to look in.

This time not only did the light not come on, but the smell of spoiled milk, bacteria, and lunch meat gone bad had filled up the darkness. Jiselle took out a garbage bag and started dumping the things she was sure couldn’t be salvaged.

She took the bag to the garbage can outside and marveled at how warm and bright the day had turned out to be after the rainy ice of the night before. What snow there was before the storm had been washed away by the rain, and the ice had melted. The lawn rolling toward the ravine, which had been covered in slush for a month, looked like a carpet of crushed green velvet.

Perhaps, Jiselle thought, she’d better go over to the Schmidts’ to see if they were okay over there without electricity. Who knew what kind of special needs the elderly might have that depended on electricity?

She went back in the house to get a sweater and saw that Sara was awake, standing barefoot in front of the refrigerator, with the door open, staring into its emptiness.

“Where did the food go?” she asked, and then, “Why isn’t the light on?”

Pulling on her sweater, Jiselle considered explaining to Sara, as her mother had to her, that the light in the refrigerator was not always on, but she felt sure this was something Sara, so full of her own inner darkness, would have been born knowing. She said, instead, “Well, no lights are on, and the food was rotten.”

“When’s Dad getting back?”

Jiselle decided to wait to say anything about that until she knew more. “Soon,” she said, and went out the sliding doors to see to the Schmidts.

Brad Schmidt opened the door wide enough to let Jiselle in, but he didn’t invite her to sit down. “Sure we’re okay,” he said, waving his hand in the air as if to wave her concern away. He said he’d grown up in a sod house in Nebraska. He was prepared for the inevitable. He’d always known the electricity was going to be the first thing to go. Gas was going to be next, then food, and then water. “When’s your husband getting back?”

“I don’t know,” Jiselle said. “He’s been”—for a few seconds she couldn’t think of the word—“detained.”

Brad Schmidt’s eyebrows leaped, as they always did when he heard bad news. “That right?” he said.

“Yes. I mean, I guess. He called last night, but I haven’t been able to get in touch with him since.”

“Where’s he at?”

“Germany,” she said, and Brad Schmidt snorted through his nose, a kind of knowing chuckle. “He’ll be back when—”

“When hell freezes over!” Brad Schmidt said. “They warned us! You gotta give ’em that. The Krauts aren’t like Americans, you know. They’re not just gonna let a bunch of foreigners in and tell them they can spread their disease all over the place.”

“Well, they’ll send them back in that case,” Jiselle said. “Why would they keep them?”

“It’s obvious!” Brad Schmidt said. “To teach us a lesson!”

“That would be against the law,” Jiselle said.

“Whose law? What law? You think the Europeans have any sympathy for us? Ha! We burned that bridge, and all the other bridges are burning as we speak.”

“I don’t think—”

But he cut her off, seeming to be gesturing to the door or to the world, suggesting with the gesture that she should go. “Good luck, Mrs. Dorn. I suggest you get yourself a rifle. I’ve got one, and enough water to last me a year.”

“I’m not worried about—”

“Of course you’re not,” Brad Schmidt said, smirking. “You don’t seem like the worrying type. But, in the meantime, you need a weapon.”

Jiselle was just turning in the doorway when Diane Schmidt wandered out of a back room wearing what looked like an old wedding dress and curtsied to Jiselle.

Before she realized she was doing it, Jiselle was curtsying back.

Back at the house, the children were gathered around the kitchen table eating peanut butter on bread and drinking warm Coke.

“What the hell is going on here?” Sara said when Jiselle slid into a chair at the table with them.

“I don’t know,” Jiselle said. She suggested that they listen to the radio. Did they own a radio that didn’t have to be plugged in? Sam and Camilla left the table to try to find one, but Camilla came back with the only thing they had, dangling it by its electrical cord.

“Call Dad,” Sam said.

“Well,” Jiselle said, trying to use the voice she’d needed so often (and so often failed to have) on planes, during turbulence, during lightning storms, during snowstorms, “everything is fine, but your father called last night, and he’s in Germany. He’s been”—again, the word escaped her for several heartbeats—“detained.”

“What’s that mean?” Sam asked, his mouth full of peanut butter sandwich.

“Well, they seem to be holding the crew—and, I don’t know, actually, maybe the passengers. I think it probably has to do with—”

“How long?” Camilla asked.

“We’ll find out,” Jiselle said. “Later. He’ll call. I’ll call. If I can’t reach him, I’ll call the airline.”

It seemed to her that, as she looked at them, the children were exchanging a look among themselves.

When it got lighter outside, the house was bright enough to clean it up a bit. Sam was playing with two small soldiers and a truck on the family room floor. Camilla was reading on the couch. Sara was in her bedroom, and it sounded to Jiselle as if her pen were scratching wildly across the pages of her diary, the pages flipping fast. She tried not to think about what Sara might be writing.

She picked Camilla’s sweater up off the floor.

Sara’s balled-up white knee socks.

She could find only one of the shoes from Madrid she’d let Sara borrow—lying abandoned on the floor of the family room, as if Sara had stumbled out of it.

Jiselle got on her hands and knees, looking under the couch, under the chairs, for the matching shoe, finding nothing.

“Sara?” she called.

“What?”

“Where’s my other shoe?”

“How the hell should I know?” Sara called back. “We were in the dark when we came home. Maybe it fell off outside.”

“Well, if it fell off your foot outside, wouldn’t you have noticed that you were wearing only one shoe when you came inside?”

“No,” Sara shouted, as if the question were absurd. “It wasn’t my idea to wear your shoes.”

Jiselle closed her eyes for a moment. There would be, she knew, no point in continuing the conversation. She held the one shoe in her hand before taking it to the bedroom and placing it carefully at the bottom of the closet. Afterward, she went to the front door and looked out to see if she might find the other shoe, discarded on the lawn.

No.

A little while later, when she heard the shower running and Sara complaining, “The water’s fucking freezing,” Jiselle hurried into Sara’s room, to her closet, and opened it.

Her heart was pounding with the thrill and anxiety of it, as if she were a safecracker or a cat burglar. She