In a Perfect World

got down on her knees and moved her hands around through the shoes scattered on the closet floor, feeling for her own. It was too dark without the overhead light to see well, but each time Jiselle felt a shoe she thought might be hers, she picked it up and looked.

No. No. No.

They were all Sara’s.

Her sandals. Her flip-flops. Her combat boots and stilettos and slippers.

She was feeling around farther in the back of the closet when she heard the shower go off—and then, as if somehow it had been kick-started by the end of Sara’s shower, the lights blinked, and blinked again, and then blinked back on, and everything in the house seemed to come alive at once—the television, the stereo, Sam whooping with happiness, Camilla calling out in surprise, the clocks beeping, every light blazing, and Jiselle looked up from the shoes, seeing everything in Sara’s closet vividly and brightly at the same time, and she gasped, finding herself staring directly into the deep green eyes of Joy Dorn.

Who was smiling.

Who was dressed in white, holding up that piece of white wedding cake. Beaming. Lovely. Full of light, as if she’d been the source of it, or had absorbed it and was letting it back into the world now.

The portrait. Sara kept it in her closet.

“What the fuck are you doing in my closet?”

Jiselle turned to find Sara standing over her, wrapped in a towel, mouth open wide in astonishment and outrage, but just at that moment she heard “The Blue Danube” coming from the other room and hurried past Sara to answer her cell phone without trying to explain.

“Oh my God, Mark,” she said. She was crying before she could say anything else.

“Look, Jiselle,” he said. “I’m not going to be able to talk long. They’re holding the whole plane here, and not telling us how long. Quarantine. But the airline’s lawyers are on it like piranhas. This can’t go on for longer than a week without an international—”

“A week?”

“Jiselle. Please. I need you not to be hysterical, okay. This is bad enough. You need—”

Jiselle said, “I’ll come there.” The whole plan spun out around her as she held the phone to her ear. The children could stay with the Schmidts. She would fly to Munich. If they wouldn’t let him come out to her, she would go in to be quarantined with him.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Now, I love you. I have to go.”

“I love you, too. Mark. Please, don’t—”

But he was gone. She tried to call the number he’d called her from, but it rang a long time and no one answered.

She had just hung up the phone when she looked up to find Sara standing in the hallway. The bedroom door was open, and she was looking in at Jiselle. “So,” she said, “when are you leaving?”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on,” Sara said. “Just tell me. You think we didn’t know the second you realized how much Dad’s gone you were going to be outta here? You think you’re the first one who got fed up with Dad being gone all the time?”

Jiselle put the phone beside her on the bed. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“The hell you aren’t,” Sara said. “I thought you looked clueless enough that it might take you nine or ten months, but I guess this time Camilla won the bet—although, to be fair, Mommy, you pretty much set the record for the longest he’s managed to keep a girlfriend around. I guess he was right that getting married might be the way to go this time.”

“Sara?”

But she was gone.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Jiselle called Mark every day. On the other end of the phone, he always sounded no farther than a few yards away. He sounded as if he were in the other room, or as if he were out in the street, in the backyard—but when Jiselle went to the windows, holding the phone in her hand, listening to Mark’s voice on the other end, she’d see that the backyard was empty, as was the front yard, and, at the end of their driveway, the road.

He sounded close, but Mark was in Munich.

Mark was detained.

By the middle of March, he’d been detained for a month.

Some days, she nearly pined, lingering at their closet, trying to conjure the feeling she’d had that used to make her knees weak when she took his uniforms in her arms. But there was so much else to do. She certainly did not have the luxury of locking herself in the bedroom to cry now that the power, when it was on, could only be counted on to go out again. During these brief spells with electricity, Jiselle had to prepare for the much longer periods during which there would be no refrigerator, no lights, no outlets to use to recharge the little appliances one relied on. There were so many things to gather and prepare—and, at the same time, as always, the children needed the usual things they needed. The schools had closed early for spring break due to the power outages and fears of the Phoenix flu. But, after spring break, they did not reopen, and it was not made clear when they would open again.

“What is it like there?” Jiselle asked Mark.

“Efficient,” Mark said.

But she had meant the weather. At home, it was the kind of weather you would invent for a perfect early spring. On their walks into the ravine, Sam and Jiselle saw chipmunks under every leafy, unfurling fern. Their fat, cartoon cheeks looked full, and they were all but tame, scampering toward the two of them on the path, looking up expectantly. If Sam and Jiselle knelt down, the chipmunks would come right to them, seeming content to gaze into their eyes for as long as they liked. Sam and Jiselle started bringing bags of nuts along on their walks, and the chipmunks took them shyly, graciously, right from their hands.

When Jiselle told Mark about the weather at home, Mark told her it was dreamlike in Germany, too. The windows didn’t open in his room, but he could see that outside the Gesundheitsschutzhaus (which, he said, roughly translated to “Good Health House”), it was sunny, with a blue sky, day after day.

Jiselle tried to picture the scene he described. The distant snowcapped mountain, the foothills surrounding it. The way those hills appeared in the evenings to breathe slowly—sleepily, deeply, purple. There was a train track, Mark said, looking like a silver stream up the side of the mountain. He could see it shining sometimes in the early mornings, behind the pines. At four o’clock every afternoon the rushing glint of a train passed over the tracks.

“I’m learning patience,” Mark said. “And studying German.”

In the background she sometimes heard a woman say something—to Mark?—in German.

“It can’t be too much longer,” he told Jiselle. “Since not one of us has even shown symptoms, they’re not going to be able to justify quarantining us forever.”

“I love you,” she said. “I miss you.”

“My dearest,” he said. “My princess. My darling. Imagine I am kissing you.”

She closed her eyes.

She tried to imagine it, but the phone made an unnerving humming in her ear.

“Herr Dorn?” someone called in the distance.

The woman.

“I have to go now,” Mark whispered. “It’s morning here. Time for breakfast.”