(all of her previous lovers, and her father, had played, and none had ever suggested teaching her), she understood now what was being enacted on it. For the first time, she understood what
They played some nights at the kitchen table by candlelight when the power went out, and, those nights, Jiselle sometimes had the feeling that she was a woman from another era, another life. That she had gone back to some step she’d skipped in a process she hadn’t recognized as a process:
Candle flickering. The child’s face, deep in concentration over a wooden board and its simple wooden pieces. Through the open windows, the crickets’ excited confessions to the dark. Next door, she might hear Diane Schmidt singing folk songs to herself in a high, girlish voice.
One day, Sara put down her leather-bound black diary, in which she sometimes spent hours writing in tiny letters (“I’m trying to save space”) and took up one of Jiselle’s half-finished afghans and finished it. After that, she began and finished another. Then, a flowing winter scarf, and then she started to crochet a shawl with the exotic yarn Jiselle had bought in Rome but never used—gossamer, fawn-colored. Sara sat for hours on the couch in the family room, intent on the task of pulling the fine, pale stuff through the silver eye of her crochet hook, spinning it out on the other side as an intricate orderliness spilling softly around her.
Jiselle picked up the edge of the shawl and smoothed her hand over the downy floss and lace of it. The stitches were perfect.
“Sara,” Jiselle said, “you’re so good at this.”
Sara looked up. She said, “I heard you reading that story to Sam, the one about the girl who had to make a shawl so thin it could be pulled through a wedding ring before the prince would marry her.”
Jiselle said, “Are you looking for a prince?”
Sara snorted, rolled her eyes, went back to work. She alternated between the careful crochet work and the tiny printing in her journal. When she wasn’t doing one, she was working on the other.
Camilla took up jogging.
Mornings, she’d head out the front door in her running shoes and silky shorts, come back an hour later soaked with sweat, scarlet-cheeked, panting. Her legs began to look stronger, the calves chiseled, defined by the muscles in them. Bobby might be waiting for her in the family room. Sometimes Jiselle would find him moving Sam’s action figures across the arm of the couch even when Sam wasn’t around. He’d laugh when she caught him at it, and say, “The boredom’s making me regress.” His father was spending more and more time on the lawn than it required, mowing it into a perfect chessboard pattern of crisscrosses and squares while Bobby, displaced, sat on the couch with the action figures or on the deck drinking lemonade.
“I could make a nice brick path for you,” Paul suggested to Jiselle one afternoon. His T-shirt was soaked with sweat, and Jiselle could see how physically fit he was. His muscles were different from Mark’s, which were hotel-gym muscles, and more defined. Paul’s body was solid, sinewy. His hair was damp around his forehead. “From the deck down to the ravine. I’ve got the bricks left over from a project. It would give me something to do, and it wouldn’t hurt Bobby to keep a bit busier, if you know what I mean.” He nodded up to Bobby, who had fallen asleep in a lawn chair while Camilla was out running. “Keep our kids out of trouble.”
He showed Jiselle where he would lay the bricks. He said he thought that at the end of the path he could even make a few steps down the bank and into the ravine. “What do you think?” he asked.
“Well, a path would lovely,” Jiselle said. “I’ll need to ask Mark, but I think—”
“Oh, of course,” Paul said. “Ask Mark. See what Mark has to say.”
They walked back across the lawn together. That day, the backyard was a riot of midsummer flowers and leaves, and overhead in the sky the contrail of a jet had dissolved across the clear blue. Planes were still flying sporadically, despite the restrictions and the drastic diminishment in flight offerings, the lack of fuel. Passengers were required to produce a statement of purpose to be approved thirty days in advance of travel, and even some of the most desperate were being denied. A woman in Oregon was trying to get to her son in New Jersey. The boy was twelve years old and had gone to visit his father and stepmother, both of whom had fallen ill and died within a week of his arrival. The boy was in the hospital in Newark now, also ill, and although she was willing to pay up to ten thousand dollars for a one-way flight, the mother could not get a seat on any airline. The last report Jiselle heard on the news was that Tom Cruise had arranged a private plane to take the woman to her son. There was footage of the woman on a tarmac climbing the stairs to a small jet, her hair whipping behind her in the wind.
Now a jet was flying over the house, and the stream behind it looked like a white ribbon that had frayed and then been pulled to pieces.
It was impossible, she thought, but Jiselle considered briefly that the jet held that mother. She was alone up there, looking down, hands clasped in her lap. Behind her, a plume of desperation and relief. Soon that disintegrating path behind her would be invisible overhead.
When Jiselle spoke to Mark about the brick path, he said, “Tell him I said that was fine.”
“You’re sure?” Jiselle asked.
She could hear what sounded like a party taking place behind Mark’s voice. Ice dropped into glasses. A violin. Mark said that they’d been bringing in entertainment, catering nice meals paid for by the airline, subsidized by the European Union, which was insisting on their continued quarantine. Sometimes Jiselle thought he sounded drunk. He slurred the occasional word.
“Why not? Brick path,” he said. “Sounds great.”
So, the next week, one morning, Paul and Bobby arrived with a load of bricks and stacked them neatly at the side of the yard while Jiselle watched from the deck—Sam running between Paul and Bobby, a blue jay shrieking down from a tree branch, the sweat on Bobby’s and his father’s T-shirts soaking through the cotton. A cross of sweat on Bobby’s back. The dark silhouette of a Victorian widow on Paul’s.
For three days in a row, the midafternoon heat had topped ninety-nine degrees. The power had come back again, and Jiselle turned on the air-conditioning when it grew so uncomfortable that she felt she couldn’t stand it. The sweat pooled on her eyelids and onto her eyelashes.
But the heat didn’t dampen Bobby’s and Paul’s and Sam’s enthusiasm for working on the brick path.
“They’re bored,” Camilla said. “They’re going nuts. They’re not like us.”
She’d come back into the house from her run. Jiselle had implored her not to run in the heat. (“You’ll pass out. Heatstroke. You’ll get dehydrated.”) But Camilla just shook her head, smiling. “It’s nice of you to worry, but I’ll be fine.”
And she did seem fine. Flushed, glowing. After her shower, Camilla lay on the couch in the family room in the air-conditioning with her hair wrapped in a towel, watching CNN. Jiselle sat down beside her.
Usually now, when she watched it, the news was good. No one expected severe power outages since the government had intervened. China was backing down. The war in the Mideast was all but over. The oil embargo would not last, but new developments in alternative fuel sources were being made every day. Researchers were on the verge of finding the cause of hemorrhagic zoonosis, and although this wasn’t a cure or a vaccine, it was the first step in that direction. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt had been married on a boat in the middle of the ocean so that the wedding could be attended by guests from every corner of the globe—the many foreign dignitaries who loved them but who could not have flown in to the country for it because of the travel restrictions. According to CNN, thousands of large and small boats had crowded around the
One afternoon Jiselle was both shocked and strangely gratified to hear a CNN reporter mention, almost offhandedly, that there’d been some speculation that the Phoenix flu was being caused by the importation of hair from developing countries, and Jiselle looked forward to telling Brad Schmidt the next time she went over to their house to see if they needed anything. She would congratulate him on his prescience. He would be pleased, especially if he’d made a believer out of her—and, in truth, suddenly this theory seemed no more farfetched than some of the other things being blamed: Herbal supplements. Global warming. Contaminated grapes. Germ warfare. Bad Karma. Infected cats. Infected dogs. Teenage sex.
On CNN, it was Britney again, dancing on a hilltop in the sunlight wearing a spangled bikini top, blond hair
