flowing behind her. Sara walked into the room. “Jesus,” she said. “Like, how many people have died since
Camilla turned the television off, pointing the remote at it like a handgun. The screen went black.
Part Five
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
He had been quarantined in Germany for twenty-two weeks, and Jiselle was having trouble picturing Mark’s face.
Every night, she’d stare at his photograph on top of their dresser—the photo in which he, in his pilot’s uniform, had his arm around her, in her flight attendant’s uniform, and the Pacific Ocean was an infinity of gray containing only one small sailboat behind them.
But as soon as she closed her eyes and tried to call up the features of her husband’s face without the help of the photograph, they would melt in her imagination, as if he were a runner, blurring by. Or on that speeding train up the side of the mountain in Germany.
“Well, Jiselle, you barely knew him before you married him, and he’s been gone most of your marriage anyway,” Annette said.
It felt like a slap across the face—some thin, feminine hand made of air and disapproval smacking her cheek. Annette made a sound on her end of the line, something like air being snorted out of her nose. She’d had a difficult delivery—hours of labor followed by a C-section—but the baby was healthy, a little girl named Paulette, who was three months old. Annette was still so weak from her pregnancy problems that they’d had to hire a nanny to look after the baby, but Annette had been able to get out of the house a few times in the last couple of months.
“Don’t worry,” she said when Jiselle’s silence went on long enough that it was clear she wasn’t going to say anything else, “it’ll all work out when Mark gets back.”
“I need you,” Jiselle said to Mark one evening when the phone connection was unusually crisp over the ocean between them, and when he responded, she could hear every consonant, perfectly pronounced. She could even hear what sounded like swallowing, and the sound of his tongue passing over his teeth when he paused.
“I don’t want to hear that right now, Jiselle,” he said. “I’m helpless over here. I have to believe you’re okay there, and that you’re up to the job of taking care of the kids and yourself. I can’t deal with any soft-minded stuff.”
“What?” Jiselle instinctively put a hand to her throat, pressed the phone closer to her ear.
“You know what I’m talking about, Jiselle. Try to rise to the occasion, okay? This isn’t Disneyland for any of us anymore. Now, I have to go. It’s the middle of the night here. Goodnight, my darling.”
Jiselle mouthed the word
She stood looking at the phone in her hand for a long time.
After it became clear that there would not be time left in the school year for schools to reopen before September, the children had begun to stay up until well into the early hours of morning—1:00 AM, 2:00—and to sleep until noon, even during the week, which had, without the routine of school, become indistinguishable from the weekends. Often, Bobby Temple did not leave for his own house until the sun came up. Those nights, Jiselle fell asleep to the low murmur of his and Camilla’s voices on the other side of the wall.
She thought that, perhaps, as the stepmother, as the adult in the house, she was supposed to ask Bobby to leave, but he was so polite, so helpful—emptying the garbage and then hauling the can to the end of the driveway on Fridays, playing with action figures on the floor with Sam, emptying the rodent cages with him. It was a comfort and a relief having a nearly grown man in the house. When the county stopped garbage pickup, Bobby helped Jiselle burn what couldn’t be composted. (He’d started the compost himself, behind the garage.) When the electricity went out, he would go through the house gathering up the flashlights they’d left lying around since the last power outage, and then he’d start up the generator.
In the middle of April, Bobby drove Jiselle to the airport in his father’s car to pick up Mark’s Mazda from airline employee parking, where it had been since Mark’s fateful flight to Germany. Jiselle drove the Mazda back, and Bobby followed in the Saab.
They parked the Cherokee in the garage and closed the garage door.
“Do what you have to do,” Mark had said disapprovingly over the phone when she told him that she was going to start driving the Mazda instead of the Cherokee now because of the SUV attacks. “Let the thugs run the world,” he said. “But be careful with my Mazda.”
Jiselle didn’t respond. His disapproval didn’t change her mind. She had responsibilities—his children. She had to take precautions. The attacks were becoming more and more common, moving inexorably from the city to its fringes. Drivers were being hauled out of their big vehicles and beaten. The SUVs were toppled, smashed with baseball bats, set on fire.
“We’ve got to blame
That afternoon, Paul had walked over to get his Saab back, but Bobby and Camilla had already taken it out again to pick up some things for dinner, so Jiselle invited him in, offered him a beer. The electricity had been on solidly and without interruption for four days, so the beer was cold. He took the bottle gratefully and settled into a chair on the deck, gazing out at the ravine, which was still glistening and dripping from the rainstorm earlier. The air was warm and humid. Paul Temple was flushed. His forehead was beaded with sweat. He leaned on his elbows with the bottle of beer on the table between his arms and held his head in his hands.
“It’s a secular society,” he went on, “so it’s not God; it’s global warming. But it’s the same idea. The idea is that we brought this on ourselves. That cult in Idaho, the one where they all killed themselves to erase their carbon footprint—that could be straight out of the Middle Ages.”
Jiselle had seen photos of the cultists—more than a hundred dead men, women, and children in rows in their compound outside of Boise. They had all had white sheets pulled up to their chins, and their bare feet dangling from the ends of their cots. Such organized mania, she’d thought, looking at the photographs on CNN. How had they managed it?
Paul looked up at Jiselle and said, “These are strange times.”
Jiselle nodded. She saw bewilderment and despair in his expression, which she felt sure had to do with his wife, Tara. That day at the bank returned to her. She was afraid she might betray her own knowledge then, and looked away. Overhead, she heard a plane and looked up to see a pinwheeling bit of silver in the haze. Not a commercial airliner. Those had been grounded for good in the last two weeks. It was, instead, one of the small, fast military or corporate jets that had been crisscrossing the sky lately—quiet and suspiciously high, gone in a blink, although Jiselle continued to stare at the silver spinning place it had been until the sun in the haze over the treetops appeared to double itself.
That afternoon, Jiselle realized they were low on everything. The milk was gone. One of the children had used the last of it and put the empty carton back in the refrigerator. The peanut butter was mostly gone, and there
