deep breath and listened to the song on the radio until she realized that it was—maybe loud enough for those slow-moving mourners to hear—“Na Na, Hey Hey, Kiss Him Goodbye.”
She snapped it off.
She bit her lip.
When she looked over, Camilla was also suppressing a smile, and then they all three started to laugh at the bad joke of it, the morbid coincidence, as car after car continued to pass, headlights shining garishly in the bright sun, little funeral parlor flags snapping from their antennas, until finally the last one, a Mazda just like Mark’s, passed, and the driver, a middle-aged man in a black suit, waved to them as if to let them know the procession was over. He was smiling brightly, not like a mourner. Still, Jiselle hesitated before following him into the road, joining the procession.
“Oh, forget it,” she said, turning left instead of right. “Let’s take the long way, or we’ll be behind them for days before they turn off at the cemetery.”
“Definitely,” the girls agreed.
“Can we turn the radio on again?” Sara asked from behind her.
Jiselle turned it on again. The song was, “Baby, It’s You.”
The long way home took them past the car dealership—where a salesman was sitting in a lawn chair, seeming to be staring up at the sun—and past the library, closed down with the other nonessential public services, and then past the high school, where the flag had been taken down. Nothing flapped there but a loose gray piece of rope.
Then they passed Sam’s school, Marquette Elementary, where the statue of Father Marquette stood in an overgrown garden with his arms open. A white plastic grocery bag was snagged around one of his wrists. The bronze plaque below the statue appeared to have been hacked away from the base, a gouged square in its shape left behind. (Was it simple vandalism, Jiselle wondered, or was there some value in bronze?) She remembered, months before, getting out of her car while waiting for Sam after school to read that plaque. She had learned that Jacques Marquette had stopped in the area during his explorations, due to poor health, and had written his journals there.
She thought, then, of Sara’s journal. All those hours she spent now hunched over, when she wasn’t crocheting, the tiny little letters spilling out of her furiously across the pages.
“Maybe that girl will be the great chronicler of these times,” Paul Temple had said. “Keeping a record of it all. You’ve heard of Brother Clynn, during the Black Plague in Ireland? He was the last monk alive in his cloister, writing a letter to the future he assumed no one would live to see. The last sentence of his journal was ‘Waiting among the dead for death to come,’ and then, written in another hand, ‘And here it seems the author died…’”
“Oh, Paul,” Jiselle had said, “don’t tell me that.”
“I’m sorry,” he’d said, laughing as he apologized. “But at least talking doesn’t make anything happen.”
They drove home along the ravine, dark and leafy-green at the same time. When they were only a few miles from home, they came upon several police cars and a fire engine idling and, along with them, a double row of parked cars. A small crowd of people had gathered, standing in a little huddle, almost as if they were posing for a photograph but looking down into the ravine instead of at a camera.
“Stop,” Camilla said. “Shouldn’t we see what it is?”
“I don’t know,” Jiselle said, but she was slowing down as she said it. “I mean, do we—”
“We have to see,” Sara said. “We can’t just drive by. Something’s going on.”
Jiselle pulled the Mazda over. She put the car in park, and she and the girls got out and walked over to the little gathered group.
No one was speaking. The only sound was the raspy call of a crow overhead and the sound of the fire engine idling, wasting fuel.
Jiselle and the girls came up behind the small crowd and stood on their tiptoes but still could see nothing, so they walked beyond them to the edge of the ravine and looked down.
At first, Jiselle thought she was looking down on flowers—a blurred garden, a wall of flowers built around a heap of flowers—roses and peonies, perhaps covered with a thin sheet of frost so that the flowers shimmered. An enchanted garden. Then she blinked.
No.
This was something else.
Down there in the shadows and among the foliage, she recognized first the face of a goat turned up to her. Its hollow eyes. Its jaw hanging open. Its implacable expression. And then others came into focus:
A bloated cow and what seemed to be a lamb tossed onto its side. Kittens, curled into a mass—or were they rabbits? A scrawny dog or a coyote. A small horse, which seemed to be bowing on its knees like a circus animal performing a trick.
The smell of it, also flowery, overpoweringly sweet and rotten, drifted up to her on the breeze, and Jiselle put her hand over her face and mouth but didn’t gasp until she saw movement—the black shadow of a rat darting under the horse’s pale corpse.
“What the hell is it?” Sara asked, holding on to Jiselle’s upper arm. Her hand was cold. She was breathing hard. Jiselle couldn’t speak. A woman in front of them answered.
“Animals,” she said. “Dead. You know, they dump them. The diseased. Farmers, I guess. Or someone. Or a bunch of someones.”
“Jesus,” Camilla said, backing away.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Back at the house, Jiselle and the girls unloaded the groceries in silence. From the glass doors, Jiselle saw that Sam, Bobby, and Paul were filling a narrow black dirt path with bricks. They had their shirts off now, and their backs were shining in the sun. Sam was holding a brick, waiting for Paul or Bobby to take it from him.
Unlike the other two, he wasn’t sweating. He’d taken off his shirt only in imitation. When Bobby or Paul wiped his own brow, Sam did the same.
Jiselle made lunch from what she’d bought at Safeco. Bread, canned ham. She made lemonade from powder and bottled water, poured it, set out a glass for each of them, and called them in for lunch.
The conversation around the table concerned trips they’d taken. The Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon. The time Jiselle’s plane to Sweden had been rerouted to Iceland.
Nothing was said about the animal dump. The girls ate heartily. They seemed to have forgotten the shock of it.
Back near the Mazda, Sara had vomited. Camilla had held her hair. They’d opened the trunk and gotten out one of the dozens of bottles of water they’d bought, and Jiselle had poured some of it onto a paper towel, wiped Sara’s face for her, given her the rest to rinse out her mouth, spit, drink. When they were back in the car, Camilla said, “What the hell is going on? Did those animals get the
“Of course not,” Jiselle said. “Humans and animals don’t get the same diseases. It’s just—like the woman said. Farm animals. It’s convenient. Like people who dump old refrigerators in the woods. You don’t have to pay to—”
“They weren’t all farm animals,” Sara said. “How did they get there? Why were all those people standing around? Why were the cops there?”
Jiselle said nothing. She could not think of any explanation for the animal dump that was not completely absurd. There
