In a Perfect World

or the police.”

But then she recalled the look on the fireman’s face—stern, unapproachable, the expression the guards at the queen’s palace wore. An expression that forbade the asking of questions.

Now Sara was eating, looking pink-cheeked again. Sam told a joke about a monkey on a bicycle. There was laughter. They lingered long enough for Jiselle to make a second pitcher of powdered lemonade, and when they were done eating, Bobby and Camilla sat down on the couch to watch television together, and Sara went to her room, where Jiselle could hear one of her own old Joni Mitchell CDs playing. She’d told Sara weeks before to feel free to borrow anything she liked but hadn’t really imagined she owned any CDs Sara would like. Apparently, she did.

Jiselle and Paul took their glasses of lemonade to the deck, along with Sam, and they sat for a while looking out at the ravine, at the half-laid path down the lawn to the edge of it. Not until Sam went back inside for a cookie did Jiselle tell Paul about what they’d seen—the animal dump.

He nodded. He bit his lower lip. He didn’t speculate but said, “I wish I could say I’m more surprised. Something’s headed in our direction. The year before the Black Plague did its worst damage, people said they saw herds of horses in the sky. Whole crowds would gather together to stare up at them.”

Jiselle was about to protest that this hadn’t been a hallucination, that there were actual animals—dozens of them—dead and dumped at the side of the road, but Sam came back out then with a cookie for each of them on a small white plate, and Paul and Jiselle each took one and ate them in the sunshine.

“Jiselle,” Paul said to her when she stood to go back in the house.

“Yes?” she said.

But there was a look in his eyes that she understood to mean he had only been saying her name, not asking anything of her.

“Mark?” Jiselle asked.

“Yeah?”

These days he simply sounded distracted when she spoke to him. He said there’d been no progress whatsoever made on their release. “No one’s going anywhere,” he said. “Anywhere. For God knows how long.”

“I love you, Mark,” she said.

“Love you, too.”

“The children are doing fine,” she said.

“Good.”

Everything must have seemed so far away to him, she realized. What was there to talk about? What were the mice, the birds, the animal dump, the weather in St. Sophia, or even the children, to Mark, detained on the other side of the ocean? When she could think of nothing to say, she said, again, “I love you.”

“I love you, too.” He said the words as if she’d badgered him into saying them.

By the end of the week, they’d finished the path.

“Do you like it?” Paul asked her. He was standing a few feet ahead of Jiselle. He crossed his arms over his sweaty T-shirt. He worked his tongue around near his back molar, the one that had been bothering him for a few days, and waited for her to answer.

It was a perfect path, straight down the back of the lawn into the leafy distance. It divided the backyard into two interlocking halves. It meandered a little, but it was a clear path. Already a bit of moss was growing in the cracks. “It’s beautiful,” she said.

It was.

Nights, under a full moon, it glowed. There was something in the bricks—ground glass?—that couldn’t be seen in daylight but that became luminous in moonlight.

Standing on the path ahead of her, Paul Temple said, as if it hurt him to say it, “You’re so good to his children. And so lovely. I hope he appreciates you.”

Jiselle inhaled and put a hand to her mouth, before turning back to the house.

“Jiselle!” he called after her. “I’m sorry…”

The weather had been so warm and sunny and so wet so early that all the flowers were already at the height of their blooming, and then starting to die already by the beginning of July. The magnolias looked soggy, littering the grass with petals. The branches of the rose bushes sagged with roses. The daffodils lay prone on the earth, their stems having slumped over under the burden of their enormous flowers.

That day, Tara Temple came to the door. Jiselle opened it, surprised to see how plump she was—certainly she’d gained fifteen pounds since Jiselle had seen her in line at the bank—and how scantily clad. She was wearing a silvery sundress, and it plunged between her large, loose breasts, even revealing a shadow of the aureolae around her nipples. The dress floated over her thighs in the breeze, threatening, it seemed to Jiselle, to fly right off.

Yes, she said to Jiselle as she stepped through the door, she’d love to step in and have a cup of coffee. She’d stopped by to tell Bobby she was going to need to go to Virginia for a week. “Grandma’s sick.”

But Bobby and Camilla had taken Mark’s car into town, on Jiselle’s request. The electricity had gone out for three days, spoiling everything, but it had been back on for a day now, and the refrigerator was working, and it seemed to Jiselle that if there was milk and butter at the Safeco, they could risk a few things in the refrigerator again, and that it would be worth the gas to stock up while they could.

While Tara Temple sat at the kitchen table, Jiselle made coffee, poured it into mugs, and, after punching holes in the top, handed the can of evaporated milk to Tara, who added it to her cup.

“It’s so important, you know,” Tara said, pouring the milk into her coffee. “Vitamin D.”

“Oh,” Jiselle said, but she had never liked evaporated milk and did not want it in her coffee, which was now a rare enough treat that spoiling it seemed like a crime. Like so many other things, coffee had become harder and harder to come by. Luckily, Jiselle had thought to buy several cans before the shortages, and now she limited herself to one cup every other day, because who knew how long it would have to last?

She looked disapproving when Jiselle set the can back down on the counter without pouring any into her cup, and Tara picked the can back up herself before following Jiselle out to the deck.

They sat together with the evaporated milk between them, both women holding their coffee to their noses, taking deep breaths of it.

“It’s not a healthy addiction,” Tara said, but she closed her eyes when she sipped.

So did Jiselle.

“My,” Tara said, and rested the cup on her knee, “that tastes good.”

She sat with her legs crossed, swinging one over the other, and her dress was so short that Jiselle could see her black lace underwear as she rested her head on the back of the chair, her face to the sun.

“Dairy products,” Tara said. “And sunlight. This disease preys on people who aren’t getting enough vitamin D, which is almost impossible to get in sufficient quantities because of the diminished sun function. Did you know that?” She looked at Jiselle.

“Really?” Jiselle asked. It was all she could think of to say. Tara Temple had delivered this news with such an air of authority that Jiselle found herself both intimidated and comforted by it. Someone, she thought, at least thinks she knows what’s going on here.

Tara reached over and handed Jiselle the can of evaporated milk, urging it on her. “You really must,” she said.

Obediently, Jiselle poured some into her cup. The coffee was strong—stronger than she would usually have made it back when she’d taken coffee for granted—and the evaporated milk made a little mushroom cloud in her cup. “Thank you,” she said, placing the can back down between them.

“That’s why the quarantines are so shortsighted,” Tara Temple went on. “It only keeps people indoors, when the problem in the first place is not enough sunlight.”

“Oh,” Jiselle said.