In a Perfect World

It was the Fourth of July?

Sara was crocheting by candlelight, and Jiselle was trying to read Far from the Madding Crowd with a flashlight balanced on her shoulder. Next door, Diane Schmidt could be heard humming a vaguely familiar tune, something Jiselle thought she might recognize from a documentary about the Civil War she’d watched on PBS in what seemed like another lifetime, a century before.

Again, they heard what might have been fireworks or gunfire. When Sam said, “See?”—as if the sound were evidence of their call to celebrate—they all started to laugh, and Jiselle said, “Okay,” and they headed outside, where they set the brush pile on fire, and Sara, Camilla, and Sam marched around it singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

During the march, Jiselle suddenly remembered a trick from Girl Scout camp—how, if you boiled a closed can of evaporated milk long enough, somehow it turned to caramel. She went back into the kitchen for a can of milk and a pan of water.

When she came back out, Jiselle boiled the can over the fire, watching Sam and Camilla and Sara march around her. They looked beautiful and feral in their strange clothes—the girls in mismatched summer skirts and tops, their hair long and wild, like pagan princesses, forest creatures, flushed in the firelight, bare arms and legs glowing orange.

And laughing between his sisters in the circle, Sam, in his cutoffs, bare-chested, appeared to be half- human and half-elf.

They looked like children from a time before civilization, before television and computers, vaccinations and fast food and jets—or children after these things, singing a patriotic song written so long ago she was surprised they knew the words.

Later, when she opened the can of evaporated milk, and it was miraculously caramel, they went back into the kitchen and stood around, eating the dense sweetness with spoons.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Once there was a little boy who went out and got his feet wet and caught cold. His mother undressed him, put him to bed, and had the tea urn brought in to make him a good cup of tea.

It was two o’clock in the morning, but they had gotten used to going to sleep later and later. They were wearing their nightclothes—Jiselle, her long summer nightgown, and Sam, his Star Wars T-shirt and checkered boxer shorts—but it didn’t seem past midnight to her, and Sam was wide awake, although the girls had gone to bed after Bobby left, an hour before, riding his bicycle off into the dark.

For eight days straight, the power had been out, so Jiselle and the children waited each night until ten or eleven o’clock to eat dinner by candlelight—a meal of bread, peanut butter, raisins, and canned soup she could heat up outside on the grill they’d bought at Wal-Mart the first week of March, before there were no more grills for sale anywhere, at any price. The charcoal was gone, and the lighter fluid, but Jiselle had the kindling that Bobby had broken up for her and left in a neat pile under an old plastic tarp on the deck.

If they ate earlier, the dark nights seemed to stretch on even longer.

Most days, until the sun set, they managed to keep busy reading, playing chess, Sara crocheting or writing in her journal, Sam throwing the Frisbee with Bobby, Jiselle trying to organize the pantry, dust the bookshelves. They had burned what trash had to be gotten rid of in the fire pit. Afterward, it was a perfect ashy black circle at the center of the brown lawn, but while it was burning, the fire there would glow in hundreds of shades of blue and orange. Watching it, you might have thought it was something magical, something biblical, if you didn’t know it was burning trash.

Jiselle was still able to charge the battery in her cell phone off the battery in the Cherokee, but only occasionally could she pick up a signal. When she could, she called her mother, who answered the phone, “This is Anna Petersen,” as if her office might be calling—but why would they? No one could be selling real estate now. When Jiselle asked how she was, and how she was going to be, and if she needed to come stay with them in St. Sophia, her mother would only chat about the weather, ending with a few last words about Jiselle’s “impossible situation.”

Mark hadn’t called in two days—or if he’d tried, he hadn’t been able to get through—and then it had been only to say hello and that he couldn’t talk long. There were German officials coming to speak to the detainees that afternoon, and he had paperwork to fill out. He told her, “Don’t get excited about a homecoming anytime soon. But I have a feeling we will, at least, be seeing a large monetary settlement from the German government when this is over.”

“I just want you home,” Jiselle said. “I don’t care about the money.”

“Of course you don’t care,” Mark said.

Jiselle was about to object—she felt a warmth spreading across her chest as though a hot soaked cloth had been placed there—but by the time she finally was able to open her mouth to speak, Mark said, “This is it. They’re here. Gotta go,” and hung up.

Jiselle did the laundry outside in the rain barrel and hung it on the line Paul had stretched for her between the deck and a tree at the end of the yard. That chore alone could sometimes take an entire afternoon before Jiselle even realized how long she’d been outside. The ravine seemed empty and completely quiet behind her as she twisted the shirts and socks until they were dry enough to hang. Occasionally, Beatrice might waddle up out of the ravine for a surprise midday visit.

The grass, which they’d had to let grow since the mower ran out of gas, had grown a foot in only a few weeks. Returned to what must have been an earlier, wilder state, there were long pale grasses mixed in with the green ones, and wildflowers Jiselle didn’t know the names of—orange, ruffled cups swaying on thin stems, delicate white frills, purple beads and pearls on long straw-colored stalks—mixed in with those.

Now it was very unusual to see a plane, and when she did, it was almost always a military jet flying fast and high. The trees and sky seemed strangely empty even of birds. It was only the end of July. Could they have flown south early this year?

There had been news reports of dead birds, numbering into the hundreds, in yards and parks and in the streets of Chicago, but Jiselle had found, a few weeks before, only a single dead sparrow—a soft gray ball of feathers—in the backyard. One of its wings looked broken, spread out at a strange angle, and there was blood on its breast.

A cat?

She took a shovel out of the garage and buried the sparrow at the edge of the ravine.

The rodents, like the birds, seemed to have fled. Every morning, Sam’s traps were empty, and he and Jiselle never saw mice or rats on their walks into the ravine any longer. Their absence was not reassuring. Jiselle felt more abandoned by their disappearance than relieved.

It was one of so many disconcerting things. Wave after wave of disastrous statistics on the news were being made human now by a few familiar faces:

Donald Trump’s son. Brad Pitt’s brother. The woman who’d founded Mrs. Fields cookies, and her entire family.

All of these cases proved what they’d already been telling people for months—that no amount of money, specialized medicine, private planes, or island hideaways could spare you.

The Fieldses, it was said, had retreated together to a house in Idaho, thinking it was an escape from the infected areas with higher populations—but they were found there by a UPS man delivering blankets, which they’d had shipped to them from Denmark because they were unwilling to use blankets that had spent any significant amount of time within U.S. borders.

“These people did everything ‘right,’” a man who was identified by a caption on the television as “Health Expert” said, making elaborate quotation marks in the air, raising his bushy eyebrows knowingly, “which goes to show that you can’t flee from a virus that’s already circulating in your body. People need to keep themselves fit,