mind their nutrition, and stay close to health experts who can help them at the first sign of illness.”
But the story that completely eclipsed the others was “A Mother, a Saint, in Maine.”
In Portland a mother of four had left a note on the kitchen table that read, “I know I have the Phoenix flu. I’m going away until it’s passed, so I won’t infect you.”
Her husband and children and the local authorities had mounted a massive search. They’d posted flyers and bought a billboard on the interstate: MOMMY. WE NEED YOU TO COME HOME. WE LOVE YOU. PLEASE. But she was found dead and alone a few days later by a maid at a Holiday Inn in Concord, New Hampshire—her bed surrounded by photos of her family.
Now the family was suing the local authorities because they’d had her remains cremated before the family had a chance to identify her, to say goodbye.
That night, on the couch in the dark, Sam was a warm weight at her side, his head on her shoulder, and Jiselle could feel both the steadiness of his breath and the depth of his concentration. The flashlight was a bright zero on the page they were reading together. His hair was a little longer now, and it tickled the side of her face. Occasionally she’d rub her cheek against the top of his head. He snuggled closer to her when she did.
As if on cue, there was a knock on the front door.
Sam and Jiselle both sat up fast, and Jiselle instinctively snapped the flashlight off and let the book fall closed on her lap. She was surprised to find her heart beating hard. She’d told everyone—Bobby and Paul Temple, Mark, her mother, the children, Annette, Brad Schmidt—that she wasn’t scared in the house, in the dark, alone with the children, without a gun, and she’d believed it.
But now she couldn’t move.
Sam whispered, “Who could it be?”
Jiselle shook her head. She put her finger to her lips. Another knock. Three times. More insistent. She felt every muscle in her body tense, as if her limbs were ready to take action, whether or not her mind agreed to it. A host of images flashed in front of her: Throwing herself over Sam to shield him. The ravine. Thrashing with his hand in hers through the brush and trees. The girls, in their nightgowns, running ahead of them. She wished that her feet weren’t bare, that Sam was wearing long pants and sleeves, that the girls did not sleep so deeply. She’d just begun to form the terrible question of how loudly she would have to scream to wake them, and felt herself inhale, and sensed the instinctive, welcome rush of what could only have been called courage beginning at the base of her brain, readying her to stand, to make some kind of decision, although only her body knew yet what that decision would be, when a voice she recognized as Diane Schmidt’s called through the crack in the door, which she had opened, because Jiselle hadn’t even locked it, “I am a little old woman.”
“Mrs. Schmidt!” Jiselle said, opening the door all the way. “What is it?”
“I am a little old woman,” Mrs. Schmidt said again. She was wearing a white nightgown.
“Oh, dear,” Jiselle said. “I’ll go find your husband. You stay here with Sam.”
As Jiselle ran across the yard to the Schmidts’ house, she wrapped her arms around herself, shivering suddenly, although she wasn’t cold. The moon lit up the backyard, and she hurried up the back steps, holding her flashlight in front of her. She knocked on the door. “Mr. Schmidt? Mr. Schmidt?
There was no answer. Jiselle tried to look through the screen door and the kitchen window, but the shades were drawn, the curtains pulled. There were no lights on inside. Maybe he was asleep. She knocked harder on the door, and then stood waiting on the steps. She cupped her hands around her mouth and called to the window, “Mr. Schmidt?”
Certainly, if he were in there, he would have heard her by then. But still there was no answer.
She turned the knob on the back door.
It was unlocked.
She pushed it all the way open and stood in the threshold.
“Hello?” she called to the darkness, shining her flashlight into the tidy kitchen before stepping in.
Jiselle had never entered the Schmidts’ house from the back door before. With her flashlight, she could make out checkerboard curtains on the windows. The cupboards were painted pastel green. There was a throw rug with a rooster embroidered on it beneath a Formica table. A little yellow rag was folded neatly over the edge of the sink. Jiselle walked through the kitchen toward the hallway that led to the living room, leaving the back door open behind her.
“Hello?” she called, but quietly.
The hallway was even darker, but when she shone her light on the walls, Jiselle could see photographs of Brad and Diane in younger days: Holding hands at the edge of a canyon. Standing with their backs to a waterfall. Diane Schmidt waving from a lounge chair at the side of a pool, wearing a two-piece bathing suit, her skin tanned and smooth, her hair still dark and pulled back, tied with a bright scarf.
“Brad?”
She peered into what must have been their bedroom.
The bed was carefully made, the white bedspread without a single crease.
He was not in the bed.
She walked past that room and what must have been the family room, and then the bathroom, which smelled of air freshener and floral soaps.
She stepped into the living room, which was darker than any of the other rooms had been. The television was off, of course, although Mr. Schmidt was sitting in front of it with his feet propped up on an ottoman, staring straight ahead with eyes that appeared to have melted deep into his skull, or fallen from it.
“Hello?” Jiselle said, although she knew he wouldn’t answer.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Very little had been said about what actually happened to victims of the Phoenix flu. The only person who’d spoken of the suffering—the Surgeon General—had been criticized for fear-mongering and replaced by a quieter Surgeon General. But his words—“I’ve seen people die of cancer and seen them die of AIDS, and had no idea God could come up with even worse ways to die”—had been quoted and repeated a hundred thousand times before they could be suppressed.
But after Brad Schmidt died, the paramedics wouldn’t, or couldn’t, answer Jiselle’s question about what had happened to his eyes, so she was left to wonder. Had he scratched them out? Had they somehow swollen? Burst?
The paramedics said only that she shouldn’t touch any of his things and that they were going to board up the house.
After they’d taken Brad Schmidt’s body away, the officer in charge wanted to take Mrs. Schmidt to the Grove Home in the city, but Jiselle had heard such terrible things about the place—completely overcrowded, since so many nursing homes and halfway houses and mental institutions had been closed down, and also without staff. One of the Grove Homes had been investigated for euthanizing some of its patients when the generator failed and their oxygen was cut off.
“I suppose you think we should have just sat by and watched them strangle to death, flap around like fish for an hour until they suffocated in their beds?” the nurse in charge said as she was being handcuffed and taken away. “Well, I invite anyone who believes that a death like that would be more compassionate than a sedative and a lethal injection to come and volunteer at the nearest Grove Home.”
Paul Temple had said, shaking his head, “During the Black Death, parents abandoned their children,
