In a Perfect World

children abandoned their parents.”

Apparently, the Schmidts had never had children. If there were any living relatives, they could not be located.

“No,” Jiselle told the police officer, who stood on the front porch in his biohazard suit looking like a visitor from space. “She can stay with us.”

“It’s irregular,” he said, but objected no further. He seemed to make a note on a pad of paper, but when Jiselle glanced at the page, she saw nothing on it. There was, apparently, no ink in the officer’s pen. Still, he’d wanted to give the appearance of being official, of following a procedure.

Sara moved into Camilla’s room so that Mrs. Schmidt could sleep in Sara’s bed—but in the warm late weeks of the month, Mrs. Schmidt often fell asleep on the deck outside and could not be persuaded to come in.

Sometimes Jiselle would rise in the middle of the night, go to the windows, and see her standing in the backyard, grass almost to her hips, looking up at the moon. Sometimes she saw what must have been Beatrice at Diane Schmidt’s feet, looking like a smaller moon, buried in grass, reflecting that reflection.

Once, when Jiselle rose and went to the windows, she found that Diane Schmidt had taken off all her clothes and was standing completely naked in the backyard, arms spread wide. The power had been out again for a week, and without light pollution, the whole sky above Mrs. Schmidt seemed to fizz with stars—some of them falling, arcing through the dark—and it looked as if Diane Schmidt might be trying to catch them in her arms, and as if she might be able to do so if she waited long enough.

Having her in the house was no more trouble than having a cat. She spent most of her time outdoors. She ate whatever was offered to her, politely. She took her medicine—which Jiselle found in the Schmidts’ bathroom cabinet—without complaint. She was clean. She wiped the bathroom sink with a tissue after she used it and even went through the house once a day with the feather duster, whistling to herself as she dusted. When she slipped in and out at night, it was in complete silence, but she never left the yard. And some of the things she had to say struck Jiselle as deeply wise.

“‘We are put on this earth but a little space,’” Diane Schmidt said one afternoon at lunch, “‘that we might learn to bear the beams of love.’”

“That’s lovely,” Jiselle said.

“That’s Blake,” Diane Schmidt replied, and returned to eating her bowl of rice without dropping a single grain. “Once upon a time I was an English teacher.”

Paul Temple said, “You know you’re going to need wood. To burn. For heat. A lot of it. We all need to think about winter without electricity.”

Jiselle nodded. She told him, however, that she supposed, really, he should be chopping and stacking wood for himself, and for Bobby, for the winter. Tara Temple had never returned from her week-long visit to her mother, and Jiselle had quit asking Paul if she had or would.

He said, “If you wouldn’t object, it would be easier, if there’s no power, for us to spend the worst of the cold spells here. Better to heat one house than two, and you have more people to move than we do.”

“Of course,” Jiselle said. She felt her pulse quicken and was hoping she hadn’t blushed. They held each other’s eyes for a few seconds before they both looked up at the emptiness of the sky.

“That is,” Paul said, not meeting her eyes, “if…”

Jiselle held up a hand to keep him from saying anything else.

Paul Temple cleared his throat, ignoring—or not noticing—her hand. “That is, if Mark…”

“I haven’t heard from Mark since…” She couldn’t even say it. It had been a week. A woman answered the phone every day at the Gesundheitsschutzhaus and said, with a heavy German accent, “We have no phone service to the quarantine. You must stop calling here. Captain Dorn is perfectly well, and he will call you when he calls you.”

The airline had said nothing, would say nothing.

“I’ll get Bobby going on the wood. God knows the kid’s got nothing to do.”

Paul’s face was tanned and lined in the sun. His beard had grown out through the summer, and it was full now, gray and sandy-blond. With the ax over his shoulder, in jeans and a flannel shirt, he looked like a woodsman: muscular, rustic. His eyes, however, were watery and tired. He’d had that toothache now for weeks—the dull throbbing of a molar, which kept him up at night, pacing around his house. Of course there were no dentists doing business in St. Sophia. No drugstores were open; nor would there have been any aspirin left on the shelves if they were. Paul had agreed to take the bottle of Advil Jiselle offered him only after she assured him that she had several bottles stored in the cellar. He’d refused it at first: “Who knows when you might need this, or when or where you’ll be able to buy more?” But he took it when she insisted.

That week, Paul and Bobby repaired the chimney, too, and swept out the fireplace.

They shooed the swallows out and put a screen over the chimney so the birds couldn’t come back.

The birds circled the roof for hours afterward, but finally they flew off for good, built their nest somewhere else, it seemed. Jiselle knew their departure was a good thing, although, after their eviction, she looked up, watched them circle in gray and feathered confusion, and felt sorry that they couldn’t stay. “You don’t think,” she said to Paul, watching beside her, “that it could be…you know, bad luck, to send them away?”

Paul shook his head. He said, “No, Jiselle. Try not to think like that. When these superstitions start, and start being taken for truth, it’s a kind of final bell tolling for civilization. We can’t start believing in luck.”

Jiselle was playing chess after midnight with Sam when Mrs. Schmidt came out of Sara’s bedroom, held up a finger, and said, “Listen.”

In the candlelight, she looked more than ever like a wraith. Her white nightgown was full of shadows, and her face was obscured by darkness. Jiselle assumed at first that she was in one of her sleepwalking states: Sometimes Mrs. Schmidt would wake from dreams and wander out of Sara’s room with something important to say, unable to recall what it was.

But Sam and Jiselle stopped their game to listen anyway.

Sam heard them first, and his eyes widened, and then Jiselle heard them, too.

At first, a distant yelp.

A womanish moan, far away, singular.

But then came a whole chorus of bawling and ululating cries, whines, plaintive and angry at the same time—and as if she were the first person to hear such a sound, as if she were a woman in a cave, a woman born before language, listening, Jiselle felt the fine blond hairs on her limbs rising away from her flesh in a feathery wave of foreboding, traveling up her body, her neck, and she stood and reached out instinctively for Sam, pulling him to her.

“Who is that?” Sam asked.

“We don’t know,” Jiselle said.

When Paul and Bobby arrived in the morning, Paul told her they had heard them, too, from their own house.

“Were they coyotes?” Jiselle asked. “Wolves?”

Paul Temple said no, he didn’t think so. He believed they might simply be the hungry pets of St. Sophia residents who’d died or fled without their dogs.

Jiselle thought then of the first day that Mark had driven her into St. Sophia—the brick facades of the buildings downtown, the little boy on his red bicycle, the shining fire engine outside the station.

ST. SOPHIA—AMERICA’S HOMETOWN.

But like so many towns in America, St. Sophia was no one’s hometown. Their families were elsewhere, as were their jobs. It looked like a town, but in the months Jiselle had lived there, even after the plague began, the Temples were the only people she’d gotten to know, and they were not from St. Sophia, either.