In a Perfect World

When trouble came here, people went somewhere else.

They went back.

They left their schools behind, their shining fire engine, their quaint downtown, their pets.

St. Sophia was just a town on a list given to people who needed a town, a town that could just as easily be crossed off the list and cease to exist.

After that, Jiselle heard them every night, and no matter how deeply asleep she was, the cries always woke her with her heart pounding and sent her hurrying to the doorway of Sam’s room to check on him, and then past the girls’ and Mrs. Schmidt’s rooms, to see that they were in their beds, and then to the window, to stare into the darkness draped over the ravine, imagining those pets, lost and changed, calling out for the ones who had abandoned them.

That week, Paul and Bobby stayed each night for dinner. Jiselle would make whatever she could from the cans and boxes she had. If the electricity was out, she would cook on the grill. Sometimes Diane Schmidt would sit with them, and sometimes Jiselle had to take a plate to her room or out to the yard, where she might be sitting beside Beatrice, watching the sun set. After dinner, Paul and Jiselle sat on the deck with their cups of tea. They said nothing about Mark, who had not called, but Paul confided in her that when Tara had not come back from Virginia, he’d felt mostly relieved. There had been trouble between them for years, but the Phoenix flu and the power outages had forced some things to the surface—like the fact that he and Tara had nothing in common, except for Bobby, who was getting older, getting on with his life.

He said that after Tara called to tell him she was going to stay longer, didn’t know when she’d be back, he couldn’t even find it in himself to feel surprised.

“She’d been ready to go for a long time.”

Jiselle thought then of Tara Temple in the line at the bank that day but said nothing.

“And all this hocus-pocus stuff she got into. I couldn’t stomach it. You know, during the Black Plague, these charlatans used to go door to door selling Abracadabras and charms and knots. People would give their last crust of bread for some worthless amulet. She wanted me to believe in her positive thinking and read her books, and I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

Bobby was the one who was grief-stricken. “He misses his mother, and he’s worried about her, of course. He’s afraid she’ll get sick in Virginia, and with no mail service and if the phone lines go completely—the way the electricity’s been going—how will we ever know?”

Jiselle nodded and bit her lip.

“Shit happens,” Paul said. “Look at Schmidt.” He nodded in the direction of Brad and Diane’s house, which had been covered by the county in yards and yards of yellow tape marked BIOHAZARD. Brad Schmidt had been gone only one week, and already the hedge between their houses had grown into a tangled thicket, a wild wall. Fat pink flowers bloomed on a few of the branches.

“Jesus Christ,” Sara said. “It’s a flowering hedge. Is that why he kept cutting it up? He was trying to keep the flowers from blooming?”

CHAPTER TWENTY

It seemed like a minor problem compared to the many other problems, but how could they simply watch her die? There was no more Fowl Feed Deluxe left in the can, and Beatrice would touch nothing else.

“Jiselle?” Sam said. “Can we go to the pet store? Please?”

He stood at the sliding glass doors shivering in the damp morning breeze, his arms wrapped around his stomach. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, but he’d grown so much in the last few months that the sleeves ended between his elbows and his wrists. Soon, if they couldn’t go shopping, he would look like Huck Finn, a boy grown out of homespun clothes, barefoot.

“We have to get some goose food,” he said. He looked at Jiselle. His eyes were wide and beseeching. “What if she starves?”

Already, at the end of May, when she and Sam had last made a special trip to the pet store and bought the last bag of Fowl Feed Deluxe off the shelf, there had not been any of the usual things. No gerbils. No fish. No rabbits snuffling around in their cages. Certainly no parakeets or parrots. The pet shop owner had told them he thought he was going to close down until normal shipments could resume. That couldn’t be too far off, he’d said hopefully. Truckers would have to be allowed to cross state lines before too long, and if the economy improved, it would sway the tide of world opinion in the direction of resumed trade.

Jiselle was trying to knock the last few ashes out of the can of goose feed. She stepped inside, shaking the rain off her hair. Her hair, which she’d always kept long, had grown several inches in the months without a trip to the salon. Now it nearly reached her waist.

“I don’t know, Sam,” Jiselle said. “Gas. If we waste it, and the store’s not open…”

She had gone by herself into town three weeks earlier and found that even the stores that hadn’t been closed before—the office supply store, the hardware store—had dark windows, padlocked doors. Certainly, she thought, none of these would have reopened.

“But we have to see,” Sam said of the pet store. “We have to try.”

“No, Sam. We—”

But as Sam stood looking out at Beatrice, Jiselle could see the ravine reflected in his eyes and also the rain falling in staticky gray light over it all. In the dampness, everything shone. Slippery. Slick. She imagined Sam imagining Beatrice retreating into the ravine, never returning to them, disappearing.

What, Jiselle wondered, did farm geese eat if there wasn’t any Fowl Feed Deluxe? She wished she’d asked the pet store owner the last time she and Sam had gone there. How wrong had it been to feed her from the beginning? She’d grown dependent on them, and now they had nothing for her.

Jiselle inhaled. She was having trouble looking into Sam’s deep, tear-filled eyes.

“Please?”

“Oh Sam,” she said.

There was, she knew, plenty of gas—for now. They’d siphoned the Cherokee’s tank, but what they had in the Mazda would have to last, and she did not know for how long. She hesitated, but then she said, “All right. Well. I guess we could at least go see. And if the pet store’s still closed, I’m sure we could find something at the grocery store. I’m sure Beatrice eats something besides”—she could find no words to describe the oil and ash of the food Beatrice ate—“and I have to go to the bank anyway.”

It was true. She was out of cash, and although there was really nothing she needed to spend cash on anyway, it made her nervous to have none. The idea of an “emergency” was still alive in her, even now that she realized how few emergencies could be averted with cash. You could not eat cash. You couldn’t use it to heat your house, reduce a fever. Still, Jiselle had stayed in the habit of going to the bank once a month to make sure Mark’s check had been deposited. So far, it had.

“You have to stay here, though, okay?” she said to Sam.

In the last week, Jiselle had heard from Paul Temple and on the radio about carjackings and violence in cities—particularly on the West Coast—over gasoline and batteries. She’d begun to worry about her mother, living alone. Her mother had been fine through the power outages, making her own fires, cooking over them. (“I grew up in worse conditions than this,” she’d said. “You have no clue, Jiselle, what life on a real farm is like.”) But if there were violence, if there were thieves?

Her mother had said, as she had said before, “Don’t worry about me, Jiselle. You’re the one with the problems.”

That things would deteriorate—slowly but certainly—seemed to be what most people believed. There would be more illness, more violence, before things got better—although most people also believed that the Midwest