In a Perfect World

would fare better than the coasts. The last time Jiselle had been in town, the fountain was still bubbling at the center of the park and the flag was still flying (never again at half-mast) outside the post office, even after it had been closed down. Until mid-July they’d even kept the pool open. “We will not participate in Doomsday thinking!” a spokeswoman for the town was quoted in the newspaper as saying.

The newspaper, which had been a weekly, was now coming out only sporadically, but when Jiselle had bought it the month before, it was full of uplifting stories about canned food drives and Boy Scouts cleaning up the streets. There was no longer any obituary section at all.

When she went to the kitchen table to pick up her car keys, Jiselle found Sara standing there. She’d overheard Jiselle telling Sam she would go into town, and she said, “Well, you’re not going by yourself. I’ll go with you.”

“No,” Jiselle said. “I’ll be fine. You stay, and—”

“I want to go,” Sara said and turned into the bedroom, as if that were the end of the conversation.

“Will you be okay here alone?” Jiselle asked Sam. Camilla and Bobby were gone, helping Paul deliver firewood to some of his elderly neighbors.

“Sure,” he said. “Besides, I’m not alone.”

They were quiet for a minute and could hear, in Sara’s old room, the light voice of Mrs. Schmidt singing some old, familiar song.

The drive into St. Sophia was accompanied by the radio’s static-filled starts and stops. Jiselle turned it first to the oldies station, but there was nothing there but a series of beeps. Morse code? The only other station they could find that wasn’t religious sounded as if it were being transmitted from the moon—a few memorable bars of a song (“Miss American Pie,” “Tea for the Tillerman”) interrupted by fuzz.

Finally, they turned the radio off.

After the early morning rain, the sky had turned a dazzling white, and Jiselle took the Mazda’s top down before they left. The air felt soft, and although there was less light, and the sun seemed to have crept farther away from the earth, a radiance was draped over everything. Summer cast its last, bright shadow on the ground. In the previous weeks, there had been a strange influx of hummingbirds, and also sandhill cranes. Paul thought that these species were stopping by from some more northern place, or that they were confused, detoured, blown off track, or had miscalculated and were headed south too soon.

For the hummingbirds, Sara had concocted her own recipe for nectar, melting down some stale cotton candy she’d found in the back of her closet, left over in a plastic bag from a carnival a million years before, and she left little saucers of it out on the railing around the deck. One night at dusk, there’d been masses of them swarming those saucers, glistening and iridescent and beating their wings in a supernatural blur. They zigzagged through the air around the house as if they were working together to sew an elaborate net, tying the house to the ground.

Sara managed to stand still long enough with a saucer of nectar held up in her palm that two of the hummingbirds—ruby-throated, soft, and motorized gems—landed on her fingers, dipping their long beaks into the dish, and stayed that way for several seconds before humming away, chasing one another off with angry stabs.

“Oh my god!” Sara said, turning to the doorway, where Sam and Jiselle and Camilla stood watching, holding their breaths.

Sara rested her elbow on the car door. Her fawn-colored hair flew around her face in a shining blur as they passed through the outskirts of town and into St. Sophia. It had been less than three weeks since Jiselle had been there, but the town looked strange to her. Had she simply not noted, then, the gradual changes that had resulted in this more complete change?

The lawns, which had been so neatly trimmed and bordered with petunias and impatiens, and the gardens dotted with pansies, seemed to have overgrown in crazed and unexpected ways. The grass and weeds in the lawns were hip high. The petunias in the gardens were tangled in poison ivy. The domesticated faces of those pansies were entwined with wildflowers—sweet pea, thistle. She slowed down to the twenty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit in town and saw a rocking chair on a front porch completely covered in vines that bore a kind of spiky purple flower she’d never seen. Windowboxes spilled their contents—long ropes of blossoms and leaves flowing out of them down the sides of houses. All the cars were parked, and no one was on the sidewalks or coming in or out of the houses. A thin black cat sat on the hood of a pickup truck parked next to the post office, licking its paw. It looked up when Jiselle and Sara drove by, seeming to watch them with distaste as they passed.

Farther into town, in the business district, no stores at all were open. The jewelry store where Jiselle had bought the bracelet for her mother, and outside of which she’d seen the reindeer, appeared to have been vandalized. The plate glass was shattered, and the shards and diamonds of the destruction glittered in the sunlight.

The bank was closed, too—the lobby windows dark—but Jiselle was happy to see that the drive-up appeared to be open. A little sign reading PULL FORWARD was illuminated over one of the lanes. She did. Behind the Plexiglas, a young woman was sitting very still, barely visible in the glare. Either the young woman was very deep in thought, or she was listening carefully to something. When she didn’t move or look in their direction, Jiselle pressed the green button for service, and the bank teller jumped, snapped to attention. “Yes?” she said into her intercom.

“I just need some cash,” Jiselle said. “And to check my balance.”

“Okay,” she said.

Jiselle could see the young woman more clearly now. Really, she was a girl. No older than Camilla. Maybe closer to Sara’s age. Jiselle put her bank card and her driver’s license into the metal tube, hit the Send button, and in seconds the tube had shot across the empty parking lot and into the darkened bank.

“I go to school with that girl,” Sara said. “Or went to school with her. Her father manages this bank. I wonder where he is.”

Jiselle looked toward the bank. It did not look like a place that needed a manager. It was impossible, really, even to think of it as the same place where she’d stood in a long line the day she’d seen Tara Temple. Or, before that, the professional-looking men and women in their glass offices, signing papers, fingers flashing over keyboards, the appearance of important transactions taking place, official forms needing to be filled out. After what seemed like a long time, the girl came back and said, over the intercom, “Mrs. Dorn?”

“Yes?” Jiselle said.

“This account has been closed. There’s nothing in it.”

“What?” Jiselle asked.

“The account’s closed,” the girl said. “Someone closed it.”

Beside Jiselle, Sara shook her head. “Asshole,” she said under her breath, and then to Jiselle, touching her shoulder gently, “Let’s just go. We don’t need money. There’s nothing to spend it on anyway.”

Jiselle said nothing. She was too stunned to speak. The girl raised her hand, as if in apology. She said, “Bye, you guys.”

At the pet shop, Jiselle didn’t even bother to slow down. The biohazard tape was draped across the front window and wound around the entrance.

“He did this to my mom, too,” Sara said. “He was always fucking around, of course. Captain Cliche. He cut her off completely just before she died. We were eating nothing but peanut butter. My dad was pretty much out of our lives until she died. I mean, he loved you, Jiselle, I’m sure. But. I’m sorry. My dad is—with women. My dad is a—”

“Fool for love,” Jiselle whispered after a long silence between them. She was trembling, and tears fell in large drops from her eyes and onto her bare arms. She pulled over outside the smashed glass of the pharmacy and turned the car off to save gasoline. She got out, walked around to the passenger side, and asked Sara to