ignition, thousands of dollars’ worth of chrome and upholstery. Why would they have come all the way out here?
But she meant it, too. They could have the cars. They were welcome to the cars, which meant nothing to her now in their silence, in their huge weight and useless gravity.
Jiselle poured the water into her mother’s teapot, over the dried mint, and the room was suffused with the scent of spring and fresh air, and the four boys seemed to lift their chins to it, as if to information they hadn’t come in search of but were happy to receive.
After the tea had steeped, and Jiselle had poured it, they sipped gratefully from her mother’s delicate cups.
“You’re sure there’s no gas left in either tank, ma’am?” the one with the stripes asked.
“None,” Jiselle answered.
The soldiers finished their tea and handed the cups back to Jiselle carefully, one by one. They stood in a row in front of the couch. “Do you mind my asking, ma’am,” the one with the stripes said, looking around the room, “do you have a plan? Do you have a weapon? Is your husband home?”
“Yes,” Jiselle said, although none of these things was true.
“Good,” the soldier said. “There’s a lot of looting, you know. And illness. And rumors.”
“I know,” Jiselle said.
She did.
She had seen what had happened in the city.
“What are the latest rumors?” she asked anyway.
The boys looked at one another as if deciding among themselves, in silence, whether or not to tell her.
“Well,” the boy with the stripes said after clearing his throat, “it’s all over the world now, you know. One in three, they’re saying. But this could just be the beginning. They’re saying it’s a bacteria. Biological warfare? It could be something as simple as a bit of some anthrax-like agent, sprinkled on the floor of a restroom, in an airport, maybe. Something entirely new. Someone could have stepped in it, worn the contaminated shoe all over the world. It could be potent enough that the spores—”
“Thank you,” Jiselle said.
She held up a hand, glanced at Sam. She was sorry she’d asked. Somehow—how?—she’d hoped for something good.
The soldier nodded, understanding. He said, “But you need to understand, and so does your son. There are groups, gangs, on the roads. You’re set back here in the trees, and without lights maybe they won’t see you, for now. But we did. And there’s a lot of desperation. And trust me, they’ll figure a new way to travel without gasoline. They’ll find a way, and they’ll find you, too, eventually. There are—”
“The garage is open,” Jiselle said, nodding toward the door, “and the keys are in the cars.”
“Thank you, ma’am. And good luck.”
They filed out then, back into the snow, turning once, in unison, to wave goodbye. They spent only a few minutes in the garage with the Cherokee, and then peering into the windows of the other two cars, before trudging back out to their Jeep and driving away, and Jiselle and Sam went back to the couch in front of the fire to finish the story they’d started.
It ended happily, with the witch vanquished. The spell broken. The children returned safely to their mother, whom they’d feared was dead.
Only later did Jiselle go to the bedroom closet and pull out of the shadows the one shoe left from Madrid.
That lovely black shoe. Its mate had never been found.
The high, narrow heel. The way the arch fit her foot perfectly. The leather polished to a glossy shine.
She remembered again the salesman on his knees in front of her in that old-fashioned shoe store in Madrid. How he’d cradled her foot in his hands, as if it were a precious gift. How he’d slid the shoe on.
And it was. That shoe had fit her as if it had been made for her by elves, by fairies, by angels.
How many millions of places had she worn those beautiful shoes?
She’d walked through a thousand streets in a hundred countries. She had stood in lines, sat in theaters, strolled down cobbled paths, occasionally bending down to pet a cat, admire a baby in a bassinet. Years before, in Phoenix, Arizona, she’d stopped by a booth at a street fair and admired a silver bracelet, slipping it over her wrist, holding it up in the bright desert sun to look at it.
She’d handed it back to the jewelry maker, an old man with a windburned face, with an apologetic smile.
She could no longer remember why she hadn’t bought it.
Now, she held up the one shoe, turned it over, ran her fingers over the sole, looked at her fingertips.
Nothing.
Not even dust.
She put the shoe back down in the shadows at the bottom of her closet, and when she turned around, she saw that Sam was standing in the doorway, smiling.
He said, “Jiselle,” shaking his head, “it wasn’t your shoe.” Smiling. “It’s nobody’s
“But what if it was?” she asked him.
Still smiling, Sam shrugged. “What if it was?” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The beginning of December was warmer, although the sky, day after day, was a deep purple. The clouds scudding across it looked ink-stained, seeming perpetually to threaten snowstorms that never came. In the afternoons, Jiselle played chess with Sam, read with him in the evenings. Mornings, there were dried beans to sort and soak. There were a few novels left from Camilla’s English Lit course to read. The fire had to be made and stoked. The ashes had to be swept up and thrown out the back door. They’d forgotten about Thanksgiving, so when Jiselle finally remembered, she gathered them all together and surprised them with a dinner of Swanson turkey and dressing from a can. She’d planned to save the turkey for Christmas, but by then, perhaps, she knew, there might be an entirely new plan.
The fire in the living room kept the house warm. There was still food in the cellar: soups, tuna fish, pasta in boxes, powdered milk. Fresh water still poured out of the faucets. But Jiselle knew they needed fruits and vegetables. There were only a few boxes of raisins and cans of peaches left. There was enough toilet paper in the linen closet to last for months, and tampons—although Jiselle and Camilla had both stopped menstruating. (Sara said it was because they weren’t drinking enough water. “You’re not getting enough iron. You can get it in the water, you know.”) They’d stopped using paper towels and napkins at the table, using rags instead, which could be rinsed out and hung up near the fire to dry with the underwear and socks.
How wasteful, Jiselle marveled now, they’d been, and for so long! She wished now she had just one of the large plastic bags she’d thrown away in the last year. So many things she could think of to do with that now. With only one notebook left in the house she realized that soon the only place they would have to write would be on the walls, in the margins of the books on the shelves.
She’d given that notebook to Sara, who had filled up all the pages of her black diary.
“You’re the chronicler,” Jiselle had said when Sara protested that there was no reason she should get the precious notebook. “Take it.”
For the future, Jiselle took down a few books she knew they wouldn’t be needing, in preparation. Some had wide margins, blank pages between chapters.
