In a Perfect World

The days passed so slowly they might have been lifetimes. Jiselle tried to impose a shape on each one:

The Day of the Spider in the Bathroom, The Day of Split Pea Soup, The Day the Wood Seemed Wet and Would Not Light, The Day of Paging Through an Old Copy of The New Yorker and Marveling at the Ordinariness and the Advertisements, The Day We Thought We Heard a Horse Whinny in the Distance, The Day the Lights Flickered, The Day We Might Have Heard Shots Fired in the Ravine, The Day Sam Invented Mint Toothpaste from Baking Soda and Tea…

Because, if she failed to do this, she would go to bed at night and feel as if she were on a drifting ship with no idea where in the world, or in time and space, she might wake up.

Now, every night, the hounds in the ravine howled longer and louder, sounding closer, hungrier. Twice, Jiselle had glimpsed one wandering in the backyard through the snow. Some scrawny blond thing. Was it a dog, she wondered, as Paul had thought—someone’s pet, altered by events? Or a coyote—something wild that no longer sensed danger from the human world it had once shunned?

It didn’t matter. There was such a feral emaciation about the animal that there was no way to tell what else it might, at one time, have been. The creature itself might not have remembered whether it had once been something tame, someone’s pet, or a dangerous predator. When Jiselle came to the glass doors to watch it, it would lift its muzzle to the air, seeming to smell her, and then slip back into the ravine.

After she was sure it was gone, she would go outside to see if Beatrice was still in the little wooden house Sam had built for her—carefully, ambitiously, nailing together some wood planks he’d found in the garage.

Each time, Jiselle was ready for the worst, but Beatrice was always still there, sitting on a nest of Mark’s old uniforms they’d piled up for her, ruffling her feathers.

But the next week the goose quit eating. Jiselle no longer had vegetable oil to mix into the feed, and it became a sticky mess, unconsumed, on the ground around the nest Beatrice never left.

Then, one morning, Jiselle saw a small rabbit in the snow, running like a vivid rag from one end of the backyard to the other. A few hours later, there were animal tracks in the snow, and blood, and the next afternoon, Jiselle saw another animal—something she didn’t recognize, an animal with a long black body, pointed ears—low to the ground, sliding across the deck, disappearing under the Schmidts’ hedge.

An enormous mink?

A wolverine?

Or an entirely new kind of animal?

Was it stalking Beatrice?

That night she woke to the sound of something like a fight between creatures in the dark—a yelping bark against a mewling scream, and she knew instantly that this was an animal, not human, scream, but still Jiselle jumped from the couch with her flashlight and checked the rooms where the children and her mother were soundly sleeping. Afterward, she went back into the family room and sat on the couch with her hands over her ears. The violence of those noises was terrible. There were teeth involved, she could tell, and claws, and blood, and when the silence came, swelling up around the house, she knew there had been a death.

In the morning, she found a dark path worn away around Beatrice’s shack. Something had circled it in the night more than once looking for a way to get in. But when Jiselle pushed open the little makeshift door, Beatrice was still there, alive. Jiselle stepped in, knelt down, ran her fingers along the white feathers, and Beatrice shifted her wings beneath Jiselle’s hand.

In the middle of December, Jiselle’s mother decided that since they could not know if or when the schools would reopen, the children had to be home-schooled, and she would do it.

So, the long afternoons of chess with Sam were replaced by lessons carefully planned out by Jiselle’s mother for the children. She’d sit up at the kitchen table in the flickering candlelight long after everyone else had gone to sleep, using the schoolbooks the children had at home, the encyclopedia, the dictionary, an atlas Mark had kept tucked into the glove compartment of the Cherokee, a medical handbook, and a book of baby names, which must have belonged to Joy.

The children were eager for the lessons, sitting down at the kitchen table in the mornings, thumbing through the books.

During “school,” Jiselle would pick up one of Camilla’s novels and read. She was halfway through Anna Karenina, but it was getting harder to concentrate. She’d find her mind returning again and again to Bobby. Those final hours.

Or Paul. Where was he now?

She’d try to imagine him, but the image that came to her was always the same: Paul walking down the center of a freeway littered with cars.

Since the day after Bobby died, and Paul left, none of them had spoken of it again. Every night, Jiselle could hear Camilla weeping in her bedroom, but in the morning she was dry-eyed. She studied at the kitchen table with Sam and Sara. She helped Jiselle around the house. In the evenings, she read while Jiselle and Sam played chess.

They kept busy.

Jiselle’s mother and Sara were involved in a sewing project together that required hours of counting and concentration. Jiselle would overhear them bickering—“Did you count these?” “Yes!”—but they seemed on friendly terms. Sara had begun to call her “Anna,” something Jiselle had known only her mother’s best friends to do.

This forgetting, this continuing—how heartless was this, Jiselle sometimes wondered, and she would close her eyes and see Bobby, and Annette, and Dr. Smith, and Diane Schmidt—a dark line of familiar silhouette against the sky, each holding the other’s hand, and instead of looking harder, Jiselle would open her eyes. She would read ten pages and comprehend not one word. She’d put the book down and find herself wandering through the rooms of the house—through the family room, and the bedroom, where Mark’s slippers still waited under the bed. Like a ghost, she’d pass through the kitchen, overhear a few sentences: He led the Mongols into China… Ferdinand and Isabella…Alfred hid from the Vikings…

But these fragments meant nothing to Jiselle. They were like fuzz, radio static.

“Did you know,” Sara asked one afternoon as Jiselle passed back through the kitchen, pointing to a place on a page in Joy’s book of baby names, “that your name means—?”

“Hostage,” Jiselle said.

“Princess,” her mother corrected.

Sara looked up and smiled. “No,” she said. “It means ‘pledge.’” Reading aloud: “Jiselle. Danish. Definition: She who keeps her promise. Pledge.’”

Jiselle went to the book and looked over Sara’s shoulder. Her finger was on the name. Jiselle read the entry silently to herself. Sara was right.

Jiselle looked up at her mother, who shrugged and said, “Who knows? I always thought it meant ‘princess.’”

Sara flipped the pages to her own name then, and looked up, laughing. She said, “Sorry to break the news to you ladies, but my name means ‘princess.’”

One night, Sara insisted they play charades. The evenings were so long. The snow had been falling steadily for days, and it made a silencing moat around the house and the world. Even the hounds stayed away, or couldn’t be heard over the insulating white.

Sam and Jiselle were playing chess by candlelight at the kitchen table, but they looked up from their game when Sara came in and announced charades. Jiselle shrugged. “Why not?”

They went into the living room, where Camilla and Jiselle’s mother were listening to some distant station they’d found on Brad Schmidt’s transistor radio. They’d had to put the radio on the windowsill, on its side, with the antenna pointed toward the fire, but behind the snowy crackle was the unmistakable sound of an orchestra playing something bright and rhythmic, full of exuberance, vibrant with possibility. The future, it seemed, was hinted at in every note. Even the static, which seemed to rise and fall with the wind through the dark night outside, couldn’t drown that out.