In a Perfect World

On Christmas Day, there was snow. A sparkling carpet of it over everything. The radio picked up some station—from where, they had no idea—that played carols all afternoon, until the signal finally faded away. For Christmas presents, Jiselle gave Sam the brass wings she used to wear above her heart. Camilla and Sara got the bracelets Mark had bought and hidden for her for Valentine’s Day. She gave her mother the jade earrings, which looked beautiful on her—exotic and lost in her hair, which had grown wild and white in the last few weeks.

“I want to give you your present now,” her mother told her. “It’s been a long time in the making. I don’t want to wait.”

Jiselle turned from the fireplace, where she’d been stirring the stew for dinner, and said, “Okay.”

“Sara helped me,” her mother said. “I could never have finished it without her.”

Her mother and Sara dragged out the box Jiselle recognized from her mother’s sewing room—the one full of rags—into the kitchen and hoisted it up onto the table. Sam and Camilla pulled up chairs and waited for Jiselle to open the box. Sam’s cheeks were flushed with health. Both he and Camilla looked radiant. Camilla had been gaining weight since the gauntness of the fall, and her hair had grown down to her waist. It hung heavy and loose tonight around her bright, rounded face.

Jiselle hesitated, without knowing why.

“Well, aren’t you going to open it?” Sam asked, nodding at the box.

Jiselle pulled open the cardboard flaps and pushed them away, peering in. Then she looked up. “What is it?” she asked, looking around the table.

“A quilt!” Sam said. They were all nodding.

“But not just a quilt,” Sara said.

Jiselle began to pull it out then: an enormous patchwork of multicolored flowers. Little hand-stitches held the hundreds of pieces of it together.

“Your mother saved everything. Everything,” Sara said.

They all stood around Jiselle, watching. She ran her hand over the quilted flowers as they watched, until, slowly, the bits and pieces came into focus.

“Do you see?” Sara asked.

A scrap of bright green satin: Prom dress?

A polka-dotted flower: a blouse she had worn almost 305 every day the summer between fifth and sixth grade?

“This,” her mother said, “is from your costume, remember? The Nutcracker?”

Jiselle nodded.

“And this you couldn’t remember. This is a piece of your baptismal gown. And this”—she pointed out a soft pink scrap—“is what I was able to snip from your baby blanket, the one part you never managed to drag through the mud or throw up on. And here: your high school graduation gown. This is a bit of your first flight attendant’s uniform. This—”

Her mother went on and on.

Jiselle couldn’t speak. She ran her fingers over familiar lace and then a bit of suede. A purse, high school, which came back to her with a whole year of sights and sounds: Ellen tossing a French fry at her across the cafeteria. A carnival at the edge of town. A huge wheel of lights spinning slowly in the sky. Jiselle closed her eyes and saw that wheel again, and this time, spinning there, she was one of the lights.

They laughed at her when she opened her eyes again, still unable to speak, until finally she managed to say, “Thank you.”

It was the only thing she could say.

The rest of the day was like any other, taken up with chores. The stoking of the fire. The boiling of water. The sweeping of the floors. The hunting and skinning of the rabbit.

For Christmas dinner they ate a stew of that rabbit and a can of potatoes. It was delicious. Jiselle’s mother had spiced it with things she found in the cellar and things she found growing under melted snow in the backyard.

“Believe me,” she said, “when you grow up the daughter of a poor farmer, you learn how to cook a rabbit.”

After dark, they gathered in the living room to play charades by candlelight. Because Sam was too happy to sleep and the color was back in his cheeks, when he begged Jiselle to let him stay up (“It’s Christmas!”), she couldn’t refuse.

So Sam started the game, marching around the room staring straight ahead as a candle flickered on the coffee table and the others shouted wrong guesses at him, sidetracked by the idea that he was a chess piece, and then a knight, and then a sandhill crane.

“A soldier,” he told them when they finally gave up, and then it was obvious to all of them: the stiffness of his limbs, that weapon he’d had resting on his shoulders, the grim expression on his face.

“I’m the king of charades!” Sam shouted, and Sara threw a pillow at his head. Over them, Joy wore her beautiful gown. No one had said a word about the portrait, which Jiselle had taken out of Sara’s closet after Sam was well again and hung in its proper place from the nail over the mantel, above Brad Schmidt’s rifle and her mother’s Little Mermaid statuette. Now Joy smiled down at them, offering that bright piece of cake to the future, as if it were her life.

Jiselle was a coffee mug, which they all shouted out at once as soon as she put her hand on her hip.

When it was her turn, Camilla rowed a boat down a river. “That’s not fair!” she said when they guessed it after only a second of rowing. “Let me go again.” This time she put her arms together and rocked them back and forth.

“A mother?” Sam asked.

“A baby?” Sara asked.

“Both!” Jiselle’s mother called out. She looked around the room. “Am I the only one who can see that Camilla’s going to have a baby?”

Jiselle put a hand to her throat.

How had she not seen it? Camilla’s growing waist. Her breasts. Her face. Of course.

“Camilla—” she said, but Camilla waved her words away. She said, “We can talk about that later. It’s Anna’s turn.”

There was a quiet moment while Jiselle’s mother stood before them, seeming to be trying either to decide what she was or how to express it. She wore a silk kimono Jiselle hadn’t known her mother owned. Her shins and feet were bare. The candlelight on her legs made the sparse downy hair on them shimmer, and the flame made the sound of little insistent wings.

But there was another sound, too, in the distance. Something familiar, Jiselle thought, and also completely new, was out there in the dark. She looked around at the others, but they didn’t seem to hear it. She turned her face to the front door. When she held her breath, she could hear it more clearly.

A purring. A propulsion. She lifted her chin and listened.

Yes.

Whatever it was, it was moving steadily, inexorably, in their direction. The hum of an enormous cat or a gathering of winds—accumulating, approaching. A vast population, migrating. An army shuffling, shoeless, toward them, marching through high grass or over gravel.

Or a parade of children. In robes. Holding lanterns. Silk banners slapping at the darkness.

Or—could it be?

Was it some forgotten piece of machinery crawling toward them: its motor grinding closer, its small oiled teeth and gears, its wheels rolling over the earth, or its wings sailing over their heads?

Jiselle stood up.

She was holding a hand to her ear, trying to hear it when Sam and Camilla and her mother shouted at the same time, “A plane!”