In a Perfect World

“To hell with that,” Mark said. “Life is short. Let me see.”

“Mark.”

“What if I die before I see it?” he said. “I’m in a dangerous profession! You’d have to live another sixty years knowing you’d denied me the greatest pleasure of my life.”

Jiselle laughed, and then went into the bathroom and took the dress out of the tissue in which it was wrapped. A few minutes later she stepped out wearing it.

“Here,” she said, offering herself in the dress.

Mark stood up from the edge of the bed. His mouth was open, but he didn’t say a word. As he stepped toward her, Jiselle was astonished to see that there were tears in his eyes.

Outside their window, a truck roared by, rattling the windowpane with its speed. They were staying in a dirty, noisy motel near the airport. As Mark had warned her she might, the owner of L’Amourette Inn, the lovely B-and-B Jiselle had found for them on the Internet, had refused to check Jiselle into their reserved suite when she was unable to convince the woman that, despite the plates on her rental car, she was Canadian

The border patrol guard between New Hampshire and Quebec had warned her, too.

“Nobody’s renting rooms to Americans, Madame.”

“I’m staying with relatives,” she’d lied.

He returned her passport and nodded disapprovingly.

Jiselle had followed her MapQuest directions up a long winding road to L’Amourette Inn, glimpsing it through the pines from a mile or two away—a Victorian mansion with a wraparound porch. Rocking chairs on the porch. Shutters on the windows. A cupola. A red weathervane and a wishing well. She parked her rental car in a litter of aspen leaves in front of the inn and walked up the stairs to the porch, carrying her cell phone, her purse, her overnight bag.

“Hello?” she called, raising a hand to her forehead to peer through the screen.

A large woman in a white apron whirled around then, at the foot of a long oak staircase, and sputtered in her lovely French accent, “Oh my, you scared me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Come in. Come in,” and bustled to the door, opened it—but before Jiselle could step in, the woman’s smile faded. She said, “You’re not Canadian.”

“Yes,” Jiselle said. “I am. I—”

The woman shook her head. “No. No U.S. citizens. I can’t risk it.”

Jiselle told the woman that she was from Toronto and hadn’t been to the States except to drive through New Hampshire after visiting relatives in Boston. She would have happily produced her passport, she said, but she’d left it behind with her fiance. He’d be arriving soon. He’d bring it with him.

“I don’t believe you,” the woman said. “You can’t cross the border without your passport. There will be no one from the States staying at my inn. You’re all going to catch this and kill the rest of us. It’s just a matter of time.”

She shut the door so hard that the little diamond-shaped panes of glass rattled in their frames, and Jiselle, whose heart seemed to echo the rattling glass in her chest, went back to the car and called Mark’s voice mail, letting him know she’d call back when she found them another place—which she was unable to do until the Budget Roadway, which had a Vacancy sign posted beside a small, hand-drawn picture of the U.S. flag.

In that hotel room, Mark came to her, standing before him in her dress. He knelt down, took her hands in his, brought them to his face, kissed them slowly. After a long time, he stood up and said, “Now take it off.”

She did. As he watched, Jiselle stepped out of her wedding dress, and then he took it from her and placed it carefully over the back of a chair, and picked her up in his arms, and placed her on the bed.

CHAPTER THREE

It was lovely summer weather in the country, and the golden corn, the green oats, and the haystacks piled up in the meadows looked beautiful. The stork walking about on his long red legs chattered in the Egyptian language, which he had learnt from his mother. The cornfields and the meadows were—

“Goddamnit!”

The cornfields and meadows were surrounded by a large forest, in the midst of which—

“Where are you? Where the hell is my black dress?”

In the midst of which were deep pools. Indeed, it was delightful to walk—

“Didn’t you hear me? What the hell happened to my black dress? It was on the fucking hook on the back of my closet door.”

Jiselle kept the book open on her knees but looked up from its pages.

Sam shifted nervously beside her.

Sara was wearing only a black bra and panties, standing at the threshold of the bedroom. Jiselle recognized the panties as a pair of her own. Jiselle had bought herself those panties—mesh and lace—for almost fifty euros in Paris. She’d stood at the edge of a large four-poster bed covered with blue pillows at a hotel in Edinburgh as Mark slid those panties slowly down her thighs, to her ankles, where she’d kicked them away with the toe of her Spanish shoes. Sara had been taking things out of her dresser again.

Well, she had been stealing Sara’s things, too.

Jiselle looked back down at the book and said, “I didn’t do anything with your dress.”

“The hell you didn’t,” Sara said as she stomped back out. “My collar’s gone, too. Stay out of my closet!” She slammed the new bedroom door behind her as hard as she could. The air pressure in the room changed with the force of it. The lace curtains fluttered in the windows, and Mark’s uniforms shifted in his closet.

Jiselle looked over at Sam. His eyes were wide but also amused. He said, “Keep reading?”

Jiselle inhaled. She swallowed. Deep in the back of her closet, her stepdaughter’s black dress—the one that covered, maybe, three inches of her thighs at most, the one with the rip in the spandex lace just over her right breast—lay on the floor like a call girl’s shadow—along with the spiked black leather dog collar Sara liked to wear with the dress. Her fishnet stockings were there, as well, and those black combat boots that, it seemed, Sara had not yet noticed were also missing. Jiselle turned the page.

It was, indeed, delightful to walk about in the country. In a sunny spot stood a pleasant old farmhouse close by a deep river. And from the house down to the waterside grew great burdock leaves, so high that under the tallest of them a little girl could stand upright.

Jiselle had begun reading the book to Sam a few weeks earlier, when one night before dinner, she found him under his bed.

“What are you doing under there?”

There was no answer.

What could she do? Mark had been gone four out of every five days since the beginning of the month. If she didn’t get Sam out from under the bed herself, he might stay under there until Mark came home again. A child’s skeleton in jeans and a T-shirt. Strawberry-blond curls and dust. “Sam?”

He didn’t answer, so she sat down on the bed.

“Sam?”

Jiselle heard him sniffle under there and felt her own implication of tears then, just behind the bridge of her nose, somewhere around her sinuses. She bit her lip to stop the tears. It would do Sam no good if she started