Laura Kasischke - In a Perfect World

For three days in a row, the midafternoon heat had topped ninety-nine degrees. The power had come back again, and Jiselle turned on the air-conditioning when it grew so uncomfortable that she felt she couldn’t stand it. The sweat pooled on her eyelids and onto her eyelashes.

But the heat didn’t dampen Bobby’s and Paul’s and Sam’s enthusiasm for working on the brick path.

“They’re bored,” Camilla said. “They’re going nuts. They’re not like us.”

She’d come back into the house from her run. Jiselle had implored her not to run in the heat. (“You’ll pass out. Heatstroke. You’ll get dehydrated.”) But Camilla just shook her head, smiling. “It’s nice of you to worry, but I’ll be fine.”

And she did seem fine. Flushed, glowing. After her shower, Camilla lay on the couch in the family room in the air-conditioning with her hair wrapped in a towel, watching CNN. Jiselle sat down beside her.

Usually now, when she watched it, the news was good. No one expected severe power outages since the government had intervened. China was backing down. The war in the Mideast was all but over. The oil embargo would not last, but new developments in alternative fuel sources were being made every day. Researchers were on the verge of finding the cause of hemorrhagic zoonosis, and although this wasn’t a cure or a vaccine, it was the first step in that direction. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt had been married on a boat in the middle of the ocean so that the wedding could be attended by guests from every corner of the globe—the many foreign dignitaries who loved them but who could not have flown in to the country for it because of the travel restrictions. According to CNN, thousands of large and small boats had crowded around the Angelina for the occasion. There were fireworks. There were photographs of the couple wearing white, waving to helicopters circling them on a calm ocean in a perfectly blue sky.

One afternoon Jiselle was both shocked and strangely gratified to hear a CNN reporter mention, almost offhandedly, that there’d been some speculation that the Phoenix flu was being caused by the importation of hair from developing countries, and Jiselle looked forward to telling Brad Schmidt the next time she went over to their house to see if they needed anything. She would congratulate him on his prescience. He would be pleased, especially if he’d made a believer out of her—and, in truth, suddenly this theory seemed no more farfetched than some of the other things being blamed: Herbal supplements. Global warming. Contaminated grapes. Germ warfare. Bad Karma. Infected cats. Infected dogs. Teenage sex.

On CNN, it was Britney again, dancing on a hilltop in the sunlight wearing a spangled bikini top, blond hair flowing behind her. Sara walked into the room. “Jesus,” she said. “Like, how many people have died since her, and they’re still going on about this?”

Camilla turned the television off, pointing the remote at it like a handgun. The screen went black. “Really,” she said. “It’s pathetic.”

He had been quarantined in Germany for twenty-two weeks, and Jiselle was having trouble picturing Mark’s face.

Every night, she’d stare at his photograph on top of their dresser—the photo in which he, in his pilot’s uniform, had his arm around her, in her flight attendant’s uniform, and the Pacific Ocean was an infinity of gray containing only one small sailboat behind them.

But as soon as she closed her eyes and tried to call up the features of her husband’s face without the help of the photograph, they would melt in her imagination, as if he were a runner, blurring by. Or on that speeding train up the side of the mountain in Germany.

“Well, Jiselle, you barely knew him before you married him, and he’s been gone most of your marriage anyway,” Annette said.

It felt like a slap across the face—some thin, feminine hand made of air and disapproval smacking her cheek. Annette made a sound on her end of the line, something like air being snorted out of her nose. She’d had a difficult delivery—hours of labor followed by a C-section—but the baby was healthy, a little girl named Paulette, who was three months old. Annette was still so weak from her pregnancy problems that they’d had to hire a nanny to look after the baby, but Annette had been able to get out of the house a few times in the last couple of months.

“Don’t worry,” she said when Jiselle’s silence went on long enough that it was clear she wasn’t going to say anything else, “it’ll all work out when Mark gets back.”

“I need you,” Jiselle said to Mark one evening when the phone connection was unusually crisp over the ocean between them, and when he responded, she could hear every consonant, perfectly pronounced. She could even hear what sounded like swallowing, and the sound of his tongue passing over his teeth when he paused.

“I don’t want to hear that right now, Jiselle,” he said. “I’m helpless over here. I have to believe you’re okay there, and that you’re up to the job of taking care of the kids and yourself. I can’t deal with any soft-minded stuff.”

“What?” Jiselle instinctively put a hand to her throat, pressed the phone closer to her ear.

“You know what I’m talking about, Jiselle. Try to rise to the occasion, okay? This isn’t Disneyland for any of us anymore. Now, I have to go. It’s the middle of the night here. Goodnight, my darling.”

Jiselle mouthed the word goodnight, but Mark hung up before she could say it aloud.

She stood looking at the phone in her hand for a long time.

After it became clear that there would not be time left in the school year for schools to reopen before September, the children had begun to stay up until well into the early hours of morning—1:00 AM, 2:00—and to sleep until noon, even during the week, which had, without the routine of school, become indistinguishable from the weekends. Often, Bobby Temple did not leave for his own house until the sun came up. Those nights, Jiselle fell asleep to the low murmur of his and Camilla’s voices on the other side of the wall.

She thought that, perhaps, as the stepmother, as the adult in the house, she was supposed to ask Bobby to leave, but he was so polite, so helpful—emptying the garbage and then hauling the can to the end of the driveway on Fridays, playing with action figures on the floor with Sam, emptying the rodent cages with him. It was a comfort and a relief having a nearly grown man in the house. When the county stopped garbage pickup, Bobby helped Jiselle burn what couldn’t be composted. (He’d started the compost himself, behind the garage.) When the electricity went out, he would go through the house gathering up the flashlights they’d left lying around since the last power outage, and then he’d start up the generator.

In the middle of April, Bobby drove Jiselle to the airport in his father’s car to pick up Mark’s Mazda from airline employee parking, where it had been since Mark’s fateful flight to Germany. Jiselle drove the Mazda back, and Bobby followed in the Saab.

They parked the Cherokee in the garage and closed the garage door.

“Do what you have to do,” Mark had said disapprovingly over the phone when she told him that she was going to start driving the Mazda instead of the Cherokee now because of the SUV attacks. “Let the thugs run the world,” he said. “But be careful with my Mazda.”

Jiselle didn’t respond. His disapproval didn’t change her mind. She had responsibilities—his children. She had to take precautions. The attacks were becoming more and more common, moving inexorably from the city to its fringes. Drivers were being hauled out of their big vehicles and beaten. The SUVs were toppled, smashed with baseball bats, set on fire.