Laura Kasischke - In a Perfect World

She brought the shawl to her face and breathed it in for several seconds before she wrapped it around her shoulders.

It was light, like standing in summer air.

Then, on second thought, Jiselle slipped it off her shoulders and removed her wedding ring. She slid the narrowest corner of the shawl into the ring, and then, in a swift and elegant flourish, pulled the whole thing through.

The power returned mysteriously after two solid weeks without it, long enough for them to get dangerously used to the convenience of the furnace in the first cool days of autumn and to watching the news. The reporters were circling the story of the Princess Cruises liner that had disappeared in the Caribbean ten months earlier—a ship sailing from Fort Myers to Tierra del Fuego, with brief stops at all the small islands between them, before such cruises had been entirely proscribed.

This particular ship had never arrived in Tierra del Fuego, but, these many months later, had run aground on the shores of the Isla Mujeres, Mexico, instead.

PLAGUE SHIP: AN UPDATE!

Jiselle and Mark had been on a ship like it—perhaps even this very ship, she realized, the name of which was being withheld until the next of kin had been notified, although surely those kin must have noticed that their loved ones hadn’t returned from the cruise they’d set out on nearly a year before.

Jiselle remembered the buffet table, every night—mounds of shrimp, oysters glistening in their half-shells, crystal bowls of cold crab and lobster meat, caviar on French bread, tropical fruit sliced into anchors and swans spread across yards and yards of crushed and sparkling ice. She remembered dancing with Mark, her head on his shoulder, the white silk shirt she’d bought for him against her cheek.

Now when she tried to call Mark, there was no answer at all.

By the time the cruise ship ran aground on the Isla Mujeres, all the passengers were long dead.

“A macabre scene greeted Red Cross workers on this small Mexican Island yesterday—”

Jiselle imagined the passengers in their lounge chairs on the deck, wrapped in their plush white velvet robes. Dancing on the parquet floor in their shiny shoes, the brass instruments of the band glittering under the slowly revolving disco ball suspended from the ceiling.

The volunteers had boarded the ship in their biohazard suits and returned from it with faraway looks on their faces, captured in photographs as they disembarked in the hours before the island was evacuated entirely of rescuers, of journalists, of residents, while decisions were made about what to do with the ship.

In the meantime, planes owned by American television networks flew over and around it, videotaping the great silence of that ship stalled on the coast of the Isla Mujeres, which Jiselle remembered as a pale and nearly treeless expanse of white in the middle of the turquoise dream of the Caribbean.

“Are you giving me this so I won’t steal it again?”

Jiselle shook her head. She said, “No. I’m giving it to you because you love it.”

“Thank you,” Sara said as she slipped onto her finger the onyx ring Mark had bought for Jiselle on Isla Mujeres. “I do love it.”

On Sara’s finger, it sparkled darkly, absorbing their reflections as they looked into it. Jiselle took Sara’s hand and kissed the ring goodbye.

That night, Jiselle woke in the dark to a sound in the hallway and sat up in bed fast. She looked to the threshold of the door, which was open. “Camilla?”

There was no answer, but the shape of a woman in a white gown was there.

“Mrs. Schmidt?” Jiselle tried to focus her eyes, but the figure seemed to be made of shadows, waving rather than standing. She swung her legs off the edge of the bed and stood. Her heart was beating hard—in her chest, in her ears, all along her arms and neck. She was holding her breath. She stepped toward the door. “Sara?”

The figure seemed to float away from her then, and then float back, and then rise, and recede, and then flash in the threshold, and Jiselle gasped when she saw who it was.

“Annette?” she whispered to the doorway, before sinking to her knees.

There was a beam of light glowing on Annette’s pale face, which was changed but familiar, and the light spilled down her chest to the place where she held a baby to her breast.

Jiselle looked from the baby and back up to Annette, and just before she vanished, Jiselle saw the look of pain and anguish on her face, and she reached toward her, touching nothing. She continued to reach toward the vanished figure long after she knew what she knew, and then she got back into bed.

The power came on for four days again the next week, and although there was nothing on television or on the radio, they kept music playing all day on the stereo, as if they might never hear music again if they turned it off—Joni Mitchell, Bach, Britney Spears, Kool Moe Dee, the Muppets, whatever CDs they could find, one after another, without a pause between them beyond what it took to take one off and put another one on. Bob Dylan was crooning “Jokerman” when the power went out again.

They went to bed early, and the sun came up bright, but the power was still out, so Jiselle went through the house resetting the electric clocks. It was a silly, optimistic gesture, she knew, but whenever the power was out, Jiselle reset the electric clocks every few hours. To see them frozen on the counters and on the walls disoriented her. Could it still be two o’clock? she’d think five times in a row before realizing it couldn’t be.

“Why don’t we just get rid of the clocks?” Sam asked. He pointed out that Jiselle’s watch still worked—although the battery in his own was dead, and there was no way to replace it. “Anyway,” he pointed out, “what difference does it make what time it is?”

Jiselle smiled a little apologetically and shrugged as she reset them.

After the clocks, she went to the refrigerator—the now-familiar routine of scouting through it for what had spoiled, what could be salvaged.

A few days earlier, a man in a white truck had pulled into the driveway. There had been no lettering on his truck, but Jiselle felt confident he was a farmer as soon as he stepped out. He was older, with a gray beard. He wore overalls and a straw hat, as if it were a farmer’s costume or a uniform.

“Howdy!” he’d called to her when he saw Jiselle standing at the front door. “I’ve got dairy!” Jiselle walked around to the back of the truck with him.

The farmer smelled reassuringly of manure—pleasant, authentic: earth, and animals, and work. His cheeks were rosy, his smile warm, although one of his front teeth was missing. He opened the back of the truck, and Jiselle gasped when she saw it.

At least a hundred beautiful glass bottles of milk. Old-fashioned, dusty wheels of cheese. What must have been another hundred golden bricks of butter wrapped in waxed paper. “Where did you get all this?” she asked.

The farmer laughed, putting one hand on his round belly as he did. He looked at her, amused, and said, “Well, ma’am, I made it. From cows . That’s where dairy products come from!”

Jiselle laughed, too, at herself. Farms. Animals. Had she forgotten? She said, “Well, I’m impressed.”

“What would you like?”

Jiselle looked at the bottles, the waxed bricks, the wheels of cheese. She said, “I’m short on cash, will you take—?”

“I’ll take gas, valuables, or cash, and that’s my order of preference,” the farmer said, counting them off on his fingers, which were dirty but plump. He’d been ready with the answer, as if he’d been asked it often. “I’ll consider other things, such as canned goods, tools, and the like. But I sure as hell ain’t takin’ a check.” Again, he put a hand to his belly as he laughed.