Laura Kasischke - In a Perfect World

Jiselle went into the house and came back out with the jade earrings Mark had given her for Christmas. She held them up for the farmer.

In the sunlight, they looked paler than they did in the house. Green teardrops. Seadrops. The farmer held them in his hand, as if to weigh them. He held them up. He looked at her, and at the gold watch on her wrist. Mark had given that to her as well. “Those real diamonds?” he asked.

She looked at the watch face, the little sparkling aurora of jewels around it, and said, “Yes. Of course.”

“I’d rather have that,” he said, and handed the jade earrings back to her.

Jiselle took off the watch and gave it to him, and he carried four bottles of milk, two bricks of butter, and a wheel of cheese into the house for her.

She had paid, she realized, what might have been seven or eight hundred dollars for a few groceries, what might have cost twenty dollars in another time—but she didn’t need the watch, and Sam looked thin to her, and she’d been thinking about Tara Temple’s warning about vitamin D.

That night she made everyone—even Bobby and Paul, even Diane Schmidt—drink a large glass of milk and eat a huge piece of cheese with the bean soup she made for dinner.

She slathered the bread she’d baked for them with butter.

Now what was left of it, eight hours after the electricity had shut down, already smelled of bacteria, decay. She took the milk out of the dark refrigerator and set it aside. She took the butter and leftover cheese outside to the deck in a sack, which she tied to the highest branch of the oak tree she could reach, hoping the height would keep animals away and the cool air would keep it fresh a little longer.

Then she went back inside and gathered up the things to make tea—the kettle of water, the matches to make a fire in the grill—and wrapped her shawl around her.

It was a damp morning after the rain of the night before, but a clear morning—the sky a pale blue overlaid with thready clouds, as if spider webs had been carefully draped over a dome. The leaves of the trees in the ravine were wet and shining in the sunrise. The branches appeared to be wrapped in black velvet against the bright sky. She put the kettle down, opened the box of matches, and was about to strike one against the side of the box when something in the side yard caught her eye, and she turned.

“Bobby?”

He was standing over the woodpile with an ax. Not swinging it, just holding it.

Despite the chill, he had his shirt off, and he was naked to the waist. He appeared to be soaked with sweat.

“Bobby?” she asked again. “What are you doing here?”

He didn’t answer. The ax dropped from his arms, and he made no sound when he fell into the long grass beside it.

After neither the Mazda nor the Cherokee would start, Camilla ran the two miles to the Temples’ house and returned in the Saab with Paul—who, jumping out of it, loped in long strides around the house to the backyard and, without asking any questions at all, bent down and scooped up his son, cradling him in his arms as if he were a child instead of the large man he was and carrying him to the car. Jiselle ran behind them, and after Paul placed Bobby carefully in the backseat, she slid in with him, still in her nightgown, without asking if she should. Behind her, she saw Camilla, weeping, trying to break loose of her sister, who was holding her back.

Over Paul’s shoulder, Jiselle watched the speedometer inch past eighty, past ninety, and then to a hundred, while Bobby lay with his head in her lap. The boy breathed steadily, but there was an oddly hollow sound when he exhaled, as if the air, instead of coming out of his lungs, were rattling through a wooden box. A wooden box on fire. His head was damp and burning at the same time, and his breath, too, seemed strangely hot. His mouth stayed open, and although his eyes were closed, Jiselle saw, in the corner of one, a tiny teardrop of watery blood.

For as far as Jiselle could see, there was no one else on either side of the freeway—not another car, or cab, or truck—so when they pulled into the St. Sophia Mercy Hospital parking lot, she thought, at first, they must have accidentally pulled off at a stadium or a mall. Except that those places were no longer open, those sorts of gatherings no longer occurred. Paul squealed past the hundreds of parked cars, leaving the smell of his tires burning against the parking lot tar, pulling up at the Emergency Room entrance. He jumped from the car then and ran inside, without saying anything to Jiselle or closing the car door, and was back in only a few seconds, followed by a woman in a white lab jacket. She had a nametag that read DR. STARK on the pocket, and a stethoscope around her neck, but otherwise she was dressed as if she’d just been called in from a picnic—jeans, tennis shoes, a University of Illinois hockey team T-shirt. Her hair was wispy and blond. She looked no older than Camilla, Jiselle thought.

Paul opened the back door for her, and Dr. Stark leaned in.

Bobby’s eyes were closed. His torso was naked but still sweat-soaked. Dr. Stark appeared curious but not alarmed. She took his arm and pressed his wrist with two fingers. After a few other things—feeling the glands in his neck, asking Jiselle what his name was and then saying the name, slapping her hands in front of his face and then sighing as if he’d disappointed her when he didn’t respond, Dr. Stark backed out of the car and stood in front of Paul in the parking lot.

“I’m sorry,” she told him, not sounding sorry. “There’s nothing we can do for him here except have him lie around in the hallway all day, until we send him away. I can’t tell you what to do, sir, but if this were my son, I’d take him home and get some sleep in case he needed me in the night. He’s probably in no immediate danger. No more so than any of us.” She gestured around—to the parking lot, herself, Paul, the sky.

Paul just stared at her as if he were waiting for her to say something else, to go on. His tongue was working over the sore molar, as it did all the time now, and then he began to shake his head in little snaps, and reached out to touch the doctor’s arm, but she stepped away and turned toward the hospital. When he said to her back, “But—” She turned once more and seemed to scan the parking lot behind him. Without emotion, she said, “If you’re up for the drive into Chicago, you might hear a different story, but the word we’re getting from there is that they won’t even look at anyone with the Phoenix flu. Still,” she said more softly, “you have to do what you have to do.”

“Medicine?” Jiselle called out the car window to Dr. Stark’s back.

Dr. Stark turned again, shrugged, and said, “Got any?”

Some people fell ill and recovered. Some lingered, it seemed. Some died quickly within a few terrible days.

Bobby Temple died quickly and terribly.

Weeping blood. Coughing blood. His sheets soaked with blood. His pillow.

The power was on, but Camilla went through the Temples’ house and turned the lights off one by one. They watched Bobby die by candlelight, and when it was over, although the phones were working again, Paul said there was no point calling the funeral home, no point notifying anyone. Who could help them? They would stay with the body until the sun rose—no one could go anywhere until it was light out anyway—and then he wanted Jiselle and Camilla to leave. He wanted to burn the body of his son in his own backyard, and he wanted to be alone.

But Jiselle and Camilla washed Bobby’s body before they left—carefully wiping the dried blood out of his eyes, swabbing the blood out of his mouth with a washcloth. Camilla clipped his fingernails, kissing each finger after she did. Jiselle went through his closet and found his best shirt and slacks. Paul knotted the tie around his neck, folded the collar of his shirt down over the tie. In the candlelight, Bobby’s eyelids appeared to flicker as if he were dreaming, but there was a look of such relaxation on his face that Jiselle knew he wasn’t.