Laura Kasischke - In a Perfect World

What else could Jiselle do? Her mother might have been fiercely independent, but how independent could an older woman, alone while the world crumbled around her, be?

Jiselle had found herself having to drive straight through Chicago because there were roadblocks, looking unofficial, homemade, thrown together by mobs without machinery or organization, on the freeway—walls of cinderblock, and even a few places where old school buses had been parked to keep traffic from traveling from one state to another.

She’d had no choice but to wind her way through downtown, and so Jiselle had seen for herself the blocks of burned houses. The vandalism. The fountains clogged with garbage. The broken-down door of Duke’s Palace Inn. The smoldering darkness inside it. The smoke pouring out of the highest floors of the Sears Tower. The debris littering Millennium Park. Windows of stores smashed all along the Magnificent Mile. Snowflakes falling peacefully and sparsely over all of it. On a few corners were boys like the ones in her living room now, wearing camouflage (why camouflage, she’d wondered, in the city?) with surgical masks, holding automatic rifles, and beyond them ashes everywhere.

It seemed possible to Jiselle that those boys had, themselves, set the fires—who else was there to do it?—but her mother had told her that it had been boys like those, with the National Guard, who’d stood outside B.C. Yu’s dry cleaning business, weeks earlier, after the rumors began that a Korean scientist had created the bacteria that caused the Phoenix flu.

The rumors weren’t quelled fast enough to keep the Korean-owned businesses in large cities and small towns alike from being destroyed. EVIL was spray-painted over the dry cleaner’s sign, and the door was boarded over, and someone had thrown what must have been a bucket of red paint over that. But the windows weren’t smashed, and the building had not been burned. The National Guard had prevented that. B.C. Yu himself had died of the Phoenix flu before the rumors even began.

Jiselle’s mother had brought nothing with her but a large box from her sewing room filled with what looked like rags, her tea set, some clothes, and the Little Mermaid statuette from the mantel, which sat on Mark’s mantel now, and they’d managed to drive back to the house in Paul’s Saab, although the gas gauge was on E for the last forty miles.

Jiselle knew that the National Guard couldn’t take the vehicles with them, that the possibility that they had some stash of gasoline with them was low. If they did, there were cars littered all over town—keys still in the ignition, thousands of dollars’ worth of chrome and upholstery. Why would they have come all the way out here?

But she meant it, too. They could have the cars. They were welcome to the cars, which meant nothing to her now in their silence, in their huge weight and useless gravity.

Jiselle poured the water into her mother’s teapot, over the dried mint, and the room was suffused with the scent of spring and fresh air, and the four boys seemed to lift their chins to it, as if to information they hadn’t come in search of but were happy to receive.

After the tea had steeped, and Jiselle had poured it, they sipped gratefully from her mother’s delicate cups.

“You’re sure there’s no gas left in either tank, ma’am?” the one with the stripes asked.

“None,” Jiselle answered.

The soldiers finished their tea and handed the cups back to Jiselle carefully, one by one. They stood in a row in front of the couch. “Do you mind my asking, ma’am,” the one with the stripes said, looking around the room, “do you have a plan? Do you have a weapon? Is your husband home?”

“Yes,” Jiselle said, although none of these things was true.

“Good,” the soldier said. “There’s a lot of looting, you know. And illness. And rumors.”

“I know,” Jiselle said.

She did.

She had seen what had happened in the city.

“What are the latest rumors?” she asked anyway.

The boys looked at one another as if deciding among themselves, in silence, whether or not to tell her.

“Well,” the boy with the stripes said after clearing his throat, “it’s all over the world now, you know. One in three, they’re saying. But this could just be the beginning. They’re saying it’s a bacteria. Biological warfare? It could be something as simple as a bit of some anthrax-like agent, sprinkled on the floor of a restroom, in an airport, maybe. Something entirely new. Someone could have stepped in it, worn the contaminated shoe all over the world. It could be potent enough that the spores—”

“Thank you,” Jiselle said.

She held up a hand, glanced at Sam. She was sorry she’d asked. Somehow—how?—she’d hoped for something good.

The soldier nodded, understanding. He said, “But you need to understand, and so does your son. There are groups, gangs, on the roads. You’re set back here in the trees, and without lights maybe they won’t see you, for now. But we did. And there’s a lot of desperation. And trust me, they’ll figure a new way to travel without gasoline. They’ll find a way, and they’ll find you, too, eventually. There are—”

“The garage is open,” Jiselle said, nodding toward the door, “and the keys are in the cars.”

“Thank you, ma’am. And good luck.”

They filed out then, back into the snow, turning once, in unison, to wave goodbye. They spent only a few minutes in the garage with the Cherokee, and then peering into the windows of the other two cars, before trudging back out to their Jeep and driving away, and Jiselle and Sam went back to the couch in front of the fire to finish the story they’d started.

It ended happily, with the witch vanquished. The spell broken. The children returned safely to their mother, whom they’d feared was dead.

Only later did Jiselle go to the bedroom closet and pull out of the shadows the one shoe left from Madrid.

That lovely black shoe. Its mate had never been found.

The high, narrow heel. The way the arch fit her foot perfectly. The leather polished to a glossy shine.

She remembered again the salesman on his knees in front of her in that old-fashioned shoe store in Madrid. How he’d cradled her foot in his hands, as if it were a precious gift. How he’d slid the shoe on. “Perfecto,” he’d said.

And it was. That shoe had fit her as if it had been made for her by elves, by fairies, by angels.

How many millions of places had she worn those beautiful shoes?

She’d walked through a thousand streets in a hundred countries. She had stood in lines, sat in theaters, strolled down cobbled paths, occasionally bending down to pet a cat, admire a baby in a bassinet. Years before, in Phoenix, Arizona, she’d stopped by a booth at a street fair and admired a silver bracelet, slipping it over her wrist, holding it up in the bright desert sun to look at it.

She’d handed it back to the jewelry maker, an old man with a windburned face, with an apologetic smile.

She could no longer remember why she hadn’t bought it.

Now, she held up the one shoe, turned it over, ran her fingers over the sole, looked at her fingertips.

Nothing.

Not even dust.

She put the shoe back down in the shadows at the bottom of her closet, and when she turned around, she saw that Sam was standing in the doorway, smiling.

He said, “Jiselle,” shaking his head, “it wasn’t your shoe.” Smiling. “It’s nobody’s shoe.”

“But what if it was?” she asked him.

Still smiling, Sam shrugged. “What if it was?” he said.

The beginning of December was warmer, although the sky, day after day, was a deep purple. The clouds scudding across it looked ink-stained, seeming perpetually to threaten snowstorms that never came. In the afternoons, Jiselle played chess with Sam, read with him in the evenings. Mornings, there were dried beans to sort and soak. There were a few novels left from Camilla’s English Lit course to read. The fire had to be made and stoked. The ashes had to be swept up and thrown out the back door. They’d forgotten about Thanksgiving, so when Jiselle finally remembered, she gathered them all together and surprised them with a dinner of Swanson turkey and dressing from a can. She’d planned to save the turkey for Christmas, but by then, perhaps, she knew, there might be an entirely new plan.