Laura Kasischke - In a Perfect World

But these fragments meant nothing to Jiselle. They were like fuzz, radio static.

“Did you know,” Sara asked one afternoon as Jiselle passed back through the kitchen, pointing to a place on a page in Joy’s book of baby names, “that your name means—?”

“Hostage,” Jiselle said.

“Princess,” her mother corrected.

Sara looked up and smiled. “No,” she said. “It means ‘pledge.’” Reading aloud: “Jiselle. Danish. Definition: She who keeps her promise. Pledge.’”

Jiselle went to the book and looked over Sara’s shoulder. Her finger was on the name. Jiselle read the entry silently to herself. Sara was right.

Jiselle looked up at her mother, who shrugged and said, “Who knows? I always thought it meant ‘princess.’”

Sara flipped the pages to her own name then, and looked up, laughing. She said, “Sorry to break the news to you ladies, but my name means ‘princess.’”

One night, Sara insisted they play charades. The evenings were so long. The snow had been falling steadily for days, and it made a silencing moat around the house and the world. Even the hounds stayed away, or couldn’t be heard over the insulating white.

Sam and Jiselle were playing chess by candlelight at the kitchen table, but they looked up from their game when Sara came in and announced charades. Jiselle shrugged. “Why not?”

They went into the living room, where Camilla and Jiselle’s mother were listening to some distant station they’d found on Brad Schmidt’s transistor radio. They’d had to put the radio on the windowsill, on its side, with the antenna pointed toward the fire, but behind the snowy crackle was the unmistakable sound of an orchestra playing something bright and rhythmic, full of exuberance, vibrant with possibility. The future, it seemed, was hinted at in every note. Even the static, which seemed to rise and fall with the wind through the dark night outside, couldn’t drown that out.

When the radio finally died completely, they turned it off and started their game.

Camilla was first.

As soon as she waved her elegant hands around in the air, they all shouted, “Mozart!” at the same time.

“Jiselle,” her mother said one morning while the children were still in bed, “Sam needs to get more to eat.”

Jiselle nodded. She knew. It had been a growing sense of dread for weeks. She looked through the kitchen into the living room, where Sam and the girls were decorating the little tree they’d cut down at the edge of the yard. They’d found Joy’s box of beautiful Christmas decorations in the basement—sugary angels, little gingerbread houses, gilded fruit—and they were hooking them onto the tree’s bright branches.

In his T-shirt (one Mark had brought home for him: HARD ROCK CAFÉ TOKYO), which was at once too small and too large, he looked like a stick figure. The shirt rode up on his waist, and Jiselle could see his ribs, but it also hung too loosely off his shoulders, and she could see the blades of those jutting out of his back, too skeletal.

This was a boy who was starving.

It had been only a week since Jiselle had opened the cupboards and counted what she had left in them—the cans, the packages—and peered into the last box of powdered milk to assess how much was left, and then put a hand to her eyes to do the math. How long did she need to make what they had last?

Surely there would be enough food left for another month.

Or two, if she was careful.

But only if she was careful.

So she began to divide two cans of soup instead of three among them for dinner. She added an extra cupful of water. If they ate Ramen noodles for lunch, she saved the water she’d boiled them in and added it to that night’s canned stew. There was always some flavor left in it. Surely there were some nutrients, too?

She started pushing her own bowl away before she finished her soup, asking Sam if he was hungry. Her mother did the same. But if Camilla or Sara tried to offer anyone else their food, Jiselle’s mother snapped, “Finish your own food.”

Although the girls quit offering Sam their food at the table, Jiselle had seen them taking their napkin rags away with them from their meals suspiciously heavy.

Once, she overheard Sam say to Sara in his bedroom, “Thanks, Sara, but I’m not hungry.”

“Eat it anyway,” Sara whispered back.

Now, in the bright winter light coming in through the family room windows, it was clear that Sam was a child who was not getting enough to eat. For how many decades had Jiselle looked at photographs of such children in newspapers and magazines, and how far away had those children seemed?

“I’m going to go look around the Schmidts’ house,” Jiselle said to her mother. “To look again. To see if there’s anything stored we didn’t find.”

Jiselle hadn’t been inside the Schmidts’ house since a few days after Brad Schmidt died, when she’d gone over with Camilla and taken what appeared to be the only useful things—a few sharp knives, some cans of anchovies, the radio, Saltines, a sack of flour, and a canister of brown sugar—and had boxed up Diane Schmidt’s clothes and medicines and brought them home.

But they hadn’t been hungry then.

Had she looked in the basement? The attic? Brad Schmidt had spoken of being prepared. Why hadn’t it occurred to Jiselle before now that he might have a cellar full of provisions?

The yellow biohazard tape had torn away from the doors and windows, and it fluttered like party streamers in the snowy wind. The hedge was white with snow, and the paving stones were buried under it, but Jiselle could feel them beneath her boots, and she followed the path to the back door, which was open. The threshold had warped and split. She stepped in.

“Hello?” she called.

Old habits. She couldn’t help it. She even flipped the light switch next to the door, but of course the kitchen light did not come on, and there was no answer to her greeting.

Still—could she be imagining things? Jiselle sensed some movement somewhere deeper inside the house and instinctively stepped backward, and then stood quietly, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness, holding her arms protectively across her chest.

If it hadn’t been that there had been no mice or rats around for so long, Jiselle would have expected the house to be full of them. Or squirrels. Swallows. A family of raccoons. They would be wild, unfamiliar with human beings.

What she hadn’t expected to encounter—like a wild ghost, padding out of the bedroom and into the hallway, and then, barely bothering to glance in her direction before slipping into the hallway, and then into the living room—was this sleek and tawny cat, as long as a man, with enormous shoulder muscles, dark ears bristling with fur.

An enormous, magical cat.

Jiselle stood frozen in the doorway for several seconds, hand over her mouth, trying to breathe and not to scream, before backing out into the snowy light, running across the yard and around the hedge, home, heart pounding cou-gar, cou-gar.

Cougar.

How? In Wisconsin? In the Schmidts’ house near the edges of St. Sophia, seventy miles from the heart of Chicago?

Jiselle knew, now, what had been making the tracks around Beatrice’s shed. Now she recognized the paw prints in the snow for what they were. Whose. The pads and claws. She hurried in the front door of the house, as excited as she was alarmed. “Sam?” she called.

Where had it come from?

North?

West?

And how had it come to live in the Schmidts’ house?

Was there so little of the usual human activity that the big cats had come back now after a century of hiding in remoter places?

Or was this someone’s exotic pet, escaped? Abandoned?