In a Perfect World

CHAPTER ONE

Jiselle put the diary back on the couch where she found it and went outside with the watering can. It was already eighty-five degrees, but a morning breeze was blowing out of the west, sifting fragrantly through the ravine. She breathed it in, knelt down, and peered beneath the stones that separated the garden from the lawn.

She had been married, and a stepmother, for a month.

In a bit of shade there, a tangled circle of violets was hidden—pale blue and purple. Small, tender, silky, blinking. If they had voices, she thought, they would be giggling.

She’d first noticed them a few days earlier, while raking dead vegetation out of the garden. That splash of color among the washed-out fallen leaves and other summer debris had caught her eye, and she knelt down and counted them (twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five) before covering them up again.

Somehow those violets had managed to stay perfectly alive through the scorching summer weather and all through the drought. The hottest, driest summer in a century. Maybe ever. They deserved special consideration, didn’t they? If God wasn’t going to give it to them, she would have to.

Now, every day, Jiselle took the watering can outside, and was always surprised to find those violets alive and tucked away in their shady crack.

Still, she knew they couldn’t last much longer—even hotter, drier weather had been predicted—so that morning, after watering them, she plucked just one. She covered the others up and brought the plucked one into the house, set it in a little souvenir shot glass from Las Vegas, with some cold water, placed it on the kitchen counter, and stepped back to admire it, deciding that she liked the little feminine gesture it made in the kitchen (Mark would be home in a day, and he would appreciate such a thing, as if she were settling in, getting comfortable, starting to decorate the place as if it were her own), until she turned her back on it, headed out of the kitchen to the bedroom to make the bed, and heard it scream.

A high, piercing, horrible, girlish scream that made all the little hairs on Jiselle’s arms rise and a cool film of sweat break out on the back of her neck. She whipped around, heart pounding, and hurried back into the kitchen, a hand covering her own mouth, to see.

Of course the violet hadn’t screamed. It rested quietly where she had placed it, drooping over the side of the shot glass. If anything, it looked more defeated than it had a few seconds before—head bowed in acceptance over the shot glass, as if waiting patiently for the ax.

It would never have been capable of screaming.

That had been Sara, howling at the news that Britney Spears was dead.

No one had said the word epidemic yet, or the word pandemic. No one was calling it a plague.

The first outbreak had swept through a nursing home in Phoenix, Arizona, over a year ago, leaving the elderly miraculously untouched but killing seven nurses and aides. Some people fled Phoenix after that—taking their vacations early, boarding up their houses, staying in cabins in the mountains, visiting relatives—but they did not evacuate in droves. The Phoenix flu seemed contained, explainable. The new carpeting in the nursing home was blamed, and then the contaminated air ducts, in which a dead bat had been found.

It was mummified. It was ashes. The biohazard men came in their orange jumpsuits and took what was left of it away in a plastic bag.

Then, a few celebrities nowhere near Phoenix died of what seemed to be the Phoenix flu—a soap opera star, Shane McDermott, Gena Lee Nolan, and the daughter of an actress who’d had a small role on The Sopranos years before—and although the non-celebrity deaths weren’t made public, it was said that the nation’s florists could not keep up with the demand for flowers. FTD changed its one-day delivery service to “Only two full days for most arrangements!” and it was reported that people were buying antibiotics and Tamiflu in bulk off the Internet, which resulted in shortages. But only the hysterical pulled their children out of school or left the country.

When a passenger fell ill after flying in a plane in which the body of a flu victim was being transported in cargo, a law was passed requiring airline passengers to be informed when human remains were aboard their planes. But, with the war on, this was such a common occurrence that it had no noticeable effect on travel habits. Flight attendants were encouraged to time their safety instructions to serve as a distraction while baggage-handlers loaded caskets, but on that side of the plane, the passengers, who had never been interested in safety instructions anyway, watched the procedures solemnly from their seats, sometimes pressing their faces to the windows for a closer look.

No one had, to Jiselle’s knowledge, ever demanded to be booked on another flight because of a corpse in cargo, and, in general, there was very little talk, public or private, about the Phoenix flu, although there was endless excited talk about what a strange year it had been.

Full of curious weather, meteor showers, and the discovery in rain forests and oceans of species thought to be extinct, it was the kind of year you might associate with an apocalypse if you were prone to making those kinds of associations, which more and more people seemed to be.

Sunspots. Earthquakes. Hurricanes. Tornadoes.

More than a year before, in what would come to seem to her to have been another life, lived by a different woman—Jiselle had been in a bar in a hotel in Atlanta, watching a Weather Channel meteorologist (bleached blonde, hot-pink suit) on the television. The meteorologist held a spinning Earth in the palm of her hand and predicted more crazy weather everywhere.

All across the globe!

It was March, which had come in that year, they were saying, like a lion being chased by a lamb.

When Captain Dorn spoke to her, Jiselle turned from the television to him, holding a glass of wine in her hand—sipping from it, stem dangling between her fingers, the way the blond meteorologist held the world.

“Can I buy you another glass of wine?” the pilot asked.

Jiselle was in her uniform—the pressed blue pencil skirt, silk hose, light-blue blouse—and the little brass wings were spread over her heart, as if her heart might have the gift of flight. She was wearing, too, a pair of beautiful shoes she’d bought weeks earlier in Madrid, at an old-fashioned shoe store in the heart of the city. A salesman with a thin black mustache and goatee had said, watching her walk across the wooden floorboards wearing them, Perfecto!

Sitting on the barstool, she had one long leg crossed over the other and was swinging the crossed leg slowly, trying to calm herself down after that terrible evening spent stuck on the runway in a driving rainstorm only to be turned back at the gate. It was nearly midnight. As Captain Dorn waited on the barstool beside her for an answer from her, one of the beautiful shoes, the one dangling from the swinging foot, slid right off her foot, and onto the floor.

In less than a second, he was on his knees below Jiselle, holding up the shoe as if considering it in the bar’s dim light, and then he slid it with a swift whisper back onto her foot, while a group of businessmen at a table nearby laughed and clapped, and she blushed, and Captain Dorn stood, smoothing down his pants, and gave her a courtly little bow before he sat back down.

That night, Jiselle was thirty-two years old.

She’d been a bridesmaid six times.

It was always a surprise to her, being asked to be a bridesmaid. In truth, she’d had only a few close friends in her life, and none of them was one of these six brides. But flight attendants made acquaintances quickly, and friendships became intense easily—a long layover, a blizzard, a terrible landing—and ended just as quickly and easily.

“You just look good in an ugly dress,” one of her boyfriends had suggested when Jiselle wondered aloud about her popularity for the position.

And maybe she did.

She had a bridesmaid’s shapely legs, wasp waist, blond hair that fell around her shoulders. The photographers at these weddings always seemed particularly interested in her, waving her over to stand by the cake, calling on her to kneel beside the bride and hold up the lacy train.

She’d worn green satin, and yellow chiffon, and something pink and stiff. She’d worn ribbons in her hair, or pinned to the top of her head, or down around her shoulders. One bride asked her bridesmaids to wear rhinestone tiaras, and although the last time Jiselle had been near a tiara was during a dance recital in second grade, The Nutcracker, she did—just as she obediently leaped to catch each bouquet as it sailed over her upturned face while the cameras flashed.

She’d been felt up by the drunken uncles of brides and been crushed on dance floors by their burly brothers. She’d been taken aside by a bride’s mother and asked, “Jiselle, darling, when in the world will we be attending your wedding?” and had simply smiled, blinking.

“Always a bridesmaid,” her mother had said on a couple of these occasions, “never a bride.”

“Mom, I—”

“You don’t have to explain to me,” her mother said. “Do you think if I had a choice about whether or not to get married again, I would?”

“No,” Jiselle said, clumsily, as if it had actually been a question. There was no question. After she’d kicked Jiselle’s father out of the house, along with Bingo, the little dog he’d just brought home, Jiselle’s mother had taken their wedding photos out into the backyard and lit them on fire one by one while Jiselle watched from the window over the kitchen sink. They shriveled up into black bats, and then into ashes, before her mother let them go.

Jiselle herself had fallen in love, too early, with two distracted boys—hockey and basketball, respectively. And then a few years escaped from her along with a married man. There’d been a British Royal Marine between scenes, and then a kleptomaniac. A drummer. A baggage-handler with a drinking problem. Then a few years passed during which she thought she’d given up men for good.

Already she’d buried the friend who would have been her maid of honor, and the father who would have walked her down the aisle. When people asked if she’d like to meet their cousin the doctor, their husband’s shy best friend, Jiselle politely declined. She kept busy, pretending to herself and to everyone else that she wasn’t waiting.

When she wasn’t working, she started crochet projects or bought journals she made plans to write in. She needed only a few plates, a couple of cups, in her rented house, while her acquaintances’ lives grew unfathomably cluttered, took on meaning, accumulated in detail. A few of the brides got divorced, and Jiselle bought them margaritas when the paperwork was complete. She attended a few second weddings in courthouses, casinos. She watched their children while they worked out custody disputes with their exes. One night she stayed up late with another flight attendant whose teenage son had disappeared.

“Never have children,” Angela had said, holding her cup of tea so fiercely that all the tiny bones and muscles in her hand glowed in the light of the television, as if lit from within. Down the block, Jiselle could hear a dog bark, sounding terrified and angry at the same time. “Just be glad you have no one, Jiselle,” Angela said, and then looked embarrassed to have said it, but also too distraught to take it back. They both knew what she meant.

When the son came home a few days later with a pierced lip and a tattoo, Angela called Jiselle and said, “When I was done kissing him, I told him I was going to kill him.”

Jiselle felt relieved and heartbroken at the same time, to think she might never know what it was like to love a child like that.

Once, in Florence, on a bus back to the airport, she had glimpsed a love like that. She was sitting behind a beautiful young girl with a glossy black braid down her back. Outside the bus window, a woman stood and watched. Clearly, she was the girl’s mother. The two of them had the same eyes, the same cheekbones. The girl put her hand to the bus window, and the mother put her own hand to her heart, and as the bus slid away, Jiselle couldn’t help but put her own hand to the glass as the mother’s love poured off of her toward them—as rolling fire, great sheets and waves of love, whole cathedrals filled with flickering candles, hurricanes, tornadoes, vast human migrations of love. Jiselle had wanted to keep watching but couldn’t help closing her eyes.

Like Angela’s son, the years ran off. But, unlike that son, they never came back, changed or otherwise.

“You’re only twenty-nine…thirty…thirty-one…thirty-two,” the six brides said. “I hardly think it’s time to give up.”

But Jiselle saw less and less of those brides as the years went by. They were so busy. So busy! After a while there was almost nothing to talk with them about on the phone, even if they’d had the time to return her calls, even if there wasn’t usually a child screaming in the background or waiting somewhere to be picked up, either in their arms or in their SUVs.

Also, Jiselle traveled for a living. She never met anyone in her own neighborhood because she was usually there for only a night or two before she left again. All the things people said to do to make friends, meet men—take a class, join a gym, attend a church—were impossible for her to do. She worked out in hotel gyms. She ate in hotel restaurants. She slept in hotel beds, where, occasionally late at night, she paged through the Gideon’s Bible in the hotel nightstand.

Once, in a Holiday Inn in Pittsburgh, she came upon a Gideon’s that had been bookmarked and highlighted for her:

Then I heard a voice from the sanctuary calling to the seven angels, “Go and empty the seven bowls of God’s anger over the earth.” And HEY PLEASE ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION? was written in small red, block letters in the margin.

Jiselle slid the Bible back into the nightstand and closed the drawer, feeling as if she’d disappointed someone (Gideon? God?), but also too tired to offer the kind of attention that reading the Bible would require.

There were hundreds of takeoffs and landings, and, occasionally, vomit in the aisles. Sometimes it was Jiselle’s turn to sprinkle coffee grounds on the vomit while the other flight attendants stood around in the galley holding their noses and rolling their eyes.

There were hundreds of layovers and delays, and then, that one windy March evening in Atlanta, seven hours were spent on a runway while the plane was slapped around boorishly in the dark, rain whipping sideways across the windows, only to have the plane turned back to the gate when the flight was canceled.

It had been a full flight, too—the proverbial sardines—with a large number of elderly passengers. There’d been a woman with a black eye sitting in silence beside a man with clenched fists. There’d also been a frat boy with a cat in a pink plastic cage beneath his seat. The cat yowled pitifully, and the frat boy, even more pitifully, kept looking under the seat with a worried expression on his face, saying, “It’s okay, Binky. Zacky’s here.”

That night Jiselle’s job was to rush up the aisle and tell anyone who tried to take off his seat belt and make a break for the bathroom to sit back down.

“Why?” they wanted to know.

“Getting out of your seat is prohibited,” she said, “on the runway.”

“But we’re not going anywhere. The plane’s not moving.”

This was true enough.

Outside, surrounding the plane, was the sense of weather growing vindictive—an accumulating energy with its own agenda. The weather didn’t care that they had connections to make, medication that needed to be taken, appointments that would be missed, vacations that were ruined before they’d even begun.

A baby began to shriek, and then a little girl with a crusty nose, wearing a purple tutu, took up the shriek. Her mother leaned over her, holding the child in her arms. As she passed their seats and looked down, it appeared to Jiselle as if that mother were trying to smother the child or wrestle with her—but, as with the frat boy and his cat, silly endearments were being whispered as she did it.

In the seat in front of the mother and child, a middle-aged man slid his toupee off his head in exasperation and set it on his lap. He stroked it with his right hand while running his left hand nervously over his hairless head.

Then, as if someone were spraying the aircraft with a high-powered hose, rain began to splash against the side of the plane. Wind rocked them harder. There was the sound of heavy breathing coming from the passengers—deep sighs, stifled sobs. Jiselle had the impulse to announce to the cabin that it wasn’t her fault. It’s the weather. It’s the airline. There are strict rules and procedures. I didn’t invent them. But she knew there would have been a reprimand for such an announcement:

But it was nearly unbearable, passing down the aisle, having to endure the glares directed at her. It had happened before, of course, but how could anyone get used to that?

When Captain Dorn’s voice finally came over the intercom and he said they’d been directed back to the terminal, something like a cry of despair and an exhalation of relief rose from the passengers at once, the kind of sound Jiselle imagined a crowd gathered at a mining disaster might make upon receiving news that one of the fifty miners had been found alive. She tried to smile as she passed back down the aisle this time, but the only passengers who would look at her did not smile back—and then an elderly woman reached up and grabbed her wrist.

Jiselle stopped, looking down at her own wrist in this woman’s bony hand, and then into the face of the old woman, who said nothing but who fixed Jiselle with an expression of such bitter rage and contempt that, until all the passengers were off the plane, Jiselle could not stop shaking.

“What did the hag say to you?” Jeremy asked. He was wearing so much ChapStick that his lips shone from the overhead lights. Earlier, she’d watched him applying it, over and over, from the corner of her eyes as they sat strapped beside one another in the bulkhead during the turnaround.

“Nothing,” Jiselle said.

And it was true.

But the old woman’s eyes had been ice blue. Her hair, pure white. She’d hated Jiselle. The expression on her face said it so clearly that the old woman hadn’t needed to speak. Her hatred had been projected so powerfully that Jiselle felt she could read the old woman’s mind, hear the old woman’s voice inside her head, saying:

You think you can pass through this life pretending, and smiling, and acting as if nothing of this has to do with you, don’t you?

But you can’t.

A curse.

A spell.

Later, at the hotel bar, when Captain Dorn glanced down at her legs crossed on the barstool a few inches away from his, Jiselle took a sip of her wine and tried to will that old woman and her evil eye away.

“What a life,” he said, raising his glass to hers.

She raised hers to his, and they touched the glasses together just lightly enough to make the faintest of sounds—the muffled sound of a very tiny glass bell ringing on the collar of a cat, which might have been rolling in some lush green grass under a warm sun in a country far away.

CHAPTER TWO

The afternoon Jiselle announced her engagement to Captain Dorn, she saw them for the first time:

The white balloons.

She was driving on the Red Arrow Highway, which meandered along the Lake Michigan shoreline, back to Illinois from the small Michigan town in which her mother lived.

She gasped when she glimpsed them.

The balloons must have originated in Chicago. Now they floated in her direction over the lake, which rippled under them in bright brain waves. At least fifty balloons, their strings trailing silver tails behind them.

Jiselle had heard of the groups of volunteers and activists who gathered every Sunday in cities all over the United States to set them loose—a white balloon for every victim of the Phoenix flu—but as yet she’d seen them only on television.

They were controversial. There had been objections. Some said that the balloons served no purpose other than to scare people, that they were really about inciting panic. Not the compassionate expression they pretended to be, but an implicit criticism of the present administration, a political maneuver rather than a commemoration of the dead. Others said they were simply, purely beautiful.

And, seeing them for herself that afternoon as she drove away from her hometown, Jiselle had to agree. The silent, swift, traveling emptiness of those balloons, their strings glistening loosely on the air as they lifted higher in a steady stream toward the sky. They seemed to be lifted in unison by a gust of wind, trembling a little against the backdrop of blue.

Intellectually, Jiselle knew what they stood for, but like so many other things at the beginning of this surprising time, they appeared to her more as a wonder than a sign.

She had never been so happy.

Could she ever be happier?

Even after the sharp words with her mother, and the dead man in his coffin, Jiselle could not help but feel lighthearted.

Jiselle’s mother had asked her, “What kind of a woman agrees to marry a man she’s known for three months? A man with three children? A man whose three children she hasn’t met?”

If Jiselle had been a different kind of daughter, or woman, she might have said, “The kind of woman I am, Mother,” but even as an adolescent, when her best friend was regularly screaming “I hate you, you bitch!” at her own mother, Jiselle was apologizing to hers for forgetting to say please when asking for a second helping of salad.

She said, instead, “Mom, I love him.”

Her mother snorted.

Of course, it was more than that, more than love, or why marriage, why the rush? But how could Jiselle have explained to anyone what a strange wild mystery this was to her? When it came to imagining herself a bride, she’d given up! And then—Captain Dorn! The handsomest man in the land!

He was a pilot with eyes the color of the grass in spring. When he stood in the threshold of the control cabin after landing a plane, men, exiting, would nod solemnly to him, offering their thanks. Women, smitten, made expressions of surprise, sheepish appreciation, when they saw him there. Leaning on the doorjamb of the cockpit, wearing his uniform, his jacket unbuttoned and all those dials and knobs behind him, Captain Dorn sometimes caused those female passengers to freeze in their places, open their mouths as if to speak, nothing coming out—love at first sight. Annette would elbow Jiselle and whisper, “Another one bites the dust.”

A few always tried to come back to the plane, to see him again. (“Did I leave a book called The Single Woman’s Guide to Rome in my seat pocket by any chance?”) Sometimes they stalled near the gate of their arrival, waiting to catch another glimpse of him. He’d tip his cap. Flash his smile. Walk crisply past—those long strides, pressed black slacks, shining shoes. Sometimes a fluttering suit coat, sometimes a pilot’s black leather jacket. Women looked up from their magazines and their cell phones, from the pacifiers they were struggling to place in their squirming toddlers’ mouths, to watch him pass. If there was a female flight attendant in the country who did not know who Captain Mark Dorn was, Jiselle hadn’t met her.

He looks like a movie star. Those eyes!

And his wife… I don’t know.

Something tragic.

Brain tumor.

Suicide.

Car accident.

He never talks about it.

That he was a widower made him even more mysterious and romantic.

The other flight attendants were ebulliently envious. “You hit the jackpot,” one said, “you fucking bitch.” Another said, when Jiselle announced her engagement, “I’m so jealous, I want to kill you. I could kill you. We all wanted to marry him.”

If there was a single woman—and a single woman in her thirties!—who would have said no if Captain Dorn had asked her to marry him, Jiselle hadn’t met her, and couldn’t imagine her.

Even the children. The romance of the handsome devoted single father, reliant on nannies and fast food, calling before takeoff to find out who’d won the soccer game, how the math test had gone. He carried their photographs in his wallet, although he apologized that each one was outdated. The children had grown older more quickly than he’d remembered to exchange each year’s school photo for the next.

Camilla, in her picture, was a ninth-grader. A cascade of blond hair. Her perfect teeth, gritted. Sara was in middle school, wearing a black beaded headband and a low-cut T-shirt. Looking at the photographs of these beautiful, provocative girls, the flight attendants would joke, “You’re going to have your hands full there, Dad! I hope you’re ready for that!”

And his son, Sam. In the photograph Mark carried in his wallet, Sam was only six, with a big gap in the front of his smile—but smiling nonetheless, as if he were perfectly happy with this life, as if the whole idea of life itself pleased him beyond all reason. He had masses of curly, shining, strawberry-blond hair—the kind of hair Jiselle suspected women had been touching, longingly, since he was a baby, saying things like, “Why are the beautiful curls always wasted on the boys?”

Those children were frozen at the ages they’d been on some past Picture Day. The school photographer’s absurdly blue sky behind them swirled with the implication of summer clouds.

“You’re not marrying the man,” her mother said. She was wearing a black skirt, black blouse, a string of black pearls, and had her hands on her hips. Jiselle took a step backward, shook her head, and looked toward the coffin, as if for help.

The dead man in it was a great-step-uncle. He’d been ninety-two years old when his heart finally stopped. Even the people gathered around the corpse, laid out in a tuxedo, were laughing, patting one another on the back, punching each other in the arm. Jiselle, her mother, and the dead man were the only ones in the room not smiling, the only ones wearing black, which Jiselle had worn only because she knew her mother would say something about it if she didn’t. Even in his coffin, Uncle Ernie looked comfortable with the idea that he was dead—hands folded over his ruffled chest, chin set, eyebrows raised above his closed eyes. He might as well have been twiddling his thumbs. It had been a decade since Jiselle had seen him alive, but she could tell he hadn’t changed. Really, she’d come to the funeral to tell her mother, in person, in a public place, about her engagement.

“No,” Jiselle said. “I am marrying him, Mom.”

Her mother shook her head, looking around the room as if for a silver lining, and then she said, “Well, you’re not going to live with him.”

She was serious, Jiselle realized. It wasn’t a question. It was a command—like, Clean your room. Or, Clear the table.

“Mom, I’m—”

Her mother raised a hand, pointed a finger at her daughter, and said, “You’re not going to move in with a man with three children—”

“Mom—”

“—a man who’s out of the country half the month and out of town most of the month. Have you thought about why he’s in such a big hurry to marry you?”

Her mother was not, of course, the first one to suggest to Jiselle that perhaps this dashing pilot pursuing her with flowers, and jewelry, and strolls along the Seine, and proposals of marriage, might be looking for someone to take care of his three children. One older flight attendant, who’d known Mark since his first flight, said, when Jiselle told her they were going to be married, “So, I guess his latest nanny didn’t work out?”

Jiselle flushed, and the woman hurriedly insisted that she was only joking, but Jiselle knew exactly what the woman meant, and she was right about the latest nanny, who’d given twelve weeks’ notice because she was going to marry a geologist and move to Wyoming. All the flight attendants knew the trouble Mark had with nannies, and childcare, and children. Before Jiselle started seeing him, she’d heard members of the flight crew advise him, “Captain Dorn, you need to get married again. That’s the only answer to your problems.”

“No,” he’d say, “I can move my mother up from Florida if I have to. Believe me, there’s nothing she’d like better than to raise my kids. If I get married again, it will be because I’m in love.”

When he said this, all the flight attendants tilted their chins, lifted their eyebrows. Some even sighed.

Jiselle’s therapist also asked Jiselle if she might be “at all concerned about his motives.”

Jiselle put her hands on the leather armrests of the chair in his office and said, “He doesn’t need me to take care of the children, if that’s what you mean. They have a grandmother.”

Dr. Smitty Smith looked down at his fingernails and asked, “Did I say I thought he was marrying you to take care of the children?”

Jiselle knew exactly where this was supposed to go. Instead of answering, she lifted one shoulder, and let it drop.

“I just don’t want—” Dr. Smith stopped himself in mid-sentence. He almost never gave advice, although he occasionally stammered out the beginning of it. “I’m concerned, as I’m sure you are, that there not be any fuzzy logic.”

Fuzzy logic.

Like sins of the father, it was a catchphrase between them, left over from Jiselle’s first session, when she’d made an appointment through the University Health Services—right after she’d dropped out of college but before they’d canceled her student benefits. Her father and Ellen had been dead for a few months, and Jiselle was flunking out, when she’d gotten a paper returned to her from her Western Civilization course.

On the bottom of it, scrawled in red pen, was “F—Fuzzy Logic.”

Nothing else.

As if no further explanation could be given or would be needed.

Jiselle no longer had any actual memory of the paper itself. Of writing it, of stapling its pages together, of her thesis and argument and support, of handing it in, but the words had stayed with her over the years. They were the words that had brought her to Smitty Smith, in whose office she had wept on that last winter day of her college career, and in which she was smiling helplessly now after announcing her engagement to Captain Mark Dorn.

Dr. Smith said nothing more until a few minutes had passed in silence, and then he said, “Well, we’ll have to finish talking about this next time,” and then, wearily, like a man with a low-grade fever, “Congratulations, Jiselle.”

“Thank you,” she said.

He nodded and said, “But just, you know, think hard about this. Think clearly.”

But there were others—plenty of them—who urged Jiselle not to think too hard, to act quickly.

“Find me a man like that, Jiselle,” another flight attendant said, “and I’d stay home with his brats, I’d iron his shirts, I’d wax his floors.”

A chorus of flight attendants gathered around her at the gate and agreed.

When Jiselle herself uttered reservations (“You know, I haven’t even met his children yet…”), this chorus sang out in unison, “Who cares? They’ll be awful! All children are awful, whether they’re yours or someone else’s! But you’ll be married to Captain Dorn!”

In Jiselle’s fantasy, the children were not awful. When she imagined herself with Mark’s children, they were always sitting in a circle around her in a forest. In this fantasy, a soft bed of fallen pine needles was spread out beneath them, and Jiselle had her gilt-edged collection of Hans Christian Andersen tales open on her lap—the book from which her father used to read to her—and she was about to start a story.

It didn’t matter, for this particular fantasy, that Mark’s daughters were certainly too old to be read to, or that once, when Jiselle visited his house while the children were in Madison with their nanny, she’d picked up the diary of one of the girls and read the most recent entry:

The diary was black and leather-bound and had been left on the kitchen counter, where, surely, the new girlfriend of her father visiting the house that weekend was supposed to find it.

Jiselle had put it down and stepped away from it slowly. Her heart had been thrumming like a bird trapped in a box.

But, in Jiselle’s fantasy, Sara would come to realize how much she had in common with her new stepmother, and how much she had missed not having a mother all these years. She would confide in Jiselle and grow to love her.

In her fantasy, Jiselle and the three children in the forest were all wearing white, and although they were sitting on the ground, their clothes did not get dirty.

The afternoon he asked Jiselle to marry him they were in Kyoto, in bed in a hotel room full of cherry blossoms, and they’d left the curtains open while they made love.

Afterward, they went to the window and looked down.

The roads were thronged. It was the day of the Lantern Parade, which was one of the city’s most important festivals, or so Jiselle had been told by her taxi driver, in perfect English.

Conceived during a plague in the ninth century as a ritual to purify the land and to appease the rampaging deity Gozu, the first parade had ended the plague, and so had been held every year since by the citizens of Kyoto, who even managed, the driver told her, to keep the Americans from dropping an atomic bomb on their city with their religious devotion and their beautiful parade.

Ten stories below them, a float made entirely of pink blossoms moved along slowly, trailing long silk flags through the streets. From a throne at the center of it, a little boy in Shintu robes was swinging a pale yellow lantern. When the boy looked up, Jiselle yanked the curtain around her naked body as quickly as she could, although he couldn’t have seen her so far above him—a woman in one of a hundred tiny windows in a tower, looking down.

“I’m not a perfect man, Jiselle,” Mark said. “I’ve got some baggage. But I’m in love with you. And I need you.” He turned from the window to her. “They need you, too,” he added. “We’ll be a family.”

An automatic family.

Was it such a crazy thing to want?

At the checkout lines at every airport gift shop were women’s magazines and tabloids announcing HOW TO KEEP YOUR FAMILY SAFE IN TROUBLED TIMES, beneath the stunning, smiling, face of Angelina Jolie, as full of inner peace as any medieval Madonna, her brood of twelve children gathered around her.

“Why wait?” Annette said when Jiselle expressed surprise that Annette was already pregnant only a month after marrying her pediatrician, Dr. Williams, thirty years her senior, the very doctor who’d administered Annette’s first vaccinations, treated her strep throat and sprained ankle.

Why wait? had, in fact, become a kind of mantra. Advertising campaigns repeated it over and over, as did religious leaders. Waiting to buy a thing or to repent of your sins could be equally foolish. The recent increase in the number of marriages was swiftly followed by a skyrocketing number of pregnancies. At the top of the bestseller list was What to Expect When You’re Expecting, followed by The Prophecies of Nostradamus.

It was said that college students across the country had formed groups devoted to the study of Nostradamus. Why wait to see what the future will hold if we can find out from the past?

The media connected the war, the fears of the flu, the beautiful and alarming weather, to the behavior of teenagers and adults alike. Bars were crowded in the middle of the day. Workplace affairs were ubiquitous. Unplanned pregnancies and planned ones. There was a pregnant woman on every street corner, it seemed, and a baby being pushed in a stroller on every street. The boys who didn’t go into the military after high school dropped out to become poets. It was said that in Las Vegas it had become so common for gamblers to sit at their slot machines until they collapsed that ambulances were kept idling behind casinos. The twenty-four-hour wedding chapels were busy twenty-four hours a day. So much champagne was being demanded that liquor stores across the country had instituted a one-bottle-per-customer rule to avoid the violent outbursts of customers who came in and found the shelves empty.

Jiselle, however, wasn’t thinking about the news when she told Mark that, yes, she would marry him.

She was thinking that she’d waited a long time for this.

She was thinking that she’d waited long enough.

In Montreal, Jiselle found the perfect dress. Off-white linen and lace. Just above the ankle. A low neckline sewn with seed pearls.

“Four hundred dollars Canadian,” the salesgirl said, “and we can tailor it for you.”

But it didn’t need to be tailored. It fit Jiselle perfectly, as if it had been made for her. And in her hair she would wear a band of lace from her grandmother’s wedding dress—which had arrived in America in tatters in a moth-filled trunk on a Danish ship. Her mother had kept the scraps of that in her attic all these years.

“Let me see,” Mark said at the Budget Roadway Inn.

“No,” Jiselle said. “You’re not supposed to see the bride in her dress until the wedding day. It’s bad luck.”

“To hell with that,” Mark said. “Life is short. Let me see.”

“Mark.”

“What if I die before I see it?” he said. “I’m in a dangerous profession! You’d have to live another sixty years knowing you’d denied me the greatest pleasure of my life.”

Jiselle laughed, and then went into the bathroom and took the dress out of the tissue in which it was wrapped. A few minutes later she stepped out wearing it.

“Here,” she said, offering herself in the dress.

Mark stood up from the edge of the bed. His mouth was open, but he didn’t say a word. As he stepped toward her, Jiselle was astonished to see that there were tears in his eyes.

Outside their window, a truck roared by, rattling the windowpane with its speed. They were staying in a dirty, noisy motel near the airport. As Mark had warned her she might, the owner of L’Amourette Inn, the lovely B-and-B Jiselle had found for them on the Internet, had refused to check Jiselle into their reserved suite when she was unable to convince the woman that, despite the plates on her rental car, she was Canadian

The border patrol guard between New Hampshire and Quebec had warned her, too.

“Nobody’s renting rooms to Americans, Madame.”

“I’m staying with relatives,” she’d lied.

He returned her passport and nodded disapprovingly.

Jiselle had followed her MapQuest directions up a long winding road to L’Amourette Inn, glimpsing it through the pines from a mile or two away—a Victorian mansion with a wraparound porch. Rocking chairs on the porch. Shutters on the windows. A cupola. A red weathervane and a wishing well. She parked her rental car in a litter of aspen leaves in front of the inn and walked up the stairs to the porch, carrying her cell phone, her purse, her overnight bag.

“Hello?” she called, raising a hand to her forehead to peer through the screen.

A large woman in a white apron whirled around then, at the foot of a long oak staircase, and sputtered in her lovely French accent, “Oh my, you scared me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Come in. Come in,” and bustled to the door, opened it—but before Jiselle could step in, the woman’s smile faded. She said, “You’re not Canadian.”

“Yes,” Jiselle said. “I am. I—”

The woman shook her head. “No. No U.S. citizens. I can’t risk it.”

Jiselle told the woman that she was from Toronto and hadn’t been to the States except to drive through New Hampshire after visiting relatives in Boston. She would have happily produced her passport, she said, but she’d left it behind with her fiancé. He’d be arriving soon. He’d bring it with him.

“I don’t believe you,” the woman said. “You can’t cross the border without your passport. There will be no one from the States staying at my inn. You’re all going to catch this and kill the rest of us. It’s just a matter of time.”

She shut the door so hard that the little diamond-shaped panes of glass rattled in their frames, and Jiselle, whose heart seemed to echo the rattling glass in her chest, went back to the car and called Mark’s voice mail, letting him know she’d call back when she found them another place—which she was unable to do until the Budget Roadway, which had a Vacancy sign posted beside a small, hand-drawn picture of the U.S. flag.

In that hotel room, Mark came to her, standing before him in her dress. He knelt down, took her hands in his, brought them to his face, kissed them slowly. After a long time, he stood up and said, “Now take it off.”

She did. As he watched, Jiselle stepped out of her wedding dress, and then he took it from her and placed it carefully over the back of a chair, and picked her up in his arms, and placed her on the bed.

CHAPTER THREE

“Goddamnit!”

“Where are you? Where the hell is my black dress?”

“Didn’t you hear me? What the hell happened to my black dress? It was on the fucking hook on the back of my closet door.”

Jiselle kept the book open on her knees but looked up from its pages.

Sam shifted nervously beside her.

Sara was wearing only a black bra and panties, standing at the threshold of the bedroom. Jiselle recognized the panties as a pair of her own. Jiselle had bought herself those panties—mesh and lace—for almost fifty euros in Paris. She’d stood at the edge of a large four-poster bed covered with blue pillows at a hotel in Edinburgh as Mark slid those panties slowly down her thighs, to her ankles, where she’d kicked them away with the toe of her Spanish shoes. Sara had been taking things out of her dresser again.

Well, she had been stealing Sara’s things, too.

Jiselle looked back down at the book and said, “I didn’t do anything with your dress.”

“The hell you didn’t,” Sara said as she stomped back out. “My collar’s gone, too. Stay out of my closet!” She slammed the new bedroom door behind her as hard as she could. The air pressure in the room changed with the force of it. The lace curtains fluttered in the windows, and Mark’s uniforms shifted in his closet.

Jiselle looked over at Sam. His eyes were wide but also amused. He said, “Keep reading?”

Jiselle inhaled. She swallowed. Deep in the back of her closet, her stepdaughter’s black dress—the one that covered, maybe, three inches of her thighs at most, the one with the rip in the spandex lace just over her right breast—lay on the floor like a call girl’s shadow—along with the spiked black leather dog collar Sara liked to wear with the dress. Her fishnet stockings were there, as well, and those black combat boots that, it seemed, Sara had not yet noticed were also missing. Jiselle turned the page.

Jiselle had begun reading the book to Sam a few weeks earlier, when one night before dinner, she found him under his bed.

“What are you doing under there?”

There was no answer.

What could she do? Mark had been gone four out of every five days since the beginning of the month. If she didn’t get Sam out from under the bed herself, he might stay under there until Mark came home again. A child’s skeleton in jeans and a T-shirt. Strawberry-blond curls and dust. “Sam?”

He didn’t answer, so she sat down on the bed.

“Sam?”

Jiselle heard him sniffle under there and felt her own implication of tears then, just behind the bridge of her nose, somewhere around her sinuses. She bit her lip to stop the tears. It would do Sam no good if she started crying, too—although, she supposed, the girls would love it. (“Are you blubbering again?” Sara would ask. “Gee,” Camilla would say, as if simply stating an interesting fact, “our mother never cried. Our mother always said, ‘Be strong, girls. Nobody likes a crybaby.’”) Jiselle pinched the place between her eyebrows and lay on her back on Sam’s bed, her feet still on the floor. She swallowed, and then counted to ten before saying it again.

“Sam?”

A muffled sob.

“Please?” she said to the ceiling. “Come out?” And then, trying to control the little quiver in her own voice, the anxiety that she imagined would sound to him like impatience, she said, “Sam? I can’t let you just stay under the bed. Can I?”

Even to her, it sounded weak, the question childlike, as if she really were expecting an answer to that question from the ten-year-old under the bed.

Sam went completely silent again. Not even a sniffle. Jiselle knelt down beside the bed and tried to look under it, but all she could see was darkness and the white rubber sole of one shoe.

“Okay, Sam,” she said. “Tell me what’s wrong. Can you please tell me?” She waited.

This time she counted to fifty.

Finally, she reached under the bed, fishing around until she’d gotten a grip on what she was fairly sure was a tennis shoe, and then a second one, and pulled Sam out by his feet as gently as she could.

He didn’t struggle. He emerged with a long strand of dust attached to his head, and his face a mess of tears and snot, wrinkled and blotched from crying.

“What’s wrong?” Jiselle asked, leading him to the edge of the bed by his wrist and sitting him down beside her.

“I miss my dad,” Sam sobbed.

“Oh, Sam,” she said, and she couldn’t help it then. A few tears ran from the corners of her eyes into the little valley between her lips and her nose. She wiped them away and said, “I’m so sorry. I miss him, too.”

So, they decided together that they needed to keep themselves busier. They wouldn’t miss Mark so much if they had 37 more to do. Especially in the evenings, after dinner, and just before bed. Jiselle would, they decided, read aloud to Sam in the evenings. He agreed that the Hans Christian Andersen looked good. She’d taken the book down from the shelf and held it out for him to see. “My father,” she told him, “read this whole book to me one summer.”

She placed it on his lap.

The heft of it was satisfying. The gilt-edged pages glowed. Opened, it smelled of pine trees and the past.

It was a hundred and two degrees that evening in the center of the city. For heat that summer, every record that could be broken had been. From the sewer grates rose a smell so sweet and terrible that people held tissues and pieces of clothing to their mouths and noses. A few wore surgical masks. The latest thing was surgical masks with noses and mouths printed on them.

Bozo noses.

Smiles with front teeth missing.

An elderly woman had tied a little scrap of pink chiffon scarf loosely around the muzzle of her poodle, which trotted beside her, looking about shyly, as if it were embarrassed about the scarf.

Some said it was the heat that was causing the Phoenix flu—which health experts were no longer referring to as the Phoenix flu but as hemorrhagic zoonosis, because it was not an influenza, they said, but an antibiotic/vaccine-resistant strain of Yersinia pestis.

Phoenix flu, they believed, was not only an inaccurate term; it was an incendiary one. People diagnosed with it were shunned, isolated in corners of emergency rooms, refused small-town hospital beds, driven out of apartment complexes, expelled from institutions of all kinds. It was hoped that calling it something scientific might lessen the public’s fear of it.

The public continued to call it the Phoenix flu.

It was not caused or spread by the heat, experts said, despite the ill effects the heat had on those who were already sick.

And birds, too, had been ruled out as infection-carriers.

If anything, it was said, humans were infecting birds.

Still, biohazard teams were sent out in yellow suits whenever a dead bird was found on the sidewalk or in a backyard—to take it away, dispose of it. The days of birdbaths and birdhouses and birdfeeders seemed over.

Then, after an outbreak at a daycare center, outraged citizens demanded a ban on imported toys—although no connection to the toys and the disease was ever confirmed. The Chinese government retaliated by banning flights from the United States to China if they held even the cremated remains of American dead, devastating Chinese Americans whose loved ones had requested to be returned to their homeland after their deaths.

But the Chinese government compared the scattering of American ashes in China to the medieval practice of catapulting plague-dead corpses over fortress walls to infect enemies.

There was nothing the U.S. government could do about the ban, except make threats.

Quarantining oneself, experts agreed, was futile. The virus could be in the water, in the dirt, in the air. Who knew? It could take years to discover the source of the infection, and more years to find a cure. Most people quit trying to guess where it might be, and how to avoid it, and simply went on with their daily lives. A poll asking, “How concerned are you about the Phoenix flu?” reported that 61 percent of Americans were Not very concerned. Another 10 percent were Not concerned at all.

As well as being the day of Britney Spears’s death, it was Jiselle’s birthday, and they were meeting her mother for dinner at Duke’s Palace Inn. It wasn’t the first time they’d eaten together since Jiselle’s wedding. There had already been a disastrous dinner at the house that had ended with Sara leaving the table without touching the food on her plate, and Sam running to the bathroom to throw up the liter of root beer he hadn’t mentioned having guzzled before sitting down to chicken and dumplings. (“For God’s sake, Jiselle, why do you let that boy drink soda?”) Fearing something even worse this time, and in public, Jiselle had almost canceled the birthday dinner, but she knew what her mother would think about that—about her new marriage, about her stepchildren, about her whole life, and all of her decisions—if she did. She would say, “How sad for you, alone on your birthday. Mark simply couldn’t take one day off to spend with you?”

They were still a block away from the restaurant when a bus rolled by, and the exhalation of diesel fumes came as a nearly pleasant relief in the stifling heat. A woman ran past with a baby tucked into her blouse. From under the damp white silk dangled little porcelain feet.

When they reached Duke’s Palace Inn, the front window was dark, but Jiselle could see the ghostly flickering of candles on the other side.

The year before, to celebrate her birthday, Mark and Jiselle had met in Copenhagen at the Tivoli Gardens, where they strolled among the flowers. The Danes said there had never been a summer like it—so much color, and the swarms of strange, stingerless bees hovering over everything in a shining, golden hum.

Together, Mark and Jiselle watched the changing of the guard outside the palace, and then took a boat ride along the canals, got a glimpse in the distance of the Little Mermaid shining against a gleaming sea—a provocative naked fish-girl, head bowed, as if she were self-conscious or a little sad, or both.

It was like seeing a character from a dream, in life. On the fireplace mantel in the house in which Jiselle grew up, her mother kept a figurine of the Little Mermaid—green, like the statue itself, but ceramic, and about the size of a lap dog.

Once, and only once, despite her mother’s many warnings not to, Jiselle had taken it down. She was twelve or thirteen, and holding it in her hands that day for the first time, she realized that it was hollow—and also heavy, especially for something hollow. When her mother walked in and saw her holding the Little Mermaid, she shouted, “Put that back. Your grandfather gave that to me.”

Jiselle had turned hurriedly to put the figurine back on the mantel, stammering something about just blowing off the dust, but her mother rushed at her, grabbed it out of her hands. “I’ll take care of that. You keep your hands off of it,” she said as she straightened the mermaid on the mantel, and then turned back to Jiselle with a look that was both threatening and beseeching. “Please.”

It was the first time Jiselle had considered the possibility that her mother might have loved her own father as much as Jiselle loved hers. It was the first time she’d ever even imagined her mother as a little girl—a girl sitting in a father’s lap, being patted on the head by his rough hand, maybe while he sang the Danish folksong Jiselle’s own father had sung to her:

Min Tankes Tanke ene Du er vorden, Du er mit Hjertes første Kjarlighed…

“You alone have become the thought of my thoughts. You are my heart’s first love…”

Her own father used to call Jiselle “my Danish princess,” and had told her, in fact, that her name in Danish meant “little princess.” Throughout her childhood, Jiselle had taken his word for it, until, in college, she looked it up.

By then it was already old news—old news of the most sordid nature—that her father was involved with Ellen, who had been Jiselle’s best friend since second grade. She’d thought by then, when it came to things having to do with her father, that nothing would surprise her. How many girlfriends had he had since her mother had thrown him out of the house, and how many of those girlfriends had been young enough to be his daughter, even if they weren’t his daughter’s age?

And still somehow it had surprised Jiselle to find, in that reference book, that the meaning of the name Jiselle was not “princess.”

It was “hostage.”

When she told her father this during one of their strained weekly phone calls, he snorted and said, “I wouldn’t know about that. Your mother was the one with the European pretensions. She certainly never asked me what I thought of the name.” But when, at Thanksgiving that year, Jiselle asked her mother how she’d come to give her the name Jiselle, her mother rolled her eyes and said, “Your father picked that one out.” And then, “How is your dear father?” she asked. “And your darling stepmother?”

“He’s not marrying Ellen,” Jiselle had said, trying not to sound defensive—but even to her it sounded protective and aggressive at the same time.

“God, Jiselle,” her mother had said, “I can’t imagine what kind of denial you’re in, to stand up for him.”

And, in truth, how many such denials had Jiselle managed to flimsily construct over the last few years?

He’s not dating Ellen.

He’s not in love with Ellen.

He’s not sleeping with Ellen.

All the time, apparently, he was.

But even before he’d been thrown out, and long before he’d started up with Ellen, it had seemed to offend and amaze her mother that Jiselle loved her father so much. When he came home from work and Jiselle ran screaming through the house to greet him, her mother would say, “Lord, Jiselle, he was just at the pharmacy, not the Crusades.”

So, the day she took down the Little Mermaid figurine, it was a revelation that her mother might have once loved her own father. He’d died many years before Jiselle was born, and her mother had always spoken disparagingly of the farm on which she’d grown up, her father’s endless labor. The manure, the pigs. The uncles in a perpetual war against the weather. Their hands under the hood of some machine all day. Her own mother’s exhausted death from heart failure at the age of fifty-three.

Standing with her back to the mantel and the Little Mermaid, her arms crossed, her mother had said to her, “It’s the only thing I have.”

In Copenhagen, Mark and Jiselle had taken a limousine together to the airport, although they had different flights back to the States. Mark was piloting a jet from Paris to Atlanta. Jiselle was headed to London, to LaGuardia, and from there to Detroit.

Their limousine driver was a young blond man, no older than twenty, who only nodded to the two of them after putting their luggage in the trunk. Between the front and back seats was a Plexiglas partition, and behind it, Mark kept Jiselle wrapped in his arms as the limousine moved smoothly through the flowers and towers and spires of Copenhagen on a Sunday morning. Church bells rang and echoed, rang and echoed, both monotonously and wildly, as if they had never really started and would never stop. Mark’s uniform smelled pleasantly stiff, like dry-cleaning chemicals, and like Mark. When the limousine stopped at an intersection, hundreds of bicyclists sped past, bikes flashing in the sunlight, sounding like the stingerless bees hovering over the yellow tulips in the Tivoli Gardens.

Some of the bicyclists were wearing the now-familiar American flag with a heavy black X through it.

Jiselle had glimpsed these all over the world.

Everyone hated the United States now, it seemed. For decades they’d been ruining the environment with their big cars and their big wars, and now they wanted to spread their disease to the rest of the world, too.

Yankee go home.

U.S. not welcome.

But, even as it got harder to travel—more bureaucracy, more hostility—during the glorious early months of their courtship, Jiselle and Mark met in exotic cities all over the world, spent their time in hotel beds, DO NOT DISTURB dangling in several languages from doorknobs.

They ate chocolates, drank champagne.

They took baths together, Mark’s knees up around Jiselle’s shoulders, Jiselle’s soapy feet sliding around his crotch, gingerly.

They ordered room service, ice cubes between her breasts, between his teeth, traced down her torso.

Afterward, they’d laugh about the sheets, which were damp, tangled.

As soon as they got into a room, they’d pull the curtains.

They ignored the fire alarm. Let’s just burn.

Together.

Oh. God.

In Brussels, Mark bought Jiselle something pink and battery-operated with long waving fronds. He had only to touch her with it to bring her to panting, helpless orgasms. When she opened her eyes afterward, he was looking down at her, smiling.

On the Italian Riviera, they went to a topless beach, where Mark rubbed suntan oil on Jiselle’s breasts in full view of the teenage boys smoking cigarettes under an umbrella beside them. When she looked over, one of the boys was rubbing his erection happily, unabashedly, through his cutoffs, looking at her.

When Jiselle rang the bell on the door of Duke’s Palace Inn, a man in a white apron unlocked it to let them in. Most of the more expensive restaurants in Chicago and on the outskirts had a locked-door policy now, and required reservations—ostensibly because, with the economy the way it was and the fears of the flu having changed the dining-out habits of the whole nation, chefs and restaurant owners had no way of estimating, any longer, the amount of food that would be needed on any given day or night.

But there had also been talk that this was just an excuse, really, to impart a false sense of safety to customers, who, it was presumed, would feel better about going to a restaurant to eat if they didn’t need to worry about unexpected people wandering in off the street—sick people, homeless people, strangers, the whole potentially infected population of those who would not think ahead far enough to make reservations at a nice restaurant.

The doorman locked the door behind them after they stepped inside.

At the hostess lectern, Jiselle stood blinking in the candlelight, scanning the dining room until she saw, at a round table in the center, her mother, who did not look up from her menu until Jiselle was standing beside her, touching her shoulder, looking down onto the top of her head with its ice-blond hair. She looked up then, and her gaze fell on Jiselle, Sam, Camilla, and Sara in turn. “Hello.”

Camilla smiled wanly and nodded at Jiselle’s mother. Sara stared at a vague place in the corner of the restaurant. Sam, bobbing on his toes, said, “Hi!” so loudly that a couple dining in a far corner of the restaurant looked over.

Jiselle sat down, trying not to look at her mother looking at Sara. Earlier, she’d given Sara her own black dress to wear when Sara couldn’t find hers, and had lent her, too, the beautiful black shoes she’d bought in Madrid.

It was a conservative, funeral parlor outfit, nothing like the one Sara had wanted to wear, and still, somehow, Sara managed to make it look provocative, managed to look like a girl whose job it was to deliver pornographic birthday greetings to corporate businessmen. Jiselle might have managed to hide the dress, but she hadn’t been able to keep Sara from wearing black fingernail polish, black lipstick, all that black eyeliner, the ring piercing her lower lip. She was pretty sure the black eyeliner was her own—the Chanel ebony pencil missing from her dresser drawer for a week—but God knew she was never going to say anything. She’d already resigned herself to the petty thefts. On the couple of occasions when it was something she couldn’t live without or couldn’t replace—the onyx ring Mark had bought for her from a street vendor on Isla Mujeres—Jiselle went into Sara’s room while she was out and searched around until she found it.

Then Sara waited until Jiselle was out, and went into Jiselle’s drawers and stole it back.

After that, Jiselle had no choice but to snatch it again and then to wear it day and night.

Her mother inhaled, looking from Sara to Jiselle. “Nice to see you,” she said. “Happy birthday, Jiselle.”

“Thank you,” Jiselle said. She sat between her mother and Sara, and across from Sam, who tucked his linen napkin into the collar of his shirt and kept it there until Jiselle managed to catch his eye, shake her head. Then he spread it theatrically onto his lap, smiling.

They ordered drinks when the waiter came over—sodas for the kids (“Just one tonight, Sam, okay?”) and champagne for Jiselle and her mother, along with an appetizer. Snails. Jiselle’s favorite dish at Duke’s. Bread was passed around in a basket so light it was hard to hold on to, as if they had been served emptiness in a basket made of air.

After the sodas and champagne arrived, Jiselle’s mother raised her glass and said, dispassionately, “Many happy returns.”

Jiselle and the children raised their glasses, too.

Jiselle was surprised, when she did, to see that her own hand, holding up the sparkling glass, was shaking.

“Let’s try to have a nice meal, shall we?” her mother said, looking around at the children.

“Yes,” Jiselle said, as if her mother had been talking to her.

They’d taken only a few, silent sips of their drinks before the snails were brought out on a little silver plate and set in the middle of the table. Sam leaned toward the plate, curious, but the girls recoiled. Sara put her napkin to her mouth as if to stifle a scream, as the smell of garlic rose from the small, curled, dark gray flesh. Camilla looked away, grimacing. Jiselle pierced one on the end of her small silver fork, brought it to her mouth, placed it on her tongue, and ate it slowly.

It was delicious—the soft, luxurious density of something delivered divinely from the sea, liberated from its shell by nymphs, relaxed into death by butter. That snail seemed nothing at all like the kind of creature Jiselle used to find clinging to rocks in her grandmother’s garden—its whole body a small, hopeless, damp tongue, bearing all that weight from one place to the next, seeming to think its shell might save it.

As she chewed, Jiselle kept her eyes on her plate, except to look up one time when her mother said to Camilla, “Aren’t you going to eat?”

Camilla didn’t answer. She was staring at the candle in the center of the table. It flickered, surged, contracted in a blue-and-orange dance, trying, Jiselle knew, to eat up all the oxygen in the room.

“Camilla?” Jiselle said. Camilla looked up then. Her eyes were so red and swollen they were painful to look at, and Jiselle looked away.

For hours after the news, Camilla lay on her bed with her face in her pillow, weeping, while Sara stomped around the house with her cell phone, spreading the bad news, sharing the grief. Jiselle hadn’t known they even liked Britney Spears. Wasn’t Camilla, at least, too old to be a Britney Spears fan? Wasn’t Sara too punk for a Barbie doll like Britney? Wasn’t Britney Spears, by then, old news anyway?

Apparently not.

Apparently Camilla and Sara had thought of Britney Spears as a kind of immortal sister. They were inconsolable. No, they did not want breakfast. Or lunch. Or to talk. Finally, after the second hour of weeping, Jiselle went to Camilla’s room, stood in the threshold, and said, “I’m sad, too, Camilla, but we can’t let it—”

“Let it what?” Camilla asked. Her tone, hysterical and angry at the same time, sounded vaguely threatening, and it was at that moment that Jiselle realized she’d had no earthly idea what she was about to say, anyway. In truth, was she even so sure she fully believed that it was inappropriate to grieve so deeply for Britney Spears? And if it was, why was it? They’d prefaced the special news bulletin with a few bars from “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,” and the tears had pricked Jiselle’s eyes before she’d even had a chance to blink.

Britney Spears, back then, with all that flaxen hair, still a child, half-naked, the wind blowing some wheat around behind her a long decade or more ago. The kind of girl who might own a winged horse—dead? Of the flu? Of hemorrhagic zoonosis? All that self-destructive energy, that combustion, just to die of the same infection that might kill the odd, unlucky nurse’s aide or mallard duck?

Anyway, she knew that even if she had managed to say something coherent to Camilla about how, maybe, it was inappropriate to grieve for a pop star the way you would grieve for a member of your own family, Camilla would have nodded politely through her tears, wiped her nose with a piece of tissue, and agreed—to Jiselle’s face. To her face, Jiselle was always right. Only later would Jiselle overhear Camilla muttering to her sister, “That bitch is so cold.”

Sara would simply have stomped out, saying something like, “Spare us your philosophy, Mommy.”

(In the previous week, Sara had taken to calling Jiselle—ironically, in italics—Mommy, while Camilla had still never called Jiselle by any name at all. Jiselle had no idea what, if Camilla were forced to get her attention in a crowd, she might have been able to bring herself to call out: Jiselle, or Stepmother, or Second wife of my father?)

What had Jiselle, standing at the threshold of Camilla’s room, thought she might say?

That was the problem with being a stepmother, Jiselle was beginning to realize, or with being a mother, for all she knew: you went around trying to convince children of things you weren’t that sure of yourself. That it was inappropriate to cry yourself sick over the death of a pop star. That it was better to read with the television off. That eating cookies before dinner was inherently wrong.

Sam was only ten, and he’d already figured out that a room looked just as clean if you kicked the laundry under the bed as it did if you spent the hours it would take to sort and fold and put the clothes in closets and drawers.

Wasn’t that what Jiselle herself had done for years?

Hypocrisy had somehow not been one of the “cons” she’d considered when thinking about resignation from her job to stay home with Mark’s children. When he’d first proposed the possibility, there had been so many things to think about that hypocrisy could never have fit on the “con” list.

Loss of seniority, pension, and job security; financial dependence after so many years of being on her own—these things had occurred to her.

When Jiselle’s mother asked her again if she planned to eat anything, Camilla finally said, in a quavering voice, “I’m not very hungry.”

Sam chased a snail around his plate with his fork, caught it, put it in his mouth, chewed, and said, “I don’t get why it’s such a big deal.”

Instantly, Jiselle recognized it as the worst possible thing he could have said, but by then it was too late. Sara whipped around to glare at her brother with her mouth open. Jiselle’s mother looked over. Jiselle cleared her throat nervously. “Sam,” she said. “Let’s not talk about that, okay?”

Obediently, Sam gave a world-weary shrug, and then he reached across the table for another slice of bread, dragging his elbow through the butter dish as he did. He wiped the butter off his elbow onto his pants leg, smiled pleasantly up at Jiselle’s mother, and continued to eat.

“What are we talking about?” Jiselle’s mother asked, looking around the table.

Jiselle cleared her throat, and then, under her breath, leaning toward her mother, answered, “Britney Spears. She died.”

Her mother blinked noncommittally. Camilla drew a ragged breath. Sara choked out, “Excuse me,” and stood up, heading for the women’s room. When she did, her linen napkin slid off her lap and onto the floor. They all glanced down at it, but no one made a move to pick it up.

“Britney Spears?” Jiselle’s mother asked, raising her eyebrows.

“Yes,” Jiselle said, scrambling to think of a way to change the subject. “The singer.”

“I know who Britney Spears is,” her mother said. “I just don’t know why we’d—”

Jiselle raised a desperate hand in the air over her mother’s head and began waving at their waiter. Her mother turned to look at him, too, and in one second he was beside the table. “Yes, ma’am?” he said to Jiselle, who opened her mouth with no idea what she should ask him for. Thinking frantically, she was surprised to hear herself say, as if she’d intended all along to say it, “It’s my birthday. Do you think we might have a cake after dinner?”

“Certainly.” The waiter smiled and bowed.

When he was gone, Jiselle’s mother said, shaking her head, “We haven’t even gotten our main course yet.”

“Oh,” Jiselle said. “I know. It’s just—you know. My birthday! I’m excited.”

Sam beamed. “Tell him to make it chocolate,” he said.