A hike? Monopoly? A trip to town to the hobby shop?
Since the children had started school in September, Jiselle had mostly spent her afternoons alone in the house, moving through its rooms, feeling baffled as to how to begin to clean them up.
The dust she’d dispersed a few days before would have either settled again or redistributed itself with maddening genius. Sam’s plastic action figures would be everywhere. The girls’ shoes, jewelry, magazines were scattered across every flat surface, and Jiselle knew that if she picked those up and moved them there would be shrieking later—
Where the hell’s my bandana? What did you do with my magazine?
And the
floors.
The floors seemed magnetized—eternally capturing or
creating
long clouds of lint and hair held together with dust, which were spirited into corners when Jiselle turned her back. She would have just finished with the broom, turned around, and there those clouds would have gathered again.
On the phone from upstate New York, Annette said, “Get a fucking housekeeper. For God’s sake. You’re not his
maid,
Jiselle.”
But how, Jiselle thought, could she justify her days to herself or to anyone else if she had a housekeeper, if someone else were coming in to do the few things she had to do?
And what would
she
do while the housekeeper did these things? And what would she do with the time left over?
Sometimes the vacuum cleaner sounded like the dual engines of a jet starting up. Or Jiselle would hear, overhead, an actual jet—a distant needle in the sky—and she’d imagine her past still taking place up there. The metal cart. The drawer of ice. The faces looking up at her. The way turbulence or exhaustion, or simply being thirty-five thousand feet in the air, could turn even the most self-satisfied businessmen and women into needy children.
They were scared.
They did not have wings. They did not know how to fly. They were incredibly grateful for the calm smile, the foil packet of pretzels.
But of course there had been the other sort of passenger. Drunk on miniature bottles of Jack Daniel’s. Punching their flight attendant buttons for more. There had been the woman who’d said to Jiselle once, when she’d had to rouse her from a drooling sleep to put her tray table back up for landing, “I hope you
burn in hell.”
She didn’t miss that.
But, since quitting, the
days
could last so long. Sometimes Jiselle would sit down at the kitchen table and will the phone to ring.
Call me, Mark.
When it did ring, she’d jump, heart racing, but it usually wasn’t Mark. Once or twice, it was Brad Schmidt calling from next door, asking if Jiselle had heard this or that bad piece of news on the radio. Although their houses were separated by a long, tall hedge, Brad Schmidt seemed able to see through it, to know when Jiselle was sitting by the phone.
No, she would not have heard the news. She didn’t listen to the news. Why would she? Whales washing up on beaches. Chickens being burned alive, and some man who called himself Henry Knighton killing prostitutes in Seattle to “cleanse the earth.”
The news had to
happen
to her before she knew about it—and even then she wasn’t always sure what it was, like the afternoon when, while folding laundry in the bedroom, she heard a crash in the kitchen.
No one was home. Mark was flying; the children were at school. Jiselle stepped cautiously out of the bedroom and went to the kitchen, where she found that the cupboards had all swung open. A broken dish lay on the ceramic tiles. A coffee cup had rolled off the counter and into the sink. She stood with her hand to her chest for what must have been several minutes, feeling her heart beat hard, trying to get used to this new order of things, this unfamiliarity, the idea that the kitchen cupboards could open on their own and spill their contents. Then she heard Brad Schmidt shout, “Hey!” from the other side of his hedge, and she hurried to the kitchen window and looked out to see him standing in the side yard, his arms parting the branches, looking through them. “You know what that was, Mrs. Dorn?”
“No,” Jiselle called back, opening the window to hear his answer.
“That
was an earthquake!”
Indeed, a rare Midwestern earthquake had shaken the whole region. Gently but surely, it had registered itself with a few framed photographs falling off walls, some cracks in a freeway overpass, that dish Jiselle had to pick up off the kitchen floor, and the cup out of the sink. Not terribly damaging, just surprising.
“This is just the beginning,” Brad Schmidt said to her later at the end of their driveways. “Tip of the iceberg. Tornadoes. Tsunamis. Hold your hat on. Ever read about the Black Death? It was all there. Before the plague did its worst work—the floods, the winds, the earthquakes. You wait.” There was no mistaking the tone in his voice for anything but excitement.
After considering his options for his free afternoon, Sam decided on a hike into the ravine behind the house.
He loved a hike. Loved the ravine. He and Jiselle had already taken a few hikes together since she’d moved in. There was a good trail, and Sam knew every inch of the ravine and liked to dispense his knowledge. Jiselle was the ingénue. Everything surprised her. Rabbits surprised her.
Ferns
surprised her. The occasional deer crashing away through the trees. Raccoons.
That afternoon, the pine trees pulsed with light under a blank white sky. Following the path into the ravine, Jiselle had the sense of entering a vast emptiness. Something abandoned. Many species of birds had migrated south. Animals were hibernating. The only sound was the watery, distant call of a pigeon. There was not a plane in the sky, as far as Jiselle could see. Not even a contrail fraying above them.
Sam walked ahead of her on the path. She’d made him wear one of his father’s fishing caps—a smashed khaki thing that was too big for him—because the exposed flesh on his freshly shaved head looked so pale. Now, trudging ahead of her in the cap, he looked comical, top-heavy, like some cartoon character, with his bony shoulders, his long gait, that hat.
She was looking from Sam’s back to the treetops, thinking what a perfect day it was (warm but not hot, the whole afternoon ahead of them) when
it
ran across the path only a few inches in front of her.
A warm-blooded darkness. A sneaky, wild, black furred thing, slipping between herself and Sam.
If she hadn’t frozen instinctively, Jiselle would have tripped over it. But after freezing, she jumped backward, screamed, and Sam turned just in time to see the rat scurry off, and Jiselle’s boot (which was all wrong for hiking, she realized at that moment, the heel of it too smooth and high) and the path slide out from under her. And suddenly she was slipping backward into the muck, arms windmilling ridiculously around her as she tried to regain her balance, not regaining it, propelling her instead farther and farther off the path until she finally fell with a thud, and then was simply sitting in the muck, on her butt, the dampness seeping in. She looked up.
The expression on Sam’s face was bright with shock. His eyes were wide, his mouth an exaggerated zero.
“Ji-
selle?”
They stared at each other for a few seconds before they both started to laugh, laughing until they were gasping with it. Sam, holding his stomach, doubled over, finally managing to ask, “Are you okay?”
“Well,” Jiselle said, wiping the tears from her eyes, “my
pride
is a little wounded.”
She tried to push herself up, but her hands slid out from under her, and then, when she slid through the muck again, she just gave up and lay back laughing. What difference did it make now? She was covered by then with the stuff.
Sam reached down to offer her a hand, and Jiselle said, taking it, “This sucks,” as Sam pulled her to her feet, and her body emerging from the muck made a genuine sucking sound, and they started to laugh so hard again that Sam lost his grip on her hand, and she was lying on her back in the muck again.
“What were you thinking?”
She looked up. She hadn’t heard Mark pull in the driveway, although she’d known he was on his way home. She and Sam were sitting beside each other on the couch, reading from the Hans Christian Andersen collection, “The Happy Family,” in which a family of naive snails foolishly envy their cousins, the escargots. Mark stood in the center of the family room holding his bag in his hand as if he might not bother to set it down.
Jiselle tried to keep her voice from trembling as she said, “He had head lice, Mark.”
She had already told Mark this news over the phone. Camilla had gotten home from school, seen Sam’s shaved head, and gasped, “Does
Dad
know about this?” She let her mouth hang open, staring at her brother, and then looked at Jiselle.
Jiselle had flushed. Hot. Sweaty. Except for the most casual criticism (“Our mother used to squeeze the orange juice herself”), Camilla had never said anything before to Jiselle’s face that wasn’t full of sugary approval—
Great! Thank you! How cool!
—and Jiselle felt now, seeing her look of deep disapproval, that something shameful was being exposed. Dirty underwear, smelly feet. That shameful thing was, she realized, her own willful naiveté. Jiselle had known (how could she not?) that the girl hated her, had overheard what she had to say to her sister from behind the curtains of their rooms, but she had let herself pretend it was something it wasn’t, anyway, and that determined ignorance had made her even more detestable, she realized now as Camilla walked swiftly out of the room.
Sara had simply come in, looked at Sam, and turned around. Her shoulders, Jiselle thought, seemed to be shaking. With laughter?
A few minutes later Jiselle heard Camilla whispering from her bedroom on her cell phone, “She just totally shaved Sam’s head, Dad. She’s gone
crazy.”
A few minutes after that, Mark called Jiselle on the house telephone, pretending he didn’t know. He started by telling Jiselle that he was in an airport lounge in Newfoundland. That there was so much wind that a corporate jet had been tipped over on the runway. He asked her how she was, how the kids were, how the weather was, and finally she couldn’t stand it anymore and just blurted out, “I shaved Sam’s head because he had head lice.”
There was a sigh, and then a clearing of the throat, and then, “You’re kidding, right? Jiselle? Tell me you’re kidding?”
“No,” Jiselle said, and even to herself, it sounded like pleading. “He would have hated the shampoo.”
She did not, and never would, tell Mark about the secretary, and what she’d said.
If he were my son, I’d shave his head.
She knew what Mark would say about that—about superstition, about hysteria, about the flu.
He said, sounding weary, “I guess, Jiselle, we’ll have to discuss this when I get home.”
Now, still holding his black leather bag, Mark walked over to Sam, took his son’s chin in his palm, moved his head around, inspecting, and then he looked over at Jiselle, and said, “There are ways to get rid of head lice without shaving the kid’s head, Jiselle. Jesus Christ.” He shook his own head. “Surely,” he said, “you must have thought…” He trailed off.
“Thought what?” Jiselle asked, but no sooner had the words come out of her mouth than she realized, suddenly, clearly,
what.
Joy.
Her curls.
Those cascades of strawberry-blond ringlets ribboned with satin on her wedding day. What that hair must have looked like beside Mark, stretching from her pillow to his in the mornings. The smell of it after she’d washed it. Rain. There was a rain barrel in the backyard, and Camilla had pointed it out one day and said, “Our mother used to wash her hair with rainwater.”
Maybe she used to let the girls brush it. Like handmaidens. In the evenings. Sitting at the little vanity table. The sparks flying off the brush into the air. Maybe Mark used to gather it in his hands and kiss it. Maybe Sam, still a baby, would have taken it in his cereal-sticky fists and shoved it into his mouth.
Oh my God,
Jiselle thought, full of understanding:
Sam’s hair had belonged to Joy.
She could feel her lips quivering. She couldn’t speak.
Mark exhaled.
“Look,” he said, seeing the expression on her face. “It’s okay. It’s okay, Jiselle. You just…didn’t think. What’s done is done. It’s just hair. It’ll grow back.” He shrugged, but then he turned away. It was the first time he’d ever come home without taking her in his arms.
“Daddy!”
Camilla called then from her bedroom, dancing out from under the cloth in the doorway. She threw her arms around her father. He lifted her up off her feet, swung her around. “How’s my princess?” he asked.
Jiselle watched them from the couch. The light from the sliding glass doors shone on Camilla’s golden hair, and a kind of pure white light flashed from it. Her cheeks were flushed. The little pearl studs in her ears looked damp, iridescent, freshly plucked from the sea.
“It was my idea!” Sam shouted then, loudly.
Jiselle looked down at him, startled, and Sam pressed his eyebrows together, elbowed her sharply.
Mark turned to look at him, and then at Jiselle. How was it that the tears sprang up so instantly, so unbidden, into her eyes, as if they’d been there all along, waiting?
“Sweetheart,” Mark said to Jiselle. “I’m sorry. I know you only did what you thought was best.”
Camilla stepped away, disappeared back into her room, as Mark came over to Jiselle on the couch and kissed the top of her head, as if she were one of the children. Still one of his children, if not his favorite.