In a Perfect World Read online

  “Here it is,” Mark said. “Your home, if you’ll have it.”

  He took her by the arm and guided her through the rooms to the kitchen, where he presented her with a bouquet of tulips he said the children had picked for her themselves. They were carefully arranged on the kitchen table in a white vase—three black-cupped blooms, each one seeming to burn with a small electric light at its center.

  “Here,” Mark said.

  When she woke up next to him in his log house on the afternoon of her first visit, in his big four-poster bed under a Navajo blanket after making love, Jiselle slipped out of his arms to wander into the rooms of his house, and felt as if she recognized them from somewhere deep inside herself, as if the place had grown up like a shell around her dream.

  The sun was high in the sky, streaming through the lace curtains and the window shades, making a dappled splash at the foot of the bed, pooling on the wooden floorboards. Jiselle picked Mark’s shirt out of that pool of light, slid her arms into it, stepped through the curtain in the doorway into the other rooms, and she saw that all the thresholds were draped with colorful silk cloth instead of doors. It was such a beautiful gesture, those silk curtains stirring peacefully in the doorways to every room.

  The house was small and cluttered but very clean. The walls were made of raw logs and planed boards trimmed with brick. The windows were old-fashioned, too—the kind you cranked open. Verdigris iron rimmed the panes. There were real wooden shutters on the outside.

  Jiselle walked down the hallway between the bedrooms to the family room, with its comfortable tweed couch, two overstuffed chairs, a coffee table spilling magazines. A big TV took up one wall, and there was a sliding glass door against the other, opening onto a cedar deck.

  Mark had told her about the deck—how it was built around an oak tree, how the tree looked, from the family room, as if it grew straight out of the house. Jiselle went to the sliding glass doors and saw that this was true.

  The trunk of the oak poured upward through the cedar slats of the deck, and then it branched overhead, gloriously green—an enormous, ancient, tree. She slid the door open and stepped out. She touched the trunk. It was rough and warm.

  Mark had also told her that he and Joy had built the house as close to the ravine as they could without having to worry about the house falling into it after forty years of rainfall and erosion. Jiselle stood on the deck and looked into that beautiful abyss. The air smelled pure. She inhaled so deeply it made her feel a little dizzy, and she steadied herself with a hand to the trunk of the oak before turning back to the house. She wanted to see the children’s rooms.

  First, she peeked around the silk curtain in the doorway and into Sam’s room. A stuffed tiger on the floor. A cowboy hat on the desk. The bed was unmade, and the sheets had pirates on them—skulls and crossbones and tall-masted ships. There was a photo of Sam himself on the nightstand. From Halloween? His curly strawberry-blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail. He wore a patch over one eye.

  Camilla’s room was spotless. Just a row of slim hardcover books on a white shelf. A round green rug on the floor. The clover-covered bedspread was pulled up carefully over the pillows. A dustless desk with a stapler, a laptop, a small bowl of thumbtacks, and a few pencils lined up.

  Sara’s room, on the other hand, was the typical adolescent disaster. Clothes tumbled out of the closet and onto the floor. There was a half-full bottle of Diet Coke open on the nightstand. Books and notebooks were scattered across the desk. On the wall was an enormous poster of a wild-haired man with a naked torso, holding the neck of an electric guitar with one hand, the other pointed at the camera, middle finger raised. The bedspread was black, as were the silk sheets rumpled on the mattress, which had been pulled off the bed frame and onto the floor.

  Jiselle stepped out of the room and back into the hallway quickly, but she wasn’t alarmed. Although she herself had kept a tidy teenage room under her mother’s vigilant administration, she remembered how teenage girls could be. She remembered Ellen’s room. The piles of dirty laundry. The books and magazines scattered across the floor. Having to wade though the debris to get to the bed, where you had to push away more debris to sit down.

  She wandered to the kitchen then, where a bowl of red apples sat on the butcher-block countertop. She took one and smelled it before biting into it. Orchards and sunlight in that mouthful of apple. It was crisp. Tart and sweet at the same time. She stood and ate it down to the core in Mark’s kitchen, her bare feet on the ceramic tile, before finding the garbage pail under the sink and dropping it in.

  Then she made her way to the living room, where she went first to the bookshelf, studied the titles on the spines lined up neatly:

  Aviation Through the Ages. Light Aircraft Navigation Essentials. Memoirs of an African Big-Game Hunter. The Art of Chess. The Sibley Guide to South American Birds. Woodcraft.

  They were books that spoke of masculine hobbies—large, heavy books with glossy dust jackets, smelling of their own clean pages—and Jiselle thought with some shame of her own shelves, overstuffed with paperbacks. The broken spines and the pages folded over to mark a place to which she’d never returned. The library books were mixed in with the books she owned, so that she was always searching, and her books were always overdue.

  She would, she vowed, clear the shelves when she got back, dispose of those books, return the library books, donate all the others to someone, something (a homeless shelter? an orphanage?) before she moved into this perfect house with Mark. She would let someone less fortunate have them. She would clean up her act, as her mother used to tell her to do.

  She was thinking about that—about her fortune, and her worthless books, and her mother—when she turned and saw it hanging above the fireplace:

  A framed photograph.

  A full-length portrait.

  A wedding portrait.

  More than anything in that first moment of recognition, Jiselle was startled that it hadn’t been the first thing she’d seen when she walked in the door.

  It took up half of an entire wall.

  Framed in filigreed silver, it was perfectly centered over the mantel.

  In it, Mark looked so much younger that she might not have even recognized him if it hadn’t been for his eyes, deep set and dark, and the playful lift of the eyebrows, an expression she recognized—one he’d make boarding a plane, saying, “Howdy, folks,” to the flight crew before the passengers boarded and one of the flight attendants, always a woman, came up behind him to help him slide out of his coat. His eyebrows would rise in that casual, inverted V, and he’d say, sighing theatrically, “Ah. A good day to die.”

  But in this portrait he was only a prop. He was an afterthought. Jiselle stepped closer to look more carefully, although her heart was already beating hard. The center of this large photograph was the bride, of course, wearing a wedding gown, holding a blindingly white piece of cake up to the photographer. She was offering that piece of cake to the future, it seemed, on a wide silver knife. Her strawberry-blond hair cascaded over her shoulders in ringlets. She did not wear a veil but, instead, a ribbon of ivory velvet in her hair, wound through a strand or two, tied in a loose knot. Jiselle put her hand to her mouth.

  “Oh, dear,” Mark said, coming up behind her.

  He’d startled her, but she didn’t turn around. She couldn’t, transfixed as she was by that first bride’s gaze.

  “Oh, Jiselle,” Mark said. “I just keep that up so the children will feel, you know, as if their mother’s here. Of course, now I’ll take it down.”

  He took Jiselle’s shoulders in his hands and turned her around to look at him.

  He pulled her to him and kissed her then with so much gentle longing that her knees would have buckled beneath her if he hadn’t been holding her so steadily in his arms.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The spring passed in a blur of anticipation. When Jiselle wasn’t flying, she was busy with preparations—the catering, the flowers, the invitation
s.

  She still hadn’t met the children, but she’d sent the girls opal necklaces to wear with their bridesmaid dresses, and Sam (not for the wedding) a pirate’s three-cornered hat with a red feather. Mark would be bringing her to the house for a week prior to their marriage, and he said, “You can see for yourself then that they’re great kids, and they’ll adore you. But you’ll still have time to back out!”

  Until after their honeymoon in Puerto Rico, he would continue to employ the nanny. Afterward, they would “see what the next step should be.”

  “If you want to quit, to be home with the children, of course that’s fine. If not—”

  If not, Jiselle knew, they would need to find another nanny.

  She had not met the present nanny, but when she’d called Mark’s house once, a bright-sounding young woman had answered and called out to Mark in singsong, “The phone’s for you!”

  “Where does she sleep?” Jiselle asked.

  “When I’m here,” he said, “she sleeps at her apartment in town. When I’m gone, I don’t know. The couch? Why would I care? I hope you’re not jealous. I’m not one of those widowers who’s so desperate he sleeps with his children’s nanny.”

  “Of course not!” Jiselle had said.

  Who knew better than she that Captain Mark Dorn could have any woman he wanted?

  Still, twice in two weeks, Jiselle had tried to make an appointment with her therapist to discuss the issue of quitting her job to take care of Mark’s children. She knew she could afford no fuzzy logic here, with her wedding only weeks away, but when she called Dr. Smitty Smith’s office, she got only his answering machine, on which he’d left a recording saying that his patients should leave a message, which he would return when he was over his illness.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The chapel in which Jiselle had been baptized, the one they’d reserved for the wedding, was damaged by the flooding that started the first week of July, after the long week of relentless rain at the end of June, so Jiselle quickly reserved the small garden behind the restaurant, where the reception was to be held as well.

  Both events had to take place outdoors due to the new Health Department regulations requiring at least three months’ notice for an indoor gathering of more than thirty people. But the weather was terrible. After the rains, a thick humidity cloaked everything in more gray and stench. Some afternoons, the air was so thick and motionless that it felt like trying to breathe inside an aquarium. Mark and Jiselle decided to be married at twilight.

  The afternoon before the wedding, around four o’clock, Jiselle and her mother arrived at the garden behind the restaurant to check on the flowers and the tables and chairs, to make sure everything was in order and had arrived, along with the cooler of champagne.

  Jiselle had tried to call Mark earlier from her cell phone, but she couldn’t get a signal. She’d wanted to know how the children were. The night before, they’d gone out to dinner after the rehearsal, and Sam had thrown up at Jiselle’s mother’s feet. He’d been drinking 7-Up. Gallons of it. Every time he finished a large glass of it, the waitress had brought him another. Only Jiselle’s mother had been watching this, and later she said, “What do you expect, letting a child drink all that soda? Of course he’s going to throw up.”

  But when Jiselle spoke to Mark that morning, Sam seemed fine. Camilla, however, was lying down, complaining of menstrual cramps, and Sara had not yet broken the Vow of Silence, as Mark had begun to refer to it. She’d begun it the week Jiselle came to stay, and Jiselle knew, from sneaking a look at her diary, that she planned to continue:

  If he marries this stupid bitch, I’m going to make their lives a living hell.

  For one thing, I’m never going to say another word out loud to either of them as long as they live.

  After they’d supervised the raising of the canopy over the garden by Perfect Party Rentals, Jiselle and her mother went back to the house together to get dressed. Jiselle’s wedding dress, freshly laundered at BC-YU Cleaners, hung on the back of the door of her childhood bedroom, now her mother’s sewing room. It was draped in a clear plastic sheet emblazoned with a black cartoon caricature of a ninja soldier with the face of B.C. Yu, the laundry’s owner and operator, a sword held high over his head.

  Jiselle had known B.C. for years. She’d driven into town with her mother to drop off their clothes at his establishment a thousand times. He’d dry-cleaned Jiselle’s prom dresses, steam-ironed her graduation gown, laundered the black dress she’d worn to her father’s and Ellen’s funerals. He’d cleaned those and wrapped them in the same clear sheet with his face and the sword. It was a perfect caricature, and Jiselle could never decide whether it was, for B.C., a joke (playing off stereotypes—the mild-mannered Korean dry cleaner turned ninja?) or a fantasy.

  She was exhausted and closed the sewing room door. The film of humidity and drizzle that had coated her during the wedding preparations had mixed with the smell of her own sweat. She was too tired to take a shower just yet. She had to rest for a minute or two first.

  Because there was no longer a bed in her old room, Jiselle lay down on the floor beside the sewing table and closed her eyes. She heard the shower begin in the bathroom, and the sound of the shower doors sliding open and closed, and then she fell asleep to the music of water pelting the naked flesh of her mother, and then she was dreaming—dreaming that she was under the Perfect Party Rentals tent, waiting for a wedding to begin. It was a dream within a dream, and the feeling was so peaceful that it didn’t matter to Jiselle whether or not anything ever happened to her again. There was water running somewhere, and the sounds of doors opening and closing politely, and then, “Oh my God, Jiselle!”

  Her eyes snapped open. She sat up, finding herself in the sewing room again, with her mother standing over her wearing the salmon-pink linen dress she’d bought for the wedding—her ice-blond hair carefully clipped behind her head; her white summer shoes, her matching purse over her arm—and an expression of horror on her face.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she shouted. “You’re getting married in thirty minutes.”

  “How long have I been asleep?” Jiselle asked. She looked at the gold watch Mark had given her for her birthday and saw that an hour had passed. The hour she’d allotted for dressing, and makeup, and arranging her hair.

  “For God’s sake,” her mother said, “get your dress on!”

  And then, still stinking, stripped down to her underwear, having only enough time to drag a brush through her hair, Jiselle was ripping the ninja off her wedding dress, pulling it up over her hips, hearing the fabric rip with a terrible, permanent sound, and realized that she was stepping on the hem of the dress at the same time that she was yanking it on, and then she was in the passenger seat of her mother’s car.

  “Oh Mom,” Jiselle said. She was trying not to cry.

  “Don’t talk,” her mother said.

  But Jiselle couldn’t help it.

  “I just can’t believe—”

  “I said, don’t talk, Jiselle. It’s just going to make it worse if you start crying now. This whole thing is a fiasco anyway.”

  Jiselle bit her lip, which tasted like salt, and willed herself not to cry, not to speak, but then, it seemed, her mother’s floodgates burst:

  “Why exactly, Jiselle, do you think I kicked your father out when you were fifteen?”

  “Because…” Jiselle said, but then realized she had nothing to say. Somehow, in her mind, she’d connected the dog, Bingo, with her parents’ divorce. Her father had come home with the dog, and the next day he was gone. But, surely, the dog could not have been the last straw. Her parents had been married for twenty years by then.

  “Because he was sleeping with that little slut already. I caught them in our bed in the middle of the afternoon while you were at school. Your little friend was playing hookie.”

  “No,” Jiselle said. “Mom, they didn’t start—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Jiselle, be quiet.”
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  Be quiet.

  Jiselle’s mouth was still open, but she couldn’t speak. It was as if her mother had cast a spell over her. Jiselle saw that her mother’s hands were holding the steering wheel so tightly that the knuckles had gone from white to red, and she was shaking her head in little snaps. Her lips were pursed, but she was also grinding her teeth.

  “I have been keeping my mouth shut about this for the last eighteen years, but didn’t it ever cross your mind? Do you ever remember your father taking an interest in anything about your life except for your friend Ellen?”

  Jiselle put her hand on the door handle, as if she might be able to simply step out of the car.

  “Well? Why do you think he was always so eager to give darling little Ellen a ride home or pick her up for you?”

  Jiselle didn’t move or swallow. She couldn’t.

  “And now my daughter’s about to make the same mistake I made, marrying a man because he’s charming and handsome, without knowing another damn thing about him.”

  Jiselle had to unroll her window despite the air-conditioning in her mother’s car, and still she could hardly breathe. She had to close her eyes. She let the air rushing past her pummel her face like ghosts in boxing gloves. Finally, her mother pulled over, brakes squealing, wheels thumping up against the curb. “Get out,” she said to Jiselle as she jumped out herself, in her salmon-pink suit, and disappeared around the corner of the restaurant.

  When Jiselle finally managed to get out of her mother’s car—carefully, she did not want to risk ripping the hem of her dress even more—and closed the car door, someone behind her called out, “Lady?”