In a Perfect World Read Free

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:
    Dear Ms. McKnight, It has been brought to our attention etc. etc. etc. on the evening in question etc. etc.—and in conclusion may we remind you that your job is not only to be liked by the passengers but to maintain safety, order, and a professional outward appearance of calm…
     
    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,