Gavin says mournfully, “Aguardiente Group never got that zoning nailed down. They don’t like talking to the neighbors. But our man bagged it.” He nods at Brian. “High-density and mixed-use, right?”
“That zoning board.” Brian can’t resist the boast. “They were out for my blood.”
“Always,” Javier says. His wingman.
Brian gives a good dash of salt to the remains of his New York strip. “Northeast Fifty-sixth. I went to an art opening there. It looked like a combat zone. There was this weird old space, closer to the west. I think it used to be someone’s house.”
“Residential.” Conrad checks the bottom of his drained highball glass, then looks around hopefully. “Suburban. As in suburban warfare. Ha.”
“That area, they’ll be begging for high density. You’re doing them a favor,” Harold says. “So you are all set with that financing?”
“Gentrify me, oh baby!” Conrad breathes, lifting the glass from his server’s hand.
“Shit, man.” Javier has a look of furious concentration, staring around the table. “Build on the outskirts—there’s the Everglades. Suburbs is all freakin NIMBY. And try to be nice and fix up the core? They’re hollering gentrification. Where the hell you supposed to put people?”
“Hey, you don’t have to tell me,” Harold says dolefully.
“Follow the money, baby,” Conrad says.
Brian draws himself up and looks around at the table. “We’re doing good work here and there isn’t a goddamned thing to apologize for. Building houses is God’s work. Look at those missionaries in—where do they go? Guatemala? Putting up those shacks for people.”
“Yeah, the only difference is that ours have a security system downstairs,” Javier says, laughing. Brian can’t tell if he’s agreeing or mocking him.
“He’s right, actually,” Harold says. “It is God’s work. I believe it.”
The men nod and there’s a good moment of values lining up with financial goals. Brian lowers his eyes to his steak.
“Of course some Little Haiti citizens’ action group has just popped up—breathing down our necks,” Gavin says.
“Day late, dollar short.” Conrad is almost humming. “They got their payout. Let them try to fight us now.”
“It won’t look very pretty if they do,” Brian says. Something about Conrad always makes Brian want to push him down a flight of stairs.
Javier has a narrow, skeptical look. “What’s behind it? Anyone heard anything?”
“Stryker?” Gavin murmurs. A competing developer: Brian knows the name. A small-timer, which makes sabotage tactics more likely.
“Oh baloney,” Conrad brays. “Styker doesn’t know his elbow from his ass from anything . . .” He drunkenly waves the intimation away.
And the others are already distracted, draining their glasses: they don’t want to talk about the actual projects; that’s old news. They like to think about the next deal and the one after that. “Well, onward soldiers.” Brian throws his cloth napkin on the table, accidentally spraying it with bread crumbs moments after Chantelle whisked the tabletop. “Oh God. Sorry.” He tries to brush at the crumbs with his hand, spreading them everywhere. Chantelle places a restraining hand on the forearm of his jacket. “Please, sir.”
He sits still, face stiff, as she brushes up all the crumbs and rights the cloth.
THE MEN’S LOBBY HAS a comforting lushness: potted palms, the lighting angled and discreet, an inviting spot for the men to make their ruminative strolls. He pushes through the doors to the inner sanctum. Entering this dim room with its splash of reflection is like catching a glimpse of a ghost. He holds his hands under the faucet, then combs them back over what’s left of his hair. He stares hard at himself. There are blue shadows under his eyes, in-dwellings. What do you call one lawyer at the bottom of the sea?
Chantelle has graduated high school. He touches the mirror.
Chantelle has started college. Community college. He’d hoped his own kids would attend Cornell. She’d had to walk several blocks out of a poorer neighborhood to attend Gables High. He feels proud of her.
His own mother had seemed the reserve of all love. But there was a thread of delicacy in her: he felt it within himself—a sensitivity to the world, a snappable filament. She suffered, stranded in a family of men, eating sweets, her body softening, losing the bones in her face, her afternoons spent sleeping or hunched in tears, a kind of pure surrender. At times, over the last few months, Brian too has felt visited by that old grief, the allure of surrender.
What. What should he and Avis have done? Put their girl’s face on a milk carton?
Missing: Felice Muir, Age 13.
Kidnapped by herself.
Motivation: Unknown.
What child does such a thing as that? Could she have been that unhappy? The temptation was to blame each other: Her mother’s daughter. Avis pointed to Brian’s absence from their life. They fought about what to do. Open a bank account for her? Rent an apartment? She refused everything they tried to offer. “She can always come home,” Brian finally said, his voice ragged with exasperation. “She knows where we live.”
Felice seemed so tiny and delicate at birth, it had taken them weeks to attempt bathing her. Avis was terrified of dropping the baby, so Brian held her: he remembered the moment that he’d dipped her tiny body, white and curved as a lotus, into the basin. Her newborn eyes widened and fastened on his—a look that pierced him. He felt he would lay down his life for his daughter. But things were never easy between Brian and Felice. She became aware of her own beauty, fussing over her clothes and hair, it seemed, from the moment she recognized her own reflection. She showed no interest in the ball games he attended with Stanley, not even in backyard games of catch and badminton. Brian caught his own stern expression flickering over her head as she looked into the mirror.
Still, there were many good moments: the hunt for shells on Sanibel Beach, long weekends in the Keys, the spring break when Felice stood at the end of the pier beside Brian and her brother. He’d bought them each their own Zebco reels and she waited patiently for the line to nod, eventually landing more than Brian or Stanley. Those long, warm afternoons of blue diamond skies, soaking a line, the flashing twists of fish, those belong to Brian and his children.
There was one night in particular: the four of them in a vacation rental on Pompano Beach, a fifties-era unit in the beach grass. He remembers a burning white circle of moon and the night, scooped out, almost cobalt behind it. There was some excitement on the beach, voices under their window. A little girl banged on their door, still open at nearly midnight, and called through the screen frame, “They’re hatching!”
Stanley and Felice rushed from their beds, Brian and Avis followed, laughing. They huddled around a staked, taped-off section of beach, waiting with a small crowd as the sand trembled, gray under the moonlight. It bubbled, then shed from the backs and flippers of emergent baby turtles. They watched the tiny creatures—tens, hundreds—struggle over the sand to the shoreline, flippers beating blind and determined. Brian watched his children watching, craning forward, pacing the sea turtles, fanning away any little stones or shells. In that warm, salty night, he felt as if the texture of time itself were thickening, settling over them, as if they would be held together in the froth of air, its silky threads attaching and keeping them safe, everlasting family.
THE RINGING ON THE other end steadies Brian as he drifts near the foyer by the entrance. He turns to face into the wall. “Hi, hello dear.”
She says, “Brian,” and then, “How is your meeting? Did you eat?” Her voice is stiff. Still angry about their earlier fight? Then it comes to him: Felice didn’t show. He’d been almost certain this would happen again. The receiver feels hot and a fringe of sweat breaks out above his temples. The phone slides a little in the damp of his palms. He rests his forehead against the wall. “Oh darling,” he whispers, “what can we—what—” But there’s a rumble of voices behind the doors, and then
the whole table of men emerges from the bar. Gavin nods to Brian as he lumbers through the front lobby. Javier parks himself right next to Brian and leans against the wall. Something tightens in Brian’s gut; he turns into the receiver and asks Avis, “How you holding up?”
“Just fine, dear. Don’t . . . I’m fine.”
Javier interlaces his fingers and straightens his arms behind his back, then tips his head from side to side, popping the vertebrae in his neck.
Brian wants to tell her about Chantelle, ask what she thinks Felice is doing with her absconded life, but this seems, now, deliberately cruel. “You know—is that bird still making a racket? How’s the noise level?”
“Brian,” she says more quietly. “Don’t worry about that.”
“Well, it affects the whole neighborhood.” His voice grows professional. “There are nuisance laws. It’s why we live in the Gables. Civil codes.”
“You know what, let’s not talk about the bird.” She sounds almost like a phone-menu voice, like the automated answering service at Citibank.
Javier hums, whisper-sings not quite under his breath.
“Well. Damn thing.”
“Brian. I’m sure you’re right.”
“Well . . . I don’t mean to . . .” His voice seems to echo back at him. “I’m not trying to be right.” Brian lowers his voice into the phone, cups it with his other hand. “Dear? Are you there? Can we—let’s talk again later . . . They’re waiting for me.”
“I’m sure they are.”
“Now, why are you so—what is it? Is it that bird?”
“Brian, it’s nothing.”
“It’s nothing,” he echoes. “Well, I have to take you at your word.”
Long pause, then, “Yes—consider it an oral contract, okay?”
He winces, places his hand on his head. “Okay, well. I guess I’ll call later, okay?”
No signal. He snaps the phone cover closed. Indicted, found guilty. He crosses his arms and blots his hands on his sleeves.
“How’s the wife?” Javier jingles the change in his pockets.
Brian makes a waving-off gesture, but Javier claps a hand on Brian’s shoulder and says, “Hey man, really.”
“What?”
“Honestly, how’s things. How’s the niño? He doing okay?”
Little boy. The same thing Javier calls his twenty-two- and twenty-five-year-old sons. “As far as I can divine.” Brian laughs softly; he can’t meet Javier’s eyes. Javier talks to his children every day—his married daughters live down the street from him. He never asks about Felice.
“I meant what I said before. You know what we should do? We should take Javito and Juanchi and Stanny out bonefishing on the boat again, like the old days.”
The old days. They went fishing exactly once. Juan hooked a rock and snapped his line. Stanley was so sun-scorched the skin across his nose and forehead turned purple. Still, it was a good trip—they drank beer with lime—even fifteen-year-old Stanley—and ended up going out for grilled mahi since they hadn’t caught anything. “I don’t know, Jav—Stan works through the weekends these days. He’s doesn’t get a lot of time off.”
“See, that’s your problem—you guys working nonstop like robots. Is that what life’s for? You really want to work so much you don’t enjoy the being alive part?”
Brian smiles through an internal sag: Javier sees no divisions between himself and his kids. He eyes the rectangular suit backs of his exiting associates, gauges the tenor of their laughter. They’re not laughing at him: he knows this. As an attorney, there’s little he finds more tiresome than paranoia. What’s that joke? Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t laughing at you? He touches his eyes with his fingertips. When he looks up again, he notices Javier watching him. “Where were you today, man?”
“What’re you talking about?”
“No, no.” Javier looks around impatiently. “I know you, man. You weren’t there. Not in the car, not at lunch. You were”—he flits his fingers in the air—“all gone.”
Brian is struck by his certainty: does Javier know him? A fishtail of fear slips through him. “It’s been a hard time. With Avis. This year, it’s . . .”
“I knew it.” Javier’s hands drop loosely against his sides. “When is it not the woman? I get it. But you got to draw that line, right? It’s interfering with your superb concentration, man. Maybe you’re fooling the others, hombre, you’re not fooling your old partner here. Take that beautiful girl out to dinner. Enjoy each other. You’re letting things get to you. Listen to me—you can’t let them get you. Keep it light, right?”
“Light,” Brian repeats, checking his Blackberry. “Yeah—I don’t know if that’s on the agenda.”
Javier slaps him on the shoulder. “Sure it is, buddy. Easiest thing in the world.”
BACK AT HIS DESK, Brian jots notes to himself: research—NE 56th? Ask Agathe to look up precedents. Neighborhood Associations. He’s got an idea for the in-house newsletter’s “Legal Eye” column—Considerations of the Ethical Developer: Established Neighborhood Fabric Vis-à-Vis New Development. Brian types bullet points on the computer: Quality of Life; Family and Friend Connections; Sense of History and Stability; Connection to Place. Parkhurst loves it when Brian “talks ethics,” which Jack believes is more compelling coming from legal counsel than from “some fairy PR guy.” “Proof we’re not one hundred percent bastard,” Parkhurst cracked. Now that Brian has a staff of associates, paralegals, and clerks, he has more time to construct a conscience for PI&B. His argument with Avis lingers, a sooty dankness in the office, behind his eyes. Brake noise and car horns slice through the window. His hand slips over the mouse when a fragrance reaches him. It’s familiar, yet he can’t place it: barely sweet, like funeral orchids, the earth of geraniums. For some reason he thinks again of Felice—sprawled on the living room floor, mouth pursed, removing toenail polish, her narrow back hunched over her work, purple-stained cotton balls all around, black hair scooped over one shoulder. An entire summer of polish remover and stained cotton balls. That sweetish acetone reek. “Doesn’t it bother you?” he’d asked Avis—always so particular about keeping the house “clear.” “Of course.” She’d held up her own trimmed hands. “But she’s that kind of girl.”
A voice behind him says, “Brian? Am I disturbing you?”
Fernanda is leaning in his office door. He sits back in his chair open-eyed. She enters, takes the leather guest chair, and lets the seat glide back, then forward. “I’m sorry to interrupt.” Her voice a soft undertow. “I wanted to thank you for helping me earlier.”
“Helping?”
Her smile tilts, half-bitten. “Well, Javier,” she says. “He keeps ‘dropping by.’ ” She curls her fingers into quotation marks. “And there’s nowhere to hide in these glass offices up here. I don’t know how you guys get anything done in these fish tanks.”
“Christ, that Javier,” he says, feeling disloyal. “A little too hands-on, sometimes.”
“That’s one way to put it.” She leans over and picks up the framed photo on his desk. “Aha.” She tilts it, a sliver of light in her palms. He has a funny impulse to reach forward, slide it gently from her fingers. “Is this your family?”
Javier took it. The photo shows Brian with his arm around Avis’s shoulders, and Stanley, inches away, holding up a fish, tail lifted, he’d just caught in the Sebastian Inlet. It was a year after Felice had run away for good, the summer before Stanley left for college. A good trip. Still, the three of them look gaunt, their smiles vaporous—all photos post-Felice looked like this. “Yeah,” Brian says. “That’s them.” Them?
“They’re charming. How old is your son?”
Brian clears his throat. “Well, he’s twenty-three now. I guess he was almost eighteen in that shot.”
“And this is your wife? She’s lovely.”
Brian lowers his eyes: Avis is lovely. Her face now not so different from when they first met: the ice tones beneath her brow, the so
ft corners of her lips, her skin lit like a Baroque portrait. Fernanda replaces the photo but her hand lingers a moment, hovering over his desk. He notices a dot of silver glinting at her clavicle. “I love that you have them here.” She doesn’t look at him but at the photograph.
When the phone rings, he glances at the phone, line two, Agathe. He presses Off.
Fernanda lifts her chin, puts her hands on the chair arms. “I should let you get back to it.”
“No, please don’t.” He lifts his hand. “It’ll stop.” He waves at the phone. “I mean—it’s probably just one of the clerks. Research reports. I can get those later.”
“Oh, is that all?” She smiles archly. “Isn’t that, like, your job?”
He rubs the back of his neck, squeezes it, smiling and disoriented. The city is full of such young women: they exist in a world separate and apart from his. They speak to him in a deferential way, as if he were a kindly old uncle. He recalls then the first instant of seeing Avis—seated in a college seminar—the back of her hand curled under her chin. He inhales, startled by a hit of the agitation and confusion of twenty-five years ago, as if time could dilate and collapse into a crystallized . . .
His BlackBerry starts to buzz, vibrating an obscene spin on his desk.
“Let me let you . . .” She’s pushing out of her chair. “Somebody really wants you.”
He stands also as he grabs the phone. “Give me two seconds. It’s just—Agathe knows I’m not answering.” He keeps one hand in midair, as if holding Fernanda in place, presses the speaker phone on with his other. “This is Muir.” In his peripheral vision, he sees Fernanda give a wave and back out of the office. Brian opens his hand—Stay! He lets go a sigh then, rakes one hand through his hair, settling back in the chair, watching through the glass as a city worker installs a new billboard: Can you say Beer-veza? Se habla CHILL? Image of a bottle of beer and an edge of lime.
“Dad?” Laughter. “That your Donald Rumsfeld impersonation?”
Brian sits up. “You got me,” he says, withered. “Want to hear Karl Rove?”
“Got your calls—what’s up? I’ve got a hundred cases of plantains I’ve got to cope with here.” Stanley has managed, once again, to flip their positions, so he is the harried overseer and Brian’s the needy old dad.
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