THE CHAIN HANGS from her neck, the silvery pear between her breasts. Felice senses some sort of old ownership about it, which makes her like it even more. She touches the necklace again, then her hands move to the backseat upholstery of Marren’s convertible. He drives with one hand slung over the tops of the seats, alternately watching the road and shouting into the rush of wind roaring over them.
Berry hadn’t wanted Felice to go with them: at the last second, she’d come out of the club and watched with Felice as the valet pulled up in the forest-green Maserati, top down.” Where you going again?” she’d murmured to Felice, eyeing Marren and J.T.
“I don’t know—just one of the dumb places on Lincoln Road, I guess.” Felice fingered her silver pear. She hadn’t really wanted to go, but somehow it seemed like it would be worse not to do it. Letting the old terrors back in. Besides, she’d accepted the gift: she owed Marren another club, at least. “He doesn’t even dance,” she’d said.
“Just stands there and looks gross.”
Felice hugged herself, one-armed. “Please come.”
Berry’s face flattened with distaste.
When Felice climbed into the car (J.T. took the front passenger’s seat), Berry reached over the door of the convertible and gripped Felice’s fingers, as if she were about to slide off a building. “Okay, look. You know what—don’t go with these guys.”
“I want to.” Felice’s voice was tiny. A late breeze was picking up and she barely heard herself.
“It was a stupid joke, what I said about hooking up with this asshole. Give him back the crappy necklace. Really—don’t go. I don’t want you to.” Berry looked nearly frantic, her fingers clutching the window.
“It’s no big deal,” Felice said. “I’ll see you later—at the Cove.”
Marren pulled away, breaking their connection. Berry trotted after them, past the valet station, her silk wrapper shining.
Now Felice shivers a little with the ocean wind in the car. The motor hums as they turn the corner too quickly, whipping Felice back against the seat. From the sidewalk, young men look up, admiring the car. She finds a hair band in the backseat and scrapes her hair into a ponytail. Leaning forward, she shouts into the wind, “You guys—you don’t ever dance?”
Marren smiles in the rearview mirror; the hollows under his eyes deep and gray. She feels something like the presence of ghosts, a breathing pressure on her skin.
“So what do you guys do, anyway?”
J.T. turns and says something. “What?” she shouts.
“He says . . .” Marren turns, streetlamps streaming past them, “that you talk a lot.”
“What?” She leans forward, her shoulders tensing.
J.T. says something more and Marren barks with laughter. “He says he’s feeling bad. Maybe we should let you go.”
Felice takes a breath through her mouth.
“What do you think? I should just let you go now?”
He turns back, and as they drive several more blocks in silence, Felice realizes she’s made a mistake. A torpor comes over her—the old feeling—icy and leaden, covering her, as she grasps that the situation has changed. No, she corrects herself. The situation has stayed the same: her thoughts have simply gotten clearer. Her limbs feel sluggish with a kind of dissolved terror. She sits back. They fly past the clubs.
They stop at a light and Marren twists around in his seat. “Now you’re not talking at all. Can’t you make up your mind?”
She blinks slowly, anesthetized by fear.
“Speak.”
“Where are we really going?”
He flicks a look at her, sighs. “Downtown. That’s where we’re going. Now you happy?”
Downtown Miami: warren of back alleys, bodegas, hidden offices. She’s heard the stories from the beach rats—how it’s a place for the deeply crazy and dangerous, drop points for drug cartels, vanished children, human trafficking. The outdoor kids avoid downtown. She thinks about a yacht party she attended where guests whispered about the beautiful boys and girls with the deadened zombie faces. They didn’t mingle or even seem to speak English, but they were willing to follow the older guests into chambers adjoining the staterooms.
“Maybe we should,” J.T. says without turning. “I mean, let this one go.”
“Fuck no—we’re going to have fun.” The light changes to green but Marren doesn’t turn back or move the car. “That okay with you?” he asks Felice.
The car behind them gives a jarring blast. J.T. clicks open the glove compartment but Marren shuts it delicately, with his fingertips. “Don’t.” He returns to staring at Felice: under the layered ocean night, his eyes are wetly black. She could not have put herself in a worse place. For years she’d assumed that the worst possible thing had already happened; she tricked herself into thinking she would stay safe. There is no safe. Her mind, like her body, feels muffled and faraway.
Another car blasts behind them, and J.T. opens the car door and gets out. Felice lets her head fall back against the seat. The stars look close and bright. “Like soldiers,” Hannah used to say. Felice wondered how stars could look like soldiers. Stanley told her that they turned pink before a hurricane. She stares hard at a cluster of stars.
“What’re you doing now, crazy girl?” Marren is grinning at her over the seat.
Some old energy stirs in Felice, an impetus—half anger—and she sits forward, closer to the man. “Hey, can we stop somewhere first? Can we go to the beach? I know a cool place.”
The man’s eyes flit over her head. He turns around to face front, settling back against the seat. In a dizzying, reckless moment, Felice twists in her seat to face the car behind her. She waves at them quickly, silently mouthing, Help, help me, but she can see nothing beyond the glare of their headlights. She faces front again, quickly. Marren twists back, his hazy eyes gazing over the headrest. “Maybe. For a little while. What the hell?”
A knot forms in her throat, making it more difficult to breathe. “Cool, thanks.”
J.T. gets back in and slams the door shut, shaking the car. “I told them to stop honking.”
In her peripheral vision, Felice notes the other cars silently gliding around them as they remain parked at the light.
“Hey,” Marren says. “Princess girl wants to go to the beach.”
J.T. turns away to gaze silently out the passenger window.
“Hey asshole,” Marren says to him, “when’s the last time you been to the actual fucking beach? The fucking actual water and sand and shit.”
“I know what the fucking beach is,” J.T. mutters.
Marren turns and smiles. He looks uglier when he smiles—his face covered with a crosshatching of lines. His eyes rest on Felice’s face. “The fucking beach. You never know what they’re gonna say, do you?”
The light switches to green again. A car pulls up behind them and honks twice.
J.T. doesn’t lift his head. “Fuck you, Marren, will you just turn around and drive?”
Brian
BRIAN SITS IN HIS HOME OFFICE LISTENING TO Avis’s movements in the kitchen. His gaze skims over the computer out the side-yard window, to rest on a fat avocado, a bleb of green light hanging from a branch. Their tree is full this year, the fruit thud on the roof all night, but he doesn’t like this varietal; they taste like old butter.
He stares at the numbers Javier gave him: there will need to be withdrawals, transfer of funds: he imagines giving the go-ahead to the agent: Reserve me two floors—muttering as if he were in some sort of TV thriller—anxious as his wife’s shadow filters past the doorway. His eyes feel scorched. He’d lain awake all night, worrying over the deal—would they really be able to flip such expensive units—wasn’t the condo sector always the first to lose value—affecting a deep, rhythmic breath when Avis came to bed, then staring at the subtle wavelength of her breath in sleep. Such a gamble, it seemed: he wouldn’t be able to tell her. But he would be doing this for her, for their family. Toward dawn, he closed his eyes, th
inking of the way his son’s infant hands used to swim in his sleep, blindly sweeping over the blankets.
He studies the shadows fluttering over the window shutters—neighbors heading to work, as he should be doing—and marvels, with a detached, out-of-body calm, at how it’s possible to arrange for one’s wealth or destitution in a matter of moments. Every reserve, every last account would need to be emptied, every investment called in, penalties assumed; he would need an expensive line of credit and a new mortgage. Two point three million. Javier said it was possible—or did he say “likely”—that they would make double that when the units sold. He sits back at the desk, going over the numbers again, this time with the stub of a pencil on a pad of paper, as he might have done in grade school. If he makes the purchase, that will leave them a little over four grand in checking: almost exactly where they were when he was thirty-two, with a new mortgage, wife, and baby. The uncertainty returns: they could simply give Stan the money—as they had in the past. But Avis doesn’t want to: she says she doesn’t trust “that girl.” Brian suspects, though, that she actually feels anxious about their finances. With a windfall like Javier predicts, Brian reasons, she’d relax.
Brian hadn’t gone to law school hoping—as many of his colleagues had—to become wealthy. Discontent has been a gradual, almost metaphysical condition, seeping in, mineralizing his bones. The inevitability of salary comparisons, of spending one’s life gazing up at the next guy. Still, he reflects, it’s something of a relief to know one’s net worth—even if it’s about to be zero. At one point, early on, their savings and investments had mounted to nearly four million. But the debts accumulated: loans for the boat, condo, starting the wine cellar, a collection of antique botanical and zoological engravings—including a very old, expensive one from Paris, titled The Types of Unicorns. They’d gotten socked by the costs of starting and keeping his wife’s business afloat. And he had to admit, didn’t he, to some guilty relief when Felice had offered them her “deal,” and Avis came home from that meeting saying, “No more private detectives, no more monitoring.” Then, to cap it all, came the even greater costs of Stanley’s market. He feels like a shrinking engine pulling the weight of endless boxcars. Can he live long enough, he wonders, to make enough money for everyone?
The shutters in his small office—formerly Felice’s bedroom—are closed against the late-summer morning heat. Happy Birthday, baby girl, he thinks mournfully. Today, isn’t it? The 23rd. Now the parent of two adults, Brian closes his eyes and mentally catalogs the physical ailments that have descended on him over the past few years: the aching hamstring and hip, the tender inner forearm, his inability to sleep through the night without one trip after another to the bathroom, the subtle abdominal pressure that teases and torments him—seeming to play tricks, eluding his doctors, frequently appearing coincident to the midnight bathroom visits, the occasional heightening (not quite squeezing) pressure on his chest. Is it possible to have such symptoms and still be considered “healthy”? Why does that one muscle in his back sometimes twitch? Why do his gums tingle? If you think you have it—if you constantly suspect and dread it—does that help keep you from actually getting it? Or does dread invoke it like an angry sleeping god?
The serrated cry of tropical birds pierces his window: he imagines their beaks like scissors, like the sound of anxiety itself: the world stabbing away. He realizes that he’s been listening to a low-level warbling cry for some time. A baby’s cry—that incessant register of complaint. Every now and then the cry seems to refresh itself, surging back with renewed vigor. The pattern of crying is, he realizes, regular as a tape loop. He moves nearer the window, peering between two slats in the blinds, finally grasping that it’s the neighbor’s damned bird.
AVIS HAS YET TO ASK why he’s still home at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday. He feels like a poltergeist in the house of the living. He wears an old cotton bathrobe and walks from room to room of his not-quite-yet profoundly mortgaged home. Where is his nerve? What sort of man backs down from risk? He tries to calculate exactly how long the FOR SALE sign has been up on the Handels’ front yard—four or five months? and he wonders if he can extrapolate from this the health of the condominium sales sector of Miami. He gazes at his own square coffee table, the Brazilian sectional couch and divan, the chestnut dining table that shimmers with polishing wax: artifacts of a previous life. Have their furnishings always seemed so cherished?
Brian calls work and tells Agathe he’s preparing for the hurricane, then he goes to the kitchen door. Avis is leaning over the counter, her strong back to him as she rolls out a circle of dough. He admires the tidy crisscross of her apron strings, her narrow waist, her movements, so elegant and precise as he looks on, tentative as the sorcerer’s apprentice. She turns, smiles, and looks at him, asks if he’s feeling okay.
He shakes his head as if sharing a joke with her. “Just going to putter around on a few projects—want to get the place stormproofed. Supposed to be a big one.”
She looks at him more closely now and he feels himself turning scarlet. They’ve ridden through several hurricanes in the past—including Andrew—with no special provisions. To his surprise, Avis nods. “Yes, that’s probably a good thing to do.”
Brian pulls on a pair of faded chinos and a soft old button-down shirt, then drives to the Home Depot in Pinecrest. It’s so jammed he has to creep behind departing customers in the parking lot to get a spot in a distant corner. People mob the aisles of the cavernous store, collecting not only hurricane necessities—batteries and flashlights and distilled water—but also seemingly random items like plastic flower arrangements and Christmas decorations—all of the shoppers moving with the same taut urgency, their faces jutting forward, nearly running their carts into one another. Brian is astonished that so many people don’t have to be at work at this time of midmorning.
He moves through the store with a sense of setting things to rights. Putting one’s house in order. Time to get serious, he repeats under his breath. He looks for help, having come without any list, but the associates in their workman’s aprons scurry through the crowds without stopping, like outnumbered riot police. Brian moves his cart forward, selecting things impressionistically: if something seems as if it might be useful, he takes it. Hammer, lightbulbs, hand-cranked radio help him to feel solid and directed, but increasingly isolated. He notices the other customers seem to move in and out of nebulous packs of family or colleagues, and everywhere, in every aisle, running currents of Spanish. He stands before bins of fasteners in graduated sizes, picks up one perfectly formed fastener—a miniature work of art in metal, its sides machined at exact right angles—and decides to buy this for Stanley.
He hurries toward one of the small mobs formed in front of a cash register. While people elbow and wave each other into the waiting crowd, Brian stands staring fixedly ahead, as if standing in a queue at a bank. He is fearful now of the thought that perhaps he isn’t considering investing purely on Stanley’s behalf, but in some small way, to impress Fernanda. He shuffles forward, his eyes glittering with preoccupation, a momentary fantasy. He imagines a pared-away existence—no difficult children, no painful history, no expensive house. He casts his gaze toward the far corner of the immense store and wonders: Where does a man in Miami run away to, anyway? Trenton? Omaha?
When Brian finally emerges with his hurricane-preparedness items, the sky over the lot glistens, brilliantly clear, a depthless turquoise. Pre-storm sky. He is unloading the bags from the car into the garage when there’s a rap on the garage door. He opens the door to a short man holding two paper bags. “I knock and knock, but no answer,” the man says stoically. “I almost give up. Then I see you drive in.” Brian leads the deliveryman through the garage door into the house. Uncertain where the fruits go, he has him leave the bags on a kitchen counter. There are big covered ceramic bowls on another counter, but no sign of Avis, not even the scent of things baking: an unnerving emptiness in the air. “These are starfruit, lychees, and blood orange i
n the jars,” the man is saying pointedly, as if he doesn’t quite trust his goods with Brian. “Where is the Cuban girl? She don’t work here no more? The boss answer the door last week. Now you.” He seems openly mournful yet resigned to this turn of events. Brian studies the narrow tilt of his eyes, his expression evocative of years of patiently borne suffering and disappointment. Where has Nina gone? Brian realizes he hasn’t heard Avis mention her assistant or seen her in weeks. How unfamiliar his wife’s daytime life has become—a separate world, moving in an orbit barely adjacent to his.
After the delivery van pulls away, Brian walks through the house, looking for Avis. The bed is neatly made, all clothes are folded and put away. Back in the kitchen, he notices the dough seems to be outgrowing the ceramic bowls, strips, soft and pale as human bellies visible beneath each tea towel. A murmuring reaches him through the rear kitchen window. He peers through a dappled film of water spots to the backyard, its border of invasive bamboo and a messy thin palm he’s been meaning to clear out for twenty years. He goes through the French doors, uncertain as to why he’s moving so quietly; for some reason, his breath is knotted, caught in the top of his chest. Squatting slightly, he’s able to peer through openings in the leaves where he beholds his wife sitting on the grass beside a young girl. He watches Avis’s profile as she talks to the girl: they appear to be sorting some kind of weeds as they talk. He notices the dark bristle of Avis’s hair: the girl’s skin is a luminous coffee color, her back and neck upright. She stands and stretches and he realizes she’s older than he’d thought, possibly the same age as his wife. A few feet away, the black bird purrs and babbles quietly. Brian feels cold with doubt, bafflement. When he was a child, his mother took him to a fortune-teller at a street fair. The woman fanned cards across a table. Those images: a hanged man, a woman on a throne, a fool wandering off a cliff, called up the same immutable feelings he has now, watching the women together. He feels a kind of terrible idea taking hold of him: that the reason he’s started to act a little crazily is because, over the past days, he has sensed his family leaving him. He’d thought he was the one who made the decisions. But first the children went off and now, here is his wife in a scene of such utter contentment he feels he is looking into a future world, twenty years after his death.
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