Birds of Paradise

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  But Felice.

  The last time Stanley had seen her, she was on her way to another “party.” He had just turned seventeen and no longer believed anything she said. She’d run away five or six times by then. Their parents had recently started allowing her to go out again with her friends at night: her new curfew was ten o’clock and up till that point she’d been relatively good—twice she’d come home by 9:30. But Stanley knew. He’d asked her again, that very night, What is wrong? Why can’t you tell me what’s happening? He didn’t know why he still bothered at that point.

  At thirteen, she was already five feet seven, a little hollowed-out by her growth spurt, her chest concave, her eyes with their ineffable violet light enormous, her bangs cut straight across her brow so she looked very young and serious. He realizes only now that as time passed he’d continued to think of Felice as that thirteen-year-old child, preserved like a geranium between the leaves of a book. She is still young and slim, yet changed. Her shoulders are straighter and more refined; the bangs are gone—her hair swings to her shoulders. Her eyes no longer seem overlarge: they are wide, almond-shaped. Nieves stares at her: he’d failed to mention his sister’s beauty.

  Stanley tucks his chin: inside, a ragged blank—the feeling that this couldn’t possibly be his sister: she is still out there—a thirteen-year-old, who vanished into the night, a black orchid. There’s no way to reconcile this adult with the lost child. She mumbles to the boy (boyfriend?) as they eat, the two brushing up against each other, casually but continually, a kind of ritual of reassurance. Stanley notices their exhaustion—especially in the boy, who scanned the room as they entered—as if they’ve been through some sort of ordeal together. Their clothes look creased with sweat and grime and there’s a rancid whiff of unwashed hair and skin. Felice’s eyes have an odd cherry-red wire of light at their centers—a glint of barely contained panic. Stanley—who hasn’t been able to say more than a handful of words—now finds his fingers are growing rigid on his glass of water. Some sort of energy field has invaded him, starting when his sister came to the office door and said, “Stan—it’s me.” He carefully places his glass on the kitchen counter. Her extreme state catches at something in his chest, but he ignores it: he feels little more than a cold absence—perhaps, now, a few wisps of anger. All those years in free fall, living through plummeting fear, living through her inexplicable loss. Is he supposed to snap his fingers and be done with it? He regards her with some fascination: Apparently people are capable of things like that—of running away without a word of explanation, of leaving you to years of nightmares, images of them bound, beaten, tortured—and then they are capable of magically, brazenly reappearing years later to request assistance!

  Stanley notices again the boy’s shoulders as he leans closer to Felice for one of their whispered conferences. He looks broad and strong, but he moves with restraint, as if to make himself smaller. Stanley feels an impulse to stop him, to say: Save yourself. Or perhaps he should say, more simply—It’s time for you two to go. He crosses his arms, the tendons in his neck and shoulders tighten. Just ask them politely to be on their way. Above all, it seems imperative to keep his parents from knowing about this visit—to spare them, if possible, one more iota of pain. After furtive meetings with her runaway daughter, his mother used to return with the disconnected expression of an assault victim. Stanley found himself in agreement with his father: insist Felice return or cut things off.

  Evidently sensing his unhappiness, Nieves begins to rattle around the kitchen, pouring drinks, wiping counters. “The bathroom is over there if anyone needs it. Hey—really—how about you let me make you another sandwich? There’s plenty of food—we’re practically living over a grocery store.” Their dumb old joke. Ha-ha. She smiles and leans against the fridge, and Stanley’s neck prickles as he sees, for possibly the first time, her hands slide unconsciously over her stomach.

  Felice finally seems able to focus—her gaze grazes lightly over Nieves. Her eyes widen. “Oh. Wow. I just—you guys—there’s a baby?” She turns toward Stanley. “You’re gonna be a dad?”

  With a despairing breath, some of that fortifying anger rushes out of Stanley. Nieves nods and fans her fingers over her belly. “Not everyone can see it yet. People aren’t sure if it’s a baby or just blubber.” She smiles and glances at Stanley. “But yeah—we decided to have it.”

  Felice breaks into a radiant smile, as if Nieves has just uttered the loveliest, most sentimental thing she’s ever heard. Stanley shifts closer and places his fingers on his sister’s wrist. He says, “Feef.” Carefully, he encloses her in his arms, and beneath the grime, catches a whiff of that thirteen-year-old kid—grass and air-dried jeans—still there.

  OUTSIDE, THE WIND GROWS more intense. Wrapped in blankets on the living room floor, Felice and Emerson lie curled together. Stanley listened to their low whispers for a while. They fell asleep quickly, despite the lights left on, the rain thrashing against thin windows. In the small, darkened bedroom, he and Nieves sit up in bed, Nieves’s profile glimmering and imperious as she watches the foul weather. “We should just put them to work in the market,” she says quietly. “Put your sister in wine or cheeses—she’d bring people in off the street. And that boyfriend is custom-made for the stockroom.”

  Stanley stares at the clock radio, its luminescent numbers look watery, floating in darkness: 2:48. Ever since he’d learned that Nieves wanted to keep the baby, he’s started waking up at 2 a.m., his heart skipping, his breath at the top of his throat. Tonight, he hasn’t fallen asleep at all. “They want to go to Seattle,” he says to her profile.

  “Oregon, dummy.” She hits his knee. Then her expression flickers in the dark room, wry and suspicious, “Why didn’t you tell me about her deal?” Stanley assumes she’s referring to Felice’s vanishing, but Nieves says, “God, she looks just like that old movie star—you know who I mean?”

  Stanley gets out of bed and moves to peer through the door. His sister is so slim she’s barely a lilt beneath the covers. “That guy—is he her boyfriend? He says he wants to go train at some gym out there.”

  “In Oregon, I know.” Nieves nods, an archness to her voice. She crosses her legs, a hand on her stomach.

  “I can’t believe it’s her.” Stanley’s voice is low. “I really can’t. She was just such a kid when she left.” He tries to get a better look. His sister’s face is partially obscured by blankets, but he makes out that it seems to be contracted in a wince. A sharp line runs between her brows, her eyes squeezed like she’s dreaming of an explosion. Even though the apartment air is lavishly humid, tropical with night heat, the wall unit sends cool currents streaming over his arms, between his fingers; his extremities are all cold. He retreats from the doorway. Nieves gathers the bedsheet to her chest. “Stan?” Her free hand scoops the hair up from her neck. “I mean, I know that we’re not even really parents yet—we haven’t even met the baby or anything. But already it’s like, when I think about what your sister did to her. To your mother, I mean.” Her voice is subdued. “Stan—that can’t happen to us.”

  Closing the door, he finds his way back to the bed in the dark. Nieves is warm and damp against his chest; he pulls her closer, glad for the creature weight of her. “It’s not going to.”

  “Why did it happen?”

  “I used to ask her—all the time. Seriously. I’d ask Felice just to tell me why she was doing it. Once, I even said I’d help her run away if she’d tell me.”

  “What she say?”

  He shrugs slightly. “She said she couldn’t.” Back then, there were times when he almost thought he understood Felice. Stanley saw the devouring way their mother watched her—doting yet somehow swallowing her up. He, in turn, often felt cheated: there might even have been a small part of him that was glad when Felice first left. Mostly, though, he missed her. He’d heard about the girl at school who killed herself—Felice had never mentioned her, but Yeni and Coco told him that they’d been friends. When he’d said th
e girl’s name to Felice, an odd blankness had dropped over her features, emptying her face. She denied knowing her: he’d pressed but could get nothing more from his sister.

  They shift positions, uncurling to lie side by side. Nieves has never been much of a cuddler, preferring a minimal touch—sliding the tips of her fingers under Stanley’s waist or hips. Now she curls her hand around his. “Are we going to help them?”

  Stanley smiles in the darkness, pleased by the we—not always a given with her. His breath floats above him and there is that sense again—the feeling he’s had, ever since meeting her, that something polished and solid, like a marble shelf in his chest, is very slowly softening, dissolving into the air. “I don’t know if there’s much we can do. Honestly, I don’t know what to say to them. They probably just need money.”

  “Well they can go ahead and get in line,” she grumbles.

  “Don’t worry about the market.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You know—we could always move the business. I mean, if we had to. Find another location.”

  She stares at him. “Are you kidding?”

  Stanley’s eyes fall to the wooden floor of their apartment, once office space above the old bank. It took eight months and over a hundred volunteers to tear out and remodel the building: they repurposed the teller counters for cash registers and the vault became cold storage. They created that market from the ground up: its hand-polished floor boards, inlaid decorations, and the stained-glass figure of Persephone with her crimson pomegranate over the main entrance.

  They don’t speak for a few moments, separately observing the darkness. Stanley notes a lingering green scent from the baskets of fresh mint, basil, sage, and oregano they foolishly used to decorate the front of the store. All that work will be destroyed by the wind. He often detects notes of fruit or prepared food twining through the floorboards into their apartment, perpetually reminding him of all sorts of unfinished tasks. He doesn’t mind: he grew up in the sugar-woven air of his mother’s kitchen—it was the thing that kept her away and yet kept her close—the scent of a cinnamon palmier in the morning was like having her hands beneath his pillow.

  Nieves moves onto her knees to peer through the window. She says, “I guess there’s around six grand, just over, in petty cash.”

  Stanley frowns, trying to think what she’s alluding to. Now he eases onto his side, head propped, trying to make out Nieves’s face, but she remains ineluctable. Recalling the thread of the conversation, it occurs to him to be indignant, to say: Are you crazy? Give that to them? That’s not even our money—that’s payroll and repairs and purveyors! But she already knows this. And she knows they probably won’t get the loan from his parents. So there’s nothing to say. There’s only the matter of coaxing her closer in bed, of rubbing her shoulders and kissing the nape of her neck, and wistfully thinking of sex: already both of them are so tired these days, and the baby’s still three months away. When people learn of her pregnancy, they all say: Enjoy these precious last months! It seems that something in Stanley is readying itself. Frightened as he is, there have been moments lately when Stanley has glimmerings of unexpected longing—as if this baby is someone he already knows and loves. Increasingly, he senses the energetic thrum of that third presence, the additional heartbeat rounding things out, expanding everything—their home, their lives, even the air molecules around them. His hands slide along Nieves’s arms, once again folding her spine into his chest, folding their arms in over her belly.

  “But what if it did happen to us?” She returns to her earlier fretting. “Like it did with Felice running away. I mean—Stan—I would die. I wouldn’t be able to stand it.” Her voice quavers. “I’m not that strong. Not like that.”

  “You are strong,” he murmurs against the side of her head, strands of hair in his face. “And it won’t happen,”

  “But how do you know?”

  “We won’t let it.”

  “Stanley?” Nieves whispers, her voice sounds rawer and younger. “I think we should give them the money—or whatever they want. We need to help them out.”

  Over the past year and a half, he has learned that Nieves has within her something like a pointing needle. It does little good to argue with her, though his own heavy nature often impels him to. Stanley tells his girlfriend, “Maybe. I don’t especially want to and she might not take it anyway. And I’m not about to beg.”

  Nieves takes such a long time to respond, Stanley wonders if she’s fallen asleep. There are low, continuous rolls of thunder in the distance. Then he hears her saying softly, “She doesn’t strike me that way—as being so hard.”

  She doesn’t know, Stanley thinks. Even now, he can’t stop checking on Felice, looking toward the door which he’s left open, allowing no one their privacy. And he will probably get up several times in the night to make sure that he hadn’t dreamed it. At this point, years after the fact, he realizes that it’s as if Felice’s departure has become an essential piece of her—the price his family had to pay for his sister, for having her at all.

  THE STORM HAD GROWN exponentially louder, thrashing windows, the nylon curtains lifting inside the apartment. The clock radio had died at 3:35 a.m. The rattling AC fell silent, ceiling fans stopped rotating, and the constant electric drone—not only of their apartment but of the market below them—ceased. Outside, wind rose in eminence, pounding the building in an oceanic surge. Half asleep, Nieves curled against his side and they listened to the roar as if they were trapped inside a small boat, whipped by rising seas. He wondered at one point if the unprotected windows would hold: something outside seemed to burst and there was a furious pounding racket against the building like that of a madman with a hammer.

  When he wakes again at 6:28, according to his wristwatch, the storm has abated, rotating north and east toward the beaches. The apartment is stultifying; Stanley gets up and cranks open the windows, the blue porthole in the bathroom, and more tropical humidity swims into the place. His eyes ache with sleeplessness. The sky is scoured-out and bright; the heat will be terrible. Nieves rises and makes sandwiches for breakfast—tahini, organic banana, and local wildflower honey on whole wheat—her manner so surly and ferocious that no one attempts to talk to her. Felice and Emerson look, if possible, even more stunned and white-faced than they had the day before. Emerson studies the first section of the Herald with an impressive thoroughness, turning a page, then turning it back again to reread something. Stanley makes them coffee with the good Jamaican beans and dollops of unpasteurized cream (soon to spoil if power doesn’t come right back). Then they go outside to survey the damage.

  Remarkably, none of the store windows broke; but there are drifts of plant debris and enormous palm fronds strewn across the parking lot like wreckage, their ends curling and gray. Power lines dangle from a pole at the corner, a child’s pink shoe lies on its side in the middle of the parking lot. The generator roars, loud as a jet engine against the west wall. Blinking, shielding their eyes, the four of them wander, moving around fallen branches, the stump of an upended ficus tree. They are quiet, startled shipwreck survivors. Abruptly Emerson grabs the stump. “Where do you want this stuff?”

  Stanley and Emerson designate a plant trash heap beside the dumpster and begin the tedious, oddly exhausting work of clearing and hauling. Emerson—Stanley notes—is a good worker, moving easily: the more he works, the more relaxed he seems. Felice and Nieves clear the doors, mop up the entrance, and sweep the store’s concrete perimeter. Then they carry out aluminum lawn chairs from the storage room and a thermos of passion fruit tea and settle in to watch the men work. Stanley is still waiting for the moment Felice will stand and stretch, put her hands on her hips, pace a bit as if rehearsing her exit. He’d dreaded it when they were younger—the preamble before she’d go out at night. But Felice seems content to be just where she is, reclining in an old chair, feet propped on an overturned grocery cart.

  “This is a great setup,” Emerson says. He and Stanley a
re at opposite ends of a black walnut branch, lugging it to the heap—now piled high with branches and coconuts. “Your market—it’s awesome. Like a community-service-type place, but also a great store.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know about the great part.” Stanley and Emerson swing the branch into the debris pile where it lands with a thump. “What we’re shooting for, just basically, is to make good food available. Like, affordable. Talk about a magic act. Dole and General Mills getting these major subsidies, and we’re telling the local growers we don’t want to charge more than the chains do for their conventional and processed crap. We do what we can—take food stamps, all that. We offer barter and volunteer discounts, whatever we can think of. Keep overhead low.”

  Emerson squints at the store, hands resting on his hips. “Well, you’re still standing, right?”

  “Barely.” Stanley uses the thumb of his leather work glove to push hair off his face. “I used to work at a co-op—everyone kept squabbling and leaving—couldn’t hang on to customers. Of course, when I bought this place the old hippie contingent said I was turning ‘establishment.’ ” He sighs. “Anyway, yeah, with this place the employees can own shares in the business—they run their own sections. Decent benefits, vacations, workshops. Blah, blah. And we’re always behind on the bills. This place has been smoking money since the second I opened it.” He smacks the dust off his gloves and surveys his storefront. “Maybe it’s not losing money as fast as it used to. I guess that’s something.”

  “Sounds good to me.” Emerson looks at Stanley, then at his own feet. Stanley realizes then that Emerson wants Stanley to like him.

  They sweat through their clothes and have to take breaks at shorter intervals. Stanley drinks iced tea until he can feel it sloshing in his stomach. He and Emerson clutch the wet glasses, pressing them against their faces. By noon, the sun roasts the air and a vaporous steam shimmers everywhere. Stanley suggests they break until sundown. But Emerson pulls off his T-shirt (Stanley marvels at the fan of muscle radiating from his neck and back), soaks it with a garden hose, and wraps it around his head. “I’ll just go for a little longer, if that’s okay.” His innate politeness catching Stanley off-guard.