Birds of Paradise

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “She’ll think I’m trying to force her.” He eases onto his back. “That’s how it is with Felice. This whole thing now—it’s kind of what it used to be like—she held us all hostage.”

  But the longer that Felice is there, the worse he feels about not telling his parents—more of an accomplice. It was as if, in the past, they could have pretended her running away had been a sort of natural disaster—inescapable, and nobody’s fault. But this, her avoidance, seems personal. And the more he considers this, the more the old anger returns, tightening his stomach. He thinks: What gives her the right?

  THAT MORNING, STANLEY GOES into the market early: Felice is already at the cheese display arranging a pyramid of sepia-edged triple-crèmes from Normandy. When Stanley first opened the market, the only cheeses they carried were flavorless bricks of organic jack and a rubbery, casein-free, vegan cheddar. Felice touches the cheeses with care, as if they’re infants, her hands hovering above each piece, placing it just so. She has arranged sprays of yellow dendrobium around the lightly refrigerated deck. She is actually humming. When she turns toward him, her expression broken open, Stanley catches a glimpse of natural contentment before the wariness resurfaces. Her lifted hands pause, then move to her chest—as if identifying or shielding herself. With dismay, he sees her eyes glisten. “You want us to go, don’t you?” she asks.

  No. He doesn’t say anything. Stanley lowers his gaze, studies the speckles in the linoleum. He argues with himself, with his old, hard nature, that tight nut at his center, that makes him feel at times that he’s lived longer than almost anybody. She got herself here, didn’t she? he asks himself. She’s doing the best she can. Stanley can’t bring himself to speak directly, though. He can’t imagine using a word like trust. He shakes his obstinate head—just as stubborn, it occurs to him, as his sister. “I don’t know,” he says finally.

  “You can’t.” She turns back to the stack of cheeses as if something’s been resolved: as if her life depends on achieving that perfect symmetry. Her fingers tremble. She won’t look at him. “I know how you are, Stan. You can’t deal with it.”

  He backs away from her, turning his face, and retreats to the office.

  Nieves brings him lunch around two, looks at him closely. She says his name, stirs the hair off his forehead with a finger, then returns her hands to her stomach. “Whatever.” She smoothes little circles around her small swell. “But I wish you’d get over yourself.”

  After she goes, Stanley cups his forehead with both hands; he rubs his scalp, wondering how hard he’d have to bang his head against the desk before he’d pass out. He sits back, kneads his side. His market should carry Maalox. The inventory sheets arrayed before him make no sense. There are notes from Eduardo: Calvin needs letter of intent by next week—latest; The basmati full of flies; Garlic shipment rotted . . . He sits that way, immobilized, incapable of following his thoughts to any sort of insight or solution. This is the one problem he’d never expected to have. He feels stupid and afraid, internally frozen, a mastodon, afraid to leave his icy tomb. The little red light on his cell flashes—another apologetic call from one or both parents, wanting to talk, asking how they’d come through the hurricane.

  At some point, beyond his silenced body and thoughts, he becomes aware of a sound: a long, low rumble, then a scraping noise. He isn’t sure how long he’s been listening without hearing it. He knows what it is. The rear lot for delivery trucks was repaved last year: now it’s smooth and slightly curved, lifted a few inches at one end, on the natural incline of the land. The elegant surface was discovered by the local skateboarders. They’re a nuisance—occasionally a couple of them clatter around the front lot and startle the customers. Stanley has added to his list the fear that one of his purveyors’ trucks will hit a skateboarder and everyone will get hauled into court. Still, it’s hard for him to muster what Nieves calls the “authoritarian will” to chase them away. Their rumble and scraping have become such a familiar backdrop he forgets they’re around until he hears the dairy deliveryman out in back yelling at them.

  This afternoon, dispersing skateboarders seems a simple, appealingly tangible task. He stands on the loading platform and inhales the syrupy hot air, watching the boys racing and spinning—their crisp, airborne movements. It’s a small group of teenagers: weedy hair, thin chests, shoulders like clothes hangers. They push off against a small retaining wall, their arms sailing up, parallel to the earth, a deep crouch, aloft. It occurs to Stanley, watching them, that his own baby—gender yet unknown—could grow into one of them. He wonders—could he actually love this, the flapping clothes and hair and bad skin? He realizes finally that the boy he’s been watching snap his board into the air, then neatly touch down—long, black, gleaming hair, pale white skin—is Felice. He didn’t know she’d learned how to skateboard. He’s never seen her like this before—so intently focused and content—her beauty beside the point, merely part of the catalog of effects—speed, balance, daring. He admires her athletic form and feels moved in some unexpected way. The three boys with her—neighbor kids, the Mexican-American sons of the migrants—call out, their voices lost in the hot air and a distant whir of insects rising from the fields beyond the lot.

  Felice swishes to a stop, neatly twisting the board to one side. She jumps down, stomps on one end, flips it up, and catches the top, nonchalant as a gunslinger. Smiling, possibly at her show of bravado, she hands it over to its owner—fourteen-year-old son of one of the onion growers. She slides her hands into her pockets, straight-armed and now shy, and slinks over to Stanley. “Hey, Stan.” She pulls back her hair.

  “Pret-ty cool.” He nods at the other skateboarders, who continue rolling but shoot him wary glances. “Where’d you learn to do that?”

  “It’s not so hard,” she mumbles. “Just gotta do it a bunch.”

  “Hey, Nieves is saying—” He stops himself, frowns into the sheer light, a distant vista of date palms. “She’s going to be upset, you know, if you guys go.”

  Felice smiles and winces; she uses the flat of her hand as a visor. “She told me we should stay.” Under her hand her eyes look like river stones. “We can’t, though, right now. We’re gonna take off in a day or two. I mean, we got this plan, you know? Maybe we can—for a visit—when the baby comes? If you want us to?”

  “Don’t say—” He cuts himself off again. Takes a deep breath he feels in his ribs. This moment. “Don’t say anything you’re not going to do,” he says more gently. He pulls out a fat brown envelope from his notebook—two thousand in well-worn tens and twenties: he and Nieves have subsisted on lentil soup, hummus, and bread in the past. “If you absolutely have to go.”

  She pushes the envelope back at him. “No. No freakin’ way.” Her brows lift and he sees the glint of their mother’s will in her face. “We have money. Emerson saved up.”

  “Goddammit, Felice.” His chest tightens with a kind of radiant anger—he has a brief, wild impulse to tear open the envelope and shower the cash over the skateboarders’ heads. “Jesus Christ, why not?”

  She looks at him, then takes the envelope and removes about five hundred dollars. “This will be our escape plan,” she says. “For when it’s time to come back.”

  He stares at her: his chest sinks on a partial sigh. It would almost have been easier if she’d stayed missing. No rough, ragged edges. He takes the remaining money. “I want to ask you to do something. It’s about our mother.”

  She turns her head toward the skateboarders. “There isn’t time. To see them? Really. We’ve got to hit it.”

  “But what if I ask you to do it.” He draws a low, even breath. “For me.”

  She squints toward the wind-shaken treeline. He knows her, he thinks, and he doesn’t know her. He feels the unexpected touch of admiration: she created herself, nearly from scratch. “Don’t you think it’s important,” she asks suddenly, “you know—to sort of hang on to your plan for things?”

  “Feef, I’m not saying move back, just—�
�

  “No, no, I know. I just mean. You make a decision. Even a principle for a way to live your life? Don’t you think that needs to be, like, the main thing?”

  He studies her for a moment. “I think,” he says slowly, “that principles are important. Yeah, I think they can get you going. Sort of help you see what you want to accomplish . . .”

  “And what you don’t want.”

  “Right. Yes, absolutely. But I think even principles can change, you know? People keep changing all their lives. It never stops. But I think it’s not like the old principles were bad or anything—just sometimes you’ve got to add some new ones.”

  “Huh.”

  Stanley walks out to the edge of the platform and sits and then Felice comes and sits beside him. The sun softens under high clouds, far away, a sound of thunder—some hope of rain. They stay out there, waiting and not speaking, watching the roll and zip of the skateboarders.

  Avis

  AT MIDDAY, AVIS WALKS AROUND THE HOUSE, switching on lights. She moves from the rectangular windows in the living room to the windows in her study, to the small panes of the French doors, each time turning away from the dark glass, the reflected oval of her own face, her eyes fretful and shadowy. She hasn’t heard from Brian since his abrupt departure for work that morning. After watching for hours, she had to turn off the Weather Channel as their predictions and graphs—something resembling a fireball hurtling toward the peninsula—grew unbearably ominous. By late afternoon, the storm’s outer bands have started to lash the house with dark, heavy rain. She shivers, drawing her arms in close to her body, drifting to the front door to watch the rain sweep up the street. Lamb slinks under the couch and yowls softly. Outside of the kitchen and her normal work rhythms, Avis feels the strangeness of the house without Brian, its emptiness intensified. In the past, he’d always hired someone to cover the windows before a big storm. He made up checklists, tested the flashlights, and monitored the bottled water: they spent the hurricanes together, watching forecasts as long as the electricity held, then listening to the wilderness of wind. How did this happen? She used to live with husband and children. How does life dwindle to such a place in which one is boxed up alone? Had she truly dreamed of a private cottage? Now she listens in misery to the drumming rain and tries not to let herself imagine Brian stranded, stuck in a highway wreck, or worse.

  The longer he doesn’t answer the phone, the more she feels a pressure in her chest, as if a hand were softly closing around her heart. As she watches from a front window, the sky goes from a bruised green to a deep eggplant, enormous columnar clouds wall off the sun, and the rain rises, slits sideways, slicing at the roof. Where is he? She goes into the kitchen, hoping that a bit of work will calm her, but her hands tremble as she tries to roll out baguette dough, and for once her mind will not be subdued by her hands. She worries over Stanley, aware that a storm this intense could destroy his entire market; the thought tears at her that their last real interaction consisted of her denying him money. And there is also, of course, the transparency underlining all her fears: her anxiety for Felice. Where on earth could her daughter be in this weather?

  As the day goes on and the storm grows, her concerns melt into one steady pulse of fear for her husband. Twice she picks up the phone, about to call the highway patrol, but such a call seems like an admission that things have gone too horribly wrong. She feels the sheen of dread, a petrification, as if her insides might turn to stone: the sense that Avis could not survive—not as a whole person—without him. The fear of losing Brian subsumes and encapsulates all the rest, spelling out her world, her understanding of loss. She sits on the edge of the living room couch staring at the black street, and the feeling of it spills through her, thoughts disjointed and dark as syllables.

  This hurricane seems worse than any she can remember—even Andrew, which they’d lived through as a family. The thunder sounds as if it caroms inside a metal barrel—the house shakes from its force. The hurricane wind, which usually drives against the south end of the house, seems wily and demonic, coming from one, then another direction. Power lines sway and snap free and rain skirts the street forming a minor river. The wind masks all other sounds as Avis calls Brian’s cell again: its unanswered ring like a stone’s echo in a well. The wind starts to drive needles of rain through the window seams and under the front door. Avis grabs bath towels and a bucket but she can’t stay ahead of it. She blames herself for the mess of rain-water: she’d repeatedly complained to Brian that she hated the idea of encasing their house in shutters, “closeting” themselves in darkness: now the floor and carpets along the south side of the house are soaked. This happened in much the same way, she senses, that she’s brought this isolation on herself—her chronic retreat, training him, in essence, to leave her.

  Late in the afternoon, Avis sees a watery flash of headlights out front: standing quickly, she is almost faint with relief. Brian straggles in the door, rain streaming from his face and collar. He’d had to park in the driveway—the garage opener shorted out. “I tried to call—the cells are useless. Oh my God—you wouldn’t believe—”

  She wraps her arms around the compass of his back, filled with joy. He presses his cold face into her neck, then looks at her, his hair dripping. “I thought I’d left the office with plenty of time but the storm came up so fast it was like a bomb. Traffic was dead in the street. I’ve been stuck on the Dixie seems like days.” Avis smells dampness on him all the way to the silk lining of his jacket. She peels off his jacket and shirt and drapes these over the shower door. She sits him on the couch and rumples a towel on his dripping hair: his face has that long, earnest sweetness she remembers from their lovestruck college days. Her thoughts flicker to the long-ago tutoring sessions in her apartment on North Aurora Street—how she tried to get Brian to kiss her, how he was so concerned that she master the principles of economic theory. An emotional history like a fire they’d carried between them, seeming to dwindle, then rekindling and leaping, all the gas rings on the stove turned up high.

  Brian reaches up to her hands as she dries his hair: she bends and kisses the top of his head. They remain together on the couch as the lights flicker off, then on, then finally go out for the night. The terrible hollow booming and shaking goes on; at one point the door and windows rattle insanely, as if some gigantic force were trying to invade. Avis sits with her head tilted low against Brian’s chest and listens to the storm within the walls of his body.

  AVIS WALKS IN THE gray dawn and studies Brian, his face mild in sleep. She rises, dresses for work, makes her determined way to the kitchen, wondering again how her children fared in the storm. The windows seem to be washed in green light, glittering with heat. The hurricane knocked down enormous fronds, spilled the stripling palms over, punched open new holes in the canopy; sunlight pours through in solid cylinders. She scans the treetops, the delicate, rummaging fingers of palm leaflets—everything heat-stunned. In the emptied backyard, the iron cage is lying on its side, door flapped open, a body with its soul turned loose. She thinks again of Solange. The world seems filled with the beloved missing. Inside the marble kitchen, she closes her eyes and can almost imagine knocks on a chapel door in Haiti, the child’s voice. Her skin is covered in dots of ice. A swirl of vertigo. She would have torn the planks off the doors, torn off her own skin. She would have murdered the man in his sleep to have answered that cry. With shaking hands, she moves away from her view of the cage, calls Stanley and leaves a message. She tries to suppress the pleading in her voice: “Let me know how you came through? Just a quick call. Anything. Your father and I want to know.”

  Now she rolls the waistband of her apron over, hitches her hands at her hips. There’s a backup generator designated specifically for her kitchen—the stove and refrigerator hum in their stations, still alive. She begins to call customers, but half don’t answer. From those that do, Avis hears of more power outages, learns that restaurants and stores will be closed for the rest of the week. Her fing
ers curl, riffling through her folder: the largest current order—ficelles with a core of nutmeg and chopped bittersweet—bread and chocolate—is for the Marine Academy on Virginia Key. But the schools are closed. A distraught woman at Endographics (bimonthly dulce de leche macarons) tells her, voice shaking, that a bougainvillea fell through the window, throwing purple-budded branches across her desk, destroying her computer and files. Everyone sounds stunned, in post-hurricane shock. Avis reaches her friend, the chef in Coconut Grove: he says he plans to set up his kettle grill on the sidewalk in front of his restaurant and cook the contents of his freezers for the locals: all contributions welcome.

  Brian hovers near the door, dressed in his soft weekend clothes, and he gestures toward the front. “Up for taking a look?” They leave the house, stepping over branches, staring at their lawn and the broken trees. They walk down their street past the big intersection with LeJeune, scanning the neighborhoods. Miami appears to be shut down—the traffic lights are out, the storm drains matted with debris, the avenues swamped. There are heaps of wet branches blocking the streets, beautiful old trees split into pieces or just overturned, root ends up. Neighbors move slowly across their lawns, dazed. Blooms and fruits and leaves are stripped away, a kind of dense black vegetal and bark matter sprayed across lawns and sidewalks.

  After an hour or so of wandering through the streets, they return to the house to escape the sun’s blare. Their own yard is covered with bramble but neither of them feels ready to take that on just yet. “How would you feel about doing a little something in the kitchen?” Avis asks tentatively. Brian laughs. He used to assist her before they had children, before she hired helpers, but she was impatient with him: he made mistakes—forgot to time the roasting almonds, or failed to sift the cake flour, or let the chocolate seize. Still, he accepts an apron and ties it on, smiling at the sense of occasion. He rests his knuckles on his hips. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”