Birds of Paradise: A Novel (39 page)

“Ha. Right. Like what?”

“It’s nuts. Try to push back against it.” He tilts his glass of wine, then gazes over its lip. “You start to see the edges of your life. It’s like being able to see the curve of the planet.”

Avis fingers the bowl of her own glass. “I know. Like you always knew it was there but you never believed it?” The night is forming into a dark glittering sky: the world is a bright machine carrying them inside itself. Though she sees Brian every evening, it seems it’s been years since she’s heard this—the actual sound of his voice. Being with him like this is like watching a tiny boat far out on the water, slowly, slowly borne back to shore. Avis turns on her lounge chair and touches his hair with the tips of her fingers. He doesn’t move or speak: his eyes seem open wide. She trails her hand across the nape of his neck. “Let’s go home,” she murmurs. He cups her shoulders, slides his palm across the wings of her shoulder blades; his lips are dry, they taste of sea salt.

DURING THE COURSE
of that week, she avoids the kitchen. She stays outside with Brian, clearing and raking the grass, sweeping the sidewalk, then the street in front of the house. Their power was restored on the afternoon following the hurricane, and for days afterward they’ve been one of the few houses on their block with electricity. The Handels run an extension cord to their house; other neighbors come to fill their coolers with ice or simply to sit in air-conditioning for an hour or two. Ella Regale’s father comes over to watch his favorite Spanish game show. They finally make contact with Stanley, who assures them that he, Nieves, and the market, are all fine—though his voice sounds a bit dark and compressed to Avis, and he rushes off the phone after just a few minutes, promising to call again soon.

After the front of the property is cleared, Brian and Avis go into the backyard, pulling out fallen branches and fronds. The local businesses have started to reopen and will soon send their bakery orders, for which she is glad. But she isn’t quite ready to go back inside yet. Avis starts cleaning out the sprawling, wasted gardens Stanley had built, gathering brush, then weeding on her hands and knees for hours. The next day she returns to drag a metal trowel through the soil, over and over, until she is turning up fine, dry furrows, the soil sparkling. She leans toward the narrow rows and imagines the warm scent of planted tomatoes—it drifts into her senses as if they grew before her. She remembers the way Solange sat in the grass, the quick flint of her eyes, scanning the earth. It comes to her as she works that gardening is a way of staying put. That evening, Avis calls Stanley again and before he can vanish, she asks, “But Stan? Do you have one more minute?” She tells him about reviving his old gardens, how beautiful the clean plots are, and how she’d imagined the scent of tomatoes. He chuckles. “Oh yeah. That’s how it gets you. One second, you’re fooling around in the dirt, next thing you know you’re up to your ears in squash and parsley.”

“Could I do that? Squash?” She realizes that is just what she wants to do.

Stanley is drawn into it, despite himself: she can hear him give way to his old love of gardening. His voice warms with interest as he tells her how to amend the soil, the importance of organic compost, how to determine the best sun exposure, the uses of earthworms. She gets out paper and takes notes. They talk for over an hour, losing themselves in the discussion of vegetables, berries, herbs, their voices running together, trading ideas, the way they did in the days when Stanley assisted in her kitchen.

Avis says, “I thought it’d be fun to start from seeds.”

“Sure, sure, just to make it as hard as possible.”

“Isn’t that the whole point?” She’s laughing. “Seedlings are for wimps.”

Then Stanley says, “Yeah, well, why don’t you come here. We’ve got good heirloom seeds at the market. I’ll be around tomorrow. Bring Dad too, why not?”

When she gets off the phone, Avis is still smiling, excited to tell Brian about this invitation—a sense of being readmitted to Stanley’s
life. But that night, Avis sits up late in the kitchen, moon glowing in the window, fretting over what to bring them. She feels nervous as a teenager worrying over a prom dress. She lingers over the cards in her notebooks—scraps of recipes tucked behind plastic sleeves—an enormous collection she’s curated for years. She turns the pages slowly, in an agony of indecision, wanting to make them something perfect and beautiful. She considers a tray of flaky
jésuites,
their centers redolent of frangipani cream, decorated with violet buds preserved in clouds of black crystal sugar. Or
dulce de leche
tarts—caramelized swirls on a
pâte sucrée
crust, glowing with chocolate, tiny muted peaks, ruffles of white pastry like Edwardian collars. But nothing seems special enough and nothing seems right. Nothing seems like Stanley. Avis brings out the meticulous botanical illustrations she did in school, pins them all around the kitchen like a room from Audubon’s house. She thinks of slim layers of chocolate interspersed with a vanilla caramel. On top she might paint a frosted forest with hints of white chocolate, dashes of rosemary subtle as déjà vu. A glissando of light spilling in butter-drops from one sweet lime leaf to the next. On a drawing pad she uses for designing wedding cakes, she begins sketching ruby-throated hummingbirds in flecks of raspberry fondant, a sub-equatorial sun depicted in neoclassical butter cream. At the center of the cake top, she draws figures regal and languid as Gauguin’s island dwellers, meant to be Stanley, Nieves, and child. Their skin would be cocoa and coffee and motes of cherry melded with a few drops of cream. Then an icing border of tiny mermaids, nixies, selkies, and seahorses below, Pegasus, Icarus, and phoenix above.

You are lucky, Avis’s mother told her, if you know what in this life you’re hunting for. Avis has always known her hunt. She believes that her work is hard and essential, like that of nurse, firefighter, carpenter: she’ll be needed after the collapse of civilization. Not the same as building houses, but still a crucial grace note. Avis exerts herself wholly and physically to produce an evanescence of sugar and butter—a phoenix’s wing. She’s proud to bring people the reprieve of a slice of torte, a bite of scone: a sort of remedy. Just enough to keep everyone going.

But Avis doesn’t move. She’s sunburned from kneeling in the garden and her back and arms ache. She stares at the cake sketches, and now they look gaudy, almost baroque. None of this interests her son. The cake fantasies seem like an indictment of her career: she sees herself drawing sweet vapors through the air, outlining the contours of a sugar castle. A bare, dry place in which to live. Too much sweetness, it occurs to her, is almost worse than too little. Swept by remorse, she presses her knuckles against her mouth. The moon is so bright it seems hot and the streetlights outside burn like match heads. Her eyes film with tears. Finally Brian is at the kitchen door. “Avis?” He comes to her side and slides his arms around her. “Come to bed, sweetheart,” he murmurs. “Leave the cake for now.”

IT’S BEEN OVER A
year since they’ve last visited their son’s market. As they walk through the parking lot they take in a number of improvements. Brian admires the raised garden beds made of cedar planks that flank the sides of the lot. There are stalks of tomatoes, staked beans, baskets of green herbs—oregano, lavender, fragrant blades of lemongrass and pointed curry leaf. The planter of baby lettuces has a chalkboard hung from its side:
Just add fork
. A wheelbarrow parked by the door is heaped with bright coronas of sunflowers, white daisies, jagged red ginger and birds-of-paradise. Avis feels a leap of pride as they enter the market: the floor of polished bamboo, the sky-blue ceiling, the wooden shelves—like bookshelves in a library. And the smells. Warm, round billows of baking bread, roasting garlic and onions and chicken. The doorframe to Stanley’s office is an inlaid mosaic of seashells—a surprise from three volunteers who’d worked on it through the night.

Still, Avis feels naked without a bakery box, her arms empty. This is not me, she thinks. Instead they come bearing a cashier’s check: the full amount Stanley and Nieves requested. She feels diminutive and humble inside the vast green world her son has created; timid about making this late offering. At the back of the store, they hear voices through the office door, and for a moment Avis has an anxious impulse, a thought of simply turning and going home. But Brian knocks and calls, “Hey Stan?”

As they walk into the room, Avis senses something, a frequency of sound or light like an echo chased out of the walls. Before her, a young woman is leaning on Stanley’s big, messy desk, her eyes like sea glass, her hair whip-dark. So lovely she seems impossible—dreamed-up. Avis gazes at her and experiences a rush of sensation as if a river flashed through her body, before she understands who this is.

Felice is talking with someone, joking, when she looks over. Avis thinks, Stanley hadn’t warned her either.

Brian wavers beside her. “Oh. Daddy.” Her voice is nearly inaudible as she moves away from the desk and hesitates before her father. Her face has a red, streaky quality. Avis is about to warn him:
Don’t touch.
Because she might run away! But the dream of her seems to become permeable because he walks through it, right through the old rules, of distance and untouchability. He embraces and holds her for a long, silent time. And Avis realizes then that her daughter did know—she’d agreed to this meeting. Brian’s face is tipped to the top of her head, her small hands high on his shoulder blades. Felice seems to be trembling, fragile as a star, and Avis hears her say, as if brokenhearted, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” And seeing this seal or separation break between Felice and Brian, Avis understands that in some way the world has finally shifted.

The air feels light and insubstantial; time has pooled around their shoulders. Avis is trying to explain something or ask for something—what is it? She doesn’t know where to look or what to do with her hands or how to speak. She and Felice never used to touch at their meetings: it had seemed like a rule to Avis—the only way her daughter would consent to come near—and now she is still afraid. But there is the light sliding along strands of her daughter’s hair, the scent of lilac, and she can’t help herself, her gaze and her hands are drawn as if by magnetized forces; she brushes aside pieces of hair, cups her cheek, revealing the small, pale face breaking into tears. She takes Felice and holds her as if she’d caught her plummeting out of the air, feels the force of her daughter’s velocity in her arms and rib cage. There’s a sudden, surprising strength in her daughter’s grip—an adult fierceness. Energy runs through Avis, rippling. A rush of indecipherable breath in her ear—Felice is talking to her, trying to claim her in some way with the stream of language, talking too quickly to be understood. Avis tries to calm both of them, saying, “It’s okay, baby. I’ve got you—I’ve got you now.” Until Felice quiets, not letting go, the two of them hanging on, gently, gradually collapsing together into the mutual silence of return.

Felice

F
ELICE WAKES TO THE RISE AND COMPRESSION
of Emerson’s chest, the slow wavelength of his sleep in the early morning. She couldn’t sleep last night, twisting, kicking at the sheets,
the air like a blanket, pressing her into the thin mattress. It was so dark—so hard to get used to after years of sleeping in an urban light haze—the blackness sank onto her body, lowering from the ceiling. It made her think of the night of the hurricane: they’d spread out on the blankets and let Stanley think they were asleep. The storm was like nothing she could remember, bending the palms nearly to the ground and tearing tiles out of the neighbors’ rooftops. Feeling the walls tremble, Felice thought the apartment was about to break apart, that they would all whirl into the black hammer of the wind. Emerson talked softly to her about the strength of the building, the fastness of old structures, the solid foundations left by the old bank downstairs. Eventually he fell asleep, and then she’d lain awake for hours, alone, listening to the howling in the windows, her eyes wide open in the dark.

Last night was another long passage of staring and thinking, and an awful feeling had come to her, how all these years, she’d clung to an idea of penance, the hope that someday she would be judged—her crime and her self-imposed punishment—and somehow absolved. But now the world seemed immense and lawless and she knew there was no judgment—not the kind she was waiting for. She’d felt a sort of dread, granular and heavy, like a half-dissolved paste; it tasted sweet, like souls, she thought, and she felt she would never be free of it.

But just the intimation of morning helps Felice to feel lighter. This is the day they’ve decided they will go, because she and Emerson agreed that if they don’t go now, it will become impossible. “We’re getting attached,” Emerson said the other day in the warehouse, surrounded by crates of Valencia oranges. “It’s all right with me if you’d rather we stay.”

Felice waits in a bed a little longer, eyes burning, but can’t fall back asleep. Eventually she curls out of bed, dresses quietly, uses the bathroom. When she emerges, the door to Stanley and Nieves’s room is still closed, but she hears soft noises in the kitchen. Nieves is there, working at the counter. “Hey.” She turns and pushes the hair from her face with the back of her wrist, a butter knife in her hand. “Go back to bed, weirdo.”

“What’re you doing?” Felice leans against the counter next to her, steals a piece of yellow cheddar from the cutting board.

“I’m doing none of your business. What do you think? I’m making sandwiches for your stupid trip.”

“For real?” Felice leans in for a better view. Particles of light are just beginning to drift through the windows. She feels better. Last night Emerson held her closely against his ribs and told her to breathe with him, to be calm, calm, calm. Breathe in, wait, breathe out slowly. He told her: This might take a while. In that dark spell she felt as if she’d forgotten her own name or who she ever was. Now the light in the kitchen is clean and vital and the terror has lifted like lace from her body.

Felice has watched Nieves for two weeks and knows she can be sharp and moody, but other times so quiet she barely seems to be present, an entrancing remoteness. On the cutting board there are two peanut butter and red currant jam sandwiches for Emerson and two Serrano ham, shaved cheddar, and apricot chutney sandwiches for Felice. Nieves wraps them smartly in waxed paper, tapes them, and puts them back in the fridge. There’s also a cooler Nieves opens: packed with trail mix, sliced pears and apples, and the lemon bars. Jarvis Firmin, another volunteer, is going to drive Felice and Emerson in his nursery truck as far as Pensacola. From there, a series of Stanley’s friends and former employees will drive them across country. Felice squints at the kitchen window, trying to imagine the network that will carry them. Nieves sighs as she fits the lid back on the cooler. “At least you won’t starve before Iowa City.”

“Really, thank you,” Felice says. For a second she feels a bitter little bead like fear or anger, like a remnant of a nightmare, surfacing at the center of her chest. She studies the floor with its cheap mustard-brown linoleum, so ugly. After a moment, the feeling softens again.

“If I thought it would do any good, I would tell you not to go.” Nieves stares at her. “Don’t go. Okay? Don’t do it.”

Felice gives the floor an aimless smile, wraps her arms across her chest. Nieves pinches the fabric of Felice’s shirt—which had until recently been Nieves’s shirt—between her fingers. “You’re not going right this second—come on outside with me.”

THE EASTERN SKY
is beginning to take on depth as they push out of the apartment. A block away, there’s a murmur of light traffic on Krome Avenue. Nieves and Felice walk down the main street, the stores quiet, several still covered with plywood and storm shutters. The light is so gray and glassy it feels as if the two of them might be ghosts, as if they’d wandered out of someone’s dream. There’s a small square with benches where Felice has noticed a few homeless people, drifters, sleeping in the grass; but it’s empty now. They settle on one of the benches and watch coral streaks brighten and expand in the distance, pink wisps of clouds over purple wells of darkness. A whorled landscape of clouds piled on the tabletop of green fields.

The two girls sit close, their forearms bands of color in Felice’s peripheral vision—reddish brown and pale olive. Nieves slumps back against the bench. “You know, I used to be so pissed at my mother.”

“Oh yeah?” Felice stares shyly at her knees. “How come?”

“Mmm. I still am, a little bit,” she continues. “Though I guess these days I almost think, like, a good mother will let her kids be pissed at her, if they need to, you know?”

Felice smiles. “Ha. You think?”

Nieves slides one hand over the small globe of her belly. “It use to be like I practically hated her for drinking so much and feeling sorry for herself all the time. And going off on how horrible men were and then following home any giant loser who showed up. Like my stepdad.” Her fingers stop their slow circles and pat gently in place. “And then—just recently this was—I was at the market unloading artichokes? And I suddenly kind of knew that I only hated her because she had five kids and I was second to last and I just wanted her to myself. I was jealous.” She smiles lazily at Felice. “Isn’t that funny? How you can just know something all along but not, sort of, tell yourself?”

“I guess.” Felice glances at Nieves’s stomach. “Do you think you know something like that right now?”

“That’s the trouble. You can’t know until you
let
yourself know.” Her head falls back to rest on the back of the bench. “It’s like my mother had this story—I mean she had like a thousand stories. But there was this one I really loved. I used to think it was true. About a girl—she was really pretty and nice and smart and she lived with her mother in Florida. Just the two of them. But there was this guy? He was like, he did construction work, I think. Welding. He was totally into this girl, but she wouldn’t even, you know, even look at him. He was rough and tough, like this bearded mountain-man type? So one day she was walking by the construction site and he couldn’t stop looking at her and suddenly he just went crazy and like stole her. He grabs her and takes her like to the coldest place he can find, this freezing tiny island way, way north. I mean it’s so cold and so far away, there’s no other people and nothing grows there but little gnarly trees and little seabirds, but way off in the distance, so you can’t even hear them. And he keeps her there with him in this little cabin and makes her probably like his love slave.”

“Right, right,” Felice says, listening, her eyes closed.

“So of course her mother goes berserk. Just insane. She starts looking for her daughter everywhere. She goes all over the world, asking everyone she sees. And one day she spots one of those little seabirds and she gets a hunch and follows it back to the freezing island and she finds her daughter.”

“This is supposed to be true?”

“Don’t worry about it. This is the short version, I’m leaving tons of stuff out. Anyway, the mountain man says he won’t give her up and the mother begs and pleads with him. So finally they work out a deal—the girl can go back and be with her mother for part of the year, and the rest of the time she has to go live on the freezing island with the guy.” Nieves sighs and smiles and adjusts her weight on the bench. “That’s pretty much it. That’s the story. I guess I just loved thinking about the mother going and finding her daughter and getting her back like that. But the part that I never got? Was why did the girl keep going back to the freezing island? You know, like why didn’t she just stay and hide with her mom somewhere?”

“Maybe she really fell in love with the welder guy.”

“Yeah. I thought of that. But I also thought, you know, I bet she liked going away to the little cold island. She liked being far away and hidden from everything. Getting a break from her mom. She loved her but she always thought her mom was going to eat her alive.”

Felice doesn’t say anything. It seems like a sad story to her—like the girl never gets to have anything of her own—trapped on either side of things, between the cold and hot places. Felice can remember feeling when she was little that she might get burned up in her mother’s gaze. She’d thought that’s what love was—like a furnace. But yesterday in Stanley’s office, her mother had stared at her. Then, just like that, she stopped, her gaze fell, and something tipped inside of Felice. She feels it there now, subtle as a gesture: it is still falling, looping through the air. Another memory comes to her—something that’s been happening since she’s returned, as if a chest filled with fragments of her childhood has swung open. She thinks about a handmade ceramic bowl—a wedding present to her parents from her mother’s mother—enormous yet almost paper-fine, light as silk. It was painted lavender and sea blue and a ring of silver fish swam between its bands of color. One day, when Felice was six or seven, she was alone with the bowl, tall enough to reach its protected shelf: she picked it up, turning it, admiring its colors. But somehow she lost her balance and the thing dropped out of her fingers, shattering on the floor.

Felice gasped, then burst into tears, inconsolable. Her mother rushed into the room. Instead of scolding her, Avis knelt beside her, lifted the biggest shard, and smashed it on the floor. “See?” she said. “We broke it together.”

That was what Felice had kept trying to say to her mother yesterday. Seeing her again in Stanley’s office, the old memory of the bowl had returned to Felice: that moment of closeness. “We broke it together,” she said, caught in some crosscurrent—angry and hurt and full of wondering, helpless love, afraid to let go of her mother for even an instant.

Felice sits quietly, feeling the looping circle, the remnants of long-suppressed grief. Now she misses her parents with a vividness she hadn’t felt over their five years apart—as if she hadn’t had to feel the loss as long as she’d kept them at a distance. She almost can’t bear to go to Portland, but as much as she wants to stay she wants to see if these new feelings will remain with her, to test the edges and see if she’ll still want to come back after she’s been away. And she’s gotten used to the rigors and energy of movement: she isn’t ready yet to ease back into the comforts of a family. She’ll return soon, she thinks, but not yet. There’s a long, faint call of gulls, soft as if the cries were a gradient of the air, its streaks of dampness and old rain. She listens to the birds, an arm draped along the bench, and her eyes slip back to Nieves’s stomach.

“You can touch her,” Nieves says, and smooths her shirt down. “Lately everyone does. I think she’s still sleeping right now, though. Or he.”

Felice moves her palm shyly over the rising curve, brings her face close and says, “Hello in there, baby.” There’s a flutter under her hand and she sits up and looks at Nieves, who is laughing. “She heard you,” Nieves says.

“For real? Did she?”

She shrugs. “Sure, I guess. Why not? They’ve got ears and stuff.”

Felice gazes solemnly at her stomach. “Can I hear her?”

“That I don’t know.” She pats her belly again. “Try if you want.”

Felice considers for a moment, then she turns on the bench and lies back, lowering her head to Nieves’s lap. Her ear presses against her stomach, and as she watches the dwindling streaks of clouds she waits. Gradually she makes out small sounds, a distant riverine gurgle. “Oh. Oh my God. Is that her?”

“It’s probably just that I haven’t had breakfast.”

Felice puts her hand on the top arc of belly and presses her ear in close and she’s almost certain now she hears a low, steady murmur. “Hi baby,” she says. “Here I am. It’s Felice.” She seems to hear tiny motes, a far-off pulse like the movements of fish. The clouds unravel over their heads and Felice shades her eyes with one hand. Beyond the sound of the traffic there’s a noise, a rip in the air. Unidentifiable and syncopated, it lifts, voices torn from the high branches. Felice watches as a flock of birds rises over their heads and curls into the white sky. She watches its progress and she holds herself silent and very still, waiting for what will come.