Birds of Paradise: A Novel (17 page)

He grins and bats away the grass. “I’m
starving
. It’s seriously time for food.”

Emerson says they can get breakfast at his friend Derek’s place. She thinks again—a strand of anxiety—that she has to get work. But as they start up Michigan Avenue, Felice realizes that it feels good to let someone steer the course of the day. What else would she be doing? Smoking on the beach? She’ll just stop for coffee, maybe a cigarette—then she’ll get going. It’s early and the air is soft as sea foam. As they walk, Emerson talks about his parents. “Jim—my dad—he was Mr. Activist Guy. But originally he was an engineer—he worked on the rockets at Cape Canaveral. Then he, like, became a hippie and moved to Fort Lauderdale. Totally a dad by accident. My mom too, pretty much. Neither of them was so into it.”

“Did you love them and all?” Felice feels as if, walking this way, hands in pockets, staring at the pebbly sidewalk, Emerson carrying her board, that she could ask or tell him anything.

He shifts the board to his other arm and the back of his hand brushes hers. “Well, yeah,” he says finally. “We fought a lot, but I guess we loved each other—me and Jim and Mandy, and my brother Tosh.”

“I have a brother too,” Felice says. “Stan.”

“Yeah? Did you used to fight?”

“Not really—not so much back before. But he got pretty pissed at me—I’m sure he hates me by now.” She smiles.

“Not exactly your fault you got born.”

“Well, he didn’t exactly beg to have a little sister, either.” But that’s not what she’d meant. Scuffling her sneakers in the white dust, she feels protective of Stanley, who’d seemed to Felice—even back when he was fifteen and she was eleven—heroic and slightly removed, reading about stuff like feeding the poor and cleaning the environment. “So, if you all loved each other,” she says, barely able to stop herself from adding,
so fucking much,
“so then why are you, like, living in the gutter and all?”

“I’m not living in the gutter.” Emerson laughs—a fine, clear tone. He puts one hand in his pocket and carries the board loosely in his other arm. “I don’t know. I just wanted to try living not in a house for a while. Or, well, not in the same house my family was in. And not at a college either. Jim says that college is just another arm of the military-industrial complex.”

“Pfft!” Felice curls her upper lip. “What isn’t?” That came directly from Stanley.

“What about you then? Why are you staying in a place like the Green House?”

‘Oh.” She shrugs heavily, aware of Emerson’s scrutiny. “No reason. Same as you.” She walks with her arms crossed.

Emerson is still considering—his eyes lifted as if reading something on the air. “I guess—for us it all kind of fell apart. Jim and Mandy never got married in the first place, so . . . They said it’s too hard on kids if you have to go through a divorce and all. So. Pretty thoughtful.” His smile is private, directed at the ground; Felice looks away, uncertain if he’s serious.

“They made it too easy—in a way—to fall apart. I mean, next thing we know, Dad’s kind of living with Sandra—this other lady with a baby son—over in Plantation. And Mom moved to Denver to take jewelry design classes.”

“They moved away from
you
? That really sucks.”

Emerson’s expression is mild. “Well, they were pretty decent about the whole deal. They talked to us tons about it before they went. I had some impulse control problems, I guess. I’d get a little wild. Jim still stopped by the old house sometimes and gave me and Tosh some cash for groceries and stuff. Of course Tosh would always spend it on weed mostly.” He smiles at her again, that flickering, uncertain expression, but now he’s looking at her.

“Fuck,” she says softly. She lets her knuckles graze his, their fingers intertwine for a few moments before she lets go. They walk several more blocks, silenced by traffic noise, and negotiate a chaotic intersection. Then they pass a residential hedge tall as a gate and the traffic howl diminishes and the street opens to tall, wide trees like those in the Gables. Felice has never been in this neighborhood before—sticking to places she knows—crowded, touristy spots on the beach and a few secret street rat places—avoiding the police and kids from school. She feels exposed and anxious walking up this stately street: there are houses with circular drives, velvety emerald lawns, and children’s bicycles on the lawns. “So where’s your brother now?”

“Tosh?” Emerson half shrugs. “I don’t totally know. He works as some kind of assistant in a medical lab at MIT. I’m too much of a waste product for him. He’s really into, like, motivation and incentives and excellence and shit.”

“And pot.” Felice smirks and Emerson nods and laughs. He pulls a ragged frond from a banana tree and fans her with it, the dry edges flapping against her hair. She swats it back at him, laughing.

DEREK LIVES IN A
big house, mid-beach, behind an ornate iron gate on Pine Tree Drive. Felice admires the place, its vaulted ceiling and big fir beams, an entry filled with flat rugs and beaded vases and wooden sculptures that look vaguely African to Felice. She immediately recognizes the young, beefy boy with the shaved head who answers the door. “Wow.” She touches a curved lintel as they enter the main room. “You
live
here? I thought you lived at the Green House.”

Derek looks around the expansive room with distaste. “My so-called dad lives here when he’s not out with his ho. I’m not supposed to even be here when he’s not. But, like when
is
he here?” He knocks on a waist-high silver sculpture of a elephant with human arms and legs. It writhes on its wood base on the floor. “Conk-conk. You wouldn’t believe what this fucker cost. Steve-o got it like in Pakistan.” He picks up a small dark carving of a woman’s body with a bird’s head, a sharp, open beak. “Here”—he thrusts it at Felice—“it’s for you—take it.”

“It’s your
dad’s,
dumbass,” she says, scowling, and replaces it on an empty bookshelf.

“Whatev.” Derek picks up a half-dollar-sized flat silver heart with a dagger through its center, then an old watch that was positioned in an artistic display of timepieces. He slips them into his pocket. “I’ll sell all this crap eventually. He always gets more.”

They follow him through the room into a bright doorway. It’s been years since Felice has been inside a nice kitchen—granite counters crowned with chrome appliances, clean glints of untouched things. Like the kitchens of her school friends’ mothers. Her own mother’s kitchen had a big convection oven and fans—the counters glowed but her appliances looked battered and industrial. Felice sniffs, half hoping for the flour vapor of her home, but the air here is flat and empty. Her hands tremble as if with reawakened muscle memory: she tugs on the heavy fridge door—its tomblike chamber spilling milky light. Expensive, nearly empty shelves: film canisters, six cobalt bottles of water, a package of bacon and carton of eggs. “What a waste,” she mutters.

Derek and Emerson prowl around, rummaging through the cupboards, pulling out jam, peanut butter, macaroni, Oreos. They fry all the bacon and eggs, stirring in ingredients—olives, onions, cocktail franks—apparently at random. When it’s done, the boys half stand, half sit on tall stools pulled up to the counter; Felice sits across from them, knobby elbows on the counter, and watches them eat hunched over their plates, a bar of light cutting across the kitchen from a blue-veined window in the back wall. Felice nibbles a strip or two of Emerson’s bacon—refusing the eggy mess—imagining, with some pleasure, her mother’s revulsion at such food. Her mother didn’t entirely approve of food anyway. Felice thinks of her poking at a steak with her fork, saying,
It’s sodden
. The food is gone within minutes. Emerson makes an attempt at stacking dishes, but Derek waves them down. “Leave it, the maid’s around somewhere.”

He leads them out a back door to the polished slate patio and a racked assortment of iron weights, dumbbells, and two padded benches. The boys peel off their T-shirts: both of them are big and broad, but Emerson’s back and biceps are defined, anatomical. Derek points a remote, turning up the volume on a portable player; music pulses, drumming the air, a Teutonic frenzy. “Rammstein!” he crows at Felice. “ ‘
Du hast
,’ ha!”

Felice slides into a painted Adirondack chair under an umbrella and watches the guys clatter on and off the benches. They laugh and clap: Derek shouts, “You got it! You got it!” slapping his hands together while Emerson swings the weights up and into his chest. Felice is used to boys showing off for her, but she notices a sort of concentrated seriousness of purpose in Emerson, as if he is focused on a point buried inside his own body. Derek drops the weights, clanking loudly, groaning while he lifts the bar, then hectoring Emerson, standing over him at the head of the weight bench, arms outstretched, ready to catch the bar. Emerson lifts in near-total silence, his neck flattening and his veins bulging in dark seams beneath the surface of his skin. Derek’s sets taper off but Emerson keeps going, sliding one, then another set of thick plates on the bar. Mesmerized by the rivulets of sweat trickling along his brow and neck, Felice loses track of the amount of weight Emerson is lifting. The sun climbs to a steeper, hotter angle, approaching 90 degrees—but Emerson continues with single-mindedness.

As she watches Emerson in his silent exertions her thoughts feel sharp, her emotions honed on a hard edge. Felice hasn’t seen this sort of focus since the days when her friend Hilda flew down parking ramps on her board, hair whipping, her arms aloft, pulling out nose grinds, rails, flips, drop-and-grabs. Emerson in movement is like a new sort of beauty: she’d always thought of beauty as a kind of passivity. Felice has never pursued anything so passionately herself. She grew up taking admiration for granted—eyes all turning toward her—soaking the air with a goldenrod-colored aura. She didn’t have to do a thing to be loved: by her family, their friends, the teachers at school.

Derek dutifully assists Emerson, jotting down weights and reps, racking his weights, helping him to chalk his hands. Emerson switches from barbell to dumbbell, through overhand and underhand grips, shoulders, biceps, triceps, deltoids, pectorals. He’s flushed all over, glowing, panting, hair glittering, swigging from a pitcher of water Felice refills from the tall blue bottles in the refrigerator. Felice watches the whole session—two continuous hours of methodical training—her long, thin legs drawn up beside her on the chair, her black hair flared across her back. Emerson finishes his workout by gulping the water straight from the pitcher, then dumping the rest over his head. He waves at Felice as if too tired for words, then wanders to the outdoor shower around the side of the house. His sweat-soaked shorts flap over the edge of the wood stall. She hears the hiss of the water and wonders what he would do if she joined him. Then Derek appears. He sprawls in the chair across from hers, dragging an arm across his forehead. “Awesome, right?”

“I guess.”

“You hungry yet? You want something?” he asks. “Or you one of those air fern-type girls?”

Felice shakes her head, eyeing the shower mist.

Derek grins at her, shoulders jutting, straight arms, palms flat against the seat of his chair. “I’ve seen you around the Green House, right?”

Felice looks away, lifting her chin. “If I had a house like this, I’d be home all the time.”

He bobs his head. “Hey, you can come over, like, whenever.”

“What does your dad do?”

“He’s a psycho-the-rapist.” Derek’s smile reveals a crooked incisor and bicuspid. “He talks, talks, talks, then he gives his clients nice painkillers. He says it’s ‘therapeutic.’ ” He makes air quotes with his fingers. “We’re all best friends with the shipping department at Merck around here.”

Felice glances over his shoulder at the shower again; frilly green shrubs and bougainvillea surround the yard. A single palm branch arches above a white rope hammock almost hidden among the trees.

“You can even live here, if you want. For real.”

She crosses her arms, the long bones pressing against each other. “We’ve got another plan.”

“Yeah? What?”

She can’t help herself: she wants to tell someone. “We’re going to Oregon. Maybe.”

Derek doesn’t say anything for a moment, studying her, his eyes still and small. “Oh yeah? Since when?”

“He’s going to train at a special gym out there. I’m going with him.” She thinks: I’m going to do it.

“Right.”

“We are.”

“
Oregon?
Do you have any idea how far that is?” A leaf shadow bobs over his face. “How’re you gonna go?”

“We’ve got some money.”

“Yeah? How much?”

“Plenty.” She hesitates. “Almost a grand.”

He sagely gazes over her head, evidently digesting this information. There are premature lines running from the sides of his nose to the corners of his mouth, a divot between his eyebrows. He’s no older than Emerson, but his skin looks weathered as sandstone. Finally he says, slowly, judiciously. “That’s enough to get you there—maybe—depending—but not much else.”

Felice shrugs, sensing he’s right—a band of anxiety encircling her ribs—because now she feels invested in the plan—but she won’t let him see this. “We’ve got other . . . sources.”

“Uh-huh. Like?”

She examines the cuticle of her index finger. “My brother Stanley maybe. He owns Freshly Grown.”

“Pff! No he doesn’t.”

She lifts her chin and peers at him through lowered lids.

Derek’s grin disappears. “No fucking way. The
store
? In Homestead? Are you shitting me? My dad is, like, obsessed with that place. We get all our protein mixes and eggs and stuff like that there. No, really, I gotta admit, that place rules.” He angles his face to one side. “You just mean he runs the place, right? He doesn’t actually
own
it?”

“He owns it all right. Came up with it, started the whole thing out of nothing,” she boasts.

Derek’s face softens with a pleased wonderment. “Wow,” he says. “That is too cool. I gotta say, I love that place. Do you hang out there a lot?”