Birds of Paradise: A Novel (31 page)

Avis feels a queasiness—soul-sickness—begin to steal over her. Her palms feel damp. She picks up one of the lace cookies, examines the filigree of chocolate, replaces it, clears her throat. She will remove the tray and thank him for coming, before he can say any more. But he raises his head as if he can will her to listen. “I didn’t want her to stay—I swear—I argued with her! I told her to go home—every night I told her. It got to be too dangerous for her to go home. The rebels took over our street and there was shooting every night, tanks rolling over houses, tearing everything up. It was beyond deafening—a maelstrom. We were under siege. You can’t imagine the feeling that you can’t leave your house—that even your home is dangerous.”

Avis feels a feverish shame creep over her skin, knowing she has to listen. She nods slowly, releasing the tea tray. She makes herself ask, “So . . . she stayed?”

He sits back on the folding chair. There is his off-kilter smile again. “When the fighters occupied the street, she slept in the chapel for a week. I stayed in my room on the other side of the wall. We listened to the tanks thundering, keeping everyone awake, till we were just so exhausted we all just learned to sleep through it. The gardener left and then the housekeeper ran away. Solange put on the woman’s clothes and decided that would be her job. We nailed the doors to the chapel shut, but Solange begged me to leave the little stained-glass windows uncovered. And, you know, through that siege? Not one window damaged.” He stares at the pastries. “Little miracles, right? Something to live for?” He seems to be mocking himself, but his smile fades. “After a couple of weeks of sleeping in the chapel, she came to my room. Like when she’d first arrived. I’d turned her away the first time, but you know . . .” He displays his palms. Something about the man seems innocent to the point of bafflement. “I felt truly helpless. We gave each other some comfort. I like to think we did. Of course I loved her—whether I wanted to or not. Sometimes I wondered if she’d put one of her hexes on me. I’d never been in love before and it was such a specific pain, so sharp, like someone had to be jabbing needles in a little doll.”

“Then you decided to come back to the States?” Avis interrupts: she doesn’t want to hear about how good or comforting Solange was.

The man rubs the inner creases of his eyes, his face pouched and swollen with shadows. He picks up the lace cookie Avis had touched and eats it, then two more. “Years ago, I had a church in South Florida and a couple of my parishioners were from a wealthy old family here. I traveled to the church offices at Port au Prince and called them to beg for help. I didn’t care what happened to me but I was so afraid for Solange. I had to get her out of there.” His voice diminishes. “The family rented the house for us. That’s our backyard, right through the trees.” He points.

“I know.”

He nods and holds the smooth chair arms. “She likes to work outside. I can never get her to come in. Even when it’s like this—like a jungle. This heat. I want to move us up north—I’ve been trying to get reassigned. Someplace like Vermont. I don’t know if she’d like it,” he adds hopelessly. “Now of course, I don’t even know—” He breaks off.

Avis leans forward on the chair, wooden slats digging into the back of her legs. “She didn’t leave a note? No warning at all?”

He reaches into his blazer pocket and withdraws a white legal-size envelope. He flicks it with the tops of his fingers. “This is from INS. It came the other day in the mail. Someone tipped them off. We were traveling so quietly. We moved a couple of times after her visa ran out, but I thought we’d be okay here for a while. I needed more time to get things in order—we’d applied for sanctuary status, but that was rejected. Maybe I kept her too isolated. My parish here doesn’t even know that we’re married.”

Avis watches the way his fingers run along the outer corners of the letter. Already it looks grubby.

“I promised Solange we’d be okay. I said I’d go talk to them, that we’d just move again if we had to. I’d thought she seemed fine at the time.” He holds his hand out, fingers extended. “Calm. She made dinner. I had my arm around her shoulders when we fell asleep last night. I woke at four a.m.” His face slips.

Avis lowers her eyes, breathing shakily, slowly.

“She’s always been so talented at hiding what she feels. Never seen anything like it. I’d never dreamed she would run away. She has no family in this country. No friends. She’s totally dependent on me. I had to take her shopping. She wouldn’t wear the new clothes I brought her—just the rags from the housekeeper. It was like she was biding her time. Just waiting.” He lifts his eyes to Avis. “I’m so afraid she’ll try to go back.”

Avis feels cool throughout her body, thinking of the last things Solange said to her.

When he finally rises to go, he stops by the front door and holds out his hands to take hers. “Forgive me, please, for unburdening myself like this. In my line of work, it’s usually the reverse. I feel embarrassed.”

“I’m sorry not to be of more help,” she murmurs. “I’m just sorry.”

“This is the first time I’ve been able to speak—openly.” He closes his eyes and squeezes her fingers; for one awful moment, she believes he’s about to cry. He opens his eyes again. “I’m certain that the son and husband were killed. It’s absurd to think otherwise. If you’d been there you could have seen for yourself. Just one ongoing massacre. If only we could have seen the bodies. She might have had some relief.”

He releases her hands. “There were nights when the fighting died down and then there was such a silence. It seemed like you could hear the land and the ocean breathing, exhaling, if it doesn’t seem too strange to say. There were nights . . .” His voice falters and he clears his throat briefly. “Sometimes we heard knocking. There were nights that we could hear a child out in the street crying,
Maman, Maman!
” His voice is soft and light. “Over and over, just like that, so sweet. You couldn’t tell if it was a boy or girl. Solange became certain it was Antoine. Of course it wasn’t. There were so many orphans—everywhere. I wouldn’t let her go outside to look.” Head lowered, he lifts his eyes, their singed edges, to Avis. “It was the most dangerous at night. Do you understand? There were snipers. There were children with guns. They would use a crying child as a trick, to lure people out of their hiding places. But still, Solange screamed at me. She beat me with her fists like a man. I didn’t let her go.”

Avis stands. She picks up the plate of remaining pastries, takes them into the kitchen, spills them into a paper bag, and brings them to the man. “I’m sorry,” she says, her voice jumping. She isn’t sure what she’s saying to him. It occurs to her that he asked almost nothing about her friendship with Solange. Now she just wants him to take his terrible stories and go.

He mumbles his thanks again and leaves her a dingy business card. “In case you happen to hear something.”

AVIS WATCHES THE MAN'S
form diminish as he moves up the street, the neighbors’ lawns dark as old emeralds. She remembers how she dreaded sleep in the months after Felice left. But her dreams were light and oddly pleasant—heartbreaking only upon waking. There were certain things she couldn’t say or think or hear in those months. Like
daughter
or
child
. Or
lost
. That was the worst of all, a sliver of metal under her breastbone. She woke from dreams in which she said it over and over, as if she were squeezing it from her body. She remembers the way she felt when she finally understood that Felice was not going to return, the sense of leadenness, the elemental weight of it filling her bones.

She gravitates to the French doors, studying the scenery behind the glass. Her gaze falls on a pile of weeds heaped up on the patio and she remembers that Solange had told her they had some sort of special properties—like a witch’s herb. The air riffles around her and it takes some minutes for her to remember why it feels so different. That quiet. There’s a crosshatching of faraway bird cries and distant lawn mowers, last-minute yard work before tomorrow’s storm. She finds she needs to sit down, flat on the cool rock. It feels as if steam is rushing through her body. She scoops up the piles of leaves Solange had left, gathering them into her lap. Her cell phone is in the front pocket of her cook’s pants: she extricates it, her fingers tremble, misdialing until she remembers the speed dial. Pound sign. Three. A string of red ants cuts jaggedly across the stone, inches from her. She watches them in a trance, then scans the thickets of palms that border their property. Voice mail picks up. Peering through the scrim of trees, she glimpses the curved iron door of the birdcage standing open. “Stanley,” she says to the machine. “Please. I’d like to come see you.”

She hadn’t felt—not in this immediate, personal way—just how much colder and sharper things could be, how planets could snap out of their orbits, how frigid, wasting blackness could come in a tide, erasing everything.

Felice

T
HE LOW CAR TURNS OFF ALTON ROAD ONTO ONE
of the narrow numbered streets perpendicular to the ocean. Felice slides onto her back to gaze out the rear windshield. Usually the night sky is full of streetlights and sea mist, but once they turn, Felice notices a new clarity to the night; every scrap of cloud has dissolved and instead there are perfect constellations and a single red-white point of light sailing past like a space station.

It occurs to Felice that something about this man reminds her of Mr. Rendell. She wonders if she went with him tonight to take one last spill into her childhood, the sweet fever of old fear, making her feel so alive, sparkling. Everything smelled sharper and sounded clearer and the stars seemed to pop right out of the sky in those days. The smell of disinfectant and chalk and rosin and old instruments and Mr. Rendell’s piney aftershave all made her feel awake and alert. They roll up to Ocean Drive and Marren doesn’t bother with parking. He just stops in the street and puts on his flashers. “The cops know me.” He slings a forearm back over the headrest and studies Felice. “So come on, fairy princess, we’re here.”

“This is stupid.” The other man doesn’t turn around. “Big stupid waste of time.”

“You’re the one wants to let her go.” Marren’s eyes look hollow and carved-out under the streetlights. “Anyone ever tell you—hey—” The man gives his friend a shove. “She looks like Elizabeth Taylor! Right? Anyone tell you that?” He chews on the end of a toothpick ruminatively, then works it between a couple of molars. “Those eyes of hers.” He runs his fingertips along Felice’s brow bone. “God, I feel sorry for you,” he says abruptly. “What’s a little girl gonna do with a face like that?”

They climb out and the night sand under her sneakers is dense and damp, wet cement, barely curving under foot. She smells the aftermath of rain—it must’ve come while she was in the club. Her skin feels like a finely woven gauze: the rain melts in the air in white flashes, flourishes.

The music room was supposed to be their sanctuary. She wasn’t very good at violin, but she still enjoyed the rasp of the bowstrings, the cool tilt of the instrument under her chin—who knows why. The whole time she played, right from the start, she felt his eyes on her profile. Mr. Rendell’s gaze, always there, hovering in the air. Even when he wasn’t looking at her directly, he was still looking. Eyes hovering like bees. The music room belonged to her and Hannah. After class, they claimed the room for hours—supposedly to practice, Felice on violin, Hannah on clarinet—even though Hannah always said it was pointless—it wasn’t like they were going to become musicians. They used to eat the
palmiers
and meringues Avis packed for Felice, and one day Hannah held up the scroll of a
palmier
and said in a languid, speculative way, “I wonder why your mother is trying to make you fat.” She glanced at Felice, her dark, solemn eyes shining. “Do you ever think about that?”

Felice smirked. “You’re crazy. She’s a
baker
.”

Hannah sniffed a meringue, then tossed it into a trash bin. “You ever wonder if she’s trying to poison you? Because, seriously? I think she might be.”

Sometimes Hannah would light a cigarette. She’d hand it to Felice, who held it up between two fingers, admiring the thin white trickle of smoke. She didn’t puff on it, though: Stanley was contemptuous of smokers. She and Hannah lounged on the gray upholstered couch pushed against the wall. One day Hannah talked about her older brother Simon (Semir) who’d killed himself by drinking the cleaning fluids stored under the bathroom sink. She talked about it in a casual way, as if she were describing a shopping trip.

“Why? Why did he do it?” Felice was breathless: she couldn’t imagine losing her brother.

Hannah looked disoriented: she touched her hair, which fell around her shoulders in pieces. Finally she said, “It was years ago. I hardly remember. He kept talking to himself a lot. And not to anyone else. I guess it was sort of like he forgot how to be happy.” Then she smiled briefly and said, “I hope that never happens to me.”

“Me either,” Felice said, chilled and heartbroken for her friend.

Late on a Tuesday afternoon, after class, Hannah told her she had to get home early that day to help her mother “have her usual mental breakdown.” This entailed, apparently, Hannah doling to her mother just the right number of Vicodin. “So she doesn’t go haywire again,” Hannah said, tugging on the sleeves of her thin black sweater. Then she and her mother watched TV together, but when Felice asked what they watched, Hannah admitted her mother generally slept through all of it. “I think the only reason she’s still working is for the drugs.”

Felice had never heard stories like this before. “Aren’t you worried about her? What does your dad say?”

She shrugged and pulled the sleeves over her hands. “They know the deal. I’ve already told them I’m out of here in a year or so.”

“You’re only fourteen years old!”

“So?” Her face was clear and cool. “And they’re a million and I can already do a better job than them.”

“Where would you go?”

“Europe. Spain. Basque Country maybe. You should come with me. We’ll take over the world.”

Felice smiled and her gaze rippled over her friend. But suddenly Hannah seemed to harden, as if she were offended, and she said, “There’s no point anyway. All any of us are doing is wasting time until we die.”

“So there’s no point to doing anything?”

She turned her head. “Doesn’t matter if you’re president or a bum. Not in the end. It all goes back to zero.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

Sometimes it was easier to be friends with Hannah when she wasn’t around. There was something perfect about school after final bell—the formal emptiness of the halls. Felice and Hannah had talked about all sorts of plans—how they’d make movies together and see things. But when Felice was alone she could sink into the feeling of the future—the delicious ache of it—just by pointing her thoughts into the distance.

Felice slipped into the music room, evading the custodial staff who sometimes patrolled the school’s east wing. It was silent and the room was full of long shadows. She left the lights off: beyond the windows, she could see rain prickling the cement courtyard. She heard a sound then and, turning, realized that she wasn’t alone in the room.

Two people. They appeared to be crumpled together on the couch. She gradually made out Hannah’s straight, choppy hair, her blouse unbuttoned and pushed down around her middle. Her skin had a bluish-white cast like marble. She’d never seen her friend’s body before. Hannah, for all her ironic, knowing ways, was extremely modest—she refused to disrobe in front of or shower with the other girls after P.E. Hannah’s eyes were lowered, her arms coiled around a man’s bare back—his shirt on the floor, his fly flapping open, though his pants were still pulled up. There was a sound like a sigh and a moan—they hadn’t seen her come in. Felice watched them, frozen. The man released another awful whimper: it was Mr. Rendell. Felice ran out of the room, the double doors crashing shut after her.

She ran down the hall to the girls’ bathroom where she burst into sobs, bent over the sinks. When Hannah came in a few moments later, she could barely look at her in the mirror. She kept seeing the small arc of her friend’s right breast squashed under Mr. Rendell’s chest, the careful, precise expression on Hannah’s face.

“Please don’t report him.” Her voice was trembling; she patted at her shirt, buttoning. “It doesn’t matter at all. It’s nothing.”

“You said you were going
home
.” This was the least of it, but somehow it was the thing Felice picked to say.

“I know. It’s stupid. He doesn’t even really like me. He just picked me because I’m friends with you.” Hannah’s face looked young and bare and frightened. “But he knew
you’d
never go with him, of course.”

Felice was shaking all over; she rubbed her arms with her hands; she kept feeling little surges of nausea. “So horrid.”

“I know.” Her voice was high and faint.

Another sort of possibility occurred to Felice then, a chill entering her bloodstream as she whispered, “Did he force you?”

Hannah’s eyes seemed huge in the dim light. “A little, the first time,” she murmured. After a moment, she dropped her eyes and said, “Not really. I kind of was happy about it. I couldn’t believe that he liked me. Even a little.”

“The
first
time? How often?” she started to ask; she broke off in the middle of
often
. She wanted to comfort Hannah, to feel sympathy for her.

Hannah started trying to explain to Felice, to give her details, in their old gossipy way. “It was the time you had the dentist, remember? You missed orchestra. Rendell said he wanted to go over a new song with me. Such a skank. He locked the doors that time—but I could tell he liked thinking about getting caught.”

Felice tried to nod and laugh, but then for some reason, Hannah faltered and said, “I’m really sorry.”

FELICE STRIDES AHEAD
on the sand and Marren lets her—she knows he won’t let her get too far. At least she doesn’t have to look at him. The moon is burning through the sky and there are gray shadows everywhere. She skirts the Starbucks beach entrance, passes the thick thatches of sea grass—half trampled by tourists, even in low season—and wanders toward the Cove. “Over this way!” she calls, trying to project her voice. She can hear him trudging behind, his breath coming in the asthmatic smoker’s wheeze she knows well—lots of outdoor kids have it. He doesn’t have to be fast, of course, if he has a gun. Felice hopes one of the kids might recognize her voice. Farther back on the sand, away from the water, she senses other forms shifting past them: street kids—staying silent and unseen.

But there’s no sign of Berry or Reynaldo. Of course: they’ll be out clubbing for hours yet. They won’t return till the water starts glimmering. The ocean looks high and white tonight, as if there is a hidden engine churning inside: the waves rumble, a deep drumming, rolling over all other sounds. For years, she’s thought there was a way to stay safe: when bad stuff happened to people, it was because they were crazy or stupid. She’d even thought that about Hannah. As she waits for Marren to close the distance between them, she thinks: There’s no escape for anyone. Felice stops and turns deliberately into the moonlight, tiring of cat-and-mouse play, facing into the glassy darkness between herself and Marren. She feels the ghost of an old age she will never live to see settling over her, oxidation rustling in her bones, catching up with her. Marren moves toward her. The night wobbles over his shoulder, and she sees that she’s walked farther ahead of the man than she’d realized. For a moment, the noise of the surf seems to recede and she can hear his breath, the little huffs, as if he’s already getting winded. “Hey, girlie,” he calls. “Slow it down now.”

Felice can’t see any sign of his friend. She glances ahead, up the beach; the moon lights the sand like a trail of silver minnows. She starts walking again, a bit more quickly, just to see what will happen next.

“
Fuck,
girlie. Don’t test me now. Trust me on that.” His voice is tense. Felice speeds up, moving faster, feet arched and silent, until she’s running, heading toward the firmer wet sand. She moves well on the beach. Almost flying. Skating. Behind her, Marren yells, “God—fuck.
Fuck
. Stop. Fucking stop
now
.” Her lungs broaden in her chest, her wiry arms whip at her sides: perfect, coordinated action. She can see in the dark, she can run like this forever, like the free divers who slice through miles of ocean on a single breath.

There’s a sound: something breaking or snapping—metal on metal. Then the explosion is so loud the night seems to wang inside out like a steel drum. Stunned, Felice trips, pitches face forward, sand grinding into her mouth and eyes, her ears scorched with the aftershock of noise.

FELICE DROPPED OUT
of orchestra. She couldn’t bear the sight of Mr. Rendell, his shambling, apologetic manner, his way of glancing at the sixth-grade girls. And Hannah had allowed him—that slack, pale body, arms like rolls of baguette dough—to
touch
her. The next morning, Hannah came right up to her after homeroom. “Hey, pretty stupid last night, right? Thank God you saved me.”

“Yeah,” she mumbled. Bella caught Felice’s eye as she slipped past them in the hall, her friend alerted to some crucial shift in Felice’s posture. “I’ve gotta—I better go,” Felice said, moving sideways, as if someone were tugging on her arm.

Hannah stared, her lips parted, then tightened, bravely. “We’ll hang out later, right?”

Felice didn’t speak to her again after that day, not once. Her old friends welcomed her back as if she’d been away on an ocean passage. No one mentioned or seemed to resent the way she’d abandoned them for Hannah, no one questioned the way that relationship had abruptly ended. They spoke of Hannah in vaguely sympathetic, sorrowful tones. “It’s so sad, the way she is,” Yeni lamented. “It’s not her fault, really.”

“She’s kind of pitiful,” Marisa said.

“She could actually almost be pretty,” Coco chimed in. “Like, if she straightened her hair and lost six or seven pounds to start.”

“Quit slumping!” Bella proclaimed. “That’s what I always want to say when I see her. And wear some actual colors for once. Enough with the black sweater. But she’s just so
scary
?” She darted a glance at Felice.

At the lunch table, Felice ducked her head. “Did you know about her and Rendell?” There were gasps. And then a look—such a look—of sumptuous pleasure came over the girls’ faces, like biting into éclairs.

All week, Hannah tried to approach Felice between classes. Felice moved to a desk near the front of the class in French. She felt Madame Cruz’s scrupulous gaze take in the change. Then there was a substitute music teacher—no one knew what had happened to Mr. Rendell. Felice’s friends traded rumors. Bella speculated that Hannah might’ve threatened to report him herself. “That’s pretty brave—I mean, if it’s true,” Coco said.