Birds of Paradise: A Novel (37 page)

There’s a pause, then Felice murmuring: “they . . . unidentified? . . . not him . . . I mean . . . he said his name . . .”

Their intent, muted voices rise and fall. Emerson: “Must not have had . . .”

Felice, reading in a sharp whisper: “
In an accidental drowning
 . . . know it was even him? And
drowning
?”

“It’s the same beach on the same night . . . anything . . . tide and the currents . . .”

“A white man, mid-forties . . .”
She is either reading this or conceding something. “What about the other . . . his friend?”

“. . . why would he stick around?”

“. . . God.”

For a long while, Stanley hears nothing but a whir of breath in his ears, a pump somewhere in the building, the buzz of the overhead lights. His mouth is so dry it adheres to itself. He closes his eyes. Through the wall, he hears minute, inarticulate sounds—perhaps paper crumpling, perhaps crying. He lowers his eyes to the heels of his palms.

He once let a girlfriend cajole him into spending a few nights with her at a hotel in Islamorada. She’d insisted that Stanley needed a “vacation,” that he was too young to be so obsessed with work. He went grudgingly, annoyed at the waste of time and money. The hotel had statues of grinning tiki idols out front and furniture that stuck to the backs of their legs. He’d awakened late one night and got up to use the bathroom. As he washed his hands in the darkened room, in the mirror he noticed something move on the floor behind him. After years of working in the food industry, he had a near-telepathic ability to detect vermin and pests of all sorts, and he imagined how satisfying it would be to tell the girlfriend that the hotel was infested with palmetto bugs.

He turned. As he stared through the purple darkness of the room, he noticed trembling movements, then the extended claws like a waiter balancing trays, then a tail curling up and over. He watched in a kind of dream-state as two scorpions made their delicate, rickety way across the bathroom floor. And the feeling of that moment—a kind of mild horror as well as a decision to leave the creatures alone and never to mention them—was virtually identical to what he feels now, eavesdropping, listening to his sister talk about drowned men, unidentified bodies—both a recoiling dread and placid neutrality. What had she gotten mixed up in?

He consciously relaxes his grip on his chair arms, seeing the scorpions’ scrape in the darkness again. He’s given up on issues like Justice and Global Peace—preferring, instead, to be kind and generous to his employees, to take good care of his girlfriend. Lately he barely sees the migrant workers who wait for jobs in the lumberyard parking lot or amble around downtown Homestead, the heels of their boots worn down to softness. He wonders, Can anyone help it? What’s ever right? You contract with a local farmer, only to find out that Dow Chemical controls their seed production. You lose money because your vegan customers want to have papayas or avocados in November. You lose customers because the only oranges you can get in December are from South America, because Big Citrus pushed a ban on privately owned orange trees, citing citrus canker, because it’s more lucrative for Florida citrus growers to ship their fruits halfway around the world than sell at home. Because an apple grower can’t afford to take a bite of his own fruit. Who says the world is fair? You have to pick your loyalties and your causes, Stanley thinks, throwing his copy of the newspaper into recycling. In this way, at the very least, he picks his sister.

ON FRIDAY MORNING,
ten days after Felice reappeared, Stanley wakes earlier than usual. He watches Nieves’s belly as she sleeps: his talisman. Each day he has awakened with a bit less anxiety, less surprised to find his sister asleep in his living room. He recognizes the way she pouts in silence, folds her hair over one shoulder, her zippy, near-enzymatic energy in the afternoons. He allows himself the pleasure of simply enjoying her presence. Nieves opens her eyes: it’s still dark, the two of them lie there, silently aware of the other’s stirrings. Their wall unit rumbles away, making its weirdly human moan, producing icy streaks in the air. She shifts, orienting herself toward him, and murmurs, “Let’s ask them to stay.”

“Here? In this apartment?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Or in the studio—we’re not using it. We can put the canned junk back in the warehouse.” She sighs faintly. Stanley can make out the glimmer on her lower lip, an iridescence on the swell of her belly. Increasingly, she seems to have less energy to be irascible, less will for gruffness. Sometimes he worries that her personality is eroding, that she’s being washed away by the pregnancy. His hand closes tightly around hers. “I like them,” she says. “They’re sweet. And I think they need us.”

She speaks with a kind of exhausted resignation Stanley recognizes in himself. He runs his thumb along the inside of her fingers. “If we ask them to stay, it might remind them that they were planning to go.” He’d meant this as a joke, but it doesn’t come out sounding that way.

Nieves props her head on her hand, “First, though—you should take her to see your mother.”

“Oh.” Stanley shakes his head. He strokes the length of her inner forearm. He feels cushioned by fatigue. “That’s pretty much the last thing she’ll do.”

“It’s different now. She’s relaxed—more used to things. Please, just—ask her again?”

“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.”