The Bird Market of Paris (11 page)

Taking care of a bird—any bird—was a welcome duty, but with the hurricane on the way, I needed to move my outside aviary birds into cages inside the house, and try to figure out who the pairs were. If I couldn't tell the individuals apart, I'd have to place each lovebird into a separate cage or they would fight, possibly to the death. There was a lot to do in my avian world. Matt's stepdad, Larry, came by and asked my dad to help secure his sailboat in the basin, and they spent an hour tying the boat down while I safeguarded the birds and my mom dragged our potted plants into the garage.

Sometime in the afternoon the National Weather Service announced emergency evacuation imperatives for neighborhoods in the path of the storm. Our neighborhood, King's Bay, lit up on the weatherman's map. Poppy's friends who lived a few miles inland said we could stay with them, but we couldn't bring the animals.

“I'm staying,” I said, as we all sat around the TV in the kitchen.

“Come with me,
Chérie
, we'll have fun,” Poppy said. “You cannot stay here alone. Do you trust your Poppy?”

“If I can't take the animals, I'm not going. There's danger coming. Can't you see it on the map?”

“Nicole, we're going and you're coming with us. End of story,” my dad said as if I were a child talking about my trip to Narnia.

“We'll be back tomorrow,” my mom said.

“Maybe I can siphon some gas from the boat?”

“Marine fuel won't run your car,” my dad said. “It's mixed with oil.”

I walked into my room and closed the door. The neighbors outside shouted to one another to hurry up. I wasn't angry, upset, or scared. I was resolute. I'd ride it out with my animals. If only a window broke, what was the big deal?

Police cars drove up and down our street with bullhorns blaring. “This is a mandatory evacuation zone,” they warned, static punctuating the beginning and end of each sentence. “You must leave your home.” They repeated their orders in Spanish.

Two policemen came to the door. Through my bedroom window I overheard them talking to my parents.

“We're making sure you folks are packing up,” one cop said, his radio buzzing with garbled voices.

“We're headed to a friend's place in Kendall, but our daughter doesn't want to go,” said my mom.

“We can arrest anyone who doesn't leave on a second-degree misdemeanor.”

“No problem, Officer, we're all leaving.”

My mom appeared in my doorway a minute later. “Did you hear the police?”

“They're not going to arrest me.”

“They could. And then what would you do? We'd have to come bail you out in the middle of a hurricane. You can't take your animals to jail, can you?”

She was right. Being arrested would eliminate my post-storm options. I had no choice but to leave and force myself to believe that the storm would exhaust itself over the Bahamas, even if my intuition said otherwise.

I called Matt and asked if I could stay with his family. Matt's family was also in an evacuation zone, but in a non-mandatory area, about half a mile inland and not on the water. I could walk the three miles home from Matt's house after the storm if necessary. His mom, Gloria, said I could bring some of my birds, so I packed my ten youngest lovebirds into a cage, those just starting to eat on their own, along with the wild baby bird in his own small cage.

I rolled a small aviary with ten black-masked lovebirds into our rec room, and stacked the rest of the cages containing peach-faced lovebirds—about sixty birds—onto counters, shelving, and the floor in the bird room behind the kitchen. I always knew Bonk—I could pick her out in a crowd of green peach-faced lovebirds—but her mate, Binky, wasn't as easy to recognize in my hurry netting the aviary birds, so they were separated. I didn't want to risk putting Bonk into a cage with another bird that might hurt her.

I put extra food and water into bowls for Gladys, Emmeline, and Paisley. Not long after Nona passed away, Poppy had found my dear Sylvester, the tuxedo kitty I'd trained to give me his paw and to sit on command, dead in the front yard at just eleven years old. We'd had a cat memorial service, complete with candle lighting and a Hebrew prayer. I missed him.

My baby albums with my infant photos and a curl from my first haircut were near the sliding glass door facing the canal, along with a Tiffany-style stained glass lamp shade Nona had soldered after she retired, so I moved those to the couch for safety. I changed clothes and grabbed an old radio to take with me.

The birds seemed protected in the back room, buffered by the kitchen on one side and the garage on the other. The next-door neighbors had several parrots, and they left them in their home when they evacuated, too.

“You have one last chance to come with us,” my mom said. I told her I wouldn't. “I'll leave you the address in case you change your mind. Don't forget to lock the door.” She headed toward the car, where my dad was waiting.

“
Chérie
, please come with your Poppy. Do not let me be alone.”

“You aren't going to be alone, Poppy. You're with everyone else.”

“That does not mean I am not alone.”

“Poppy, come on.”

“Call me every hour. I will wait for your calls and not sleep until I know you are safe.”

Then they left.

My parents believed the storm was a minor speed bump in our day; they left home with no preparations to secure the house, no putting away or taking of valuable and sentimental objects, no thought to the possibility of more than a window breaking. I stood in the middle of the living room, the day still bright, and thought I should stay. I could hide from the police and hunker down in the house to look after the animals; but in the end, I forced myself to trust what my parents said. Matt picked me up in the late afternoon.

I don't know why I left Bonk behind.

*   *   *

Mitch and Brad, Matt's older brothers, were boarding up windows and moving furniture into the middle of the living room when Matt and I arrived. Gloria and Larry, Matt's stepdad, kissed me and welcomed me inside. Karen, Brad's pretty fiancée, was there, and Gloria's little Maltese, Goldie, ran around our ankles begging to be held. I placed the cages of lovebird babies and the wild baby bird into the bathtub in a hallway bathroom and closed the door. I figured they'd be safe because there were no windows in that room.

Matt's family loved me and considered me an adopted daughter. With three sons, having her sons' female friends around was fun for Gloria. She came back from every shopping trip with presents for me: elaborate hair ties, shower bonnets, and fancy soaps—girly goodies she couldn't buy for her boys. Larry had a racing sailboat, now moored in the basin behind my house, and Matt and I spent summer evenings cruising around Biscayne Bay on the boat, curled together on the bow, almost in love.

Gloria and I drove through deserted streets to buy dinner. Most of the stores were closed and boarded up, but one fast food chicken place had a long line in front of it, so we parked and waited. The wind trembled every leaf and the sky turned oyster shell gray.

Back at Matt's, we found some board games and puzzles and ate our dinners. The storm appeared and sounded like a normal Miami thunderstorm—thunder and lightning, the wind howling through the space under the doors. Matt and I spooned in his bed and I fell asleep with the warmth of his familiar body behind me.

I woke up alone at midnight in a darkness that felt almost sinister. The power had gone out, and the storm rattled the boards over the windows. I knew Matt's room was an addition to the home, and I believed it was less safe than the rest of the house. I scrabbled my way into the living room by feeling along the walls, following voices and candlelight coming from the master bedroom.

“Matt, you left me in there by myself.” I was scared, but when I spoke, my words came out as angry.

“You were sleeping. I didn't want to bother you,” he said.

I wanted a drink, but was too self-conscious to ask for one. I sat cross-legged on the king-size bed with everyone else. We listened to the storm, wind and rain and thunder, debris pinging like birdshot against the boards over the sliding glass doors in the bedroom. I tuned my radio to Y100 and we listened to Bryan Norcross, our famous local meteorologist. He was our link to the outside world. The phones had long gone dead.

“It's not the strong winds that destroy windows and homes,” Norcross said in his soothing, authoritative voice. “It's the debris that turns into projectiles.”

As the wind escalated, huge pieces of debris flew against the house, vibrating the walls. Matt held my hand. I still wanted a drink, but we were huddled in the bedroom, and I didn't know how to ask for alcohol from people who weren't drinkers.

“When we move, you need to move to your safe spot, too,” Norcross said from his newsroom, preparing to retreat to a back room with his scant crew. “Examine your house and find a safe place, but don't lock yourself in anywhere, because if the water starts rising you may have to fend for your life.”

I squeezed Matt's hand, imagining water flooding the room and wondering how we'd escape, since all the windows were boarded. Wind whistled through every crevice in the house, and I hoped the water wouldn't reach the ceiling. How would Goldie survive? I'd hold the little Maltese above the surface if I had to drown to do it.

At three thirty in the morning, Bryan Norcross and his crew said they were moving to a safer spot inside their studio and that we should do the same.

We didn't move right then, but fifteen minutes later windows shattered all over the house like a series of bomb blasts. We ran into the closet and slammed the door, huddling together and watching the walls sway. I imagined the house peeling apart in the wind. The roof shook and my ears popped. The square attic door above us danced from the pressure building in the house. We communicated with our eyes as objects hit the house and vibrated the floor and walls. No one spoke.

“Do not think that you are in any way safe,” said Norcross over the radio waves. “If you have not hunkered down and gotten that mattress over you, friends, this is the time to do it. Get into an interior closet, get a mattress over your head, and wait this thing out.”

I clasped my hands over my ears. Larry showed us the pressure lowering on the barometer he had taken off his sailboat. I was thankful to have someone nearby who wasn't panicked. Maybe we'd live through this.

Then the batteries in my radio died.

More crashing sounds and splintering glass and wood, like a demolition crew taking down a building rebar by rebar. I held my breath, listening for my lovebirds chirping, but the storm growled on the other side of the wall, drowning any living voices. I held little Goldie in my lap and petted her, consoling myself.

After an hour in the darkness the storm relaxed, and we left the closet. Bradley peeked outside and reported that the storm seemed over. We opened the bedroom door and walked into the living room, starting to assess the damage in the darkness, when another wall of wind and debris struck the house, and we ran back into the closet. The lull had been the eye of the storm, an eerie break in the calamity, like the bells ringing between rounds in a prizefight. The pressure dropped again—the winds had reversed and grown stronger—and the house shook to its foundation. I waited for the roof to collapse and kill us all.

The hurricane ditched us around sunrise, crawling west to say good morning to Fort Myers and Clearwater. Every window in the house was broken; a foot of water stood in the sunken living room; dirt and debris were strewn all over the kitchen. The pressure had pushed one of the windows from the frame, leaving a large, rectangular gap in the concrete of the house. Cabinet doors were torn off their hinges in the kitchen, and the piles of dishes inside had delicate heart-shaped green leaves stuck between the plates. The baby lovebirds were safe in the bathroom and chirruped when they saw me, clambering to the front of the cage.

We all walked through the space where the front doors had once hung into a hard drizzle and whipping wind under a gray sky. Fluffy yellow insulation and roof shingles of all colors covered every inch of ground, obscuring the distinction between lawn and asphalt. Half a roof sagged on a lawn across the street, and every power line, phone pole, and tree sprawled on the road. A green street sign reading “124th Street” stuck up from the ground where the wind had planted it. We were on 136th Street.

Neighbors paced around in a daze, talking to one another and wondering how we would survive, at least in the short term. We had been shoved back in time: no running water, electricity, or phone service. This was Miami in August and we needed water, at least. Did everyone we loved survive the storm? We had no way of knowing. Cell phones weren't commonplace back then.

I fed the wild baby bird some cold hand-feeding formula. Everything I knew about birds said it was a bad idea, but I had no choice. I needed to return home to assess the situation there, and I thought I'd meet my parents at the house. I wasn't panicked—I was numb.

I told Gloria I was going to walk home, and I wanted Matt to come with me, but they didn't want to let me go. Downed power lines slithered over every street. A neighbor wandering the streets with us agreed to drive me home after I begged for a ride. He pulled an immaculate, shiny black Porsche 911 from his garage, a surreal vision against the backdrop of ruin. I settled into the tan leather seat and we set out on the three-mile drive. We wove around downed trees and cars that looked as if giant hands had picked them up, smashed and twisted them like clay, and then tossed them down again.

We couldn't take a direct route because most of the streets were blocked by mounds of debris, which rose higher as we drove closer to the water, hills of the remains of people's homes. Yachts balanced atop heaps of seaweed and debris on the roads. Furniture was piled on downed trees. Clothing, shoes, bicycles, and toys were scattered across the wreckage. Everywhere people stood in front of what remained of their houses, holding babies, small dogs, and shotguns.