Only a handful of cars remain in the garage—Brian’s SUV, Fernanda’s sedan, Javier’s Jag among them. Brian climbs shakily into the truck, then he just sits there for a while, panting, his head dripping and pressed against the steering wheel. He’d bought the thing envisioning expeditions to Sanibel and Captiva, he and his family, the back a jumble of fishing rods and tents. The only trip they’d taken had happened because one day, with no warning, Javier had pulled up into their driveway, honking, his car loaded with his own kids. Brian went but he’d spent most of the time checking voice mail and returning calls. Even out on the chartered boat, he toted along a waterproof rucksack full of applications for zoning variances.
Something hits his shoulder and clatters to the floor. A pair of sunglasses. “Hey, culo.” It’s Javier, striding, dripping, across the garage. “I call your name and you don’t even hold the freaking elevator for me? I had to walk down thirty-four fucking flights, man.”
Brian squeezes the steering wheel, as if stuck in rush-hour traffic. He looks away from Javier to the frame of the passenger window. “Really, can you just not talk to me?”
“What the hell, man? What’s your problem? You go tearing out of the building like I don’t know what . . .”
Brian presses his palm over his eyes. For a moment, the wind drowns all other sounds, roaring past the garage ramparts. “How long?” he croaks.
“What?”
“You and Fernanda. How long?”
Javier doesn’t say anything for a few moments and Brian turns to look at him.
“I don’t know—a couple weeks, I guess,” he says quietly.
“Weeks?”
“Man, what do you even care?”
“I don’t know,” he says honestly. He folds his arms along the top of the wheel. “What about her and Parkhurst?”
“Santa Madre Virgen de Dios,” Javier mutters. “What are you thinking, Bry? It’s all play to her. Me, Parkhurst, whatever. She’s just messing around to make her mother mad. Maybe kick herself a little higher in the company. I know that. It only goes so far. I’m not Jewish—she’s never gonna stick with some Latino Cristiano.”
Brian stares at the top of his windshield. “What about your wife?” His voice is stony with sarcasm. “Does she think it’s play? Is it all a glorious entertainment?”
Javier doesn’t say anything for a moment: abruptly his hands fall to his sides as he starts laughing. “Ay, compay! You didn’t have a choice, did you? You’re one of these guys who had to become a lawyer. You just love your words.” He rolls his eyes. “Listen, chico, here’s the big difference between you and me—last month, my wife threw me out of the house. She found some girl’s number on a matchbook in my pocket. So I been living up the street, in the Intercon. They give you a nice breakfast there.”
Brian’s mouth opens.
“Things between me and Odalis . . .” His mouth twists as if he were trying to smile. “She says I don’t love her no more. Stupid. What does that even mean? So I get a little lonely. So sue me.” He gives Brian a cool glance. “Why you look so upset? You just let me walk thirty-four flights, man.”
Brian climbs down from the car. “You didn’t say anything.”
“It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud, even.” Javier sinks back against a garage pillar. “Even my papi doesn’t know. But I did it—I left. To make her happy. You see how that works? You keep leaving, like you say, to keep them happy. You go to work, you keep working, you run away until you’re all the way gone. Maybe even you shoot yourself. And the whole time you keep thinking—Are they happy yet?”
Brian picks up the sunglasses—the Ray-Bans. One of the lenses is scratched. He rubs them against the sleeve of his jacket, hands them back to his friend. Javier sighs and props the glasses on his head. He loosens his tie, then undoes it, lets it hang. “Who knows—the last kid just went up to Gainesville. Maybe Odalis and me will be back again by Thanksgiving?” His mouth twists again, approximating a smile, his brows lifted, a yellow sleepless cast to the bottoms of his eyes. Brian shuffles to Javier holding out his hands, then wraps his arms around his friend, clapping him on the back. Javier leans into him. It happens in a few scant moments, but in that time, Brian feels the scoured-out quality in both of them, the absence of tears, the shared, unspoken wish that at least one of them could remember how to weep.
HE SQUINTS THROUGH the dark core as he merges onto U.S. 1, the washed-away darkness at the center of his windshield ringed by taillights, traffic lights. The storm has begun in earnest—the thunder sounds like distant drums—but he cracks the moon roof to admit the moist, mild air. Javier used to tell him: Things begin and end with the wife. He imagines, as he sails under the sulfurous lights, through curtains of rain, how he will unlock the front door and go to her.
There’s another hard lash of rain and wind. The car shimmies with it and the row of taillights glows red. Someone two car lengths up puts on hazards; they strobe in the cascade. The car is quaking with the wind, wipers going at a frantic slash. The streetlights around him seem to wobble and his head fills with oxygen, a mind-expanding release. What appears to be a ten-foot-long striped store awning sails past his car; there is another red stream of taillights as a pond forms on the Dixie northbound. Southbound traffic is starting to dwindle—it’s all northbound now: the hegira, rushing off the Florida peninsula—if they aren’t blown off the road in the process. A long section of palm frond skates over his hood and flies off to the next car. His hands tighten as he navigates what appears to be a branch of bananas in the road. Brian watches a coconut bounce mid-highway, a few car lengths ahead. Traffic is paralytic, creeping, then stopping entirely. A few cars disperse into the Grove, Shenandoah, making big round turns around the blocks. And then it’s too quiet, the rain pooling over the highway, wipers unable to keep up, tires hydroplaning. It’s like taking a trip, he thinks, tension filling him with clear, still ideas. Going toward the other person, beckoning them back. Hopefully, the other person, your wife, will come back. You meet in the road.
The rain comes in an opaque sheet, it’s like peering into a wave. Lightning cracks horizontally down the length of the highway. He moves at a crawl, the car rocking, the palms belling like blown-out umbrellas. Seconds later, the wind goes slack and the rain hisses away. There’s a lucidity to the air. A blanketing calm settles over him as he considers how ironic it would be if he were to spin into the path of an onrushing car now, and never have the ability to see his wife again, to tell her that she is his one and only, that things will be fine. For some reason, his mind feels so light, an ether, as he imagines the house at the end of his block coming into view, its lights burning with a low sheen.
Stanley
HE SITS WITH HIS CHAIR CLOSE TO THE REAR windows, watching them liquefy, then solidify in the rolling gusts of rain. The store is finally starting to settle down after they’d announced they were closing early. He feels glassy with exhaustion. Years of hard, daily, market labor—trucking bushels of produce, scrubbing the walk-in dairy storage, pressure-washing the entry—have given him the ability to rise early and work well into the evening, not thinking, his mind content with and diverted by doing. But today, the frantic preparations for the storm—one ear trained on the NOAA forecasts—have left him nearly inert, bones dissolved. Too many loose ends. This damn business. He’s been stewing: if his father doesn’t stake him the money, they won’t be able to cover the reassessed property taxes—much less make a down payment on the place. There are rumors that commercial property insurance premiums are set to double. Lord only knows what kind of wind damage or flood disaster he’ll wake up to tomorrow. They’ve been fairly lucky with tropical storm systems up till now, but he has no faith in the store’s elderly drainage system, their stormwater basin prone to overflowing.
The tarp tied over a pallet of rutabagas still on the loading dock looks as if it will flap free, and someone—probably Stanley—will have to run out in the rain and lash it back down. Rutabagas, he thinks irri
tably, watching the pale knobs gleam as the tarp flaps. The lights in his office have flickered a number of times, which means the backup generator may be kicking on soon—its roar loud enough to annoy neighbors ten blocks away. Although he’s not sure who’s left to annoy—the shops closest to him, over on Krome, are boarded up with plywood, windows Xed out with masking tape like the eyes of dead cartoon characters, the town shuttered and half abandoned.
Hurricane Andrew struck Homestead in 1992. Six years later, Stanley came hunting for a cheap storefront: he was eighteen years old and had a $10,000 start-up stake scraped together from working in orange groves, farmers’ markets, and nurseries, as well as shelving product and bagging and rolling at Winn Dixie and Publix. He’d dropped out—college was for dawdlers. Andrew had left a trail of devastation across Homestead, slashing it open before ripping up the rest of the state. The locals who remained (thousands fled north, north, north) bore a dazzled, sanctified light in their faces. Stanley could still see the residue of the hurricane everywhere—in torn-up fields, acres of downed trees, houses smashed to pieces. Humble as its name, set off at the lonely bottom of the peninsula, Homestead was home to farmers and Mexican migrant workers in straw cowboy hats, flooding the dance hall weekend nights. The little downtown had been trying to reconstruct itself, but back then property values were flat. A realtor whispered to Stanley that the owner of the building, a former bank, near the corner of Krome and Northwest Second, was frantic to move to North Carolina. So, at eighteen, Stanley had his space and a $50,000 small business loan.
His lucky break came with another price tag, which was that he would have to spend a portion of each late summer and early autumn in a state of free-floating anxiety—watching the sky, listening to the radio—haunting the store like a captain preparing to die with his ship.
Now, as the latest system approaches—hovering somewhere over the ocean—he hears the rocket explosion of a transformer blowing a few blocks away, and the lights go out for nearly a minute. He’s certain they’ll stay out this time; but then they’re back. His chest is aching, his lungs compressed. They can’t really afford to run the generator—a ghastly, anti-eco, energy suck—for very long, but they can’t afford not to. He has Bosch-like visions of rotting eggplant, broccoli; swarms of fruit flies attacking the bananas; he imagines the expensive, hormone-free, dry-aged beef, the unpasteurized goat’s milk, the yogurt from Greece, cartons of organic ice cream flavored with rosewater or cardamom . . . all sweating, decaying carnage. It would take days—weeks—to shovel out from under. Not to mention the pressure-washing, disinfecting, and hunting for molds, fungi, and spores. Past hurricane seasons, they’ve suffered partial (yet substantial) losses, but never a total collapse. Not yet. He is entertaining such visions of disaster when Nieves barges into the office, not quite six months along, already carrying herself sideways, the top two buttons of her jeans undone, twenty-three years old and unconcerned. “Stanley—what the hell? Get out of here. There’s rain coming in the north windows and Gloria’s trying to help me mop.”
This is what’s really different about this summer—Nieves—her difficult, bossy, magnetic nature his counterweight. Stanley squints through the door into the market. “Gloria’s still here? Everyone needs to get home now.”
“Oh my God, you’re telling me.” Nieves pushes aside a stack of orders and billing statements from local purveyors and sits heavily on his desktop, scowling. “Make another announcement—there’re still people out there. They’re buying out the store—the canned and dry goods stuff is, like, gone. Bottled water—gone; bulk foods—gone. Now they’re working on the perishables.”
A little over a year ago, Freshly Grown was expanding and advertised for someone to manage cheeses, chocolates, and coffees. Nieves banged on his office door. She painted cat’s-eye wings at the corners of her eyes back then; there was a gold stud at her eyebrow, a diamond chip tucked above one nostril. She didn’t want to talk about prior work experience—she wanted to talk about wine varietals, the dry little bubbles in a bottle of Krug, the best cheese to pair with a good chardonnay. She half smiled, smoothed her hair behind one ear, and told him about the bands she’d sang and played guitar in; she stretched out her long legs and toted the ethnicities she’d uncovered in her family background: “Oneida, Mohawk, some kind of African—maybe Senegal—French, oh, Moroccan, um, oh, Costa Rican, Dutch—or wait—Danish? There’s more. Those are just the main ones.” She smelled bready, like a kid who’d spent the day outside playing. Stanley’s office was filled with stacked cartons of organic crackers, macaroni and cheese, couscous—mainly a storage room with a desk and chair in it. She’d eyed the half-crushed cartons and said, “You need to deal with that.”
Stanley loves the smell of the back of her head, loves putting his nose to her scalp, inside the wavy dark curtains of her hair. He stands and leans against the desk, pulling her in so she reclines back against him—she no longer resists his embrace the way she did before pregnancy. His hands move over her shoulders, the inner curves of her arms, then wander over her breasts, which, he’s noticed, have assumed a fuller, teardrop shape, like the new lobe of her belly. His arms cross over her chest, entwining her. Mine, he thinks. He’d never say it out loud.
When they’d first started seeing each other, Stanley wasn’t sure it would last: Nieves’s personality could be cold and steady as a flashlight. And she always seemed to him to be poised in doorways, always about to leave him, leave town, and assume a new existence—like all the other employees and volunteers brimming with stories about house-building trips to Honduras and cross-country bike rides. (Last week he’d reluctantly agreed to a showing of Eduardo’s experimental video: an insufferable diatribe on the evils of Big Sugar, spliced with photographs of electric-green Caribbean mountains.) Now he’s no longer sure why he’d felt that way. Unlike other employees, Nieves never spent her days rambling on about traveling to Prague or the Galápagos or applying to graduate programs in film studies. Stanley, on the other hand, could be intrigued, seduced by the stories—the home videos of diving the Great Barrier Reef or of hiking Antarctica.
Unlike Nieves, he is tired and battle-weary: after Hurricane Charley ruined their drainage field last year, the Internet and papers were full of reports that the bump in hurricanes was connected to global warming, rising water tables and the ocean temperatures—that things could only get worse as the ice caps melted away. It was hard to fathom how quickly the world could change: when Stanley first opened shop, there was nothing around but acres of agricultural land, orchards of sweeping palms and everglades, tidal and primordial, filled with swooping egrets, ibises, the creeks nosed up with alligators. Now, barely six years later, every time he drives out of town, he sees new housing developments growing in concentric circles around Homestead—townhouses uniform as barracks, a hospital like a penitentiary, and billboards advertising this construction at exorbitant prices.
Whenever he mutters about selling the market to GNC, taking time off and learning to surf, or taking the train across Europe, or, for that matter, just starting over in a new place—Asheville, New Orleans—where they get small-local-organic, Nieves smirks, her eyes narrow to a black line. She says, “These are your people, Stan.”
She took to the market as if she’d found her missing home. Nieves worked the longest hours of anyone, often opening the store before Stanley himself arrived. She worked tirelessly—even at hard physical labor—pushing trucks, stocking, and swabbing. He admires her, afraid of the way she makes him feel. She’d claimed him at their first meeting, and the intensity of this claim seemed the direct opposite of the way he’d grown up—nudged to one side, overshadowed by his sister’s beauty, then her absence. Standing now, pressing her warm back into his chest, his arms capturing her, Stanley gazes into his store and thinks about how oddly specific love is, how it must always seem to every person that he or she was the one who invented it, and that no one else’s love could ever be as strong. Stanley feels this way. It would have b
een nice, he thinks, to have had more time to be just a couple. But her pregnancy finally gave him a bit of calm: the luxury of their mutual ownership.
“Oh for—” Nieves’s arms fall flat at her sides as she stares into the store. “Don’t these people have homes?”
Stanley spots the silhouetted form of a couple walking up Ethnic/Prepared/Mixes. They seem to be hazily looking around, not shopping exactly, and he shifts his hands back to Nieves’s shoulders. He’s about to call out, in some exasperation, Hey, we’re closed—get yourselves home! when he hears a young, quiet, familiar voice say, “Stan?”
HE ALWAYS MEANT to tell the girls he’d dated about Felice, how her disappearance had left such a mark on his life, but it turned out that she was something he couldn’t talk about at all—as if someone had rubbed out those years of waiting and anxiety with a pencil eraser and now it was difficult even to perceive faint lines left in the paper. Only recently had he revealed to Nieves that he’d had a sister, that she’d “left home,” that he “rarely” heard from her. At the time, Nieves had scrutinized his face, listening quietly in the shadow of their tiny apartment. She touched his hand and stroked the back of his fingers with uncharacteristic tenderness.
Now Felice stands in his kitchen, eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Stanley feels layers of disorientation and distance gathering around him like the folds of a cape. This is my sister, he tells himself. Nieves is motionless, holding a scraped-out jar in one hand, as she watches Felice eat. The boy—Felice’s friend—barely speaks. He ate his sandwich in three bites, then politely declined offers of more. He hunches on the stool, one bulky arm resting on the kitchen counter.
Birds of Paradise Page 33
