Birds of Paradise

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Retreating, Stanley discovers both Felice and Nieves inside the apartment sprawled on the leftover bedding and pillows on the floor, watching cartoons. They’re eating the “all-natural” toaster tarts Nieves persuaded him to carry.

  “Hey, sweat monster.” Nieves kisses him, a drift of sugary blueberries on her breath. “Electricity’s back on. Yay.”

  Felice looks at him mildly, almost vacantly, and once again there is the unreal sensation: Can she truly be here? He goes to shower and as the cool water spills over him, he considers unhappily that he’s no longer as angry as he used to be. It was so difficult—almost impossible, really—to put her away emotionally, to stop wondering where she was or if she’d return—he doesn’t want to relinquish all that hard work. And think of what she’d done to their mother! His stomach tightens like a fist beneath his rib cage. As he’s rinsing off the layers of soap, a thought creeps into his mind: She’s going to slip out while I’m in the shower.

  He forces himself to not rush: he taps up the warm and shaves in the shower, then lingers a few seconds under the spray. He towels off thoroughly, combs his hair, his pulse rising in his throat, breath. Is she gone yet? He tells himself that he isn’t being quite rational. Finally he wraps a towel around his waist and emerges from the bathroom: the TV is off; the bedding has been folded and stacked on an armchair. Something like a dense, dark pressure settles over him. It is resonant with old emotional weight—the loneliness of his old bedroom, the backseat of his parents’ car, staring out the window, eternally searching—no matter if they were just going to the store, to school, to the movies. He tugs himself away from the feeling. No, I won’t. Even if his hands tremble as he pulls on his pants. Because she will not do that to him, or to anyone he loves, again. He is not that boy who drove through the neighborhoods, imagining the worst things in the world, his chest filled with a sagging emptiness, looking for a sister who, he believed, had to be injured or dead.

  Stanley picks up some of the accounting paperwork and a notebook from the desk in their bedroom. He’ll need to inventory any exterior wind damage and inspect the inside of the market. The thought intrudes again: She’s gone. He instructs himself: Then I’m glad. Felice will always land on her feet. He lets the apartment door swing shut behind him and takes the wooden steps down to the landing behind the building. It occurs to him then to wonder where Nieves is. He considers that Felice could not have been a good influence on his girlfriend or future baby: like a free radical, unsettling the environment. He climbs over some bramble that had blown in at the foot of the landing and the chain-link fence encircling the sides and rear of the market. The air vibrates with a high-pitched whine; Stanley walks the perimeter, gathering the twigs and debris, then stops abruptly: Emerson is still there.

  He’s out in front with Noah Tibold, who owns Zone Ten exotics nursery, and Nancy Pegrum—one of Stanley’s cashiers. Noah is using a small chain saw to take apart a bougainvillea that toppled over the lot’s north entrance. Emerson and Nancy rake piles of twigs and leaves. There’s such a settled, contented rhythm to their work that for a moment Stanley just stands there quietly, watching.

  Stanley’s joints and muscles seem to loosen, relief coursing through his body. If Emerson is still here, Felice must be as well. But relief is immediately followed by stern annoyance. Stanley enters the front of the market. The generator is off and the air-conditioning seems to be functioning—he’d been braced for the pungent effluvia that had pervaded the store after Hurricane Charley. There’s some frost buildup on the dairy cases, the cut flowers have withered away, and the magazine covers of women in yoga poses or of gleaming plates of vegan stew (New Vegetarian) have all curled and buckled. But they appear to have come through the storm intact.

  There’s a noise behind him and Stanley turns to see Marco Braithwaite, another regular, halfway through the door. “Stan? You guys open today?”

  Stanley gestures him in. “We haven’t restocked yet, but if you see something you need . . .” He swings his arm open; he feels careless, expansive. “Go for it.”

  Marco salutes, heading for the near-empty cereal aisle. “I’ll leave the money up front, how ’bout.”

  Light-headed, Stanley strolls down Vinegars/Oils/Pastas toward the office. He can hear voices: the low current is Nieves and the nervous, lighter clip is, apparently, the voice his sister has grown into. Their voices slip together easily. He’s never seen Nieves warm to someone so quickly before. Felice is awkward, as if she’s out of practice with conversation, but she keeps going—making up for lost time. What happened to her? He’s employed enough people on various sorts of margins to recognize the bitten-away cuticles, the haunted eyes. He feels another surge of irritation: she should go. He doesn’t need this: he’s got enough to worry about without more turmoil, wondering about whatever ruins his sister is running from or the next time she’ll vanish. When Stanley reaches the doorway, both women look up, startled. Then Nieves smiles. “Hi, babe.” She reaches up for his kiss.

  Felice seems instantly diffident. “Hiya, Stan.”

  The air feels high and tight in his chest, his lungs cinched like a drawstring. Felice. Here. A velvety black gecko appears on the wall behind the girls—it’s trickled out of some corner and now rests mid-wall, its tiny throat beating, its body pointed like a dart. Stanley looks back at the women and he realizes that Felice is watching him with some anxiety, as if awaiting a decision. Arms crossed, her right hand absently circles her left elbow—a small tic he’d almost forgotten. He smiles weakly. Annoyed with himself, his lack of will, he sits beside Nieves and tips his nose to her hair. Not yet. He closes his eyes.

  FELICE AND EMERSON spend that night and the next on Stanley’s floor, and still he fails to ask them to leave. Then they discover the couch in the living room pulls out into a bed—Stanley mimes smacking himself in the head—he’d completely forgotten (though it was, in fact, the place he used to sleep before meeting Nieves). Nieves gives him a narrow look and smooths fresh sheets onto the hide-a-bed.

  Emerson spends the next few days clearing the parking lot, sawing tree limbs, sweeping the cement patio, and swabbing the store. Then he and Noah go out in Noah’s pickup and return with flats of wind-resistant coleus and aloe, and plant a decorative border along the front of the store. Nieves walks Felice through wines and cheeses. They officially reopen on the third day after the hurricane, and right away customers flash through the entrance. Still, Stanley can’t stop watching Felice, uneasy about the way his sister and girlfriend have adopted each other. He can’t understand how they can have so much to talk about so quickly. One day while he’s in his office, the girls are restocking the cheese cave. Through the office wall he overhears Nieves mention her big family. Their voices are barely muffled. Nieves is estranged from most of her relatives, and is coolly off-handed about it—Stanley has heard her tirades against her tyrannical stepfather and humorless siblings, as well as her disaffection for the notion of “family.” He’s opening cartons of crackers and stacking them against the wall when he hears Felice begin describing her life to Nieves—her runaway life. Stanley drifts to a stop, his hands still pressed to the large carton, as he hears: “It was like a kind of a halfway house, I guess. The Green House. Lots of kids. Yeah, Emerson, too, sometimes . . . No, I claimed this crappy mattress in a back room . . . A couple years. I guess . . . pretty safe. Compared to, you know, anyplace.”

  There is the creak of a hand truck, a sound of movement, something tumbles, a flutter of laughter. Then, “We really can’t—exactly—go back. You know? I mean, I was done anyway. But we got into, like, some pretty heavy—some trouble? . . . Yeah . . . I did. Some guys . . . Yeah . . . I don’t know . . . I guess I probably shouldn’t say too much.”

  Nieves’s questions are just soft dabs of sound.

  “Modeling, sort of . . . Yeah . . . No . . . It was dumb . . . Tattoos . . . Yeah! Not permanent . . . I know . . . Actually it sucked . . . You can’t hardly eat . . . Not that I . . .”

&nb
sp; Just like that, filling in the abysmal silence, the missing past, as if such a thing could be done. He stares at the carton in his hands: Finnish Flatbread: 48 count. The yellow walls of his office, the wet stain beside the coffeepot, a mug filled with pens, curling photographs of friends waving from canoes, rappelling up sheer cliffs. On his desk, an announcement for underwater birthing class, a flier for a tai chi workshop, stating: Only this moment, right now, to see the possibilities in it or not. Everything is so ordinary, yet he feels as if he’s been teleported to another solar system.

  Stanley lies awake that night replaying old fragments, bits of memories of Felice: her tidy bedroom with the translucent shell chimes; the poster above her bed—Christina’s World—the back of a girl’s wind-stirred hair, her oddly twisted recline in the field. Stanley recycles their last conversations: the way he was always trying to apologize for whatever was making Felice run away, then trying to make himself angry enough not to care. But that was Stanley’s big problem—his anger was insubstantial—it wisped away between his fingers when he tried to grasp it. He even tried to provoke fights with her: once he snapped, “You need a shrink!”

  She’d asked, “Would that make you happy?” What a thing for a thirteen-year-old to say! How could he be angry with her when so often she didn’t even seem to be there.

  Now Stanley cannot shake the sense that Felice and Emerson are recovering from something like a catastrophic illness. There’s a lingering frailty, a delicacy in their actions and voices, especially in the way they treat each other, with such tenderness and solicitude. Felice talks about Portland, about the route they’ll take, how much money they’ll need, the sort of work she might look for. But increasingly, Stanley notices, Emerson responds with less enthusiasm, in a kind of gentle, pro forma manner. Every morning, Emerson is the first up, the first to unfold the paper, which he combs, reading it all the way through, subsequently refolding it so it appears nearly undisturbed. Stanley has seen him retrieve the paper from the recycling bin later, on his break, and start rereading—his finger tracing the columns. Once, Stanley said something to Emerson about the president’s obsession with Iraqi oil fields and the boy looked at him a moment before saying, “Oh, right—what a mess, I know.”

  End of conversation.

  They work well together, Stanley will admit: this is something he understands—the language of communal work, how cooperation gives rise to the best kind of friendships. Stanley is impressed with Emerson’s capacity for labor, his endurance, and his ability to learn quickly—how to inventory, to build displays, to keep accounts. He doesn’t say much—especially not about himself, but to Stanley, this is a positive thing, refreshing even, after years of loquacious, sensitive young men, guys in touch with themselves, drummers, poets, and political activists—each brimming with feelings, insights, and opinions. Emerson is steady: a quality Stanley prizes. Emerson will unload trucks or work a cash register for hours, until someone orders him to sit, brings him some food. At times, he and Felice seem almost shy with each other, the backs of their hands barely brushing. Stanley tries not to monitor them, but he’s painfully curious: he’s never seen them kiss, though they continue to share a bed and stay continually in each other’s orbits, murmuring together on breaks.

  Stanley also refuses to ask Felice questions. He talks to her, of course; he is friendly and cordial—he hasn’t asked her to go or to stay; he will not ask why she left or where she went. He imagines that he’s made himself smooth and cool—like a wax candle or an old pewter spoon, half melted by time and use.

  Don’t go/Don’t stay.

  One week after their arrival, Stanley is stationed at his desk studying the books—his most dreaded task and yet the best to lose himself in. He hears a rustling, shuffling sound, the creak of hand truck wheels, then a furious, intent whispering that sends icy goose bumps down his back and makes him wonder if one of their homeless locals is trying to set up a bedroll in the cheese cave (they once opened the market to find a bedraggled elderly man sleeping in Prepared Foods). He lowers his hands on the keyboard, then wheels his chair closer to the office wall. Gradually he distinguishes two voices—Emerson’s and Felice’s. He hears another crackling rustle (grocery bags?), then Emerson’s voice, somewhat louder, saying, “—it’s here—under the . . .”

  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 ov
er 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?”