Birds of Paradise: A Novel (10 page)

His window faces south and east. If only he had strong enough binoculars he might be able to locate his family. The city spreads its cantons over endless miles. Little Haiti must be somewhere behind him: one of those places where you should never run out of gas. And Haiti itself is somewhere before him, beyond the barrier island of Miami Beach, a slender nation tucked within the horizon, Edenic and rife with turmoil and poverty. There but for the grace of God, his father liked to say. As if his own life had descended to him straight from heaven itself.

Now the gray light evinces the lowering of Stanley’s stern gaze, his disapproval: how he would scorn this latest condo project! Brian can almost hear his son’s voice, taking up his favorite topics—the preservation of neighborhood fabric, cultural history and community. Brian admires his son, but sometimes he reminds Brian, oddly, of his righteous old dad. He turns from window to desk—his two poles—with a sense of facing something. He picks up his handset, preferring its shape to the cold chip of the cell, and makes a call. “Tony—yeah—tell me again where we’re at with Little Haiti?”

Avis

A
VIS LOOKS WITH BLANK EYES AT THE ONRUSHING
freeway. The air smells of tar and cement, as if the city has turned into a smoking construction pit. She curls into herself, trying not to touch the sides of the car, trying not to speak or brush up against anything.

Miami seems as frightening to Avis now as it had when they’d first arrived—a lawless land where cabbies kidnapped young coeds on spring break, German tourists were shot in broad daylight, gangs of young black and brown men roved around in their thin white tanks, long baggy jeans, hands jammed in their pockets. There were “home invasions,” in which thieves would simply rampage into houses and murder the inhabitants at their dinner tables. She’d seen a fistfight break out at the local video store, twice watched police run across neighbors’ lawns with guns drawn, and—too many times to count—she’s had to slam on her brakes to avoid a careening drunken driver—her heart seized up, throbbing in her chest. One day Avis cut short a phone conversation because of a racket outside. She went out to the front lawn to see a police helicopter hovering almost directly over her house: some neighbors told her that a “fugitive” was on the loose: she and the children stayed inside, doors locked for hours, waiting for an all-clear. After Felice had left, Avis had to stop watching the local news because it was too awful, more than she could stand. Her teenage daughter was out there.

How is she supposed to endure this, she wonders, nearly in a trance. They meet only at Felice’s whim, on Felice’s terms. The psychotherapist, the police counselor, the family social services counselor said, No: don’t agree to these conditions. “You’re giving her too much control and no incentive to come to you,” the girl at the runaway crisis line told her. Brian seemed to have instinctively understood this principle—coolly, systematically shutting down all attempts at seeing Felice within months of her final disappearance. But two months ago, Avis was standing in the produce section at Publix when a woman approached her. Her round face was clear, just a wrinkle at the corner of each eye: she took Avis’s hand and studied her for a moment before saying in cadenced English, “I heard you go to see your baby whenever she calls. I would do exactly same thing as you. Exactly.”

She squeezed Avis’s hand and Avis realized that this was Marina, the housekeeper for Mrs. Grigorian, down the street from them. Avis stared at bunches of guavas, hunched as if her center had caved in.

Nina clears her throat and Avis realizes they are already done with the freeway and are now taking Coral Way to beat the Dixie backup. “Do you have anything in the house for dinner? Do you need me to stop—we get some rice and chicken,
empanadas
or some
postres
?” Nina insists on certain Cuban interpretations in her own cooking, uses lard in her pan Cubano and boils condensed milk in the can for
dulce de leche
.

“No, we’re fine,” Avis mumbles. She presses the window button and accidentally hits the lock instead. “
Postres,
why would I want
postres
? Do you not know what I do for a living?”

“You need more air?” Nina reaches for the climate control panel.

“No, please, nothing.”

They make a left on Douglas and stop at the intersection with Bird. The traffic is torturously slow with the erratic, newly-arriveds—immigrants and tourists—prone to rolling to a distracted stop mid-lane. As they wait, about eight cars from the light, a homeless person materializes between the cars near the intersection, wafting up the street toward them, flashing his wrecked, hand-lettered sign on a panel of cardboard box:
Pleese help. I have wife and kid and no—
He turns toward a white Cadillac several cars ahead before Avis can finish reading. Cadillac stuffs some bills into his jar. He turns back and begins drifting back toward them, a tall black man so emaciated Avis can see the fine bones of his scapula, the ribboned, muscles of his forearms; he looks burnt down to a shadow, a cinder in the blast of August sunlight.

Avis picks up her handbag.

“Oh no,” Nina says. “Please don’t.”

“Oh, for heaven sakes,” Avis mutters, rummaging in her bag. “I only want to give him a buck.”

“Too late,” Nina says, because the light’s changed, but they have to wait for the usual procession of yellow and red light–runners in the cross street. When they finally move, it’s only to inch up a few spaces before the light turns again, so they’re now a car length away from the man and his sign:
job or hous. Im good person
—

“Please,
querida
. I really do understand, but it’s better if you give the money to a homeless shelter or some sort of something . . .”

Avis ignores her, digging out her wallet, in which, she discovers, she has no small bills, only the fifties for Felice. The man is now making a beeline for them, his eyes round and hollow. Avis goes for the window button and instead hits the lock again. “Shit. How do you open this thing?”

“
Ay, mujer,
why do you have to be so—”

“I want to help this guy out a little. What’s the big deal?” Now the man is standing on the other side of the window, peering in.

“He’s some scam artist. These guys, they make tons of money.”

“Well, then it’s a crappy job and he’s earned every penny!” Avis’s voice rises, stretching thin. Anger throbs in her temples as she grabs her door handle.

“What are you
doing
?” Nina taps the accelerator, trying to scoot ahead, but now a row of skate punks and pedestrians is crossing in front of the car. The man on the other side of the window strolls alongside the car as they move a few feet. “That’s dangerous!”

Avis opens the car door and hands the man some fifties. His eyes roll from the cash to her face and she can see a fine, inflamed crimson web beneath his irises.
“O Bondye mwen bon sou lat
è
.”
His voice is grainy and low, it sounds like crushed sugar.
“M
è
si, pitit fi. Bondye beni ou.”

Flooded by a jolt of pleasure, she also hands him the silver cookie tin: he accepts, thunderstruck. “Cookies,” she says.
“P
â
tisserie.”
His sign is tucked under his arm and his hands shake with tremors that rattle the tin like a snare drum. He tugs at the lid and for a moment Avis fears he isn’t strong enough to open it.

The light changes, Nina steps on it, and Avis slams the door shut. “I cannot believe you,” Nina says angrily. “What a waste.”

“Why? Because I wanted to help someone?” She turns in her seat in time to see him pry the tin open, cars swerving around him as he peers inside.

“That won’t help him—he’s just gonna go get drugs or some booze.”

“Good. I hope he enjoys it. I hope he has one moment of pleasure on this crappy earth.”

“I doubt he even has enough teeth to chew those cookies,” Nina adds bitterly. “He won’t know what to do with that sort of food. Let him go up to Overtown and get food.”

Avis is infuriated. “How is this any of your business?”

Nina starts to speak, stops, then, with her eyes narrowed, she says, “That
negro viejo
—he has nothing to do with your daughter!”

Avis’s lips part.

“Because they’re both outdoors—on the streets. Come on, don’t act dumb. Just because you gave to him doesn’t make things better for her. You do these stupid things like you think one is like the other.”

Avis feels another throb in her temples. Her fingers curl into her empty hands.

When they pull into Avis’s driveway twelve blocks later, Nina is calmer and she tries to mollify Avis, speaking in her modulated voice. “
Ven, cari
ñ
a,
hey, I’m sorry.” She touches her employer’s wrist. “I shouldn’t have tried to stop you. You were right—it—none of it was really my business.”

But the anger has a chemical grip on her. Avis shoulders her way out of the car door, then throws it shut without a backwards glance. Nina gets out of the car. “Please, Avis, can we just talk?” Avis keeps going, skipping the flagstone path and striding across the lawn. “It’s okay if you want to be angry,” Nina pleads. “But do you have to be this angry?”

Avis turns the key in the door. “Aren’t we still friends?” Nina calls, hands on her hips.

Avis steps inside and closes the door.

DURING THE YEAR OF
Felice’s runaway attempts, Avis and Brian created their own protocol: call the Gables police, the sheriff’s department, the highway patrol. Contact the local FBI, the missing children help lines, her school. Place notices in the
Herald
and local newsletters. Send alerts to the National Runaway Switchboard. And they searched. They spent hours in their cars crawling through the streets of Coral Gables, Coconut Grove, Kendall, Hialeah, staring into yards and windows, spying on other people’s lives and families. Avis approached strangers in the street with photographs—which horrified Brian. He told her:
That isn’t safe.
And:
You’re upsetting people
. Some of the worst fights of their marriage were over those snapshots. Avis accusing him of caring more about appearances than about their own daughter. Brian said: We have to draw a line.

After two or three or four nights away, Felice would either come home by herself or the police would deliver her, followed by humiliating and protracted visits from social service counselors. But there were long, comparatively peaceful periods between these vanishings, during which Felice seemed to “return” to herself. As if she’d split into two separate girls. She settled back into school. She would be well-mannered; she helped Stanley with the dishes; she chattered with her father about soccer practice; she confided in her mother about her friends—but never about running away, why she kept leaving. Where she went when she was gone.

She tricked them—Avis thinks—every single time. They’d relax the curfew, relax their vigilance, enjoy a week, a few months, without incident. And just when Avis would tell herself (she wanted to believe it so badly) that their nightmare was ending—it would happen again.

Two months after Felice’s thirteenth birthday, Avis woke in the vinyl rocker in the den with dread like a slickness covering her skin. She knew, even as she was waking, that things weren’t right because she was in the vinyl chair—it sweated and stuck to her skin; it was where she waited and slept whenever Felice was missing. It was an uncomfortable chair so it helped her stay up late and wake early and it was a punishment place—for failing to keep her daughter at home.

Brian materialized out of the powdery dark, a pale face in gray pajamas, like a figure in a nightmare. The house felt hollow to Avis, despite the presence of husband and son. It seemed that some menace was lurking in the hidden corners, something worse than mere emptiness. “Darling,” he whispered. “Please. Bed.”

“Where is she?” Avis asked, almost conversationally. She stared at the blackly glinting night outside: she’d left the windows unshuttered just in case she might catch a hint of someone in the street, a single footfall, a child’s breath.

“You have to rest,” Brian said. “This isn’t helping anything.”

“She’s never stayed away this long before.” Avis’s voice sounded wrong.

“She’ll come back—she always does.”

Avis looked at her husband: it was like nothing she’d ever felt before—almost crystalline in its hardness and acuity. Grains in her blood, between her internal organs: her voice full of slivers as she said, “She’s only thirteen years old.”

Brian tried to put his arms around her, but Avis straightened up, turning deliberately toward the windows. She’d slept for an hour at most—the wall clock said 3 a.m. But Avis was trained to these black morning bakery hours. She went to the kitchen, shook out an apron, and pried the lid from one of the thigh-high canisters of flour. Deep, fluting emotions were a form of weakness. She’d seen the softening in her work over the years, she’d started making the lazy, homey treats like apple crumble, chocolate muffins, butterscotch pudding, and lemon bars. They were fast and cheap and they pleased her children. But she’d trained at one of the best pastry programs in the country. Her teachers were French. She’d learned the classical method of rolling fondant, of making real buttercream with its spun-candy base and beating the precise fraction of egg into the
p
â
te
à
choux
. She knew how to blow sugar into glassine nests and birds and fountains, how to construct seven-tiered wedding cakes draped with sugar curtains copied from the tapestries at Versailles. When the other students interned at the Four Seasons, the French Laundry, and Dean & Deluca, Avis had apprenticed with a botanical illustrator in the department of horticulture at Cornell, learning to steady her hand and eye, to work with the tip of the brush, to dissect and replicate in tinted royal icing and multihued glazes the tiniest pieces of stamen, pistil, and rhizome. She studied Audubon and Redoute. At the end of her apprenticeship, her mentor, who pronounced the work “extraordinary and heartbreaking,” arranged an exhibition of Avis’s pastries at the school. “Remembering the Lost Country” was a series of cakes decorated in perfectly rendered sugar olive branches, cross sections of figs, and frosting replicas of lemon leaves. Her mother attended and pronounced the effect
amusant
.

It was this training, the discipline, her instructors’ crisply starched linen hats and jackets, which she summoned in that seesawing darkness. She was ill, unbalanced from lack of sleep and food, and raw from crying. Avis yanked the apron strings twice around her waist: she ate a dry scone. She asked Brian, “Please, would you keep the boy out of here?” Then she dusted her pastry slab with jets of flour and began the daylong process of making
mille-feuilles
. She drove the flour and sugar before her on the slab, drew its vapors into her lungs, knowing that this work—the most challenging and imperial of pastry creation—might have the power to save her.