Birds of Paradise: A Novel (3 page)

“Hi Mommy,” Felice said in a dazed, unnatural voice. “I feel so tired. I don’t know what it is. I’m just so tired.”

Avis felt her daughter’s forehead, then helped her get undressed and slide under the covers: the child fell asleep instantly.

Felice stayed in bed all night and all the next day: she lay so still it didn’t even seem like sleep to Avis, but a kind of stony, mortal sinking. Stanley boiled a whole chicken, browned carrots, onions, and turnips, and brought Felice the fragrant broth, but she barely managed a few spoonfuls. Avis and Brian had terse, whispered conferences outside Felice’s bedroom door. Brian was convinced that Felice was merely overtired: “Soccer practice, gymnastics camp, birthday parties practically every week. And these mountains of homework! She needs a vacation just to be a regular kid.”

Then Avis learned through the school’s phone grapevine that there’d been a suicide at Gables Middle. The girl was thirteen, a grade ahead of Felice, but Avis had heard that suicides could send ripples of shock throughout a school: the administrators offered counseling services to students. She went into the bedroom to ask her daughter if she’d known the girl. “Who?” Felice stared up from her pillow: her eyes had a pearly luster. “Who is that?”

Even after she’d spent three days in bed, Avis didn’t want to take Felice to a doctor: she didn’t think it would help. She didn’t have much of a fever—or any clear physical symptoms, apart from lassitude. It almost seemed as if she needed some sort of
bruja,
as Nina would say, a witch or sorcerer, to break the feverish spell. She tried to talk to Felice, to be easy and comforting, hoping that conversation might help restore her. But Felice’s unresponsiveness was so frightening she gave up. Instead Avis retreated to the kitchen, trying to concoct something to tempt Felice, as if coaxing her away from a ledge. She made chocolate truffles with essence of Earl Grey; Brie
goug
è
res
; sable cookies;
baba au rhum
. Felice refused everything. Throat constricted, Avis watched Stanley withdraw from Felice’s room each day, his soup bowls emptied.

Eventually she did reemerge, but the light in her face seemed different: she’d gone from clarity to a gray gem. Even her voice was different, textured. There was a new satiny quality about her, like grief, that made her seem older—her loveliness elevated into something unearthly. Geraldine—Avis’s mother—would have said that Felice had stepped through some sort of enchantment, and that it had altered her. Part of the spell remained inside her. Avis could see its remnants—a sly, feline indifference: the impatience to return to her enchantment. Things escalated after that, the atmosphere in the house became inexplicably combative. Avis remembers her daughter’s distraught expression, unable to comprehend why her father was forcing her—
forcing her
—to return from a party before midnight.

“Humor me,” Brian had said, lingering in their daughter’s bedroom door. “I only have a few more years to pretend to make the rules.”

Avis knew this would be meaningless to their daughter, that Felice believed that the only true time was the present: she was twelve and she would always be twelve, sprawled across her bed, sobbing. They had elected to be old, they were meant to be old. Nothing would change: Felice was meant to be young, and she was sad and would always feel that way.

Felice used to be such an easy, pliant child. “Of course she’s easy,” Brian used to joke with their friends. “All you have to do is give your child everything.”

After her “illness,” as Avis thought of that time, she noticed the sharpening of Felice’s personality—a willful recalcitrance, bouts of spoiled, pettish behavior. It was unpredictable. A kind of furtiveness spirited across her daughter’s face. Once, she broke into tears when Avis made her change an outfit. “It’s like you think you
own
me. You don’t even really love me.”

Brian, of course, said Avis was imagining things. “She’s a preteen girl. This is what they do.”

The night of the party, there’d been a storm of tears. Brian, home late from work, bowed over a stack of paperwork. Avis thought he was being particularly rigid about a 10 p.m. curfew, and she was tempted to dissent. Their daughter wept passionately, her lashes dark and pointed. “I can’t believe you people,” Felice had cried, her voice ragged as if something were sawing away inside her.

“Maybe you’d rather not go at all?” Brian threatened, arms crossed, standing in her doorway. Looking back, Avis is jealous of these young parents who could still offer and withhold freedom. Avis spoke with Brian privately in their bedroom. A compromise was brokered.

So Felice went to the party. She smiled at them before leaving—it seemed that all was forgiven—they’d agreed on a curfew of 11:30. When Avis kissed Felice, she detected a trace of dried tears on her daughter’s face and moved to brush it away, then checked herself, saying instead, “You look so pretty.”

Felice had given her a tremulous smile that pierced Avis. “Thank you, Mommy. You do too.” She waved on her way out the door.

That evening, Felice didn’t come home.

AVIS STIRS THE MURK
of sugar in the bottom of her glass. She watches it rise a few inches into the amber liquid, then settle back. If this place were half-decent, she muses, they’d have given her simple syrup.

She fingers her watch, refusing to look at it. Felice has been over an hour late in the past, hasn’t she? Surely. She has also not come at all, on one or two occasions.

The waiter is hovering near her left elbow and Avis finds she has taken an intense dislike to this man, his demonic appearances and disappearances, the way he places the refilled basket before her, murmuring, “Fresh bread.”

The cell phone rings and Avis nearly upsets her drink, which the waiter (why is he still there?) catches. It might be Felice, she thinks, though her daughter never uses the prepaid cell phone she gave her three years ago (too late, too late . . . Felice had started asking for her own phone when she’d turned ten, but Brian had ruled she was too young). Avis checks the screen and her pulse slows with disappointment:
Nina—Cell
. The time stamp on the screen: 2:02.

“Do you know what you’d like, ma’am?” the waiter asks.

Avis experiences a surge of rage so cool and hard it feels as if her body is filled with ice. She could stand and quietly crush the waiter’s windpipe with her thumbs, sit down and finish sipping her gritty tea. She smiles at him, her face metallic. “Not right now, thank you,” her voice a tiny hammer on iron.

She can’t quite let herself get at that night—the first night—that Felice didn’t come home. She knows police were involved, and 3 a.m.
drives, and calls to other parents—she can’t recall the sequence. Then, after the terrible empty hours of waiting, like a miracle, there was Felice emerging from Del Fishbein’s BMW. It was the morning after the party, the sun a blister on the horizon. The birds were chucking, creaking, whirring; they sounded like monkeys and lizards and rubbing tree limbs.

And there was that boy with Felice—what was his name? Casey? Shawn?

But it wasn’t the boy, Felice insisted. She’d gotten tired of the party, she said. She’d asked Casey—or Connor—to walk her home, but they’d stopped to look at the water in the dark.
Water?
Avis realized she was talking about the canals that intersected the Gables: slow, fat manatees sometimes rose to the water’s surface and ibises littered the banks like stars.

See, Felice had wondered if they could see the manatees in the dark, she tried to explain to her mother in her reasonable voice. She and Avis stood in the middle of the yard in the dawn, as if Felice simply couldn’t wait to get inside the house to explain herself, both of them still in the clothes they’d been wearing the night before. Felice’s hands held out in explanation, “I wanted to see if they slept or where they would be, you know? And we cut across the Fishbeins’ yard and there were, like, a hundred million of them! They were playing all together in the canal—the manatees!” Avis glanced at the boy; he stood, sleepy-eyed, behind Felice, hands jammed in his pockets. He squinted, the grass on the front lawn seemed to be too bright for him.

Avis’s daughter’s eyes were overwide; she was speaking too loudly. She’d told her mother that she and this Shawn—who was just a friend, nothing else (he looked away, over one narrow shoulder, blinking at the bright lawns. He was fourteen at most, Avis calculated)—had sat on the banks of the Fishbeins’ yard, just above the stone steps to the water, watching this display in the dark. “And it was just, you know, it was all like warm and soft”—Felice had put her hands up to her face, calming a bit—“and we fell asleep. And the next thing we knew, Mrs. Fishbein was out there in her nightie. ‘Your mother’s going crazy!’ ” Felice mimicked.

Avis listened with tears standing in her eyes. Brian was too furious to come out of the house. He didn’t trust himself to speak. Still, they didn’t actually punish Felice: perhaps they should have? Brian wanted to ground her but Avis talked him out of it, saying, That’s the problem—we tried to control her, so she rebelled.

Avis didn’t know what to make of her daughter’s fantastic story. Was she on drugs? Avis stood next to her and ran her fingers through Felice’s silky hair. Her daughter’s breath and hair smelled clean—not a hint of beer or cigarettes.

Felice seemed to ground herself—coming straight home from school, sleeping for hours over the weekend. Stanley moved through the house silently, as if around a convalescent. Gradually they all relaxed, and things seemed mostly normal again. Three months later, when Felice was thirteen, she went to another party. She’d laughed on her way out the door, swearing she’d be home by ten latest, kissing her father and saying, mock-serious, “Don’t worry, Daddy.” She was missing for three nights in a row.

Avis remembers the three nights and days without her daughter—the sheer panic of driving around, searching. At home, she couldn’t sleep more than ten minutes at a time; instead she stood at her marble slab rolling pie crusts that shattered and crumpled, filling the freezer with crusts lined with flour and parchment, stacked in towers. When Felice finally reappeared in the driveway, it felt like taking a breath after being buried alive. Avis recalls how Felice stared out of the backseat of the cruiser, fixing her parents with a sharp, red gaze. She hadn’t meant to come home that time—not ever. The police had found her with some older kids in a nightclub on Hollywood Beach. She was wearing clothes Avis had never seen before—a mesh blouse that adhered to her skin and a pair of faded jeans cinched with a belt of leather petals like a daisy chain. Avis wept while a white-haired officer with a weathered, kindly face stood in their front door talking to her and Brian about social services and family counseling, and their daughter stared out of the police car, over their heads. She begged Felice to tell them why she’d stayed away. Felice stared as if she wasn’t there at all.

Avis had wished desperately at that moment that she’d grown up with a proper mother—a real one—who would’ve shown her what to do—not the shadow figure, muttering over books and papers, two pencils tucked into her hair. Avis’s mother had raised her in a state of benign neglect, and would scarcely have noticed if Avis had stayed out all night for a week or a month. After the police had taken their statements, the officers left and Felice followed her parents back into the house. Avis had closed the front door, and Brian grabbed Felice by one of her winglike arms and swatted her, hard, twice with the flat of his palm against the seat of her jeans.

Avis gulped a high, startled suck of air, and watched her daughter’s face broaden, as if she were about to burst into tears, and then tighten, masklike, into something unfamiliar. Avis didn’t blame Brian exactly—or at least not in the way he assumed she did—not for the spanking. It seemed possible in fact, at times like that, that she really did still love him. She blamed him only for making it so plain to all of them—the gesture so furious and despairing—how ineffectual they were. Felice had started leaving them already: neither one knew how to stop it, neither knew why it was happening.

AVIS LOOKS PAST
the waiter’s shoulder. About to surrender the table, she takes a last look at the crowded sidewalk. In that moment, taking in the flux of hair and eyes and talking, the hands and dresses, all at once, a rush of pure, incandescent relief. It floods her body, melting away her bones. There: emerging from the crowd, that brisk, unmistakable, long-boned walk, tall and slim, the fingers curling absently against her sides.

Avis releases the cookie tin and places her hand on the iron chair arms, letting her breath deepen, pushing up, uncurling from her tight hunch.
At last.
Another electrical cascade of release as she moves forward. At the same moment, the waiter appears, interposing himself between Felice and Avis. “Know what you want yet?”

She flinches. For a moment, the day seems to tilt: Avis sees green and silver leaves, a lace of cirrus clouds, a bit of linen-colored umbrella. Her breath and pulse knock in her cranium. Avis lifts her arms, moving toward the girl, but Felice looks so shocked that Avis halts midway, her arms frozen in the air. The girl’s eyes are wide; whites show around the irises—Avis sucks in a tiny sip of air, trying to smile, because (of course!) it seems that this is not Felice after all, but just another lovely wraith of a girl, a stranger minding her own business. Avis’s lips tremble as she smiles; she says, “Oh, I just—I beg your pardon. I thought you were my daughter . . . I’m so—I’m—” But the girl turns her body in a smooth, evasive manuever, flipping her hair through her fingers, reentering the procession of shoppers.

Avis watches her go: blood rushes to her face, stinging as if she’d been slapped. She snaps, “You aren’t even that pretty.”

Two bronzed women, dark, sprayed hair piled on their heads, look up as Avis sinks back to her table. She notices the waiter watching her from several tables away, and returns his stare until he looks away.