Diana Abu-Jaber - Birds of Paradise

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 pâte 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.

Avis remembers that time as a feeling, the sensation of entering a long tunnel: her dreams, when she slept, were night-curved; they wound around her. The police had urged them to “carry on” with their lives. Her reimmersion into classical baking stopped her from obsessing over her daughter’s possible whereabouts, whether she was hurt or hungry or in danger. Her peripheral vision burned away cleanly, like the edges of a crème brûlée . She built her business, garnered awards, had her photograph in magazines, was approached by publishers asking for her cookbook. She could charge almost any price and customers seemed to consider it a privilege to pay it. For a year, then two and three, she couldn’t quite see her husband, son, or assistants. It was like being a deep-sea diver — the cold pressure on her body, her hands waving through frigid darkness.

Sometimes, while she worked, she revisited memories of the prelapsarian days with Felice, of shopping and talking. After a morning of strolling through the open-air mall, they went to the café and settled down to cups of consommé and airy popovers with strawberry butter. Felice sat across from Avis, a black velvet choker around her neck, her attention drawn to the young women who entered the tearoom wearing expensive, formfitting clothes. Mother and daughter would discuss the outfits — which styles would look the most becoming on Felice. Avis’s mother was amused by their old-fashioned domesticity. She told Avis, “You’re teaching the girl to be an odalisque !”

After Felice had gone, Avis would admit to herself — much to her shame — that there were occasions when she felt as if she hadn’t known her daughter as she should have. Among the happiest memories were more difficult, even confounding recollections: changes that had come over Felice after the time she’d taken to her bed. How she stopped laughing. How the light had seemed to go out in her face. Depression? Drugs? One night at the dinner table, Avis asked if Felice was feeling all right.

“I don’t know,” she’d said. That was her answer. Avis turns it around and around, this memory. She has considered that tiny exchange many times over the years; each time she does is like running her fingertip along a blade, testing to see if it still draws blood. Because she didn’t ask Felice anything more. She put her daughter to bed and placed a cool washcloth on her head and read to her from The Magic Garden, but she never asked her what was the matter . Why didn’t she — Avis asks herself now. Why didn’t I ask her?

Neither she nor Brian knew what to do with this wordless, unsmiling girl. When she began running away, Brian responded by becoming more rigid, moving up her bedtime, insisting they eat breakfast and dinner together, insisting she continue her violin lessons long after the point she’d lost interest. Brian had great faith in discipline — as if Felice could be saved by principles alone.

SHE STANDS STILL in the kitchen; her head is heavy and a damp warmth starts in the quick of her spine, spreading up through her skin, capillaries dilating. Typically the meetings with Felice turn her jittery, nerves jangling in her body for hours afterward. Now, however, she must physically fight the craving to crawl back into bed. Avis holds on to the wide counter that runs along the north wall: it feels as if microscopic earthquakes run through her arms and legs, and she seems to hear blood move in a rumbling twist through her head. This corner, with its window overlooking the necklace plant and the old avocado and overgrown garden out back, was where Stanley liked to sit while she was working. He was so sensitive as a child. He had too many questions, and he watched her too closely, as if certain that she would try to run away from him. The way she used to watch her own mother escaping into her books. He gave away his toys: once, he came home from school without his shirt and belt. He worried like an old man over people. When he was five, he walked into the kitchen, his voice rusty from crying, and told his mother that Andrew, a boy in his class, was eating rotten cakes.

That was Avis’s term for Ding Dongs, Yodels, Ho Hos, Zingers — any of the artificial desserts that lined supermarket walls. Stanley had always intuitively grasped the difference between such things and, say, a vanilla mousse roulade . He admitted to giving his pastries to Andrew. A year later, he wanted Avis to provision him with enough éclairs for his school. In junior high, he began to scowl at her assistants, complaining that they didn’t knead or measure properly — and it was true, they were sloppy. He often appeared in the kitchen, taking notes, making caramel, at times when he should have been in class.