Diana Abu-Jaber - Birds of Paradise

The men nod and there’s a good moment of values lining up with financial goals. Brian lowers his eyes to his steak.

“Of course some Little Haiti citizens’ action group has just popped up — breathing down our necks,” Gavin says.

“Day late, dollar short.” Conrad is almost humming. “They got their payout. Let them try to fight us now.”

“It won’t look very pretty if they do,” Brian says. Something about Conrad always makes Brian want to push him down a flight of stairs.

Javier has a narrow, skeptical look. “What’s behind it? Anyone heard anything?”

“Stryker?” Gavin murmurs. A competing developer: Brian knows the name. A small-timer, which makes sabotage tactics more likely.

“Oh baloney,” Conrad brays. “Styker doesn’t know his elbow from his ass from anything…” He drunkenly waves the intimation away.

And the others are already distracted, draining their glasses: they don’t want to talk about the actual projects; that’s old news. They like to think about the next deal and the one after that. “Well, onward soldiers.” Brian throws his cloth napkin on the table, accidentally spraying it with bread crumbs moments after Chantelle whisked the tabletop. “Oh God. Sorry.” He tries to brush at the crumbs with his hand, spreading them everywhere. Chantelle places a restraining hand on the forearm of his jacket. “Please, sir.”

He sits still, face stiff, as she brushes up all the crumbs and rights the cloth.

THE MEN’S LOBBY HAS a comforting lushness: potted palms, the lighting angled and discreet, an inviting spot for the men to make their ruminative strolls. He pushes through the doors to the inner sanctum. Entering this dim room with its splash of reflection is like catching a glimpse of a ghost. He holds his hands under the faucet, then combs them back over what’s left of his hair. He stares hard at himself. There are blue shadows under his eyes, in-dwellings. What do you call one lawyer at the bottom of the sea?

Chantelle has graduated high school. He touches the mirror.

Chantelle has started college. Community college. He’d hoped his own kids would attend Cornell. She’d had to walk several blocks out of a poorer neighborhood to attend Gables High. He feels proud of her.

His own mother had seemed the reserve of all love. But there was a thread of delicacy in her: he felt it within himself — a sensitivity to the world, a snappable filament. She suffered, stranded in a family of men, eating sweets, her body softening, losing the bones in her face, her afternoons spent sleeping or hunched in tears, a kind of pure surrender. At times, over the last few months, Brian too has felt visited by that old grief, the allure of surrender.

What. What should he and Avis have done? Put their girl’s face on a milk carton?

Missing: Felice Muir, Age 13.

Kidnapped by herself.

Motivation: Unknown.

What child does such a thing as that? Could she have been that unhappy? The temptation was to blame each other: Her mother’s daughter. Avis pointed to Brian’s absence from their life. They fought about what to do. Open a bank account for her? Rent an apartment? She refused everything they tried to offer. “She can always come home,” Brian finally said, his voice ragged with exasperation. “She knows where we live.”

Felice seemed so tiny and delicate at birth, it had taken them weeks to attempt bathing her. Avis was terrified of dropping the baby, so Brian held her: he remembered the moment that he’d dipped her tiny body, white and curved as a lotus, into the basin. Her newborn eyes widened and fastened on his — a look that pierced him. He felt he would lay down his life for his daughter. But things were never easy between Brian and Felice. She became aware of her own beauty, fussing over her clothes and hair, it seemed, from the moment she recognized her own reflection. She showed no interest in the ball games he attended with Stanley, not even in backyard games of catch and badminton. Brian caught his own stern expression flickering over her head as she looked into the mirror.

Still, there were many good moments: the hunt for shells on Sanibel Beach, long weekends in the Keys, the spring break when Felice stood at the end of the pier beside Brian and her brother. He’d bought them each their own Zebco reels and she waited patiently for the line to nod, eventually landing more than Brian or Stanley. Those long, warm afternoons of blue diamond skies, soaking a line, the flashing twists of fish, those belong to Brian and his children.

There was one night in particular: the four of them in a vacation rental on Pompano Beach, a fifties-era unit in the beach grass. He remembers a burning white circle of moon and the night, scooped out, almost cobalt behind it. There was some excitement on the beach, voices under their window. A little girl banged on their door, still open at nearly midnight, and called through the screen frame, “They’re hatching!”

Stanley and Felice rushed from their beds, Brian and Avis followed, laughing. They huddled around a staked, taped-off section of beach, waiting with a small crowd as the sand trembled, gray under the moonlight. It bubbled, then shed from the backs and flippers of emergent baby turtles. They watched the tiny creatures — tens, hundreds — struggle over the sand to the shoreline, flippers beating blind and determined. Brian watched his children watching, craning forward, pacing the sea turtles, fanning away any little stones or shells. In that warm, salty night, he felt as if the texture of time itself were thickening, settling over them, as if they would be held together in the froth of air, its silky threads attaching and keeping them safe, everlasting family.

THE RINGING ON THE other end steadies Brian as he drifts near the foyer by the entrance. He turns to face into the wall. “Hi, hello dear.”

She says, “Brian,” and then, “How is your meeting? Did you eat?” Her voice is stiff. Still angry about their earlier fight? Then it comes to him: Felice didn’t show. He’d been almost certain this would happen again. The receiver feels hot and a fringe of sweat breaks out above his temples. The phone slides a little in the damp of his palms. He rests his forehead against the wall. “Oh darling,” he whispers, “what can we — what—” But there’s a rumble of voices behind the doors, and then the whole table of men emerges from the bar. Gavin nods to Brian as he lumbers through the front lobby. Javier parks himself right next to Brian and leans against the wall. Something tightens in Brian’s gut; he turns into the receiver and asks Avis, “How you holding up?”

“Just fine, dear. Don’t… I’m fine.”

Javier interlaces his fingers and straightens his arms behind his back, then tips his head from side to side, popping the vertebrae in his neck.

Brian wants to tell her about Chantelle, ask what she thinks Felice is doing with her absconded life, but this seems, now, deliberately cruel. “You know — is that bird still making a racket? How’s the noise level?”

“Brian,” she says more quietly. “Don’t worry about that.”

“Well, it affects the whole neighborhood.” His voice grows professional. “There are nuisance laws. It’s why we live in the Gables. Civil codes.”

“You know what, let’s not talk about the bird.” She sounds almost like a phone-menu voice, like the automated answering service at Citibank.

Javier hums, whisper-sings not quite under his breath.

“Well. Damn thing.”

“Brian. I’m sure you’re right.”

“Well… I don’t mean to…” His voice seems to echo back at him. “I’m not trying to be right .” Brian lowers his voice into the phone, cups it with his other hand. “Dear? Are you there? Can we — let’s talk again later… They’re waiting for me.”