Diana Abu-Jaber - Birds of Paradise

Hannah’s hair was lighter than Felice’s but her skin was dark, a deep, rosy tan. She had a softly curved nose and a sloping chin that almost spoiled her looks. But there were her lucid green eyes, pale as windowpanes, startling and ghostly in all that dark skin. After a week of hallway conversations, the girl entrusted Felice with the information that her real name wasn’t actually Hannah Joseph but Hanan Yusef. That she hadn’t been born in the States — her parents had moved them from Jerusalem when Hannah was two. That her father had changed her name when they moved to Miami because he was sick of putting up with anti-Arab bullshit.

A frisson ran through Felice’s arms and spine. Thrilled, she asked, “But don’t you hate that? Hanan sounds beautiful. Don’t you hate having a fake American name?”

“No, I was glad,” Hannah said curtly, and looked away.

Bella, Marisa, and Yeni made room for Hannah in their coterie, a little infatuated with her. “She just has this way about her,” Jacqueline said. “Yeah, like, she knows what’s cool and what isn’t without even trying,” Court said.

Felice also sensed an adult weariness about the girl — her comments adroit, funny, often bleak. She seemed to have a kind of cold insight verging on telepathy into people — especially adults — their lives like transparencies before her eyes. “Dottie over there?” she whispered to Felice. “She wants to get with Charleton Baker.” Felice cracked up, a hand cupped over her mouth. “No way!” Charleton was sweet and tall — a thyroid case, as Hannah put it. But he was twelve, stringy and chronically broken-voiced. She realized that a doting light came into the social studies teacher’s powdered face whenever she called on him: Dottie Horkheimer’s smile deepened and she looked, fleetingly, pretty. Knowing something forbidden about Ms. Horkheimer made social studies bearable.

All that fall, through Hannah’s funny, scorching way of looking at things, school itself seemed more tolerable. Hannah seemed to know a lot about other kids: she warned Felice that her friend Coco was a fake, jealous of Felice’s looks, that she whispered behind her back. Felice and her friends had known each other since kindergarten. As soon as Hannah told her this, Felice thought it must be true: she began to distance herself from Coco. Later she realized she wasn’t sure if it was true, or if it just seemed so because of the supremely certain way that Hannah said things.

Felice and Hannah fell into rituals of endless email and phone calls — messages raveling together, switching from one to the other at whim. By October, they snuck out of P.E. on a regular basis. They sprawled in the east field and watched the boys’ soccer team running wind sprints and snapping through calisthenics. Hannah would gossip with Felice about teachers and other kids for a while, but then she’d start to say things like, “Isn’t it weird that everyone has to die? Like, everyone on this field right now? Someday they’ll all be dead. Everyone in this whole school. Gone.”

“I guess.” Felice squinted so spangles of colored light glittered inside her eyelashes. Off in the distance, there were moving vistas of palms, their enormous shaggy fronds seemed to swim and undulate against the sky. Felice loved listening to Hannah say her crazy stuff. She had decided never to introduce her to her mother. Avis would come out — she always did — with plates of cherry cookies, their chocolate icing like lacquer, or lemon cream scones coruscated with sugar crystals — her friends fought for the morsels of her miniature éclairs. “Your mother is a god, ” Bella once moaned.

Hannah didn’t like to talk about her parents either. “My dad is a big boring freak and for some reason my mom married him.” She flopped back in the grass, swishing her arms back and forth, the way Felice had seen kids make snow angels on TV. “I hate Arabs. I hate Israelis. I hate soldiers. I hate Saddam Hussein. I hate George Bush. I hate politics, I hate words that begin with p . So don’t ask me about any of it.”

“Fine,” Felice said, laughing and rolling her eyes. “I wasn’t going to.”

Felice could see the shapes of old shadows moving over Hannah’s eyes. Odd references came up all the time. A truck overturned a block away from the school and a brackish chemical exhaust hung in the air: Hannah said, “That smells exactly like a sulfur bomb.” Another time, when a jet clapped a sonic boom over the school, Hannah collapsed into a hunch on the floor, her face stark with shock. She recovered, brushing aside the teacher’s concern, but later went home without speaking to Felice.

Hannah made fun of Felice’s other friends behind their backs. She mimicked Yeni’s prissy Venezuelan accent, Bella’s slack, sweetly bovine expression. They sensed her disdain, as well as the way she claimed Felice all for herself, edging out a world in which she and Felice were the only ones who mattered: Felice was flattered and pleased. This was a new kind of friend.

SEVERAL BLOCKS LATER, Emerson and Derek receding into distance, Felice starts to relax. The streets widen and hiss with traffic, the air rain-pearled. There’s a burst of squawking in the air and she looks up to see a passing flock of sapphire-colored macaws with orange bellies. Stanley said they were the prettiest animals with the ugliest voices. He’d told her how, after big hurricanes, wild birds escaped from the aviaries and zoos and from the metal cages people kept in their backyards. They returned to nature. “They’ll nip off your finger with that beak — like scissors. Snip!” he said. Felice was seven when Andrew hit, but she didn’t remember much of it beyond the fun of nightly picnics from their cooler and reading by flashlight and bathing in the swimming pool.

Felice admires the long blue tails of the birds just before they vanish into the trees. That’s the way to be, she thinks, kicking hard on her board, letting the wind stream through her hair — no plans, no fear, no expectations: never to be held in live captivity.

SHE DREAMS OF A LITTLE BOY: HIS HAIR SLOWLY rising and falling as he runs in long, slow arcs, up to kick the ball, the air filled with bright cries:

I’ve got it! I’ve got the ball!

Avis opens her eyes. For a moment, she waits, spooled in the sweetness of an after-dream. It seems to continue unfolding around her, her son still eight years old.

Consciousness emerges then, and Avis realizes she can still hear the cries, the child’s voice. Gradually she notices the hard repeating beat. The mynah. She lingers in bed with her eyes closed, marveling at the mimicry — the miracle of it — a bird, capturing the parabola of laughter so exactly. Who is the little boy, Avis wonders, this parrot listened to?

Glancing at the clock, she realizes, with a deep dismay, that it’s 6:30: she’s overslept by two hours: too late to fulfill the standing order for palmiers at the Anacapri and La Granada restaurants — she’ll probably lose their business. Usually she wakes on her own with no problem. She hears Brian’s familiar pace between bathroom and bedroom. Why didn’t he wake her? He hums and mutters, runs a brush through his hair. Because she’d been stood up, she thinks grimly. He felt sorry for her. Avis rises, ties back her hair; ignores the strands that slide free in her fingers, ignores its lighter mass. She brews strong black tea with cream and honey and goes to her desk in what she still thinks of as Stanley’s room, to email the restaurants. She struggles to construct an apology as the mynah shrieks through the window.

Newly showered, Brian smiles at Avis as he moves past the door. She still enjoys the sight of her husband undressed, his slightly bowlegged stance, the softening pouch of his middle, his penis, its innocent, leftward slump. Once Stanley was out of the house, she sometimes lured Brian back to bed in the morning, enjoying the coolness of his washed skin against her kitchen warmth. But she hasn’t been much interested in a while. She sighs, then twists around at the desk chair. “Do you hear that?”