Diana Abu-Jaber: Birds of Paradise

The ice in her glass begins to melt. The waiter removes it and puts down a fresh glass of ice and tea. “Do you know what you want yet?” He scans the other tables as if he’s at a party, waiting for someone more interesting to appear.

Sunlight edges around the table umbrella and she can feel the heat on her forearm: they must use such small umbrellas to keep people from lingering. “No — I’d like to wait for my — for my other party to arrive.” Her voice is professionally uninflected; she looks directly at him, sits back into shadow: I too have worked the front of the house.

But Avis also feels a minor soughing at the center of her chest as the waiter turns on his heel. The air seems to bow straight through her skin, her body raw. She moves the cookie tin from her lap to the table, not caring if the waiter thinks she’s a weird lost woman clutching her treasure. Nothing matters. She stares at her hands, crosshatched with scrapings of this morning’s flour work, sinewy with veins and knuckles, overdeveloped, like her calves and ankles, from standing and kneading and stirring. The tin is her talisman. She no longer focuses on the crowds: she sees herself and her daughter everywhere, like memory echoes from the past, bouncing along the sidewalks. All those pairs hovering outside store windows, a hand glissading down the back of a head of hair, an armload of shopping bags — oh, that was once her and Felice. For years and years, that’s how it was — even her son knew it — that somehow, without any conscious decision, Avis had assumed that daughters belonged to mothers, and sons to their fathers. Before she’d ever had kids or even met her husband, she’d imagined baking with a daughter. Showing her how to crack an egg one-handed, between her fingers, the way to distill essences from berries, the proper way to tie an apron.

Avis curls in her lips, bites down with just enough pressure to keep from crying. She thinks of Felice at twelve — just before she had gotten so angry.

Felice had wanted to go to a party at Lola Rodriguez’s house — just a few blocks away, right in the Gables. They knew Lola — she was one of Felice’s cadre — unserious, sweet-natured girls, all of them just beginning to be vain about their smooth hair and skin and nails. When they were together — Lola, Felice, Betty, Coco, Marisa, Yeni, Bella — Avis had a general impression of splashes of laughter, colorful dresses, and thin, tan arms. These girls were accustomed to elaborate entertainments — pool parties, birthday parties; in a few more years most of them would plan wedding-like quinceañeras, their fancy white dresses like poufs of Bavarian cream. Brian and Avis did their best to keep up — taking the kids to water parks and museums, summertime hegiras to Europe, and the costly winter pilgrimages to Disney World, its coiling lines and raw sunshine. But sometimes she would notice Felice standing apart from the others, especially as she grew older — her eyes grave, even when she was laughing — a kind of fretful concentration about her.

A few days past Thanksgiving, six years ago. Avis had been working so steadily kneading bread dough that she hadn’t noticed how late it was until a blue glistening in the window distracted her: the Calvadoses’ Christmas lights had come on, floating the outline of a house on the black night. Brian didn’t get home until after seven and Stanley was at a friend’s house. Usually Felice would’ve stopped in the kitchen after school for whatever treat her mother was testing (back then, she was forever developing new offerings for her clients). Avis checked the cooling rack: a tray of raspberry éclairs in glossy chocolate coats.

Avis moved through the house, switching on lights, wondering if Felice had stayed late at school. In the hallway outside her daughter’s room, her hand on a light switch, Avis stopped: there were tiny, gasping, imploring sounds coming from within. They sounded so unearthly that everything seemed to hover there, as if the night and stars had leaked into the house and hovered in this dark, sparkling hallway. After listening for a moment, Avis knocked gently, bringing her ear close to the door. “Felice? Darling? Are you there? Can I come in?”

The tiny noises ceased and it was quiet for such a long time that Avis began to wonder if she was hearing things. Finally she heard something muffled and low, and after another pause, she turned the old glass doorknob. She could barely make out Felice on the bed. Her head was propped on the pillow, her hair curling and waving like a sea anemone, her arms flung to either side, she looked half-drowned, ineffably lovely. “Watch your eyes.” Instead of the overhead, Avis switched on the softer desk lamp so the room glowed with a sea-green penumbra. “Hey.” She sat on the edge of the bed. “What’s going on? You didn’t say hi. I’ve got éclairs, and there’s still some mousse with the salted caramel.”

“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 gougères ; 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.