Diana Abu-Jaber: Birds of Paradise

“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.