Diana Abu-Jaber - Birds of Paradise

Closing the door, he finds his way back to the bed in the dark. Nieves is warm and damp against his chest; he pulls her closer, glad for the creature weight of her. “It’s not going to.”

“ Why did it happen?”

“I used to ask her — all the time. Seriously. I’d ask Felice just to tell me why she was doing it. Once, I even said I’d help her run away if she’d tell me.”

“What she say?”

He shrugs slightly. “She said she couldn’t.” Back then, there were times when he almost thought he understood Felice. Stanley saw the devouring way their mother watched her — doting yet somehow swallowing her up. He, in turn, often felt cheated: there might even have been a small part of him that was glad when Felice first left. Mostly, though, he missed her. He’d heard about the girl at school who killed herself — Felice had never mentioned her, but Yeni and Coco told him that they’d been friends. When he’d said the girl’s name to Felice, an odd blankness had dropped over her features, emptying her face. She denied knowing her: he’d pressed but could get nothing more from his sister.

They shift positions, uncurling to lie side by side. Nieves has never been much of a cuddler, preferring a minimal touch — sliding the tips of her fingers under Stanley’s waist or hips. Now she curls her hand around his. “Are we going to help them?”

Stanley smiles in the darkness, pleased by the we —not always a given with her. His breath floats above him and there is that sense again — the feeling he’s had, ever since meeting her, that something polished and solid, like a marble shelf in his chest, is very slowly softening, dissolving into the air. “I don’t know if there’s much we can do. Honestly, I don’t know what to say to them. They probably just need money.”

“Well they can go ahead and get in line,” she grumbles.

“Don’t worry about the market.”

“I’m not.”

“You know — we could always move the business. I mean, if we had to. Find another location.”

She stares at him. “Are you kidding?”

Stanley’s eyes fall to the wooden floor of their apartment, once office space above the old bank. It took eight months and over a hundred volunteers to tear out and remodel the building: they repurposed the teller counters for cash registers and the vault became cold storage. They created that market from the ground up: its hand-polished floor boards, inlaid decorations, and the stained-glass figure of Persephone with her crimson pomegranate over the main entrance.

They don’t speak for a few moments, separately observing the darkness. Stanley notes a lingering green scent from the baskets of fresh mint, basil, sage, and oregano they foolishly used to decorate the front of the store. All that work will be destroyed by the wind. He often detects notes of fruit or prepared food twining through the floorboards into their apartment, perpetually reminding him of all sorts of unfinished tasks. He doesn’t mind: he grew up in the sugar-woven air of his mother’s kitchen — it was the thing that kept her away and yet kept her close — the scent of a cinnamon palmier in the morning was like having her hands beneath his pillow.

Nieves moves onto her knees to peer through the window. She says, “I guess there’s around six grand, just over, in petty cash.”

Stanley frowns, trying to think what she’s alluding to. Now he eases onto his side, head propped, trying to make out Nieves’s face, but she remains ineluctable. Recalling the thread of the conversation, it occurs to him to be indignant, to say: Are you crazy? Give that to them? That’s not even our money — that’s payroll and repairs and purveyors! But she already knows this. And she knows they probably won’t get the loan from his parents. So there’s nothing to say. There’s only the matter of coaxing her closer in bed, of rubbing her shoulders and kissing the nape of her neck, and wistfully thinking of sex: already both of them are so tired these days, and the baby’s still three months away. When people learn of her pregnancy, they all say: Enjoy these precious last months! It seems that something in Stanley is readying itself. Frightened as he is, there have been moments lately when Stanley has glimmerings of unexpected longing — as if this baby is someone he already knows and loves. Increasingly, he senses the energetic thrum of that third presence, the additional heartbeat rounding things out, expanding everything — their home, their lives, even the air molecules around them. His hands slide along Nieves’s arms, once again folding her spine into his chest, folding their arms in over her belly.

“But what if it did happen to us?” She returns to her earlier fretting. “Like it did with Felice running away. I mean — Stan — I would die . I wouldn’t be able to stand it.” Her voice quavers. “I’m not that strong. Not like that.”

“You are strong,” he murmurs against the side of her head, strands of hair in his face. “And it won’t happen,”

“But how do you know?”

“We won’t let it.”

“Stanley?” Nieves whispers, her voice sounds rawer and younger. “I think we should give them the money — or whatever they want. We need to help them out.”

Over the past year and a half, he has learned that Nieves has within her something like a pointing needle. It does little good to argue with her, though his own heavy nature often impels him to. Stanley tells his girlfriend, “Maybe. I don’t especially want to and she might not take it anyway. And I’m not about to beg.”

Nieves takes such a long time to respond, Stanley wonders if she’s fallen asleep. There are low, continuous rolls of thunder in the distance. Then he hears her saying softly, “She doesn’t strike me that way — as being so hard.”

She doesn’t know, Stanley thinks. Even now, he can’t stop checking on Felice, looking toward the door which he’s left open, allowing no one their privacy. And he will probably get up several times in the night to make sure that he hadn’t dreamed it. At this point, years after the fact, he realizes that it’s as if Felice’s departure has become an essential piece of her — the price his family had to pay for his sister, for having her at all.

THE STORM HAD GROWN exponentially louder, thrashing windows, the nylon curtains lifting inside the apartment. The clock radio had died at 3:35 a.m. The rattling AC fell silent, ceiling fans stopped rotating, and the constant electric drone — not only of their apartment but of the market below them — ceased. Outside, wind rose in eminence, pounding the building in an oceanic surge. Half asleep, Nieves curled against his side and they listened to the roar as if they were trapped inside a small boat, whipped by rising seas. He wondered at one point if the unprotected windows would hold: something outside seemed to burst and there was a furious pounding racket against the building like that of a madman with a hammer.

When he wakes again at 6:28, according to his wristwatch, the storm has abated, rotating north and east toward the beaches. The apartment is stultifying; Stanley gets up and cranks open the windows, the blue porthole in the bathroom, and more tropical humidity swims into the place. His eyes ache with sleeplessness. The sky is scoured-out and bright; the heat will be terrible. Nieves rises and makes sandwiches for breakfast — tahini, organic banana, and local wildflower honey on whole wheat — her manner so surly and ferocious that no one attempts to talk to her. Felice and Emerson look, if possible, even more stunned and white-faced than they had the day before. Emerson studies the first section of the Herald with an impressive thoroughness, turning a page, then turning it back again to reread something. Stanley makes them coffee with the good Jamaican beans and dollops of unpasteurized cream (soon to spoil if power doesn’t come right back). Then they go outside to survey the damage.