Diana Abu-Jaber - Birds of Paradise

Stanley also refuses to ask Felice questions. He talks to her, of course; he is friendly and cordial — he hasn’t asked her to go or to stay; he will not ask why she left or where she went. He imagines that he’s made himself smooth and cool — like a wax candle or an old pewter spoon, half melted by time and use.

Don’t go/Don’t stay.

One week after their arrival, Stanley is stationed at his desk studying the books — his most dreaded task and yet the best to lose himself in. He hears a rustling, shuffling sound, the creak of hand truck wheels, then a furious, intent whispering that sends icy goose bumps down his back and makes him wonder if one of their homeless locals is trying to set up a bedroll in the cheese cave (they once opened the market to find a bedraggled elderly man sleeping in Prepared Foods). He lowers his hands on the keyboard, then wheels his chair closer to the office wall. Gradually he distinguishes two voices — Emerson’s and Felice’s. He hears another crackling rustle (grocery bags?), then Emerson’s voice, somewhat louder, saying, “—it’s here — under the…”

There’s a pause, then Felice murmuring: “they… unidentified?… not him… I mean… he said his name…”

Their intent, muted voices rise and fall. Emerson: “Must not have had…”

Felice, reading in a sharp whisper: “ In an accidental drowning … know it was even him? And drowning ?”

“It’s the same beach on the same night… anything… tide and the currents…”

“A white man, mid-forties…” She is either reading this or conceding something. “What about the other… his friend?”

“. why would he stick around?”

“. God.”

For a long while, Stanley hears nothing but a whir of breath in his ears, a pump somewhere in the building, the buzz of the overhead lights. His mouth is so dry it adheres to itself. He closes his eyes. Through the wall, he hears minute, inarticulate sounds — perhaps paper crumpling, perhaps crying. He lowers his eyes to the heels of his palms.

He once let a girlfriend cajole him into spending a few nights with her at a hotel in Islamorada. She’d insisted that Stanley needed a “vacation,” that he was too young to be so obsessed with work. He went grudgingly, annoyed at the waste of time and money. The hotel had statues of grinning tiki idols out front and furniture that stuck to the backs of their legs. He’d awakened late one night and got up to use the bathroom. As he washed his hands in the darkened room, in the mirror he noticed something move on the floor behind him. After years of working in the food industry, he had a near-telepathic ability to detect vermin and pests of all sorts, and he imagined how satisfying it would be to tell the girlfriend that the hotel was infested with palmetto bugs.

He turned. As he stared through the purple darkness of the room, he noticed trembling movements, then the extended claws like a waiter balancing trays, then a tail curling up and over. He watched in a kind of dream-state as two scorpions made their delicate, rickety way across the bathroom floor. And the feeling of that moment — a kind of mild horror as well as a decision to leave the creatures alone and never to mention them — was virtually identical to what he feels now, eavesdropping, listening to his sister talk about drowned men, unidentified bodies — both a recoiling dread and placid neutrality. What had she gotten mixed up in?

He consciously relaxes his grip on his chair arms, seeing the scorpions’ scrape in the darkness again. He’s given up on issues like Justice and Global Peace — preferring, instead, to be kind and generous to his employees, to take good care of his girlfriend. Lately he barely sees the migrant workers who wait for jobs in the lumberyard parking lot or amble around downtown Homestead, the heels of their boots worn down to softness. He wonders, Can anyone help it? What’s ever right? You contract with a local farmer, only to find out that Dow Chemical controls their seed production. You lose money because your vegan customers want to have papayas or avocados in November. You lose customers because the only oranges you can get in December are from South America, because Big Citrus pushed a ban on privately owned orange trees, citing citrus canker, because it’s more lucrative for Florida citrus growers to ship their fruits halfway around the world than sell at home. Because an apple grower can’t afford to take a bite of his own fruit. Who says the world is fair? You have to pick your loyalties and your causes, Stanley thinks, throwing his copy of the newspaper into recycling. In this way, at the very least, he picks his sister.

ON FRIDAY MORNING, ten days after Felice reappeared, Stanley wakes earlier than usual. He watches Nieves’s belly as she sleeps: his talisman. Each day he has awakened with a bit less anxiety, less surprised to find his sister asleep in his living room. He recognizes the way she pouts in silence, folds her hair over one shoulder, her zippy, near-enzymatic energy in the afternoons. He allows himself the pleasure of simply enjoying her presence. Nieves opens her eyes: it’s still dark, the two of them lie there, silently aware of the other’s stirrings. Their wall unit rumbles away, making its weirdly human moan, producing icy streaks in the air. She shifts, orienting herself toward him, and murmurs, “Let’s ask them to stay.”

“Here? In this apartment?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Or in the studio — we’re not using it. We can put the canned junk back in the warehouse.” She sighs faintly. Stanley can make out the glimmer on her lower lip, an iridescence on the swell of her belly. Increasingly, she seems to have less energy to be irascible, less will for gruffness. Sometimes he worries that her personality is eroding, that she’s being washed away by the pregnancy. His hand closes tightly around hers. “I like them,” she says. “They’re sweet. And I think they need us.”

She speaks with a kind of exhausted resignation Stanley recognizes in himself. He runs his thumb along the inside of her fingers. “If we ask them to stay, it might remind them that they were planning to go.” He’d meant this as a joke, but it doesn’t come out sounding that way.

Nieves props her head on her hand, “First, though — you should take her to see your mother.”

“Oh.” Stanley shakes his head. He strokes the length of her inner forearm. He feels cushioned by fatigue. “That’s pretty much the last thing she’ll do.”

“It’s different now. She’s relaxed — more used to things. Please, just — ask her again?”

“She’ll think I’m trying to force her.” He eases onto his back. “That’s how it is with Felice. This whole thing now — it’s kind of what it used to be like — she held us all hostage.”

But the longer that Felice is there, the worse he feels about not telling his parents — more of an accomplice. It was as if, in the past, they could have pretended her running away had been a sort of natural disaster — inescapable, and nobody’s fault. But this, her avoidance, seems personal. And the more he considers this, the more the old anger returns, tightening his stomach. He thinks: What gives her the right?

THAT MORNING, STANLEY GOES into the market early: Felice is already at the cheese display arranging a pyramid of sepia-edged triple-crèmes from Normandy. When Stanley first opened the market, the only cheeses they carried were flavorless bricks of organic jack and a rubbery, casein-free, vegan cheddar. Felice touches the cheeses with care, as if they’re infants, her hands hovering above each piece, placing it just so. She has arranged sprays of yellow dendrobium around the lightly refrigerated deck. She is actually humming. When she turns toward him, her expression broken open, Stanley catches a glimpse of natural contentment before the wariness resurfaces. Her lifted hands pause, then move to her chest — as if identifying or shielding herself. With dismay, he sees her eyes glisten. “You want us to go, don’t you?” she asks.