Diana Abu-Jaber - Birds of Paradise

Brian hovers near the door, dressed in his soft weekend clothes, and he gestures toward the front. “Up for taking a look?” They leave the house, stepping over branches, staring at their lawn and the broken trees. They walk down their street past the big intersection with LeJeune, scanning the neighborhoods. Miami appears to be shut down — the traffic lights are out, the storm drains matted with debris, the avenues swamped. There are heaps of wet branches blocking the streets, beautiful old trees split into pieces or just overturned, root ends up. Neighbors move slowly across their lawns, dazed. Blooms and fruits and leaves are stripped away, a kind of dense black vegetal and bark matter sprayed across lawns and sidewalks.

After an hour or so of wandering through the streets, they return to the house to escape the sun’s blare. Their own yard is covered with bramble but neither of them feels ready to take that on just yet. “How would you feel about doing a little something in the kitchen?” Avis asks tentatively. Brian laughs. He used to assist her before they had children, before she hired helpers, but she was impatient with him: he made mistakes — forgot to time the roasting almonds, or failed to sift the cake flour, or let the chocolate seize. Still, he accepts an apron and ties it on, smiling at the sense of occasion. He rests his knuckles on his hips. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

The first recipe is ancient, written on a card in her mother’s sloping hand — though her mother never actually made it. A list: eggs, brown sugar, vanilla, flour, chocolate chips. Over the course of the day, Avis and Brian fill the cooling racks with cookies: oatmeal raisin, molasses, butterscotch, peanut butter, and chocolate chip. Humble, crude, lightly crisp and filigreed at the edges, butter, salt, and sweetness at the centers. Avis samples batches with Brian. They stand near each other, immersed in the good, clean silence of work.

That afternoon, as the sun points low, potent rays across the yards, Avis and Brian pack the cookies into bakery boxes, stack them on the backseat and floor of the SUV, and set off. The traffic lights are still out and intersections are chaotic, drivers interpreting traffic protocol at will. Even though it’s barely a mile away, the narrow, rustic lanes of the Grove are even more backed up and flooded than the streets in the Gables: they have to reverse several times and hunt for a passable route. There’s been a storm of mosquitoes since the hurricane, and the heat makes everything seem slow and elastic, like a recording played at the wrong speed. Several times, they roll down the windows and give cookies wrapped in napkins to people dragging shrubs and limbs, raking lawns, sweeping sidewalks, slicing and sawing through piles of stumps, vines, brackish rafts of debris. A man in a sweat-stained T-shirt drops his garden hose and accepts the cookie, looking as if he might cry. When they finally get to Commodore Plaza, they spot Jean-Françoise in a white butcher’s jacket tending a series of smoking grills in the middle of the street. Before him, a subdued group waits with paper plates, humble as a soup line. People sit on the curb and in battered aluminum lawn chairs. Waiters hand out dinner rolls, assemble small salads, grill fingerling potatoes, onions, and artichokes. The marrow scent of grilling meat mingles with billows of wet leaves, hot tar — someone’s half-finished roof roasting. A glass pitcher is on the pavement, stuffed with curling twenties and fifties and personal checks. Jean-Françoise’s smile is a white spark in his silhouette; he raises the flat of his spatula in a kind of martial greeting. “She arrives!” The late sun fills the street, a translucent mesh of light. He looks almost devilish in the yellow light, turning steaks and guzzling wine from a spotted water glass.

The people waiting on line murmur, excited by her white boxes. Brian and Avis deliver their stacks and try to refuse dinner, but the waiters bring them glasses of burgundy, porcelain plates with thin, peppery steaks redolent of garlic, scoops of buttery grilled Brussels sprouts, and a salad of beets, walnuts, and Roquefort. They drag a couple of lawn chairs to a quiet spot on the street and they balance the plates on their laps. Some ingredient in the air reminds Avis of the rare delicious trips they used to make to the Keys. Ten years after they’d moved to Miami they’d left Stanley and Felice with family friends and Avis and Brian drove to Key West on a sort of second honeymoon. She remembers how the land dropped back into distance: wetlands, marsh, lazy-legged egrets flapping over the highway, tangled, sulfurous mangroves. And water. Steel-blue plains, celadon translucence.

She and Brian had rented a vacation cottage in Old Town, ate small meals of fruit, cheese, olives, and crackers, swam in the warm, folding water. Each day stirring into the next, talking about nothing more complicated than the weather, spotting a shark off the pier, a mysterious constellation lowering in the west. Brian sheltered under a celery-green umbrella while Avis swam: the water formed pearls on the film of her sunscreen. They watched the night’s rise, an immense black curtain from the ocean. Up and down the beach they heard the sounds of the outdoor bars, sandy patios switching on, distant strains of laughter, bursts of music. Someone played an instrument — quick runs of notes, arpeggios floating in soft ovals like soap bubbles over the darkening water.

Now the wind comes up, fanning them with music, laughter carried up from the street, then washing them with silence again. The stars are very gentle, faraway as old thoughts.

“Good God,” Brian says faintly. He sounds like he’s just reached the life raft, climbed out of a cold sea. He takes a gulp of wine, then rubs at the inner crease of his arm. “I don’t know how you do that. That kind of exertion. And every single day — my God.”

It had been a long and intense workday, but there was something more to it, Avis thinks — the strain of the day itself, the aftermath of the storm. She’s so tired she feels as if she’s floating just above the chair. “Trust me — not typical. I didn’t even know if I could still push like that.”

“You are something else, kid,” Brian says. “But as for me. Boy, you never really expect it. I mean, getting older. It almost seems like you ought to be able to imagine your way out of it. Do something.”

“Ha. Right. Like what?”

“It’s nuts. Try to push back against it.” He tilts his glass of wine, then gazes over its lip. “You start to see the edges of your life. It’s like being able to see the curve of the planet.”

Avis fingers the bowl of her own glass. “I know. Like you always knew it was there but you never believed it?” The night is forming into a dark glittering sky: the world is a bright machine carrying them inside itself. Though she sees Brian every evening, it seems it’s been years since she’s heard this — the actual sound of his voice. Being with him like this is like watching a tiny boat far out on the water, slowly, slowly borne back to shore. Avis turns on her lounge chair and touches his hair with the tips of her fingers. He doesn’t move or speak: his eyes seem open wide. She trails her hand across the nape of his neck. “Let’s go home,” she murmurs. He cups her shoulders, slides his palm across the wings of her shoulder blades; his lips are dry, they taste of sea salt.

DURING THE COURSE of that week, she avoids the kitchen. She stays outside with Brian, clearing and raking the grass, sweeping the sidewalk, then the street in front of the house. Their power was restored on the afternoon following the hurricane, and for days afterward they’ve been one of the few houses on their block with electricity. The Handels run an extension cord to their house; other neighbors come to fill their coolers with ice or simply to sit in air-conditioning for an hour or two. Ella Regale’s father comes over to watch his favorite Spanish game show. They finally make contact with Stanley, who assures them that he, Nieves, and the market, are all fine — though his voice sounds a bit dark and compressed to Avis, and he rushes off the phone after just a few minutes, promising to call again soon.