Birds of Paradise Read online

  She became Avis’s first assistant—initially, more of a babysitter for the children—once they started school, she began helping Avis in the kitchen—washing dishes, crushing walnuts, chopping cherries, scraping vanilla beans, measuring and sifting flour. After she left, claiming snidely there would be less work at the Au Bon Pain, Avis went through a series of assistants. They talked to the children in Spanish; they helped Avis with the infinite tasks of running a home bakery. Some became her friends—though rarely confidantes. This was, as far as Avis could divine, the way people did it in Miami: they were friendly but reserved, confined mainly to the close orbits of relatives. While Avis’s kitchen was increasingly taken over by her bakery, the assistants brought in home-cooked dishes—picadillo, moros y cristianos, ropa vieja, pastelitos—beef crumbled or shredded, fried nearly crispy and tossed with dark spices, served with rice or bread or stuffed into flaking, downy pies that, Avis knew, had to be made with lard. They took Avis shopping, taught the kids torchy, breathless Cuban love songs like Bésame Mucho and Adoración. Avis had no extended family, no old ties to the area: they explained Miami to her, the intricacies of the Cuban community, the warring clans that owned the city, the class nuances of the Gables neighborhoods—the “Platinum Triangle,” the “bohemian North End.” Rarely did anyone work for her for more than a year or two—they left to get married or have their own children: or they tired of Avis’s imperious, Gallic approach to baking. Or Avis fired them, tired of “Cuban time,” “Miami time.” The entitled pouting and eye-rolling of formerly wealthy or spoiled women.

  ON THE CORNER OF ALTON and Lincoln Roads, Avis feels wobbly, as if the ground is stirring very slightly beneath her feet. “You okay?” Nina calls through the passenger window.

  Avis is barely aware of having moved from the car. She turns to Nina and lifts her lips into a smile, then turns back. As she starts down Lincoln Road, she tries not to hold the bakery box too high. The pedestrian mall is fluted with trees, a late-summer flush over the simple, old Art Deco buildings. A ruffle of awnings and brick red table umbrellas, planters spilling over with arthurium, ginger, hibiscus, blooms in decadent colors, vermillion, magenta, sapphire. Grand date palms line the center of the walkway, their emerald fronds like starbursts and water fountains. Orchids and bromeliads tumble from crates hanging over store displays or secreted in the branches of trees. Avis hunches her shoulders and lowers her head—she doesn’t have the reserves to take in this exuberance. The stores and shoppers appear blurry, then break into clarity as she gets closer, as if moving along the sides of a fishbowl. There are shopkeepers rinsing their storefronts with garden hoses and waiters setting out chairs; shirtless men strut along the sidewalk; elderly women in pearls and black cashmere window-shop beside young girls who each in some way remind Avis of Felice. Couples push double and triple baby strollers, some of the mothers are also extravagantly pregnant. Avis believes that these women deliberately avert their eyes.

  Four—almost five—years of erratic visits—perhaps twelve visits in all. No, Avis corrects herself; she has not lost track after all. There have been eight visits to date, no more no less. She has seen her daughter exactly eight times since she turned thirteen.

  By the door of a restaurant, a girl with long beige hair steps forward, pushing a menu at Avis. “We’re offering out-of-towner specials,” she chimes, then seems to detect something on Avis’s face and directs herself to the next pedestrian.

  At last, Avis reaches the outdoor café table where she will await Felice. It takes all of her effort to stay clear-headed and calm. She notes that the usual waiter is there, an olive-skinned man with drowsy eyes, who once exclaimed, “She is here at last!” when Felice arrived an hour late. Avis sits at a table, feeling fluish, gripping the tin of precious cookies. Will Felice eat these? Avis charges such exorbitant prices for her little pastries that her son told her it was “shameful.” But she doesn’t take the shortcuts of professional bakeries—nothing is rushed, each batch is constructed of pure ingredients, no factory lard or chemical fillers or cheap flour. She thinks of herself as an artisan, each of her pastries as delicately constructed as a piece of stained glass. And she has discovered that the more she charges, the more the customers want.

  She orders an iced tea and tells the waiter she needs more time with the menu. He returns with a basket of rolls, a tin of purple jam, a round, peach-colored plumeria blossom among the rolls. Avis sits back, scanning each face in the stream of shoppers. She tries to avoid her watch but catches a glimpse, involuntarily, when she lifts her water glass: 12:08. She lays one hand on top of the other on the tin and tries to steady them.

  Felice is often late.

  She sips her sweating iced tea and watches the passersby: everyone is so young. So many girls, their small chins tilted toward the light like sunflowers. A child walks by, perhaps six or seven years old, her narrow back sprightly, her hair tucked into a black velvet headband; she is holding her mother’s hand.

  The waiter wafts through her line of vision—a gigalo-ish face, outlandishly seductive eyes. She looks down.

  12:13. She is angry with herself for peeking—not meaning to—doing it habitually—she twists the watch face around on her wrist so it taps against the café table. Felice isn’t usually more than a half hour late. But there was that one time. An hour. Anything is possible.

  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 someti
mes 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.

  “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.