Felice could see the shapes of old shadows moving over Hannah’s eyes. Odd references came up all the time. A truck overturned a block away from the school and a brackish chemical exhaust hung in the air: Hannah said, “That smells exactly like a sulfur bomb.” Another time, when a jet clapped a sonic boom over the school, Hannah collapsed into a hunch on the floor, her face stark with shock. She recovered, brushing aside the teacher’s concern, but later went home without speaking to Felice.
Hannah made fun of Felice’s other friends behind their backs. She mimicked Yeni’s prissy Venezuelan accent, Bella’s slack, sweetly bovine expression. They sensed her disdain, as well as the way she claimed Felice all for herself, edging out a world in which she and Felice were the only ones who mattered: Felice was flattered and pleased. This was a new kind of friend.
SEVERAL BLOCKS LATER, Emerson and Derek receding into distance, Felice starts to relax. The streets widen and hiss with traffic, the air rain-pearled. There’s a burst of squawking in the air and she looks up to see a passing flock of sapphire-colored macaws with orange bellies. Stanley said they were the prettiest animals with the ugliest voices. He’d told her how, after big hurricanes, wild birds escaped from the aviaries and zoos and from the metal cages people kept in their backyards. They returned to nature. “They’ll nip off your finger with that beak — like scissors. Snip!” he said. Felice was seven when Andrew hit, but she didn’t remember much of it beyond the fun of nightly picnics from their cooler and reading by flashlight and bathing in the swimming pool.
Felice admires the long blue tails of the birds just before they vanish into the trees. That’s the way to be, she thinks, kicking hard on her board, letting the wind stream through her hair — no plans, no fear, no expectations: never to be held in live captivity.
Avis
SHE DREAMS OF A LITTLE BOY: HIS HAIR SLOWLY rising and falling as he runs in long, slow arcs, up to kick the ball, the air filled with bright cries:
I’ve got it! I’ve got the ball!
Avis opens her eyes. For a moment, she waits, spooled in the sweetness of an after-dream. It seems to continue unfolding around her, her son still eight years old.
Consciousness emerges then, and Avis realizes she can still hear the cries, the child’s voice. Gradually she notices the hard repeating beat. The mynah. She lingers in bed with her eyes closed, marveling at the mimicry — the miracle of it — a bird, capturing the parabola of laughter so exactly. Who is the little boy, Avis wonders, this parrot listened to?
Glancing at the clock, she realizes, with a deep dismay, that it’s 6:30: she’s overslept by two hours: too late to fulfill the standing order for palmiers at the Anacapri and La Granada restaurants — she’ll probably lose their business. Usually she wakes on her own with no problem. She hears Brian’s familiar pace between bathroom and bedroom. Why didn’t he wake her? He hums and mutters, runs a brush through his hair. Because she’d been stood up, she thinks grimly. He felt sorry for her. Avis rises, ties back her hair; ignores the strands that slide free in her fingers, ignores its lighter mass. She brews strong black tea with cream and honey and goes to her desk in what she still thinks of as Stanley’s room, to email the restaurants. She struggles to construct an apology as the mynah shrieks through the window.
Newly showered, Brian smiles at Avis as he moves past the door. She still enjoys the sight of her husband undressed, his slightly bowlegged stance, the softening pouch of his middle, his penis, its innocent, leftward slump. Once Stanley was out of the house, she sometimes lured Brian back to bed in the morning, enjoying the coolness of his washed skin against her kitchen warmth. But she hasn’t been much interested in a while. She sighs, then twists around at the desk chair. “Do you hear that?”
Brian ruffles the back of his hair with a towel. “You mean the damn bird?”
“It always sounds a little different each time.”
He combs his hair before the full-length mirror, presenting his back and tidy buttocks. “Not to me it doesn’t.”
She rarely sees Brian in the morning — she’s usually in the middle of rushing out orders of fresh baguettes and scones. Avis abandons the desk and prepares Brian a plate of croissants, salted butter, a bowl of blackberry preserves she gets in trade from a local jams and jellies lady. Then she sits at the table with him, one hand knotting closed the placket of her chef’s jacket, the other hand running the length of Lamb’s slinking back.
“Parkhurst. Ugh. Wants to wrap up the contract on the Design District deal,” he mumbles, studying his BlackBerry. “He’s obsessed with that deal.”
“Design District’s supposed to be the hot place,” she says, watching him stare at the tiny screen. “I have a restaurant client there — their lines are out the door.”
“Except it’s not the Design District — not even close. I keep telling them.” He looks up at her. “I’m sorry — you were saying something — what were you saying?”
Avis considers the view through the French doors: in that pause, she feels herself telescoping backwards, out of their life. She watches him touch the rim of his plate with the edge of his knife, observes the striations of his knuckles, the ropy veins in the backs of his hands. She estimates that it’s been nearly six months since they last made love. The longest they’ve ever gone. Perhaps it has something to do with her mother’s passing last year. She wonders — the thought softly bursting in on her — if he’s in love with someone else.
He pauses before getting up. “That bird,” he says darkly. She becomes once again conscious of the parrot’s cry, now the quavering singsong of a madwoman. “This is ridiculous,” he says. “How’s anybody supposed to get any work done?”
“Most people around here commute to work.”
“You don’t.” He takes his plate to the kitchen sink. She hears him rummaging around. “I swear I’m going to call code enforcement.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Her hand slips to the base of her throat.
Brian stands in the doorway holding a banana. “But you’ve been struggling.” He stops short, the catch in his statement like a little gap between them, encompassing her stumblings and mistakes over the past year: miscalculating ingredient amounts for breads she’s made hundreds of times; forgetting orders, singeing entire sheets of the most delicate, time-consuming pastries: she’s mournfully discarded entire batches. Long sheaths of nothingness open in Avis’s days, inertia: she reports to the kitchen, picks up a spoon, then, quickly, it’s the end of the day and she’s done nothing. Sometimes the days dissolve between her fingers. They haven’t spoken of these things openly.
Avis named her business Paradise Pastry because she imagined cathedrals. She thought about the stonemasons, glassblowers, sculptors — who gave lifetimes to the creation of beauty. Every sugar crust she rolled, every simple tarte Tatin was a bit of a church. She consecrated herself to it: later, it became her tribute to her daughter and the unknown into which she’d disappeared. She had her cathedral to enter, to console her. Her friend Jean-Françoise, chef at Le Petit Choux, said that her pastries would be transcendent, if only she weren’t American.
BRIAN FLIPS OPEN his briefcase on the dining room table and places a waxed bag next to the sheaf of folders and his BlackBerry. “You remember the thing Barry told us…” One of the post-Felice family counselors — an earnest man with a habit of stroking his ponytail throughout the sessions.
“He told us a lot of things.”