Avis swallows. She wants to say, I know, I know, I know this, I do. But she doesn’t speak, sensing the size of what Solange is talking about: an enormity, bigger than anything she has known. Too big to look at directly.
Solange shifts her leg so the mynah steps up onto her knee, its scaly talons carefully opening and curling around her leg. It hunkers like a child in her lap and she strokes its head for a while, humming, its neck feathers ruffling up between each stroke. “A grandbaby,” she says at last, “is a stroke of luck.”
Avis blinks and shades her eyes with her hand. She lowers her chin onto the palm of her hand, studying Solange. “Yes, thank you,” she murmurs.
Solange lowers her shining lids and runs one finger down the back of the bird’s head. Avis eyes her, afraid that she thinks Avis doesn’t deserve a grandchild, as if believing a thing might be enough to keep a grandchild away.
For the rest of the afternoon, Avis digs rows of shallow furrows in which Solange drops tiny seeds. They cultivate a garden plot at the far western edge of Solange’s yard — a spot which probably cuts into the Martinezes’ property line next door. Solange amended the soil with her own compost, raised beds sparkling with minerals. From time to time a ghostly ringing from Avis’s house reaches them in whiffs through the trees.
“That’s Miami, calling for its sugar,” Avis says.
Solange’s face is traced with dark trails of sweat. She pats mounds of earth carefully over each seed. “You don’t care? You can afford to laugh at your patrons?”
Avis drags her fingers into the black soil, reviving a scent memory, distant scrap of childhood — the pleasure of digging in dirt. Does she disdain the people she bakes for?
Solange pats some of the raked bands of soil. “You might just poison someone that way. If you don’t care very much.”
She gives a thin smile. “Have you ever done that? Sort of lost your place in things?” She knows she should be worried: there’s a tower of pans growing in her sink, all sorts of tiny unfinished chores: separate eggs for a soufflé; place orders for nutmeg and coconut — tasks Nina had performed, efficiently and automatically. Avis rakes open another seam in the dirt and gestures for a seed, not ready to face her kitchen.
Solange raises her eyebrows without looking at her. “No, I don’t forget where my place is. I bide my time.”
Avis shakes her head. “I forgot what this was like.”
“Myra — the lady my mother worked for — she had no children of her own, so she tried to win me all the time.” Solange cast a sidelong glance at Avis. “She would give me bonbons and treats and dresses. She never wanted me to go outside. I was the only child there and it was a lonely place. The house was built on tall rocks above the water. Miles away from town. Sometimes it was so quiet we heard cars and voices — sometimes shooting. Once I thought I heard a man screaming. Mostly there was the sound of the waves, water the color of blue beads. I learned about France all the time, in the books the lady gave me to study. I read Dumas, Hugo. Later, Proust. The only thing I knew about my own home was what my mother taught me when we were outdoors together. Myra did everything she could think of to keep us apart. She told me terrible things about my mother. She said my mother had tried to smother me in my sleep, after I was born, but that Myra had saved me.”
Avis fingers the short, curling hairs at the nape of her neck, reflectively. “Do you think it’s true?”
Solange’s eyes seem to harden, as if she’d forgotten she was speaking out loud. She pauses and there is the wind’s liquid swish through the palm spears, the dark interstices between the fronds. A big sea-green anole watches them, frozen on the Martinezes’ loquat. For a moment, Avis has the oddest feeling, more tangible and familiar even than déjà vu, that all of this — the leaves and Solange and the lizard and the wind — has happened before, in just this way. The sunlight is brassy and lower now, cutting across their faces, and Avis scratches at her wrists: the mosquitoes will be worse soon.
“You know what I think?” Solange asks coolly. Avis sees again that slim crescent of teeth, her dark purple underlip. “I think my story is not something to wrap up with a bow and hand over. Not to you and not to anyone.”
THAT EVENING, WHEN AVIS goes back inside, it feels like a deliberate act, a small attempt at return. She moves through the house, switching on the lights and closing the shutters against the evening. Lamb follows her, twining between her ankles. She opens the front door and Lamb comes out on the front step with her: the neighborhood is falling into a velvet green darkness, the advance of the tropical night. A few people — high school students and domestics — are still out, strolling home, most of the commuter cars tucked in their driveways. It’s been a long time since she’s last stood on her front step, watching the neighbors come in.
Avis goes in to take a shower. While she’s toweling dry, she hears Brian’s key. He’s home early for the first time in ages and this, she realizes, makes her happy.
Avis pulls on her thin cotton bathrobe and pads out to the living room, barefooted. At first he doesn’t realize she’s there, and she has a moment to observe his unguarded expression as he sorts through the mail. The lines in his face, the pensive eyes — and now he wears glasses — are all stimulating to her. How easy it is — when one lies beside another person for years — to forget to look at them. In the beginning, she’d thought she’d never stop looking.
Brian glances up; his eyes light on his wife, and there is a moment of hesitation. Then he gives way to a full, helpless smile, and says, “Can you believe it?” Just as if this were an ongoing conversation. And she says, “I know.”
Brian moves closer, takes her hand, then closes his arms around Avis. She inhales his plain scent, then places her hand at the center of his chest and presses the side of her face against his body. She thinks about the story that Solange almost told her and feels grateful now that Solange had held back from it. Avis wants the world to be clear.
Felice
WHAT COULD SHE HAVE BEEN THINKING, LISTENING to that fool? How had she become so easy to dupe? Oregon. She shifts her weight forward on her board and feels the salt air on her face and eyes. She is happy — delighted even — to be free of Emerson and his dumb plans. This is the special world, right here. Emerson. His parents gave him that bizarre name to try to make themselves seem clever and speciaclass="underline" which is always the sign of the dumbest, most un-special people. She pictures him, the clayey whiteness of his skin, the pink of his scalp showing through his stupid Nazi haircut. Who’s he kidding, anyway? That strongman stuff? How lame and sad. Like that proves anything.
Felice rolls down to Lincoln Road, then hops off, flips the board up and carries it as she walks along the mall. She doesn’t need to be cautious anymore. The police haven’t eyed her very closely in a year or two, and several times now she’s spotted kids from school — at bars, stores, and the beach — whose eyes glazed over hers without a glimmer of recognition. She turns right onto Washington to Seventeenth Street, past a cloud of Japanese girls with auburn hair and fuzzy animal backpacks, and strolls into the tattoo shop. Recently Duffy’s has been her main source of income. She’ll put her feet up in one of their dentist chairs by the chrome sinks while Kaiyo and Frederick airbrush ornate, brightly colored designs on her back, arms, shoulders, and legs. They pay her two hundred bucks to sit out in front of their store in a halter top and shorts, sipping Frappuccinos and flipping through magazines. German backpackers, Brazilian and Gulfie rich kids all get snagged on her look. She sees them out of the corner of her eyes, blond college kids daring each other to go talk to her — as if she were someone famous. Some go to Duffy’s for the stupid spring-break airbrush that will start to streak off as soon they wade into the surf; most of them get permanent ink. They come out and show her the new illustrations on their skin — tramp-stamps with stock designs — butterflies or boys’ names. Sometimes Felice feels kind of bad about it.