IT’S BEEN OVER A year since they’ve last visited their son’s market. As they walk through the parking lot they take in a number of improvements. Brian admires the raised garden beds made of cedar planks that flank the sides of the lot. There are stalks of tomatoes, staked beans, baskets of green herbs — oregano, lavender, fragrant blades of lemongrass and pointed curry leaf. The planter of baby lettuces has a chalkboard hung from its side: Just add fork. A wheelbarrow parked by the door is heaped with bright coronas of sunflowers, white daisies, jagged red ginger and birds-of-paradise. Avis feels a leap of pride as they enter the market: the floor of polished bamboo, the sky-blue ceiling, the wooden shelves — like bookshelves in a library. And the smells. Warm, round billows of baking bread, roasting garlic and onions and chicken. The doorframe to Stanley’s office is an inlaid mosaic of seashells — a surprise from three volunteers who’d worked on it through the night.
Still, Avis feels naked without a bakery box, her arms empty. This is not me, she thinks. Instead they come bearing a cashier’s check: the full amount Stanley and Nieves requested. She feels diminutive and humble inside the vast green world her son has created; timid about making this late offering. At the back of the store, they hear voices through the office door, and for a moment Avis has an anxious impulse, a thought of simply turning and going home. But Brian knocks and calls, “Hey Stan?”
As they walk into the room, Avis senses something, a frequency of sound or light like an echo chased out of the walls. Before her, a young woman is leaning on Stanley’s big, messy desk, her eyes like sea glass, her hair whip-dark. So lovely she seems impossible — dreamed-up. Avis gazes at her and experiences a rush of sensation as if a river flashed through her body, before she understands who this is.
Felice is talking with someone, joking, when she looks over. Avis thinks, Stanley hadn’t warned her either.
Brian wavers beside her. “Oh. Daddy.” Her voice is nearly inaudible as she moves away from the desk and hesitates before her father. Her face has a red, streaky quality. Avis is about to warn him: Don’t touch. Because she might run away! But the dream of her seems to become permeable because he walks through it, right through the old rules, of distance and untouchability. He embraces and holds her for a long, silent time. And Avis realizes then that her daughter did know — she’d agreed to this meeting. Brian’s face is tipped to the top of her head, her small hands high on his shoulder blades. Felice seems to be trembling, fragile as a star, and Avis hears her say, as if brokenhearted, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” And seeing this seal or separation break between Felice and Brian, Avis understands that in some way the world has finally shifted.
The air feels light and insubstantial; time has pooled around their shoulders. Avis is trying to explain something or ask for something — what is it? She doesn’t know where to look or what to do with her hands or how to speak. She and Felice never used to touch at their meetings: it had seemed like a rule to Avis — the only way her daughter would consent to come near — and now she is still afraid. But there is the light sliding along strands of her daughter’s hair, the scent of lilac, and she can’t help herself, her gaze and her hands are drawn as if by magnetized forces; she brushes aside pieces of hair, cups her cheek, revealing the small, pale face breaking into tears. She takes Felice and holds her as if she’d caught her plummeting out of the air, feels the force of her daughter’s velocity in her arms and rib cage. There’s a sudden, surprising strength in her daughter’s grip — an adult fierceness. Energy runs through Avis, rippling. A rush of indecipherable breath in her ear — Felice is talking to her, trying to claim her in some way with the stream of language, talking too quickly to be understood. Avis tries to calm both of them, saying, “It’s okay, baby. I’ve got you — I’ve got you now.” Until Felice quiets, not letting go, the two of them hanging on, gently, gradually collapsing together into the mutual silence of return.
Felice
FELICE WAKES TO THE RISE AND COMPRESSION of Emerson’s chest, the slow wavelength of his sleep in the early morning. She couldn’t sleep last night, twisting, kicking at the sheets, the air like a blanket, pressing her into the thin mattress. It was so dark — so hard to get used to after years of sleeping in an urban light haze — the blackness sank onto her body, lowering from the ceiling. It made her think of the night of the hurricane: they’d spread out on the blankets and let Stanley think they were asleep. The storm was like nothing she could remember, bending the palms nearly to the ground and tearing tiles out of the neighbors’ rooftops. Feeling the walls tremble, Felice thought the apartment was about to break apart, that they would all whirl into the black hammer of the wind. Emerson talked softly to her about the strength of the building, the fastness of old structures, the solid foundations left by the old bank downstairs. Eventually he fell asleep, and then she’d lain awake for hours, alone, listening to the howling in the windows, her eyes wide open in the dark.
Last night was another long passage of staring and thinking, and an awful feeling had come to her, how all these years, she’d clung to an idea of penance, the hope that someday she would be judged — her crime and her self-imposed punishment — and somehow absolved. But now the world seemed immense and lawless and she knew there was no judgment — not the kind she was waiting for. She’d felt a sort of dread, granular and heavy, like a half-dissolved paste; it tasted sweet, like souls, she thought, and she felt she would never be free of it.
But just the intimation of morning helps Felice to feel lighter. This is the day they’ve decided they will go, because she and Emerson agreed that if they don’t go now, it will become impossible. “We’re getting attached,” Emerson said the other day in the warehouse, surrounded by crates of Valencia oranges. “It’s all right with me if you’d rather we stay.”
Felice waits in a bed a little longer, eyes burning, but can’t fall back asleep. Eventually she curls out of bed, dresses quietly, uses the bathroom. When she emerges, the door to Stanley and Nieves’s room is still closed, but she hears soft noises in the kitchen. Nieves is there, working at the counter. “Hey.” She turns and pushes the hair from her face with the back of her wrist, a butter knife in her hand. “Go back to bed, weirdo.”
“What’re you doing?” Felice leans against the counter next to her, steals a piece of yellow cheddar from the cutting board.
“I’m doing none of your business. What do you think? I’m making sandwiches for your stupid trip.”
“For real?” Felice leans in for a better view. Particles of light are just beginning to drift through the windows. She feels better. Last night Emerson held her closely against his ribs and told her to breathe with him, to be calm, calm, calm. Breathe in, wait, breathe out slowly. He told her: This might take a while. In that dark spell she felt as if she’d forgotten her own name or who she ever was. Now the light in the kitchen is clean and vital and the terror has lifted like lace from her body.
Felice has watched Nieves for two weeks and knows she can be sharp and moody, but other times so quiet she barely seems to be present, an entrancing remoteness. On the cutting board there are two peanut butter and red currant jam sandwiches for Emerson and two Serrano ham, shaved cheddar, and apricot chutney sandwiches for Felice. Nieves wraps them smartly in waxed paper, tapes them, and puts them back in the fridge. There’s also a cooler Nieves opens: packed with trail mix, sliced pears and apples, and the lemon bars. Jarvis Firmin, another volunteer, is going to drive Felice and Emerson in his nursery truck as far as Pensacola. From there, a series of Stanley’s friends and former employees will drive them across country. Felice squints at the kitchen window, trying to imagine the network that will carry them. Nieves sighs as she fits the lid back on the cooler. “At least you won’t starve before Iowa City.”