The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender (21 page)

I scowled and tried, unsuccessfully, to ignore all the furtive whispers.

“F-forget them,” Rowe said. “What they th-think isn’t important.”

“Maybe not to you,” I muttered.

He held my gaze for a moment. I blushed a deep pink remembering the feel of his wool coat against my cheek on that first night at the reservoir. And for a brief moment, I compared how I was feeling to how I felt when I thought about Nathaniel Sorrows. I thought of the life I’d created for us in my head: the cocktail parties, the dog named Noodle. But it was an illusion, a prefabricated dream, while Rowe was real. I could touch him. And he could touch me. A shiver rolled up my spine when I thought of how much I would like the warmth of my palm pressed against Rowe’s, our fingers intertwined. Was this the difference between infatuation and . . . ?

“What do you mean?” Rowe asked.

“People don’t look at you like you’re —”

“A monster?” Rowe suggested.

“Yeah.”

“See my sister?” Rowe motioned to Cardigan, who stood laughing with a group of people. “The moment she o-opens her mouth, everyone im-m-mediately loves her. The m-moment I open mine, everyone immediately p-p-pities me.”

I winced. “I’m sorry.”

Rowe shrugged. “The point is, if I cared what everyone else th-thought, I’d see myself as p-pitiful, but I don’t.” He smiled. “I think I’m pretty cool.”

I laughed.

“I just don’t think you should let other people d-define you,” Rowe said quickly. “I think you could be anything you wanted.”

There were very few people who made me feel as if they saw me as
me
, and not as some winged aberration. My mother was one of them. Henry was another (not that being regarded as “normal” by Henry was anything to brag about). Rowe, I was coming to realize, was another.

“Thanks,” I said softly.

We walked slowly around the edge of the reservoir. I balanced on the ledge, occasionally dipping a foot into the water as I walked. I could feel Rowe’s eyes on me. I turned to him and made a face. “What?” I asked.

Rowe shrugged. “You. Just — you.”

When I passed Widow Pie’s house that night, I forgot to imagine Nathaniel waiting for me behind the rhododendron bushes. I tried saying his name aloud to myself and was surprised by how foreign it felt on my tongue. And with that, the love I thought I had for Marigold Pie’s nephew ran off me like water from melting ice. Like so many others, Nathaniel Sorrows was interested only in my wings.
Unlike Rowe
, I considered thoughtfully.

I reached over and closed my curtains with a determined snap and went to bed.

That night I dreamed I could fly.

Every once in a while, Emilienne allowed herself to contemplate what she might have done with her life if she’d never married and had instead grown old in Beauregard’s Manhatine apartment; if she hadn’t fallen in love with the way prospective suitors praised the half-moons of her fingernails; if she had instead allowed them to climb the rickety rungs of the fire escape to her floor whereupon she would pluck their fingers from the bars, then howl with laughter as they fell.

She reached up and touched the belled lip of her old cloche hat — the one painted with red poppies — and the house on Pinnacle Lane fell away, replaced by the crumbling plaster walls of that derelict apartment: the kitchen sink, with its cracked porcelain and lines of rust circling the drain; the old-fashioned icebox, with its metal hinges and the square block of ice that made them feel rich even when the cupboards were bare; the bureau with the drawer where Pierette slept and the corners where her feathers gathered; the sofa René balanced on his forearms.

And though she still wouldn’t converse with her ghostly siblings, Emilienne could, in a fashion, communicate with them as they might have been.

She started with an inquiry after Margaux’s child. When Margaux showed off her infant, Emilienne at first smiled, then turned away when she saw his eyes — one green, the other blue. Margaux held her son protectively against the hole where her heart used to be. She was exceedingly proud of her offspring; he was the greatest thing she’d accomplished in her life. And in her death.

Where was Maman? Beauregard? They didn’t know. There was only ever the three of them and the baby — and sometimes a young black-eyed girl. What was death like? she wondered. They did not seem able to answer, nor could they tell her why, in the afterlife, they would continue to carry the evidence of their sins in such a gruesome way.

“Maybe you are in purgatory,” Emilienne offered.

René shrugged. Maybe.

Sometimes Margaux would motion to the harpsichord in the corner of the parlor, a request for Emilienne to play. That’s when the walls of the Manhatine apartment would melt away — along with the warbling voices of her siblings — and the walls of the house at the end of Pinnacle Lane would spring back up around her, the harpsichord unused, yellowing in the corner.

From the personal diary of Nathaniel Sorrows:

THREE WEEKS INTO JUNE
, the meteorologists brought out their fancy rain gauges and showed the public what we already knew — it still hadn’t rained. The rich Seattle soil dried up in the garden beds, and the winds blew great gusts of it into the eyes of those along Pinnacle Lane. Even the rose gardens down in Portland were suffering. It had been three months since any fresh flowers had graced the altar at the Lutheran church. There would be no flowers for the women to wear in their hair at the summer solstice celebration, which made them weep. Well, either that or the wind had blown specks of dirt in their eyes.

Ever since the night of Gabe’s attempted flight with bat-inspired wings — an attempt that ended up being his last — the farther away from the house at the end of Pinnacle Lane Gabe was, the better it seemed he felt. Before then he’d been disinclined to accept jobs that took him away from the neighborhood. Now he was spending as much of his time outside of it as he could: Mercer Island, Silverdale, Belltown. He left the house before dawn and returned after dark, seeing Henry, my mother, and me only when he peeked in on us as we slept. Henry slept on his back, his fingers clasped around the satiny edge of the quilt and Trouver curled in a large furry ball at the foot of the bed. I always slept with the tip of one wing covering my nose. On the nights when Viviane did sleep, she did so curled on her side, her arms wrapped protectively around her chest, as though holding her heart in place.

Watching Viviane sleep, Gabe’s heart leaped the way it did when he saw her hanging the sheets in the yard or walking down the stairs. But then he’d remind himself how foolish it was to love someone who didn’t love you back. He’d go to his room, climb into bed, and count the black spots against his closed eyelids until he fell into a fitful sleep, waking hourly to stop himself from dreaming of Viviane Lavender’s hair.

Falling out of love was much harder than Gabe would have liked. Normally led through life by the heart attached to his sleeve, finding logic in love proved to be a bit like getting vaccinated for some dread disease: a good idea in the end, but the initial pain certainly wasn’t any fun. He came to appreciate that there were worse ways to live than to live without love. For instance, if he didn’t have arms, Gabe wouldn’t be able to hide in his work. Yes, a life without arms would be quite tragic, indeed.

In Gabe’s view, the whole world had given up on love anyway and clung instead to its malformed cousins: lust, narcissism, self-interest. Only his own stupid heart sent up flares when he thought of any woman besides Viviane Lavender.

When June came around, he forced himself to ask out a waitress from Bremen, Maine, who lived alone in a Craftsman bungalow behind the elementary school. On Friday nights he and the waitress sat around the fire, sharing platters of Ritz crackers with lobster Newburg spread, bacon wraparounds, and hot cheese puffs. Gabe watched her knees — bare because of her fashionably short skirt — turn red from the heat of the flames.

Eventually, Gabe was sure his heart would get used to the idea and allow him to finally touch her. After all, that was what people generally did when they couldn’t be with the one they loved.

Wasn’t it?

Henry had continued making maps of the neighborhood. He drew them on the backs of old letters, in the front pages of books, in the dirt using a stick or the sharp edge of a trowel. Much like his muteness and then his nonsensical speech, Henry’s compulsive mapmaking was considered another idiosyncrasy not meant to be understood. We never considered there might be a reason or a purpose for the maps. No matter — Henry knew what they were for. And that was enough, for a while anyway.

Until Trouver arrived, we thought that Henry couldn’t talk. Turned out, he could; he just didn’t like to. He made himself a rule to say only things that were important. No one — not even his own family — knew about this rule. No one needed to.

On the morning of midsummer’s eve, Henry awoke and stretched his toes toward the spot on the bed where Trouver was still curled in sleep. Henry liked the feel of the fur on his feet and wiggled them in pleasure until the dog sighed and moved to the floor. Trouver’s fur was one of the few things Henry liked to touch. He liked the feel of my feathers and the soft worn edge of the quilt on his bed. He liked the warm hood of the truck, the engine going
tick-tick-tick
long after Gabe drove back from town. He liked that too, the engine going
tick-tick-tick.
He liked that some tree trunks were rough, like the cherry tree in our yard, that others were smooth, and that some were in-between, like the birch trees in front of our grandmother’s bakery. There might have been more things he would like to touch, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t touch many things.

Henry got out of bed and pulled on his red-and-blue-striped T-shirt — the stripes faded from so many washes — over his head. Trouver stretched and licked himself in
inappropriate
places. Henry didn’t like that word. When Henry heard a word he didn’t like, he had to lie facedown on the floor until the bad feeling stopped. Humming sometimes worked too.

Henry and Trouver shared a piece of toast with orange marmalade for breakfast. If that day were any other day, he might have gone out in the yard to count bugs afterward. He no longer needed to catch them to feed the bat, but Henry liked counting things and he still liked knowing how many there were out there. He liked knowing that there were sixteen stairs to his bedroom and eight bowls in the kitchen cupboards above the sink. He liked clapping his hands five times in a row, even nine times if he needed to, and knew that if he clapped his hands ten times, our mother would ask him to stop in her loud mother voice. If that day were any other day, Henry might have gone back upstairs to his room to find the notebook in which he wrote his favorite words, struggling to keep each letter between the blue lines. But that day wasn’t any other day.

Henry did go back upstairs to his room, but instead of getting his notebook, he emptied his toy chest. He lined up all his stuffed animals along the wall in order of size, and then placed his building blocks and toy cars on the cracks of the floorboards.