The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender

by Leslye Walton

  When we reached the age at which most children typically begin to read, Viviane spent her nights secretly begging the sky to give Henry some form of language, some way to let her know she was doing a good job, some way to make it better. She read to him before bed and obsessed over the attentive way Henry listened to the story. She hired a specialist to come to the house and work with Henry. Still, Henry gave no sign that he knew his numbers or his letters, the word hi from no, or that he knew what the specialist meant when he held up a flash card and said, “This is a house. Can you point to the picture of the house? Henry?”

  Everyone eventually gave up hoping. Our grandmother spoke to Henry less intentionally, using the partial-French, partial-English babble she used when she spoke to herself. Our mother continued to read to us every night, usually from books that Gabe brought home from the library — books about carpentry or the wingspan of the southern brown kiwi and other flightless birds. And Henry was still bathed, of course, but in the water that flowed from the bathroom faucet and with charcoal soap to counter his fresh-rain smell. Viviane just came to accept that Henry was different from the rest. As was I.

  Our mother decided that the best place for her strange children was within the confines of our house and the hill. My young childhood was spent among the familiar faces of my family: my mother, warm and smiling, a twinge of sadness hidden in the corner of her mouth; my grandmother, stern but beautiful, the grief of her past worn in lines around her eyes. There was Wilhelmina Dovewolf. Gabe, the gentle giant. And Henry, my mute, wingless half.

  Some twins have their own language, their own “twin speak.” There are reports of twins sharing the same dreams, of one feeling sympathetic pain when the other is injured. There was even a case of twins who died at the very same time, right down to the minute. I never experienced such a connection with Henry. My twin always lived in his own world — one that even I, in my holy, mutated form, was unable to visit. It felt as though Henry had been born my twin only to remind me of my own constant state of isolation. By the time we learned just how strong the connection between Henry and myself really was, it was almost too late.

  There it was again. Fate. As a child, that word was often my only companion. It whispered to me from dark corners during lonely nights. It was the song of the birds in spring and the call of the wind through bare branches on a cold winter afternoon. Fate. Both my anguish and my solace. My escort and my cage.

  Before I turned five, the religious stopped paying homage to me in clusters at the bottom of Pinnacle Lane. Eventually very few recalled the references in the local paper to the Living Angel. But what did that mean? Was my safety worth my isolation? It made my mother wonder if I was lonely. Or bored. Which may have been the reason Gabe decided to teach me how to fly.

  Gabe spent his days off in a workshop he built behind the house, trying time and time again to build a set of wings with the same wingspan and contours as mine. He studied birds — the ones in our backyard and the ones in the books he borrowed from the elementary-school library. He measured my wings and my growth spurts, and he asked Viviane to collect my molted feathers so he could examine them more closely.

  “Do you really think she needs to fly?” Viviane asked Gabe late one night. The two sat in the parlor, Viviane in the wing-backed chair across from the harpsichord, Gabe on the divan by the window. One of our cats sat in Viviane’s lap. A fire crackled low in the cobblestone chimney, the soft light making the highlights in Viviane’s hair glow red.

  Now twenty-five, Viviane maintained her youthful appearance by keeping her hair long and applying cold cream to her cheeks with the same diligence she used to preen my feathers. She never got back into the habit of wearing shoes. Not that there was ever a reason to. My mother hadn’t left the hill on Pinnacle Lane since the day she brought us home from the hospital. When she allowed herself to consider why, she realized that she was still waiting. Waiting for Jack to come back for her.

  Viviane stole a glance at Gabe, whose own gaze was lost in the fire’s flames. It wasn’t that she didn’t think Gabe was handsome. She did. Sometimes she’d catch herself studying him — the ease in his grasp as he reached for a bowl from the cupboard or the movement of the muscles in his forearms as he sanded the arched leg of a rocking chair — and she’d imagine how his hands would feel on her skin, the strength behind them as he lifted her hips to his. But before she got too far lost in her reverie, she’d remember Jack and the world would crash to the ground once again.

  “It’s not like she’s shown any interest in it,” Viviane said. This was true; once I’d learned how to tie the ribbons she sewed into the backs of all my clothes, and figured out that sleeping was most comfortable with the tip of one wing covering my nose, and how to pop open my wings with such force I could blow a candle out across the room, I figured I’d mastered everything that came with having wings. That I might fly never even crossed my mind.

  “Maybe not yet. But when she does, I’ll be ready,” Gabe said. Gabe had decided a while ago that what Viviane’s children needed was a father. He was afraid of letting us down. If the world that Gabe knew was unprepared for a Romanian beauty with royal blood, how would it treat a child with wings? Or another who preferred to be left alone, unable to stand a hug or a kiss? The problem was, he didn’t know how to act like a father — it wasn’t as if he’d had one himself. Instead, he improvised good parenting by strapping handmade wings to his back and taking unintentional nosedives off the roof of his woodshop. Gabe had yet to decide what to do for Henry.

  “Besides,” Gabe finished, “why would she have wings if she wasn’t meant to fly?”

  My mother didn’t have an answer for that.

  I acknowledged Gabe and his attempts at flight the way a legless child might view a hopeful but misguided parent buying a house full of stairs. After a while, when Gabe offered me a morning greeting, it didn’t feel like he was greeting me but rather a giant pair of wings; no girl, just feathers.

  By 1952 Pinnacle Lane, like the rest of the world, had undergone a few changes. Two years earlier the Cooper family built a house next door to ours. The father, Zeb Cooper, was a red-haired Irishman with a thick woolly beard, a large menacing stride, and a quiet demeanor. His wife, Penelope, was a vivacious blonde quickly hired by my grandmother to help in the bakery. They had two children: a son, Rowe, who was quiet, but not quite as quiet as Henry, and a daughter, Cardigan, who had no problem declaring her age (eight) and the number of months (eleven) until her next birthday to anyone she met.

  Cardigan Cooper was my first and only friend for many years.

  We became such the day Cardigan peered over the fence at me where I was making mud pies in our yard and asked, “Are you a bird, an angel, or what?”

  I shrugged. I wasn’t sure how to answer such a question, not because I hadn’t considered it, but because I didn’t yet have the answer. I certainly wasn’t a bird, as far as I could tell. But in the same breath, I couldn’t say I was human. What did it mean to be human anyway? I knew I was different, but didn’t that make me as human as anyone, or was I something else? I didn’t know. And at only eight years old, I hadn’t the time, the energy, or the mental capacity to form a more adequate response than “I think I’m just a girl.” Which is what I said.

  “Well, you’re definitely not a bird,” Cardigan answered. “Birds don’t have noses, and they don’t have hands or ears or nothing like that neither. So I guess you are just a girl. Do you want me to come over and play with you, or what?”

  I nodded. Cardigan climbed over the fence and we shyly inspected one another.

  “Lemme see you fly then,” she demanded.

  I shook my head.

  “Why not? You ever try?”

  I had not. Which was probably how my new friend quickly convinced me to climb up the cherry tree in the yard. Because, why hadn’t I tried? I remember standing precariously on a branch, how the branch shook and arched beneath my weight. I remember looking down at Cardigan’s blond hea
d and her expectant face as she called, “Are you gonna jump?”

  I closed my eyes, hoping both to fly and to fall, and equally terrified of both options. I jumped. And quickly landed, slightly bruised and bloody, on the ground.

  Cardigan peered down at me. “Huh. Well, you definitely can’t fly. I guess you really are just a girl.”

  I winced at the blood pooling on my scraped knee. “How d’ya know I’m not an angel?” I asked.

  “Oh. That’s easy, silly.” Cardigan lightly touched one of my brown feathers. “Angels have white wings.”

  I considered my wings the way some might consider a clubfoot — a defect that had no apparent usefulness and made it impossible to walk down the street without being followed by small children’s stares. Which was why I rarely fought my mother’s decision to keep us cloistered in the house at the end of Pinnacle Lane. It was safer for us there. Dangers lurk around every corner for the strange. And with my feathered appendages, Henry’s mute tongue, and my mother’s broken heart, what else were we but strange? Sheltered beneath the shroud of my grandmother’s reputation, my mother, my brother, and I remained on the hill, none of us eager to fling open the door and escape. Two of us didn’t even try.

  But I did.

  The neighborhood kids often gathered after dinner to play a round of sardines, or some other wild game that left them all breathless — even me, my little face in the window, watching them play from the high vantage point of the hill at the end of Pinnacle Lane. There was Cardigan, of course, and her older brother, Rowe, and Jeremiah Flannery, son of Mart Flannery, who wasn’t particularly nice but lived on Pinnacle Lane and so had all that was required of a playmate: availability.

  It was while playing one such game that Cardigan came across an injured bird. It was sprawled on the ground along the stretch of yard that divided our house from that of our neighbor Marigold Pie. The bird was a starling. Its wings were fluttering and its head was red, most likely with blood, but how could she be sure? Did birds bleed red, like people did?

  Jeremiah Flannery came up beside Cardigan. He looked down at the bird and raised his boot. We all heard the sickening snap of the bird’s wing when he stomped. And we all heard Jeremiah groan from the swift blow of Cardigan’s knee to his groin, a sharp leg punch that left young Jeremiah’s left testicle deformed. Jerry — as he was later called — would subsequently ascribe his inability to impregnate his wife to this incident.

  Hours later, after the other children returned home for dinner and their nightly baths, I snuck out my window and climbed down the old cherry tree that was planted too close to the house. With a shovel I took from the garden, I put the screeching bird out of its final misery and then dragged myself back up the hill, sobbing. It would not be the last time I would relate to flightless birds.

  John Griffith shared his estranged wife’s dreams for the rest of his life — nightly reveries of polar bears on black sand beaches, spiny pieces of exotic fruit, and tiny porcelain teacups. He feared sleep, dreaded nightfall like a child afraid of what might be lurking in the shadows. Sleep aids — those little white pills hidden in the medicine cabinets of so many good 1950s housewives — did nothing but make the polar bears move in slow motion.

  This insomnia took a toll on the seemingly indestructible John Griffith. First he put on weight — a few pounds that made his belt a little harder to fasten. Then, just as suddenly, he lost that weight plus twenty pounds more. His complexion grew sallow. He awoke one morning to find all the hair on his head in a mound on his pillow. His sight and his hearing deteriorated. He couldn’t concentrate on things the way he used to. Words seemed to melt from his lips in the middle of a conversation.

  The tiny house behind the bakery fell to shambles, as did John Griffith, who now spent all his days dressed in an old bathrobe and a pair of fluffy house shoes, no doubt once owned by his wife.

  Then, one unusually sunny February morning — just a couple of weeks before Henry and I celebrated our tenth birthday — John Griffith made his way into the bakery.

  My grandmother was busy writing the day’s special — mille-feuille — on the blackboard behind the counter, and Penelope was putting the final touches on a box of chocolate éclairs for one of the Moss sisters. At the sound of the bells on the door, Penelope glanced up, ready to holler a cheerful Be with you in a moment! But when she saw John Griffith clutching the shabby bathrobe to his chest, the women’s slippers on his feet, she could only tap Emilienne on the shoulder.

  It took a minute for Emilienne to recognize the once-formidable John Griffith. When she did, she could only widen her eyes in alarm as he shuffled into the shop, pressed his nose to the countertop, and blew foggy halos against the glass. As he leaned back to admire his work, he looked up and saw Emilienne Lavender staring back at him.

  “All I’ve ever wanted,” he whispered.

  Emilienne brought her hand to her throat. She glanced at Penelope and then back at the man standing before her.

  “I’m sorry,” she choked. “What was that?”

  “All I’ve ever wanted in my whole damned waste of a life,” he said, banging his fists against the countertop in front of him. Nervously, the Moss sister began eating one of her éclairs.

  John pointed a shaking finger at Emilienne. “Is you,” he said simply, then left.

  For once my grandmother had nothing to say.

  It was Penelope who muttered, “That poor man needs help.” The Moss sister nodded in agreement.

  It took a few weeks after the bakery incident for help to appear at John Griffith’s door. That help brought with him a framed diploma from Whitman College; a slight twitch he’d developed in his right eye; his wife, Laura Lovelorn; and his wife’s money — ready to prove just how useful he could be.

  Some commented on how strange it was to see him, this grown version of Jack Griffith, taking over his father’s affairs, turning the now run-down house into one far more impressive than it had ever been. The neighborhood watched, transfixed, as the kitchen was stocked with state-of-the-art appliances: a chrome toaster and coffee maker, a dishwasher, and a set of newly purchased Tupperware. There was a Formica dining set with vinyl and chrome chairs and a sunshine-yellow GE refrigerator. The living room had a Dunbar sofa and bamboo chairs, a sunburst clock, and a painting believed to be an original Jackson Pollock. The walls of the house were painted in popular shades of bubblegum pink, lime green, and pale blue; the rooms decorated with ceramic nodding dogs, pineapple ice buckets, and an ashtray in the shape of a pair of pink poodles. Jack had a sunken recreation room added to the back of the house, complete with wood paneling and wall-to-wall carpeting. A kidney-shaped swimming pool was dug into the backyard, overlooked by an angry-looking Tahitian statue; a thatched-roof bar was fully stocked with dark rum and brandy for mai tais and mojitos. There was a new washing machine and dryer, and a housemaid to use them. And in the attached garage was parked a brand-new Cadillac Eldorado, the largest on the market with its extravagant tailfins, twin bullet-tail lamps, and wide whitewall tires.

  That isn’t to say that Jack and his wife used her inheritance solely for selfish purposes. Far from it. After all, Laura Lovelorn was a good woman, and men are always influenced by good women. So, after the renovations on the house were paid for, Jack paid for several expensive electroshock therapies for his father. Jack then made several large donations to local charities. He and his wife threw extravagant parties at least three times a year for their neighbors and influential members of the community. And when Jack had his unstable father committed to the very psychiatric hospital they believed took in Fatima Inês, it was quite clear that Jack Griffith had finally slipped out from behind his father’s shadow. It was Jack, not John, who now stood centered in the light of the frosted-pink glass ceiling lamp hanging in the center of the house’s entryway.

  When it was understood that Jack Griffith was back to stay, many of his neighbors began to wonder when he would make his way over to Pinnacle Lane. But after a while, they
stopped wondering. And my mother, who still hadn’t left the house since our birth, had no idea that Jack had returned — after all, who would possibly tell her? Emilienne certainly wasn’t going to. Emilienne started smoking cigars, perhaps hoping the heavy smell of tobacco could mask Jack’s distinctive scent of soap and Turtle Wax — just in case it should find its way to Viviane’s sensitive nose. And Gabe? Gabe was too busy suppressing the urge to walk up that impressive driveway and punch Jack in the face to even think about mentioning Jack’s return to Viviane.

  I, of course, had no idea of the personal implications of Jack Griffith’s arrival, about whom I’d heard from Cardigan. But there was definitely a change in the air — and it wasn’t caused by my grandmother’s cigar smoke.

  Cardigan and I often played the “Is that the rat fink?” game, where we rattled off the names of different men in the neighborhood we thought disreputable enough to leave my mother with two children to raise on her own. Our favorite was Amos Fields, who was actually my grandmother’s age and a broken man since his son Dinky’s death in the war.

  “Maybe your mother was trying to comfort him,” Cardigan offered.

  I nodded. Maybe.

  Secretly, I had always assumed Gabe was our father. After all, Gabe had been living in our house since before we were born, even after he’d made a good name for himself as a carpenter and could afford much more than a single room with a shared bathroom down the hall.

  Why else would he have stayed so long?

  HENRY WAS FREED from our mother’s protective rule on the hill just a few months after we turned thirteen. Thirteen years. I often wondered if my mother truly had our best interests or hers at heart when she imposed this way of life on us. Nonetheless, it was Gabe, our gentle giant, who convinced her to finally let Henry off the hill.