The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender

by Leslye Walton

  Marigold, it seemed, did not intend to stop eating. By the end of April, she could no longer cross her legs or tie her shoes. Her eyes, nose, and mouth became tiny pinpricks in a mound of billowing flesh, and the tops of her arms resembled thick, red sausages. Sundays no longer found Marigold at church, perched in her usual pew with her white gloves and red leather Bible. She was quite content to spend her days in bed, balancing piles of macarons across her pillow, plucking them one by one from the stack, and plopping them into her insatiable mouth. Marigold’s neighbors became concerned.

  The day Marigold’s sister, Iris Sorrows, came to find what had prompted the neighbors to raise the alarm, she took one look at this bloated version of her sister and stifled a short scream. Then she called her son and insisted he come stay with his aunt for a while.

  “Don’t worry, dear,” she said, patting Marigold’s puffy hand. “Nathaniel can surely fix this.” Then she went to make a pot of tea, for no other reason than to keep from staring at Marigold.

  Iris was quite confident that if anyone could do something about her sister, it was her son, a very pious young man. As a boy, Nathaniel’s simple “hello” prompted neighbors to blurt out long-hidden sins or to donate new clothing to the local homeless shelter. Just the sight of him crossing the street with his mother led adulterous men to become celibate and avid hunters to develop appetites satisfied only by vegetarian recipes.

  Iris Sorrows and her son lived in the broken part of Seattle, far from the magnificent Catholic church in Pioneer Square. So Iris would pack sandwiches every Sunday morning and set out with her young son for the long trek to Saint James Cathedral. When they arrived, they sat on the steps outside and ate the sandwiches before venturing in for noonday Mass. Iris wasn’t Catholic, nor could she understand the Latin recited throughout the service. She claimed she took comfort in the ambience of the holy place.

  This was a lie.

  Iris visited the Catholic cathedral not to light a candle for a beloved or to kneel in prayer, but to stand at the foot of the Holy Mother in a corner of the church. Iris associated deeply with the tragic beauty of the statue: the weeping eyes, the open palms, the blue folds of Mary’s skirts. She searched the eyes of Mary, the Mother of God, for a recognition of the self she saw reflected in the mirror every day and ultimately convinced herself that her child, too, had been conceived by the seed of the Holy Spirit, and not by an evening of sinful and confusing passion with an older married friend of her parents.

  Iris had Nathaniel baptized when he was five. At the time, Nathaniel mistook the baptism water for his mother’s tears. As Nathaniel grew, so did Iris’s belief that her son had been cut from the same cloth as Saint Anthony of Padua. So she made sure he received the finest Catholic education, and she kept a journal of the little miracles that occurred in his presence — for the eventuality of his nomination to sainthood.

  By age twenty-nine, Nathaniel Sorrows had been rejected by three seminary schools. He continued to live with his mother and spent both his days and nights reading Scripture and preparing for the holy work his mother so firmly believed he was meant to do. He allowed himself an hour’s break at the neighboring pub each evening for a bowl of soup and a handful of table crackers.

  It should be noted that Nathaniel hadn’t grown into a handsome man. Nevertheless, there was something decidedly attractive about him. Young coeds from the nearby college were drawn to his table not with the same intensity they might approach boys who were marriage material, but rather with the determination of a ranch hand about to break in their first horse. They never ended up staying at Nathaniel’s table for long. If he had been any other man, they might have handed him their phone numbers. Instead, they went back to their rooms to throw away the contraceptives locked in their armoires and to call their grandmothers on the hallway community phone.

  When Nathaniel arrived at his aunt’s house on Pinnacle Lane, carrying all of his belongings in one tiny suitcase, he arrived as a man many believed had never used his hands to point his genitals toward the toilet bowl, had never glanced down the cashier’s shirt as she made change, had never become angry at a traffic light, and never wanted more than what was given to him.

  When Nathaniel Sorrows arrived at the house at the base of the hill on Pinnacle Lane, he exited the taxi and glanced around at the quiet neighborhood. And what did he see, this seemingly pious man? He spotted a pair of white and brown speckled wings behind the parched lilac bush in the next yard over.

  And at that moment, an entirely new and unfamiliar feeling stirred inside him.

  IF MY MOTHER KEPT a list of the reasons she confined me to the house on the hill, she’d have a length of paper that could stretch all the way down Pinnacle Lane and trail into the waters of the Puget Sound. It could choke passing sea life. It could flap in the wind like a giant white flag of surrender atop our house’s widow’s walk. To put it simply, my mother worried. She worried about our neighbors’ reactions. Would they break me with their disparaging glances, their cruel intolerance? She worried I was just like every other teenage girl, all tender heart and fragile ego. She worried I was more myth and figment than flesh and blood. She worried about my calcium levels, my protein levels, even my reading levels. She worried she couldn’t protect me from all of the things that had hurt her: loss and fear, pain and love.

  Most especially from love.

  During that spring when the rains had disappeared, Cardigan and I spent most afternoons sprawled in the browning grass in my yard, pretending to study as Cardigan beguiled me with tales of her latest beau.

  By the tender age of fifteen, my best friend, Miss Cardigan Cooper, was already well versed in the complicated attributes of physical love. Jeremiah Flannery, the boy who’d once crushed a bird’s wing under his boot, was her latest acquisition.

  “The poor bastard follows me everywhere.” Cardigan snorted. “And you should see the way he stares at me. I practically have to wipe the drool from his chin before I can kiss him. It’s pathetic.” She smiled wickedly. “I love it.”

  I laughed as I attempted to make sense of Cardigan’s haphazard algebra notes.

  That was another thing my mother worried about: my education. She modeled my daily home-schooling lessons off of Cardigan’s messy composition books.

  “Is this a five or a three?” I asked.

  “No idea. Looks like an R to me.” Cardigan arched her back like a cat and threw her arm over her eyes to shield them from the sun. I rolled my eyes. It was already late April, and though finals weren’t far off, Cardigan seemed quite content to maintain her C-minus average.

  On the other side of the house, my mother was on the front porch, washing the windows in soapy methodical circles, when Henry came flying around the corner and screamed, “Pinna hurt! Pinna hurt!” His eyes were wide with fear. Trouver was right behind him, barking madly.

  In one fluid motion, Viviane dropped the soapy sponge, flew down the porch stairs and around to the backyard to find me, leaving Henry on the porch, pounding his ears with his open palms. As she ran, my mother thought, This is it. This is the reason not to love. If I didn’t love, then whatever I find, no matter how awful, wouldn’t hurt.

  My mother found me lazing in the grass with Cardigan. She reached down, grabbed my arm, and yanked me upright. “What happened?” she asked, frantically looking me over for signs of injury.

  “Nothing,” I replied, blinking.

  Viviane dropped her hands, suddenly aware of the wild beating of her heart, the labored pull of her lungs. “Are you sure?” she asked.

  I exchanged a look with Cardigan. “Yeah. We’re both fine. Are you?”

  My mother looked me over closely before turning away. “Sorry. I thought — never mind.” She sighed. “Do you girls need anything?” she asked as an afterthought. I shook my head.

  Good, she must have thought, and slowly made her way back to Henry, who was frantically painting a map of our neighborhood across the front porch in soapy water.

 
; It was just after that that Cardigan and I saw a taxicab pull up to Marigold Pie’s house. A man got out and retrieved a raggedy-looking suitcase from the trunk, then gave a halfhearted wave to the cab as it pulled away. Though I didn’t know it at the time, Marigold’s visitor carried a well-used journal in his back pocket. He took the journal everywhere he went.

  Curious and impulsive, I dashed down the hill and ducked behind a lilac bush near the road to spy. The man walked slowly up Marigold’s front walk, taking in our quiet neighborhood. He paused for a moment, shielded his eyes from the sun, and stared up at my house at the top of the hill. Before he continued into Marigold’s house, I swore he saw me hiding there in the lilacs.

  The door closed behind him, and I ran back up the hill to Cardigan, who looked bemused.

  “Who do you suppose that was?” I asked breathlessly.

  Cardigan shrugged. “What a dreamboat, though, don’t you think?”

  I glanced back down the hill, my head reeling with the thought of this man having seen me. Could he have liked what he saw? “Oh,” I murmured, blushing. “I don’t know.”

  Years ago, when Emilienne’s family was still whole and living in that tenement in Beauregard’s Manhatine, Emilienne’s maman spent a good deal of her time finding scraps of fabric to contribute to the quilts that were intended for her daughters’ dowries. The quilts were meant to be enclosed in elaborately hand-carved trousseaux, along with lace pillowcases and heavy silver flatware. They were also meant to be split fairly between three daughters, not left as an inheritance for the lone survivor, but Emilienne had long ago learned that perfection was hardly something to expect in life.

  Each quilt carried a telling name, and years later each would find its way onto an appropriate bed — “Bright Hopes” for Viviane before Jack, “Broken Path” for after, “Dove in the Window” for me, and the “Crazy Quilt” for Henry.

  Emilienne herself slept under a pile of plain woolen blankets.

  Emilienne straightened the quilt on Henry’s bed, being careful not to disturb anything. Viviane all but ran the house those days, but occasionally Emilienne could find a menial task to fill her time and keep her mind off things she’d rather not think about. From out of the corner of her eye, she could see the faint outline of a man illuminated by the thin triangle of sun coming through the window. She’d learned over the thirty-six years since his death that the more she ignored him, the louder the ghost of René tried to speak. If Emilienne had looked at him, she would have seen the place where his mouth used to be. He seemed to be yelling right then and gesturing wildly out the window with his hands.

  Instead, she gave a pillow one final thump and, with practiced immunity, stepped right through the apparition in the corner, never stopping to find out what he was trying to say this time. If she had . . . well, it’s hardly worth fretting over ifs and whens.

  C’est la vie, as she might say.

  Downstairs Emilienne found Henry at the dining-room table, licking frosting off a spoon. They were there as well. All three of them — René, who dogged her steps, along with Margaux and the canary, Pierette. And someone Emilienne had never seen before — a small, dark-haired child with thick eyebrows and chapped lips. The child ran her hand along the collection of antique teapots atop the oak hutch, her translucent fingers tracing the edges of the porcelain pots.

  It wasn’t just that they were there. That she’d gotten used to, along with Pierette’s incessant chirping, René’s mutilated face, the hole in Margaux’s chest where her heart used to be. No, the truly awful part was that Henry was talking with them.

  Well, he was talking with René, the only one who spoke. Even if Emilienne had allowed herself to hear him, René was hardly easy to understand, what with his not having an actual mouth and all. But Henry and René didn’t seem to have any problem communicating with one another.

  René would mutter something and Henry would nod, as if in agreement. “Bee in the bush and cat on the wall,” Henry said seriously around the spoonful of frosting in his mouth.

  Emilienne went into the kitchen and got out a plate for a slice of the chocolate cake she’d left on the counter.

  The ghost child followed her into the kitchen. With black, vacant eyes she watched Emilienne. And though Emilienne tried to block it out, she heard the child’s quiet whisper clearly: “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

  Very few in the neighborhood then knew or remembered the story of Fatima Inês de Dores and her ship captain brother — the way the child paced the widow’s walk awaiting his return, the Communion wafer that burst into flame when it touched her tongue. Some mistook the story of the siblings for a fairy tale, even congratulating themselves for thinking up such a vivid bedtime story to tell their children. Emilienne knew better than to disparage something as powerful as a fairy tale, and she never forgot the tale of the ill-fated little girl who once roamed the hallways of the house on the hill. Or rather, it seemed, still did.

  Emilienne coughed a mouthful of ashes into the air.

  She wiped away the gray soot stuck to her teeth, left the cake in the kitchen, and joined Henry in the dining room, where he’d just finished his final spoonful of frosting. Henry went to his grandmother and took her face between his hands. “The Sad Man needs you to know,” he said to her.

  Startled, Emilienne looked to her siblings. The Sad Man? René? But they were gone. Only the young dark-haired specter stared back at her from the corner of the room.

  “Yes?” Emilienne whispered, looking into Henry’s wide eyes.

  “There’s red on the floor and feathers everywhere,” he replied.

  And with that, Fatima Inês faded away.

  After Fatima’s visit, Henry carried on an endlessly looping conversation that sounded a bit like this:

  “Henry, what do you want on your toast this morning?”

  “There’s a bee in the bush!” he insisted.

  “Jam? Butter? Honey?”

  “And a cat on the wall!”

  “What about cereal instead?”

  “There’s red on the floor and feathers everywhere!”

  Then he would tear around the house calling, “Pinna hurt! Pinna hurt!” as Trouver barked wildly behind him.

  From the personal diary of Nathaniel Sorrows:

  April 29, 1959

  In the past, staying with my aunt Marigold meant sleeping on starched sheets, and it meant the musty stench of her potpourri seeping into the fabric of my clothes. It meant early morning services at the Lutheran church down the street and afternoon tea served on my aunt’s finest china, but without the customary array of butter cookies or crumpets with marmalade. This time I arrived to a house in disarray — dust had gathered atop her decorative knickknacks, and the furniture had lost its usual pine-scented shine. And it seems my once-righteous aunt now has an appetite only for desserts: raspberry jam–filled scones, maraschino cherry pudding, and butterscotch brownies fill the kitchen counters and the shelves of the refrigerator. It is rare to see her without her mouth full, without her swollen fingers brushing crumbs from her lips. She keeps tiny chocolates beneath the pillows on her bed. Her sheets are perpetually smeared with caramel and toffee and cherry liqueur. Once I even found a slice of chocolate cake, the frosting completely licked off, hidden under her bed.

  Exactly how I am meant to help my now-fat aunt, I don’t know. Of course, I admit to no one that I am at a loss. I’ve never had to work at helping someone turn away from sin; for reasons known only to Him, my effect on people has always been somewhat spontaneous. Mother says it isn’t for me to question how the Lord does His work through me; it is enough knowing that He does.

  Therefore, I know that He would not place something or someone so blatantly holy before me to disregard. An Angel, defined as I remember it, is an agent of God sent forth to execute His purposes. It is supremely fitting that this Angel should appear on the street where His most reverent follower is staying, where I have been struggling to hear His call and execute His purpos
e. It is true that I looked at her, perhaps much longer than appropriate, but on the day I arrived and caught my first glimpse of those wings and that beautiful angelic face, I thought I was going mad!

  TROUVER HAD GROWN fast into his big paws. We had hoped he’d remain small and manageable, but once he passed one hundred pounds, we knew we weren’t dealing with a Maltese or a shih tzu. Trouver was a Great Pyrenees — a purebred at that — which was quite remarkable considering he’d been found rifling through the peony bush in our backyard. His pelt resembled that of a white musk ox, and when he shed, tufts of fur the size of small rabbits blew like white tumbleweeds across the wood floors of our house.

  Trouver and Henry were inseparable and often walked not dog following boy but side by side. They were walking in this way — a strange set of conjoined twins — when they strode into the woodshop where Gabe was nursing a bleeding lip after another failed attempt at flight.

  Gabe had built the first set of wings out of lacquered cheesecloth stretched over a bamboo frame. When that didn’t work, he tried wicker — a weave of willow bark and madrone twigs — but each of those creations proved too heavy. Another set he made out of aluminum wire and gauze, which sent Gabe spiraling into a panicky nosedive after he launched himself off the roof of the shed.

  Gabe dragged himself back into the woodshop, bleeding from the mouth and glad that only Henry, and neither my mother nor I, had witnessed that test flight. “Failure number four,” Gabe muttered, and he tossed the broken wings onto the growing trash pile in the corner of the shop. In doing so, he disturbed a bat living in the rafters of the woodshop. He followed the bat as it made its way outside, and when Gabe saw the bat’s wings beat against the night sky, Gabe realized he’d been looking for inspiration in the wrong place. He also decided he had to catch that bat.