The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender

by Leslye Walton

  Emilienne picked up the keys to the bakery from the counter and made her way to the front door. Emilienne kept the keys on a leather rope worn smooth from the hours it spent hanging around her neck. They never left her — she even kept them on her pillow as she slept.

  Emilienne stepped onto the porch, blinking in the spring sun. As she closed the door, the sound of Gabe’s diligent working quieted to a distant pounding. At the bakery Emilienne was always in charge. Not even Wilhelmina dared to make a decision without consulting Emilienne first. She sighed. If only that were the case at home.

  What actually belonged in a nursery still remained a mystery to Gabe, but he’d managed to make a crib and placed it near the window. He was trying to decide the color for the walls when Viviane slipped into the room behind him.

  “Green,” Viviane said, glancing down at the buckets of white and blue between his feet.

  Gabe looked up, startled to see her. “What kind of green?” he asked.

  “Light, but not lime. More like apple green. Spring green.”

  Gabe nodded in agreement. “Spring green it is.”

  Gabe never needed very much sleep at all and instead spent most nights the way he spent his days — working on the house, the beat of his hammer and the raking of his saw making their way into my mother’s dreams. Some nights he did no work at all and instead celebrated his renovations with creamy bottles of home-brewed beer. My mother spent those nights in a dreamless sleep.

  Gabe watched as Viviane walked around the room. He was pleased to see her bathed. Gabe wasn’t sure if it had been Emilienne’s or Wilhelmina’s doing, but he hoped Viviane herself had washed the cherry juice from her hands, tied the red ribbon in her hair. Perhaps it was a sign of something good to come.

  She ran her fingertips across the newly sanded crib, paused to admire the curtains in the windows. Gabe held his breath when she noticed the tiny sculpture hanging above the crib.

  “Feathers,” she said, offering a vague smile.

  “Well, I thought, maybe, it would be . . .” Gabe stammered, unsure how to explain what compelled him to collect discarded feathers from the neighborhood birds and hang them over the place where Viviane’s child would sleep.

  Once, after a particularly wet night of celebrating, Gabe had found himself in Viviane’s room, kneeling by her bed. Even though she was miserable, even though she was filthy — her feet were encrusted in dirt, and there were circles of red juice around her frowning mouth and on the palms of her hands — he still found her beautiful. He had lightly pressed a hand to the mound of her belly. In case she were to ask him, he had thought about names for the baby. Maybe Alexandria or Elise for a girl, and if a boy, Dmitry.

  As he was about to pull his hand away, he felt it: a light fluttering from beneath his hand. And though Gabe knew the common term was quickening, he could hardly keep from laughing out loud: it had felt just like wings!

  Viviane smiled again. “Feathers are fine, Gabe,” she said, and walked out of the room, leaving Gabe to stumble over the fact that for the first time, Viviane Lavender had said his name. That fact filled Gabe with so much hope that he grew another two inches just to have enough room to hold it all.

  Hardly a soul slept the night my mother was in labor. Nocturnal birds gathered on the lawns like pious parishioners to eat noisily, their doomed prey screaming wildly into the dark. Earlier in the day, the crows and sparrows had tormented the neighborhood with angry calls, flying into windows and after small children. Viviane, however, was unaware of the strange disturbance her upcoming delivery had brought to the neighborhood birds.

  Gabe drove her to the hospital in the clunky Chevy truck he’d bought for the odds-and-ends jobs he took around town. Emilienne was still at the bakery, and there was no time.

  “No time!” Viviane screamed from the passenger side of the truck, her clenched fists as tight as the ball of her belly. She squeezed her eyes shut in pain, and a slick layer of sweat gathered above her upper lip.

  Gabe reached across the old truck and grabbed her hand — slightly disgusted with himself for finding pleasure in being able to touch her at such a time.

  “Hold on, there, Vivi,” he said. “We’ll be there soon.”

  Gabe was forced to remain in the waiting room as Viviane was whisked away by a pair of apron-clad nurses, who quickly set her up in a sterile white room before their squeaky shoes took them back down the hall.

  Alone, my mother cried and screamed. Screamed for the nurses, for Jack, even for her mother — though Emilienne was hardly the type to hold her daughter’s hand or wipe her forehead with a damp cloth. And when the pain felt too great, when it felt like the contractions would split her in half, the squeaky shoes finally returned, bringing with them a cold syringe of relief.

  Just before slipping into a deep twilight sleep, Viviane swore she saw giant feathers falling from the ceiling, an image she attributed to the anesthetic.

  When I was born, the on-call doctor examined the forceps in his hands in bewilderment before going in search of family in the waiting room.

  According to the nurses in attendance, moments after I made my entrance, I opened my eyes and pointed a pinkie finger toward the light. This was an admirable feat considering I first had to unfold a pair of speckled wings sprouting from the edges of my shoulder blades.

  My twin came as a surprise to them all — most especially the doctor, who had to be rushed back for his birth. It was later debated whether or not my wings had anything to do with how Henry turned out. But that wouldn’t explain the many others like him — others who were born just as strange as Henry but without a feathery twin.

  It took two hours for the press to catch wind of my strange birth. Soon there they were, crowding the hospital hallways, the nursing staff shooting them malicious looks. The head nurse was able to keep the cameras and journalists from the actual hospital room, but outside our window the devout gathered into the night, holding candles and singing hymns of praise and fear. The crowd was so dense, it took Gabe four hours to pick up Emilienne from the bakery and bring her back to the hospital. It took another four hours to take her back when Emilienne declared that, after an uncomfortable forty-five minutes, she had been away from the bakery too long.

  It was the nurse’s aide who attended to us during most of our stay, who emptied my mother’s bedpan and enticed her with tiny cups of green Jell-O and bottles of chocolate milk. The nurse’s aide was a feverish reader of the Bible and brought in pages of notebook paper on which she had jotted down all the feminine forms of Michael, Raphael, and Uriel she could find.

  “She really does need a name,” she said.

  As a newborn, I was lovely in every sense of the word, or so I’ve been told.

  I had dark eyes and a full head of black hair like my mother’s on the day she was born — right down to the ringlet at the back of my head. Other than the fact that I had wings, I was perfect. And even the wings weren’t that bad. Only a few days old and I was already able to wrap them around myself like a swaddling blanket.

  “I like Michaela,” the nurse’s aide said, standing in the doorway. “Or maybe you could call her Raphaela.”

  It usually took Gabe a while to get from the elevator to the hospital room. He had to will his fingers to stop shaking and his chest to stop heaving first. When he did arrive, it was with a ceremonious bumping of his head on the door frame and a bouquet of flowers, wilted from his tight and sweaty grip.

  “I was thinking you could call her Ava,” he said, rubbing his head and handing the flowers to the nurse’s aide. She gave him a quizzical look before adding the bouquet to the array of brown flowers from his other visits.

  “What angel was ever named that?” she asked.

  “It means bird,” Viviane said softly. She tried not to look disappointed, but she and Gabe and Emilienne all knew that a very large part of her was still hoping Jack would walk through the door. She didn’t care if he brought her flowers. Or even an apology. She just needed h
im to be there. She needed him because that was the only thing that made sense.

  Then, for a moment, my mother caught a glimpse of Gabe’s good heart and forgot that her own was in mourning. For a moment, she saw in him a common soul and smiled at the thought of spending the next fifty years sleeping in the crook of his long arm or walking together in stride — arms matching arms, step matching step. But then she remembered Jack and all those months she’d spent waiting for a love that never returned, and she wrapped her heart in its burial shroud once again.

  “Well, fine,” the young aide said, rolling her eyes. “Name her whatever you want, but what about the other one?”

  To Viviane, one of the worst parts about all the attention — the reporters, the newspaper articles, the crowds of worshipful followers — was that it focused on one twin, as if I were a single entity. What were twins but a pair? They came together for a reason, after all. But maybe worse was that underneath her motherly indignation lay the underlying fear that Viviane wasn’t so sure about the other one either. He was small and quiet, too quiet for an infant. He went limp when anyone tried to hold him. It seemed to Viviane that she’d given birth to not one oddity but two.

  “Henry,” Viviane decided. “I want to call him Henry.”

  Gabe smiled. “Ava and Henry.”

  IT WAS OBVIOUS Jack Griffith was the father of Viviane Lavender’s children — anyone who knew Jack could recognize him in my brother’s face — but no one in the neighborhood dared to mention it. Perhaps they took their cues from Jack’s father, the disagreeable John Griffith, who furrowed his brow and clenched his jaw whenever he passed Emilienne’s bakery. Some swore they’d seen him spit at Viviane the day she quit her job at the soda fountain, still pregnant and wearing that soiled white dress she refused to take off. His long, spindly drop of saliva had run down the back of her dress and landed on the pavement with a wet, milky splat.

  Most preferred to give Jack the benefit of the doubt. They liked to assume that he simply didn’t know about us. He’d returned to Whitman College the September before we were born. And hadn’t come back since. It was two hundred ​seventy miles away, after all.

  But then, on our second birthday, Beatrix Griffith came to visit us.

  It was the first and only time.

  My grandmother was the one who saw her come up the walk. The woman’s tiny frail steps were so reminiscent of Emilienne’s own delicate maman that she couldn’t help but welcome Beatrix and usher her into the parlor. Later Emilienne would recall how remarkably overdressed Beatrix seemed for such a short visit. She was wearing a smart-looking gray suit with a wide belt cinched around her waist, a pair of white gloves, and a netted hat cupped around her short hair. On each paper-thin cheek, she’d carefully applied a pink oval of rouge.

  When our mother introduced Henry and me to her, Beatrix clutched her tiny gloved hands together and murmured a soft mmm until her hands began to shake and tears slid into her smile lines.

  She brought gifts — a spinning top for me, a set of blocks for Henry. And she held me in her lap until my wings tickled her chin.

  Before she left, Beatrix seized Viviane’s hand. “You shouldn’t have to do this alone,” she whispered.

  Beatrix Griffith wasn’t always such a quiet woman. She used to be funny — spirited even — and was voted Most Outstanding Girl in her senior class. She was the one who distracted the rival football team with her wit while classmates stole the team mascot. She was the first girl in the neighborhood to cut her hair into a stylish new bob, then convinced her girlfriends to do the same once she felt the thrill of the fall air on her ears. When John Griffith came into her life, his blue eyes and firm jaw made her weak in the knees, and her friends saw a change in their fun-loving Beatrix. Before long, waiting at home for John to call was more important than attending the homecoming game. “What would I tell him if it ran late?” she’d worry, her fingers fidgeting with anxiety.

  John — the son of an unsuccessful carpet salesman — worked as a laundry delivery truck driver. His illegal involvements were mere rumors, quiet whispers that followed him about like an elusive mosquito on a warm summer evening. People saw even less of Beatrix once she and John were married. When her girlfriends invited her over for tea, Beatrix always had an excuse not to come, a reason to hurry back out the door. She had to prepare dinner. John liked his promptly at six. She had to clean the house. John liked coming home to floors freshly waxed, the bathtub newly scoured. But, most important, she had to conceive a child, and John wanted a son.

  Her friends stopped coming to call altogether shortly after Jack was born. What was the point? The sprightly Beatrix they once knew had long since faded away. Perhaps this was why, many years later, no one noticed when she did actually disappear. Not her neighbors or her old friends or even Emilienne, who was too busy trying to run a bakery to notice that Beatrix Griffith no longer stopped in for her weekly three loaves of bread.

  Beatrix’s own husband might not have realized she was gone if he hadn’t arrived home at six and found his dinner wasn’t waiting for him on the table.

  “Goddammit, Beatrix!” he called. “What the hell is this about?”

  That was when he noticed that all of his wife’s belongings were gone — one side of their bedroom sat empty and bare. It looked as if she’d never lived there at all, as if John had spent the last twenty-three years merely living a half-life. He called out her name again and was surprised by how easily his big voice filled the room.

  In all their years of marriage, Beatrix Griffith never once considered her husband a controlling man. Perhaps it had crossed her mind once or twice, but she’d always assumed that freedom was a sacrifice one made for love. Which was why she hadn’t batted an eye when, on the night of their wedding, her new husband closely inspected their nuptial sheets for her virginal blood. Or when he’d thrown her carefully planned meals to the dogs when the meat wasn’t prepared to his liking. No, Beatrix never considered her husband a controlling man until she heard him command their son, Jack, to break up with Viviane Lavender. Afterward, when they were alone, Beatrix took a deep breath and said, “You shouldn’t be so hard on him, dear. He’s fallen in love with her.”

  John looked at her in amazement, as if shocked to learn she still had a voice at all, and said, “What kind of man falls in love?”

  After an unsatisfying meal of canned cocktail sausages and a jar of peach preserves he found in the basement, John Griffith went to sleep in that half-empty room. That night he dreamed he could fly. He dreamed of the whispery kiss of clouds, cold and wet on his cheek, as he soared into the night sky, the streets below fading into darkness.

  But this wasn’t his dream. It was his wife’s.

  The next morning John Griffith awoke feeling heavy and weak, as if in sleep he’d swallowed a handful of large rocks and no longer had the strength to carry his own weight. No one on Pinnacle Lane ever saw Beatrix Griffith again, not even John, but he knew she was still out there, that she had not simply faded into a small pile of blue ashes he would someday find between the sheets of their bed. He knew because every night after she left, he shared her dreams. Dreams of giant flocks of pelicans, mugs of hot chocolate, and foreign men’s strong hands.

  My mother didn’t want to fall in love with her strange children. She was sure that she hadn’t enough room in her heart for anyone but Jack.

  She was wrong.

  Lucky for us, Viviane found motherhood to be more and more agreeable as time went by. She was amazed by how easy it all was: learning how Popsicles could be made with orange juice, toothpicks, and an ice tray; how to listen for noises from a child’s bedroom even in the midst of a dead sleep; when a scraped elbow needed a kiss or a bandage. But more than that, she learned how to worry. She, who’d always thought love’s only companion was sorrow, learned that worry came hand in hand with love.

  By our third birthday, Henry still had yet to utter a sound. Not a peep, not a whimper, not a grunt, a moan, or a groan. He r
eached other developmental stages without any obvious difficulties. Just like me, he cut his first tooth at twelve weeks, could stand on his own by our first birthday, and was walking just a couple of months later. The fact that he was silent while doing so hardly bothered our mother, or so she told herself. And perhaps he just wasn’t one for smiling. Or touching, for that matter. And when he stared into space in such a daze that Viviane couldn’t get his attention, even when banging the kitchen kettle against a black iron pot, well, that didn’t necessarily signify anything either.

  The doctors, of course, had their theories, their special labels and terminology for Henry. They had their contradicting diagnoses, their remedies, their medical recommendations.

  Our mother had her own ideas. She placed her good china bowls in the yard, and Henry was washed with the collected water every night for eight months because she’d heard that some babies who were bathed in rainwater spoke earlier than others. Though it hardly increased his verbal skills, after a while Viviane noticed that Henry’s skin now permanently shared the crisp wet smell of Seattle rain.

  Our grandmother was convinced that Henry had merely been born fluent in a language other than English. She spoke to him in French and in the Italian she still remembered from her life before. It was the most attention Emilienne ever paid to either of us, who, for our part, were much more Roux than Viviane ever was. Perhaps that was the problem. Perhaps my feathers reminded Emilienne of the days when canary feathers collected in the far corners of a Manhattan apartment. Perhaps Henry’s lack of speech reminded Emilienne of the three silent translucent figures still lingering in the shadows.