The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender

by Leslye Walton

  “We need your mother’s colander,” Gabe said to Henry. “And a large supply of beetles, mosquitoes, flies, and — moths. Like that one!” Gabe reached out and grabbed a brown-winged insect in midflight. He carried it into the kitchen and placed it in an empty coffee can, the fluttery drum of its wings echoing against the tin sides. He dug through the cupboards until he found the colander. In the living room, he thumbed through the books on birds he received by mail order years before until he found what he was looking for: a short section on bats included in the back of one.

  From a second-floor window, my mother watched Henry in the yard snatch moths out of the air.

  Viviane suddenly recalled the day Jack left for college. She remembered the glass jar he presented her, and then watching as he made his way back down the hill, and the look of the taillights of his father’s Coupe.

  There was a dragonfly inside the jar. Viviane had never seen one so close before — its green iridescent wings looked far too fragile to be capable of flight.

  Wilhelmina later told Viviane the superstition about dragonflies. “It’s a saying so old I don’t think anyone knows where it came from anymore,” she said.

  “How does it go?” Viviane asked.

  Wilhelmina’s eyes twinkled. “Catch a dragonfly, wed within the year.”

  Viviane’s dragonfly had died within the week.

  Downstairs she asked Gabe, “What’s Henry doing?”

  “Bats and birds share a similar wing-beat pattern,” Gabe read from the book in his hands. He looked up at Viviane excitedly. “I’m going to catch a bat. Henry’s catching bugs to feed it.”

  “Why not just catch a bird?” Viviane asked Gabe. “You can do that in the daylight.”

  Gabe glanced up from his book. “I can’t replicate the feathers. I tried.”

  It took three nights to catch the bat. In the end, the little mammal made its own way into an ancient rusted birdcage Gabe had found in the basement crusted with old crow and dove feathers. Every night after dinner, Henry fed insects to the bat through the bars and Gabe worked on a new set of wings.

  I HAD BEEN ASLEEP when I heard the tap of Cardigan’s finger against the windowpane. She’d climbed up the cherry tree outside my bedroom window and breathlessly confirmed what we had both assumed since the day she had kneed Jeremiah in the groin.

  “One of ’em looks like a fig — a pink shriveled-up fig,” she said.

  “Yuck.” After letting her in, I climbed back into bed and wrapped my wings around me like a security blanket. “What’s it supposed to look like?”

  Cardigan shrugged. “Not like that.”

  My bedroom was typical of the late 1950s. There were stacks of fashion magazines on the floor and a vanity with a lace ruffle. A full-length mirror stood opposite my twin bed, which was covered in pillows and a quilt patterned with colored triangles. There was nothing about it that would indicate I was anything but a normal teenage girl. But there wasn’t a pink princess phone for late-night conversations or a pair of saddle shoes, soles worn from doing the hand jive at high-school dances. I had little connection with the outside world; there wasn’t any need for such things. Instead, there was a window where I spent my nights looking out at Salmon Bay and watching the ships drift by. And there were piles of feathers, which gathered mysteriously in my room’s lonely corners.

  “So, are you and Jeremiah still an item?” I asked.

  “God, no.” Cardigan pulled a tube of lipstick from her coat pocket. She slicked the gloss across her lips then tossed it to me. “Here, try it on. I snagged it from my mom.” But I placed it on my bedside table. Cardigan smiled at her pretty blond reflection in my mirror and wiped the red stain from her teeth with the side of her finger.

  I had long dark hair like my grandmother, but whereas Emilienne tied hers in a severe chignon at the base of her neck, I wore mine in a high ponytail tied with a black ribbon. According to Cardigan, the ribbon was the perfect accessory for me.

  “You gotta accentuate what you got,” Cardigan said. “And you, girl, have got whimsical beauty.” She flicked my wingtips with her finger. “You gotta admit, it’s definitely a strange kind of attractiveness.”

  A sharp ping reverberated on my window. Cardigan flung open the window and made a wild gesture with her hands.

  “I told my brother to meet me here,” Cardigan said.

  Rowe Cooper was seventeen. He drove the delivery truck for my grandmother’s bakery and had already received a full scholarship from Boston University for his unusual capacity for astronomical facts and figures. Most of his belongings were already packed and labeled in cardboard boxes. Rowe wasn’t nearly as popular as his sister. He was tall and lanky, with a thick mop of curly black hair, and he always wore an old peacoat from his father’s navy days, even during Seattle’s summer months. He also stuttered. He was handsome, though, with deep-blue eyes and a quick smile.

  Not that I’d noticed.

  Cardigan threw her legs over the side of the open window. “A bunch of kids are going to the reservoir tonight,” she said to me.

  Like every other batch of teenagers, those who lived near Pinnacle Lane had a spot where ridiculous and foolhardy acts occurred. Instead of a drive-in movie theater or soda shop, the town reservoir — with its moonlit water and shadowy edges — was the perfect place for such imperative nonsense. By this time, the old caretaker and his wife had grown cantankerous but deaf, so the kids knew they only had to be quiet when they passed by the little white house. I, of course, had never been there. But I’d heard so many stories, I believed I could see the lights from the caretaker’s house, could count the number of beer cans left on the reservoir’s edge, could hear the kids’ drunken laughter.

  I found it ironic that I should be blessed with wings and yet feel so constrained, so trapped. It was because of my condition, I believe, that I noticed life’s ironies a bit more often than the average person. I collected them: how love arrived when you least expected it, how someone who said he didn’t want to hurt you eventually would.

  When we were younger, my grandmother kept a small flock of chickens in a hutch Gabe built beside the workshop. I liked to watch them peck about the yard, flightless birds moving in nervous groups and scratching the ground with reptilian feet. I named them after places I would never visit: Pisa, Aiea, Nepal, Vermont.

  Emilienne eventually complained that their eggs were hardly worth the mess they made of the yard so decided to have the chickens slaughtered. Gabe caught them and took them, one by one, into the woodshop and snapped their necks with his large hands. Gabe had no reason to think that I might be hiding behind a pile of rubble in the woodshop, watching the end of each hen’s life. What horrified me the most — what would haunt me for years to come — was how each bird flapped and flapped her wings, expecting them to carry her to freedom. I never could eat chicken after that. It seemed cannibalistic.

  As Cardigan lowered herself onto the branches of the cherry tree outside my window, I got out of bed, shook out my wings, and said, “I’m coming with you.”

  Cardigan paused, stared at me, then pulled herself back into the room. “Cool.”

  It took us half an hour to concoct a harness strong enough to pin down my wings. We made it using an old leather bridle Rowe grabbed from the workshop behind my house and tossed up to us. He waited for us in the dark yard, the end of his lit cigarette glowing red.

  The harness kept my wings folded flat to my back, but it was painful. I finally understood the phrase seeing stars. An old musty cloak we found in a forgotten hall closet hid them completely. The cloak was emerald-green wool with a satin lining and a giant hood that fell down my back.

  We snuck off the hill and walked silently down Pinnacle Lane. We passed Marigold Pie’s house, then the Fields’ house. We passed the spot where the rough road turned to pavement and where a pair of worn sneakers hanging from an overhead power line danced in the wind. I was sure the other two could hear the quickening of my heart as I stepped farther an
d farther away from the only place I had ever known. We passed my grandmother’s bakery and the house that stood behind it, the Lutheran church, the elementary school, and the spot where Rowe and Cardigan waited for the bus that took them to school. We passed the remodeled police station with its brick walls and clear, shiny windows, and the cluster of identical new homes that sprang up after the war. We passed the old deaf couple’s little white house and the place where my mother once watched the moon disappear. Then we arrived at the reservoir, a dark spot guarded by maple trees and surly high-school students.

  Much to my relief, no one seemed to notice me or that I was wearing a large and unfashionable cloak. Cardigan moved to join a group that was building pyramids out of empty beer cans on the reservoir’s cement ledge.

  “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” I muttered, backing away until I bumped into someone behind me. Rowe.

  He smiled down at me. “N-nah, it was a p-p-perfectly good idea. It t-takes a while to acclimate oneself to the d-deb-bauchery of wild t-t-teenage life. Come on,” he said, and, taking me by the elbow, steered me to a secluded spot beneath the trees.

  Years later the lights of the growing city would erase the stars from the sky, but back then they shone through the branches like jailed fireflies.

  “Weird, isn’t it?” Rowe sat next to me. “H-how it’s sup-po-posed to be spring, but doesn’t l-look l-l-like it?” I watched the bulge of his Adam’s apple jump as he breathed and swallowed. He was right. Without the rain, it seemed spring would never come and the stars would remain forever imprisoned by the leafless branches.

  “The only constellation I know is that one.” I pointed to a cluster of stars that made the shape of a ladle.

  Rowe swallowed hard. “A-actually, the B-Big Dipper is a p-p-part of Ursa Major — the Great Bear. It makes up his b-body and t-ta-ail. See his legs?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I murmured. “There it is.” It did look like a bear, a big white bear, head down, rooting through the snow. “I wonder why I haven’t seen that before.”

  “Maybe you just needed someone to help you see the parts that aren’t so obvious.”

  I looked at him. “You didn’t stutter.”

  Rowe ducked his head. “I don’t always.”

  “Ava!” Cardigan commanded from the reservoir’s edge. “Come over here!”

  I pulled my knees to my chest, nervously tugged the cloak tighter around my shoulders. I shook my head. Not just yet.

  “Are you afraid they won’t like you?” Rowe asked.

  “Oh.” My eyes widened. “I hadn’t even thought of that. What if they don’t like me?”

  “It’s hard to imagine anyone not liking you,” he said candidly, meeting my eyes. He cleared his throat. “Anyway, what’s r-really bothering you?”

  “It’s . . . dangerous for someone like me to be out in the open.”

  As if in response, my wings started to flutter beneath their shroud. I gave the cloak a good yank.

  “Someone like you? Someone different, you mean?”

  I shrugged. “Yes,” I answered quietly, suddenly shy.

  “So, is it dangerous for us or for you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, are you the threat, or are we?”

  “You are! Well, they are.” I motioned to the cluster of teenagers. Of course it was them.

  Rowe peered at me thoughtfully. “Funny. I suspect they might say otherwise.” He stood. “And that might just be the root of the problem: we’re all afraid of each other, wings or no wings.” Rowe smiled that quick smile of his. “Shall we join them?”

  He offered his hand and pulled me up easily. I was surprised by how small my own hand looked wrapped in his. I blushed. I adjusted the cloak one last time and let him lead me toward the group, his hand gently pressed against the small of my back.

  Cardigan sat on the edge of the reservoir with two boys and a girl. The boys were twins, identical in every way. The girl was small and bone-thin, her wrists like crane legs.

  Cardigan stood and, with a flourish toward me, announced, “This is the Living Angel,” resurrecting the name the newspapers had given me on the day I was born. On the day Henry and I were born.

  The three stared at me, then the girl said, “Isn’t she supposed to have wings?”

  The twins laughed at her. I gaped at Cardigan, shocked that my best friend would give me away just like that. Some friend, I thought, glaring at Cardigan.

  “She does!” Cardigan said. “They’re just — hidden.” Her face fell as she sat back down. “It is her, though.”

  Rowe moved slightly, shielding me from the group. He frowned at Cardigan. “You can’t be s-serious,” he said to her quietly. “You don’t kn-now how they’re g-going to r-react.”

  Still believing it was all a joke, one of the boys said, “I heard her wings are, like, six feet long.”

  “Twelve feet, five inches across actually,” I murmured.

  “Like an eagle?” he dared.

  “Wandering albatross.”

  The other twin stood and crossed his arms. “So, if they’re so big, how d’ya hide ’em?”

  I sighed and moved out of Rowe’s protective stance. I pulled the green cloak open just far enough to reveal the front straps of my harness.

  One of them whistled. “Off the wall. That looks painful.”

  “It is,” I admitted.

  “Why do it, then?” the girl asked. She had a soft, wispy sort of voice that made me think of dandelion clocks. I shrugged.

  “Take that thing off,” the girl said. “We don’t mind.”

  “Yeah, do your thing, baby,” said one of the twins.

  The other boy grinned. “And don’t feel like you have to stop there either.”

  So I took them off. First the heavy cloak, then the harness. My wings popped free and opened, the tips stretching toward the sky. Suddenly everyone around the reservoir grew quiet. Conversations forgotten, they gathered around the mythical creature whose story they’d heard once as children but had mostly forgotten or never really believed.

  “Let’s see ya fly,” a boy called out.

  “I can’t —” I began. I dropped my wings back to my sides. Flying had never felt like something I could do. But, then again, neither had leaving my house on the hill.

  “Yes, she can!” Cardigan’s excited voice echoed across the water.

  I stared at her. “No,” I muttered. “No, I can’t.”

  “Of course you can!” she insisted, manic elation gleaming in her eyes. “Why would you be given wings if you weren’t meant to fly?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that.

  Cardigan grabbed my wrist in a tight grip. I clawed at her hand, begging her to let me go. I searched the faces around me for the one I could count on: Rowe’s. But I couldn’t find him.

  “Oh, don’t be such a baby,” she said, laughing. “This will be fun.”

  Followed by a fervent and growing crowd, Cardigan gleefully dragged me to the end of the reservoir, where the ground fell away — a ravine.

  I stood alone at the edge of the cliff. The kids crowded around, close enough that I could hear their enthusiastic calls, but distant enough that I couldn’t grab and drag one of them with me if I should plunge to my death.

  A body broke through the crowd and walked purposefully toward me. The next moment I was wrapped in Rowe’s arms. I felt his twitching muscles in the quickening of my heart, his anger and indignation through my hands on his chest.

  “Rowe!” Cardigan objected.

  “Enough.” His tone said it all.

  Into my ear he murmured, “You don’t have to do this.” He gently moved his hand down my arm to steer me away. “I can take you home.”

  I let my head drop against the itchy wool of his jacket. The fabric felt coarse on my cheek. I found it comforting. Like his arms wrapped around me. And how perfectly I seemed to fit into the spaces of his body.

  I breathed him in, wishing that I had my mother’s g
ift and could smell him — the essence of him — the way that she would be able to. He made me feel safe. Protected.

  But I’d been protected my whole life, forced to watch the world through the lonely window of my bedroom while the night called to me, like a siren luring forlorn sailors onto a rocky shoal. I didn’t want to be protected from the world anymore.

  I pulled away from Rowe and moved back to the edge of the cliff. I shuffled my feet. Dirt and pebbles gave way and bounced over the jagged rocks lining the side of the cliff.

  I smiled back at Rowe, who looked at me quizzically.

  “Watch this,” I said.

  I turned and spread my wings open, as wide as they would go, feeling the wind comb its cold fingers through my feathers. One feather came loose and danced its way down into the dark ravine below.

  In my mind’s eye, I could see myself arching upward. I could see the awe on the kids’ faces. I could feel the ground fall away from me and a heavy ache in my shoulders as my wings lifted me up into the night. For a moment the act of flight seemed possible.

  The sky suddenly looked so vast.

  And I suddenly felt so small.

  My wings opened and closed uselessly once or twice more before I stepped away from the ledge. “I can’t,” I said, my teeth chattering as much from the cold as from the adrenaline rushing through me.

  Cardigan smiled. A real smile this time. She stepped toward me and rubbed my arms to warm them. “I know,” she said kindly.

  Rowe breathed an exasperated sigh of relief.

  A girl in the crowd piped up. “What are they for, then?”

  For? I didn’t want to think about what my wings were for, so I showed off my one winged trick instead, knocking down a beer-can pyramid with a flap.

  Not long after that, the small crowd dispersed, until it was just me, my wings, Cardigan, and Rowe.