The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender

by Leslye Walton

  When a stray feather fell from the sky and brushed against my face, I had my first true experience of spiritual ecstasy. Once I awoke in such a state of excitement that I took a knife to one of my bed pillows and pleasured myself with the feathers inside. Because that’s what I believe an angel will feel like: like slipping into a pillow of downy feathers. So soft, so light. Nightly I watch as she preens her feathers in front of her open window. Light illuminates her from behind, making her glow like the holy being that only I know her to be.

  THAT MAY I SPENT MY EVENINGS waiting for the house to fall silent with sleep so that I could make my escape to the reservoir. As I waited, I preened in my bedroom, practicing coquettish smiles in my window’s reflection and pretending to smoke cigarettes with the same careless air that Cardigan did. I imagined the boys in the neighborhood, the very ones who vehemently avoided me at the reservoir, climbing the rickety limbs of the cherry tree outside my window, whereupon I would pluck their fingers from the branches, then howl with laughter as they fell.

  I imagined Widow Pie’s nephew watching me, his eyes, like fingers, leaving hot prints on my skin. I tried to leave for the reservoir around the same time each night and would feel jittery and wound up until I passed Marigold’s house. I imagined him standing faithfully in the dark behind a rhododendron bush as I passed by and cast furtive glances his way.

  One night, I left one of my feathers on Marigold Pie’s front step, intending for him to find it. From behind the broken lilac bush in my yard, I watched, blushing wildly, as he opened the door. The wind lifted the feather into the air, then let it float back down gently against his face. I ran up the hill, feeling giddy and bold.

  I imagined myself his bride; I pictured the white dress and the flower I’d tuck behind my right ear as the Hawaiian maidens do. I pictured a little house somewhere far from the hill at the end of Pinnacle Lane: dinners with neighbors, the husbands drinking Tom Collins in the parlor, the wives swapping recipes in the kitchen; the dog we’d have — a spaniel named Noodle. From these daydreams I always omitted my wings, mentally erased them from my shoulder blades.

  In my daydreams I was always just a girl.

  The more my infatuation grew, the more deeply I mourned the potential loss of the life I dreamed of. It was all too precious, too thoroughly imagined and yearned for to lose. I stopped sleeping. I stopped eating. My wings lost feathers.

  My nightly escapes were put on hold in the middle of May when my infatuation got the best of me and I fell ill with a fever. I emerged from my bed only to go to the bathroom and with help at that. My mother spent the week piling quilts on my shivering body and heating batches of chicken noodle soup so hot her face flushed red when she leaned over the pot.

  I’d never been so deliriously sick; even my waking moments were spent in dreams — nightmares in which infants turned into bloody animal bits, hallucinations in which the night sky fell into a burning ocean.

  Then late one night, on the night of Pentecost, I sat up suddenly in bed, my hair plastered to my forehead, my feathers damp with sweat.

  A young girl stood at my window, her back to the room. The lace on the old-fashioned white dress she wore trailed behind her, ripped and dirty. Her black hair, a matted mass of tangles, cascaded down her back. She turned to face me, and I could see the stars shining brightly through the back of her head.

  She motioned for me to follow her, then stepped through the wall.

  I threw back the piles of quilts and stumbled to the window. Peering outside, I could see her waiting for me in the grass below, her ghostly form shimmering silver in the moonlight. Without another thought, I grabbed my green cloak and climbed through the window and down the bare branches of the cherry tree into the yard.

  The rains still hadn’t arrived. The grass was brown and dried. It crunched underfoot. The water of the bay had crept so low that the local teens could walk straight across it without the girls getting the hems of their skirts wet.

  I followed my ghostly guide to the Lutheran church and through the church’s heavy double doors. The church was decorated for Pentecost with red linens and baskets of red silk chrysanthemums. There hadn’t been any fresh flowers in months. It was the first midnight service of Pentecostal Sunday that anyone could remember when deadly puddles hadn’t formed in the doorways, waiting to break a hip or fracture a pelvis. Even the little old ladies left their rain bonnets at home. Red banners waved gently from the ceiling. Someone had prepared a batch of sugar cookies dyed with food coloring that looked more orange than red. The parishioners were mingling in the narthex of the church, holding their plates of orange cookies, when I entered. I dropped my cloak to the ground and all conversation stopped at the sight of my uncovered wings.

  The black-eyed ghost led me to the sanctuary, where the head of the Altar Guild, Nathaniel Sorrows, was gathering the unblessed wafers and leftover wine to store in the sacristy near the altar.

  He turned and saw me, my wings exposed. He paled. For reasons even I remain unsure of, I dropped to my knees, raised my chin, and opened my mouth. For a moment he stood unmoving, possibly awestruck by the close proximity of the blooms of my lips. Then he held up a paper-thin wafer and brought it to my mouth. I reached up and touched it with my tongue.

  A strange pink fire sparked and jumped from my parted lips. A sharp gasp came from the doorway of the nave where the rest of the parishioners now stood.

  The fire was still dancing on my tongue when Nathaniel, regaining his senses, dropped the flaming host from his singed fingers. He stamped the flames out with his foot, instantly immortalizing the incident with a black mark on the carpet. I blinked as though emerging from a trance, then scrambled to my feet and stumbled from the church.

  Cardigan Cooper remembered the next moment more vividly than any other in her life. She had been walking past the church alone, meaning to meet Jeremiah Flannery at the reservoir, when she saw me in my green cloak stumbling up the stone pathway of the church. She knew I’d been sick. Curious, she followed me inside and watched the entire scene play out from the back of the church. I ran by her as I was fleeing the nave. She grabbed the cloak I’d dropped earlier inside the church doors and joined me in my escape. We ran all the way back to my house on the hill on Pinnacle Lane, where we both dropped to the ground and lay with our pink faces turned toward the sky. Our breath made tiny clouds of condensation against the stars.

  Cardigan turned to me. “Damn, girl. What was that about?”

  But the dark-haired specter in the tattered white dress was there, too. She raised a transparent finger to her lips, then smiled eerily at me before fading away into the night.

  I turned my feverish cheek to the grass and sighed. “I don’t know.”

  By June I was a familiar face among the nightly crowd that gathered at the reservoir. Though I always wore the cloak, my initial visit and exposure had left its impression. So had my fevered visit to the church. Many still stared. Some even pointed, saying, “Look! There she is!”

  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.”
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br />   “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:

  May 26, 1959

  It seems that the Angel has passed her fire into me — from her mouth through the burning host and into my fingers. At first the fever showed itself as a pink flush across my cheeks and down my neck. Beads of sweat sizzled on my forehead. I woke up in the night covered in a prickly heat rash and sat in a tub filled with ice cubes until the melted water steamed off my body. I tried suppressing the rash through starvation and lashes and desperate prayer, through a week spent kneeling on a hairbrush, a board of nails, a pincushion. I tried pushing the heat away with a glass of wine or a mouthful of food, but the only things edible in Marigold’s kitchen made me choke.

  Perhaps this heat is punishment for my impure thoughts. Despite this, I still watch for her every night. I stand in Aunt Marigold’s dark yard, wiping the sweat from my face and from under my arms with a red handkerchief, and wait. I carefully prepare conversations to share, but every time she passes, flanked by the other two — the girl wearing some revealing midriff, the boy in a navy-issue wool peacoat — I become transfixed by the way the wind ruffles her feathers, and all my planned words slip down my throat.

  I am unable to concentrate. One moment I am changing the reader board in the church’s yard — making sure each letter is properly aligned and positioned, that I am spelling each word correctly — and the next I am lying in an imaginary bed of feathers.

  When it comes to Aunt Marigold, I admit that I am failing quite spectacularly. She has grown — it should be recorded — to roughly the size and shape of the mattress on her bed. I now believe that the reason for my being here on Pinnacle Lane has nothing to do with my aunt, and everything to do with the Angel. I’ve started slipping tranquilizers into the éclairs she eats by the pound. It is the only way I can maintain the number of visions the Lord sends me of the Angel. The hours I used to spend in prayer I now use on the memory of her wet mouth. This is now how I pray.

  Perhaps this heat isn’t a penance I am meant to suffer. Perhaps it is a gift, each drop of sweat the Angel’s kiss, sweetly progressing down the length of my spine.

  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 lo
gic 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.