On the morning of midsummer’s eve, Henry awoke and stretched his toes toward the spot on the bed where Trouver was still curled in sleep. Henry liked the feel of the fur on his feet and wiggled them in pleasure until the dog sighed and moved to the floor. Trouver’s fur was one of the few things Henry liked to touch. He liked the feel of my feathers and the soft worn edge of the quilt on his bed. He liked the warm hood of the truck, the engine going tick-tick-tick long after Gabe drove back from town. He liked that too, the engine going tick-tick-tick. He liked that some tree trunks were rough, like the cherry tree in our yard, that others were smooth, and that some were in-between, like the birch trees in front of our grandmother’s bakery. There might have been more things he would like to touch, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t touch many things.
Henry got out of bed and pulled on his red-and-blue-striped T-shirt — the stripes faded from so many washes — over his head. Trouver stretched and licked himself in inappropriate places. Henry didn’t like that word. When Henry heard a word he didn’t like, he had to lie facedown on the floor until the bad feeling stopped. Humming sometimes worked too.
Henry and Trouver shared a piece of toast with orange marmalade for breakfast. If that day were any other day, he might have gone out in the yard to count bugs afterward. He no longer needed to catch them to feed the bat, but Henry liked counting things and he still liked knowing how many there were out there. He liked knowing that there were sixteen stairs to his bedroom and eight bowls in the kitchen cupboards above the sink. He liked clapping his hands five times in a row, even nine times if he needed to, and knew that if he clapped his hands ten times, our mother would ask him to stop in her loud mother voice. If that day were any other day, Henry might have gone back upstairs to his room to find the notebook in which he wrote his favorite words, struggling to keep each letter between the blue lines. But that day wasn’t any other day.
Henry did go back upstairs to his room, but instead of getting his notebook, he emptied his toy chest. He lined up all his stuffed animals along the wall in order of size, and then placed his building blocks and toy cars on the cracks of the floorboards.
When the toy chest was empty, Henry climbed in. Though the toy chest was fairly large and Henry was a fairly small fifteen-year-old boy, he could fit only by hanging his legs over the side. Being in the chest made him feel safe. And safe was how he needed to feel right then. With his knees pointed at his chin Henry could talk to the Sad Man about the maps and the cat on the wall and the bee in the bush.
There were good people and bad people, this Henry knew for sure. His mother was good. And me, of course. Gabe. Trouver wasn’t a person, but he was good all the same. Policemen were good people too. He had learned that a few days earlier when a policeman came into the bakery. The pretty blond woman who worked behind the counter handed the policeman a cup of coffee and a croissant fresh from the oven. When the policeman tried to pay, Penelope said, “On the house.” When he left, the woman turned to Henry and said, “That’s honorable work there. He’s a good man for doing it.”
As for bad people, Henry knew only one. Henry knew he was a bad person because the Sad Man told him so. He also knew that no matter how hard he had tried to tell them, no one else understood this. Not his grandmother, not his mother, not me, not Gabe. Trouver probably did, but he wasn’t a person. Trouver was a dog, and, even if he did understand, what good would that do?
Somehow he had to find a way to leave the house on the hill before the rain came. Because the rain was coming and it all happened after the rain. That’s what the Sad Man said.
From the personal diary of Nathaniel Sorrows:
June 21, 1959
I haven’t left my aunt’s living room since June 18. Three days. I haven’t eaten or slept; instead, I stand in front of the window and watch and wait. Sometimes I write. Sometimes I pace. When I need to relieve myself, I just open the window and piss onto the dried-up flower bed below.
I started this vigil on the day the postman delivered a letter from Pastor Graves. The letter, typed by the church secretary onto reverent-looking parchment paper, stated that my assistance was no longer needed. It also asked me to refrain from crossing onto church grounds. The pastor’s reprimand barely made a bruise on my fevered skin.
The change came four days ago in the midst of the homily. I realized that the church, the holy doctrines, the religious ramblings I’d once tried so hard to follow were all just parts of a lie created by humans so blind and so flawed they’d mistake a divine being for one of their wretched own.
My neighbors are content to sing useless hymns about rivers, fountains, and rocks, but their devotions are empty.
None of them know anything about devotion! I pushed through the parishioners and made my way to the front of the church. From the wooden pulpit, I told them as much, pounding my fist in anger. Behind closed eyes, they prayed for promotions and the newest kitchen gadget. What could they give with their flawed, human love? I had known what she was from the very beginning. An Angel — one of God’s true messengers — lived at the end of my road. I had touched her feathers with my outstretched fingers, had caught a fever from the mere touch of her rosebud tongue.
I know what they saw: my wrinkled clothes; the dark circles under my eyes, weak and red from so many sleepless nights; hair matted with unwash. Pastor Graves approached me. He covered my hand with his own. I could read the fear in his eyes, saw how the irises bled black into the brown.
“Of whom do you speak?” he asked quietly.
I began to laugh.
I pulled my hand out from under Pastor Graves’s light grip. How sorry I felt for the reverend, his life wasted on such a monstrous bunch of tricks! I left the church then, knowing, even before receiving the letter, that I would never return.
FOR FOURTEEN YEARS, I could only watch from my window each time Pinnacle Lane was transformed for the solstice celebration. From a distance, I watched the neighborhood men set up booths where chocolate truffles, plates of krumkake, and husks of yellow corn would be sold for a nickel; I watched gaggles of girls from the high school’s Key Club arrive with their mothers in tow, toting pies to sell for the benefit of the Veterans Hospital downtown; I watched the musicians gather, bringing mandolins, accordions, creaky violins, xylophones, clarinets, and sitars; I watched the giant bonfire in the school parking lot blaze against the night sky; and I cursed every living thing with feathers.
But that year was going to be different.
Cardigan had been secretly preparing for solstice for weeks. She didn’t even let Rowe or me in on her plan until the day before, when she told Rowe to meet us not at the bottom of the hill as usual, but at the festival itself.
“You’ll see why soon enough!” Cardigan told him, laughing.
I stood in front of my bedroom window, watching the sunset paint glorious shades of orange and purple across the sky while Cardigan brushed my hair. The festivities were already well under way, but I’d insisted on waiting until the sun had set to make my escape. It would already be far earlier than I’d ever been out before — it was risky.
But what a risk to take, I thought, smiling to myself.
It took Cardigan a few hours of persistent nagging to convince me to cut and dye my hair.
“Just think,” Cardigan said, “no one will recognize you.”
“I think the wings will probably give me away,” I said dryly.
“That’s what those are for.” Cardigan pointed to a set of wings in the corner, the very ones Gabe had made when he had hoped to teach me to fly. Seeing those wings made my chest ache. I looked away. I didn’t want to be sad. Not that day.
Cardigan and I suspected Gabe had a new sweetheart. He’d rarely been home in weeks. When I did see him, it seemed he was always on his way out, his hands scrubbed clean, the collar on his shirt freshly pressed, his woodsy smell replaced with the sharp tang of cologne that my mother always pretended to be offended by. He left his dilapidated pickup truck in the drive
way. Perhaps his sweetheart was too delicate for those tattered, threadbare seats. Whoever she was.
I wrinkled my nose. “How are those supposed to help?”
“If I wear them, there will be two angels, not one,” Cardigan said defensively. “It’ll throw people off your scent.” She held up the mangled mess with her fingers. “I glued a bunch of feathers to ’em. So, see? No one will think your wings are real. They’ll just assume we’re both wearing costumes. Plus, a lot of people still think the Angel never leaves the house. And that she only wears white. And that she has talons —”
“I don’t have . . . what?”
“Talons,” Cardigan made her finger into a hook. “You know, like an eagle.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “I do not have . . . those.”
Cardigan shrugged. “I know, but there’ve been speculations. Which,” she quickly added, “only further supports what I’ve been saying: no one will know it’s you because you won’t be what they’re expecting.”
I watched nervously as dark strands of my hair fell and gathered at my feet.
“It keeps sticking to your feathers,” Cardigan said, checking to be sure she’d cut each side evenly.
The bleach took the longest, and for a moment we both feared I would end up with orange hair. But when the smell of bleach finally stopped burning my eyes, Cardigan took a step back and whistled. “Jeez, Ava. You are one hot blonde!”
In ancient Gaul the midsummer celebration was called the Feast of Epona, named after the goddess of abundance, sovereignty, and the harvest. She was portrayed as a woman riding a mare. The pagans celebrated solstice with bonfires believed to possess a form of earthly magic, granting maidens insight on their future husbands and banishing spirits and demons. The men of the Hopi tribe dressed in traditional masks to honor the kachinas, the dancing spirits of rain and fertility who were believed to leave the villages at midsummer to visit the dead underground and hold ceremonies on their behalf. In Russia young girls floated their flower garlands down rivers, reading one another’s fortunes by the movement of the flowers on the water. In Sweden neighbors gathered to raise and dance around a huge maypole draped in greenery and flowers. They call it Litha or Vestalia in Rome, Gathering Day in Wales, All Couples’ Day in Greece. It’s Sonnwend, Feill-Sheathain, Thing-Tide, the feast day of John the Baptist.
For the people of Pinnacle Lane, the solstice celebration was a chance to shed their cloaks of modesty and decorum, and replace them with wildflowers woven in their hair. Only during the summer solstice did the old Moss sisters remove their crosses from between their low-hanging breasts and drink themselves silly on great pints of malt liquor. Only during solstice could Pastor Graves forgive himself for his favorite sweet, the Nipples of Venus, feasting on white chocolate from the truffle’s teat. And only during solstice could Rowe Cooper arrive at the festival to find two identical winged girls waiting for him.
“How d-did you . . . ?” Rowe flicked his fingers at the feathers sprouting from his sister’s shoulder blades.
Cardigan hit his hand away. “Don’t. They’re not dry yet. Pretty neato, huh?”
Rowe turned toward me. “I like your hair.”
I smiled.
Rowe glanced from girl to girl. “So, why do you look the same?”
Cardigan put an arm around me. “We’re blending in.”
As we wandered through the festivities, I saw something new or strange at every turn: an ambush of tiny tigers and panda bears, their face paint smeared, their fingers clasping giant sticks of cotton candy; men and women in medieval garb; a small girl in a wheelchair, her legs encased by a shiny fabric mermaid tail. There were Norwegian mormors dressed in their woolen bunads, and Shakespeare’s mule-headed Bottom stumbling from tents of sheer turquoise and white. The crowds of solstice revelers were so strange that, for perhaps the first time ever, I fit in. I grabbed Cardigan and swung her around right there in front of a booth selling wind chimes. Then I laughed out loud because no one even glanced at the angels dancing to the chimes ringing in the growing breeze. Cardigan was right. We blended in beautifully.
I’d spent so many years imagining the event, placing myself in the crowd, that I wondered if maybe, in the end, it wouldn’t matter if I actually felt the flames of the bonfire on my face. I often wondered the same thing about being kissed. Or falling in love. Did I need to experience them if I could imagine them? A part of me feared that Pinnacle Lane’s solstice celebration couldn’t possibly live up to la fête in my head.
I was thrilled to discover I was wrong. From my window for the past fourteen years, I hadn’t been able to hear the crowds sing along when the street-corner musicians played rowdy drinking songs on their mandolins and sitars. I couldn’t observe lovers finding shadows perfect for private trysts. I hadn’t known how easy it would be to avoid getting caught by my grandmother, the heat from the ovens clouding the bakery’s windows all night. Or how hard I would laugh when Rowe let the Kiwanis Key Club girls paint a tri-colored rainbow across his left cheek. And I hadn’t known how my heart would pound when Rowe pulled me aside, gently took my face in his hands, and pressed his lips to mine.
When the celebration came to an end, the fire was doused with buckets filled with water from the bay. Mothers gathered their children and husbands. Panda bears and tigers became sticky little boys and girls once again. And two angels and one boy with a rainbow painted on his cheek made their way back to Pinnacle Lane.
My mother insisted she had smelled the rain before it came. It had been a beautiful day, all clear blue skies and warm sunshine. There had been no indication that it would be anything but a picturesque midsummer’s night, except for the smell. The coming rain smelled different from any other she’d ever known. It didn’t smell like a summer rain, or even like a spring rain that had been waiting to escape water-heavy clouds since February. It didn’t smell murky, like the rain from last winter’s floods that poured into basements and left the neighborhood dogs stranded on the roofs of their doghouses. This rain smelled eerily to her like nothing at all. Or, if anything, it smelled the way she suspected an omen might smell: a lunar eclipse, the evil eye, the number 13. It smelled, also, like fear.
When Viviane sensed its approach, she had to suppress an instinct to hide. Fear had that effect. Instead, she washed the dishes in the sink. She made a casserole, not that there was anyone around to eat it. Her mother was still at the bakery — had been since early that morning — preparing for that night’s festival. Viviane hadn’t seen Gabe in a while, days even, though his truck sat parked in the driveway. She tried not to think about where he might be. Cardigan and I had insisted we weren’t hungry, and my mother assumed we were holed up in my room for the night. Then there was Henry.
Henry had been particularly agitated lately. Viviane had caught him sneaking off the hill — and by himself at that! — at least three separate times that day. It seemed whenever she looked outside, there he was, marching down the hill with that big white dog traipsing beside him. At least right now she knew both he and Trouver were in Henry’s room, fast asleep. Just in case, she peeked in on him one more time, relieved to see his sleeping head resting on his pillow.
The barren smell of the coming rain drove her to plug her nose with a clothespin. Viviane tried to remember what her mother had said about counteracting bad omens: a robin flying into the house was considered lucky. As was meeting three sheep or an itch on the top of your head. None seemed a very relevant (or practical, Viviane thought) solution until Viviane remembered the one about salt. Returning to the kitchen, Viviane hesitantly reached for the saltshaker, slowly spilled a bit of salt into her hand, then tossed it over her left shoulder. Tentatively, Viviane pulled the clothespin from her nose and breathed deeply, but, alas, the stench of impending disaster was still there.
Within that same hour, Viviane picked up a pin, dropped a glove, and turned her dress inside out and wore it with the pockets exposed and flapping at her sides. She knocked on wood until
her knuckles ached and went searching through the house on her knees until she found a penny, since, apparently, picking them up was supposed to ensure some kind of daylong good luck. She turned around seven times clockwise. Crossed her fingers. Hopped backward over a broom. After all of these, she unclasped the clothespin from her nose and took a deep breath, waiting to be filled with a sense of relief. But it never came.
Finally, she surrendered and retreated to hide in the basement with the tumbling towels and the warm dryer and one of her mother’s cigars.
Tossing the clothespin aside, Viviane took a few puffs on the cigar. She felt calmer and was relieved to discover that the only thing she could smell then was the crude odor of the cigar. She rubbed her eyes. Imagine, getting this unsettled over a smell, she thought. Feeling somewhat embarrassed and silly, Viviane stubbed out the cigar and made her way back upstairs.
And that’s when the rain began to fall.
The rain increased steadily over the next hour, beating a staccato rhythm against the rooftops. People in the same houses had to yell over the noise to ask if there was a bucket to place under the leaks that were appearing in hallways, kitchens, bedrooms.
In the Lavender house, water leaked in around the poorly sealed windows, flooded the entryway with puddles, and filled the rooms with an unpleasant stink of fear.
Viviane made a mental checklist for Gabe — water damage to carpets, wood floors, and walls; leaking roof and windows — then climbed up the rickety stairs to check on the second floor.
Viviane knocked softly on my bedroom door. “Ava?” she called. “Cardigan?” Receiving no answer, she opened the door. Tufts of my long dark hair blew across the floor. The redolence of bleach stung her nose. The room, Viviane realized with stark dread, was empty. She stuck her head out the open window and peered into the rain. The bark of the cherry tree outside my room was spattered with wet brown and white feathers.
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender Page 16
