The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender

by Leslye Walton

  “I wish you didn’t make me do that. You have such a pretty mouth,” he said, stroking my cheek.

  He flipped me on my stomach then, my face pressed against the carpet and my arms trapped beneath me. Keeping a firm grasp on my wings, he undid his belt. My wings shuddered. I felt as much as heard my own screams, so wretched and desperate that they sounded inhuman.

  “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve imagined this,” he whispered. “How many times I’ve been aroused by the thought of downy pillows and cotton balls and rain-heavy clouds.”

  He rubbed my feathers between his fingers, then dipped his face to my shoulder blades. I could feel his breath on my skin. “Because that’s what I imagine an angel will feel like.”

  I remember pain. White-hot searing pain. And shame.

  Then, clutching my feathers in his fists, he began to cry. “You’re just a girl!” he wailed. “Jesus Christ. You’re just a girl after all.” Huge racking sobs rattled his chest.

  “You stupid bitch!” he screamed, his voice hoarse with rage. He ripped feathers from my wings as he pushed into me deeper. Fiercer.

  The ax blade was little — no larger than his fist — but it was sharp and when he yanked it from the woodpile, maybe he thought it would slice through my wings easily. But mine were nothing like the tiny bird wings he’d amputated before. My wings were strong and virile and had no intention of giving up without a fight. They thrashed and flailed so much that in the end he had to lunge and hack away at them like a crazed butcher.

  When it was over, he tossed the ax to the floor next to my amputated wings.

  “You tricked me,” he sneered. I moaned while he wiped the blood from his face.

  Then he ran.

  Emilienne made her way through a puddle in the hallway of her house with slow, cautious steps. In the kitchen she took a glass from the cupboard and placed it under the faucet. With a weary glance at the rain seeping in through the cracks around the windows, she realized that more water was the last thing she needed. One of the cats — the needy orange tabby — rubbed against her legs and mewed. What did Viviane call this one? Underfoot? Well, she thought, reaching down and lifting him into her arms, that seems fitting.

  “Are the kids upstairs?” she asked the cat. He blinked once with his cerebral green eyes, which she took as a reassuring yes. As she was carrying him past the living room, the cat made a low moaning sound and jumped out of her arms, skidding on his hind legs as he fled down the hallway. In the living room, René sat on the harpsichord bench, his fingers tapping various keys in a silent song; he was alone.

  Emilienne could still see the damage William Peyton had done to René’s face so many years ago. One eye stared blindly over her shoulder, the color muted by a white film; the other eye hung from its socket and rested on the sharp edge of his exposed cheekbone. Of his nose there was only a sliver of cartilage left. There was no mouth, no chin; his jaw hung at a crude and broken angle, which explained why his voice sounded so thick-tongued. As far as Emilienne could tell, he hadn’t a tongue at all. Or any teeth.

  “Oh, René.” Emilienne sank down beside him.

  Later, when remembering this moment, Emilienne would recall how morbidly suitable she found his deformed face, how apt it seemed to hear such horror related by such a gruesome source. Because it was horrific, what he was telling her. Indescribably, unimaginably horrific. She thought it strange that she felt nothing at all when he tried to hold her hand; his transparent fingers slipped through hers. When he finished telling her the terrible truth, she rose from the bench, smoothed the wrinkles from her skirt. She walked out of the room and through the water in the hallway to the phone, dialed the number to the police station, and in a clear voice gave the operator the address on Pinnacle Lane where Marigold Pie lived with her nephew.

  Before she left the house herself, she turned back to René. “Don’t you dare take her with you,” she pleaded.

  “I don’t want to,” he croaked.

  WHEN MY GRANDMOTHER reached Marigold Pie’s front yard, a crisp lightning bolt cracked overhead, quickly followed by a thunderous boom! In the moment when the lightning lit up the sky, Emilienne noted that the letter P in Marigold Pie’s name was missing from the mailbox. It lay under the giant rhododendron bush that blocked the house from the road. The letter must have fallen off, landing upside down and backward so that it resembled not a P but a lowercase b. With ironic despair, Emilienne thought, Henry, I’ve finally found your b in the bush.

  The front door was open, the house dark and quiet. Emilienne shivered, partly from the cold, partly from fear. But then she entered and resignation settled over her. She found a light switch and flicked it on. The floor and walls of the hallway were splattered with what looked like paint, so bright was the red. The air was thick with brown-and-white-speckled feathers. She choked as if they were going into her mouth, up her nose, into her lungs. Frantically, Emilienne brushed them away from her face.

  There’s blood on the floor and feathers everywhere.

  When Emilienne first entered the back room, her heart galloped with some relief: her granddaughter didn’t have blond hair. But then she saw the bloody stumps on my back. And saw my wings — a bloody mess of torn sinews and feathers and broken bones cast aside on the carpet. The bile rose in her throat, and her heart sank. It was me after all.

  Emilienne knelt down and pressed her face close to mine, refusing to breathe until she felt my breath on her cheek. There it was. Quickly she pulled off her wet coat and pushed it against the wounds. There was so much blood. The carpet was sticky with it. Red rings leaked through both sides of the coat, and Emilienne’s hands were soon covered with blood too. And though she didn’t need to see it to know it was there, she looked up anyway. There it was, hanging over the mantel.

  The cat on the wall.

  “Heart in my mouth” was a phrase my mother had never understood. As she sped toward Pinnacle Lane, Henry and Trouver trying to stay upright in the seat beside her, Viviane’s heart was not in her mouth. What good could it do in her mouth? Her heart had leaped out of her chest and was racing two feet in front of the truck. She could see it in the headlights, its arteries pumping like arms at its side. Viviane wished she could send it farther ahead. She wished that it had already rounded the curve onto Pinnacle Lane. She wished that it was sitting beside me, wherever I was.

  Henry whimpered with worry.

  “We’ll be there soon,” Viviane crooned, creating a little song with the words, something she used to do to soothe him when he was little. Even now, as Henry began to hum the song to himself, she could see the tension wash away from his face.

  The truck sped past the elementary school, the church, and the post office in a wet blur. The rain surged; the wipers barely kept pace. Viviane leaned forward, knuckles white on the steering wheel, and peered into the dark.

  When she saw him — the man running straight toward her — she slammed on the brakes. The tires ripped hard through the clattering rain with a squeal, and she threw her arm out to stop Trouver and Henry from crashing into the windshield. The man stopped in front of the truck and stared at Viviane with wild black eyes, his face streaked with red. Blood, she realized with horror.

  Before Viviane had time to react, two figures appeared behind him. Translucent and pale, they shimmered in the truck’s headlights. Their eyes were opaque and blind; water poured over their monstrous gray skin. One figure cradled a baby over the place where her heart should have been. The other flashed from canary to girl, reaching out an arm in rage to grab at the man.

  And then they were upon him.

  Viviane watched in terror as the translucent figures engulfed him. His screams, hoarse and inhuman, filled the night.

  With a sudden flash, the street burst into flames. The heat scorched the glass of the windshield. The man tried to flee — wildly thrashing his arms — but his movements only seemed to feed the fire.

  And then, just as suddenly, the fire and its victim were gone
, leaving only the heavy stench of singed skin.

  Trouver turned a nervous half-circle on the truck seat, whining and stepping on Henry.

  “You stay here. Don’t move,” Viviane told Henry. She threw the truck into park and flung open the door. The dog leaped out after her and circled the truck in hurried steps, his body tucked low to the ground. In front of the truck, a black mark scarred the pavement where the wretched man had stood. She recalled the man’s eyes — black, feral, and unblinking. Viviane dropped to her knees, sinking into the puddle of water around the truck, and ran her fingers over the mark. It was still hot to the touch.

  She looked up in time to see the specters fade into the darkness.

  The ambulance arrived at Marigold Pie’s house, soon followed by the local police. The flashing lights had drawn all of Pinnacle Lane to the scene. There were the old Moss sisters in their matching house shoes and coats and a single umbrella protecting their curlers from the rain. There was a sleepy and bed-clothed Mart Flannery and his son, Jeremiah. Zeb Cooper had jumped out of bed at the sound of the ambulance’s wail. Wearing nothing but red long johns and a pair of galoshes, he was trying to persuade his curious neighbors to move to the sidewalk. His son, Rowe, was there and his crying daughter, Cardigan — both of their faces white with shock. Next to them was his wife, Penelope, who’d wept upon learning that her own family was all right, and then again when she learned Emilienne’s family was not. There was Wilhelmina Dovewolf, guiding my mother inside Marigold’s house, both quiet in stoic despair.

  There was Constance Quakenbush and Delilah Zimmer, best friends and first-grade teachers at the elementary school. There was Ignatius Lux, the high-school principal, and his wife, Estelle Margolis, and, next to them, Amos Fields, who’d never been much good to anyone since his son died in the Second Great War but always seemed to have money for a morning croissant at Emilienne’s bakery. There was Pastor Trace Graves and some of the high-school kids who’d wandered down from the reservoir. One of the boys thought to grab the big white dog standing in the street and loop his belt around the dog’s neck to keep him out of trouble. A girl wiped the dog’s muddy paws with her jacket. Eventually there were several teams of ambulance attendants and more police officers in stiff blue uniforms, their vehicles crowding the street in a chaotic jumble of flashing lights. When they carried me out — my wingless body prone on a stretcher, my mother and grandmother walking beside me in blood-covered clothes — it was said that the entire block fell silent in reverence.

  The lead attendant was a big surly man who led Emilienne and Viviane into the ambulance behind me, telling his partner to watch them both for shock. Unintentionally, this left Henry to his own devices.

  Though his sister, his mother, and his grandmother were on the way to the nearest hospital, Henry was happy. He was happy because the whole thing was over and he no longer had the responsibility of trying to make the Sad Man’s warning heard. Because once things turned out, good or bad, there’s nothing you can do about it. It just is. And Henry liked just is. Anything else was too complicated.

  Our mother had told him to Stay here. Don’t move. So that was what Henry did. He stayed in the truck. But after a while, Henry realized that though he didn’t see anyone he knew, he did see lots of people he didn’t know, and that made him feel a little sick. Then he saw Trouver. Henry got out of the truck and walked toward the big dog, counting things as he went. Henry counted the flashing lights, the number of people gathered in the street, the umbrellas, the raindrops. He counted because counting always felt good, and it felt bad not being able to see anyone he knew. It also felt bad that Trouver was sitting with another boy, one Henry didn’t know. So Henry stayed focused on counting — counting the number of steps it took to get across the street to Trouver — until someone put a hand on his shoulder.

  Henry screamed. The woman with her hand on his shoulder jumped and pulled her hand away.

  “I’m sorry!” she gasped. “I just thought — you looked lost.” The woman twirled a strand of her copper-colored hair around one of her fingers. She looked around frantically. “I didn’t mean anything by it!” she insisted.

  Wilhelmina rushed over, Penelope right behind her. Wilhelmina spoke to Henry in a soothing voice, all the while motioning for the boy with his belt looped around Trouver’s neck to bring the dog over. Penelope turned to the woman. “What’d you touch him for?” she scolded. “Don’t you think he’s had a rough enough night as it is?”

  The woman released her hair from her finger. “Well, I certainly didn’t mean to upset him. I didn’t know he — I just thought I could help.”

  “And what made you think you could do that?”

  “He looked . . . He needed . . .” she stuttered nonsensically.

  When Laura Lovelorn moved to the neighborhood five years ago, she hadn’t known about Viviane Lavender. Hadn’t even remembered meeting her that night at the summer solstice so many years ago. And during her many trips to the bakery for a loaf of the thick-crusted pain au levain or a dinner baguette, she’d never noticed how much Emilienne Lavender’s grandson resembled her husband. Now she was embarrassed by how blind she’d been.

  After Beatrix Griffith disappeared, Laura moved away from her beloved eastern Washington — with its hot summers and snowy winters — to live with her husband in Seattle, a town known for its year-round rains. She was quickly welcomed into the neighborhood, due mainly to her themed cocktail parties and sweet disposition. She could always be counted on to buy at least one box of shortbread cookies from the local Girl Scout troop, never left the house without her white gloves, never served her husband a meal of leftover casserole, always did everything she was supposed to do. When Jack didn’t want any children, she told the girls at the hospital where she volunteered that she and Jack needed to take care of his father before they started a family of their own. After John Griffith died, she told them she and Jack wanted to travel the world instead, visit the pyramids in Egypt, walk the boot-shaped coastline of Italy. Then when Jack moved to the separate bedroom on the other side of the house, she stopped telling them anything at all.

  It might have been clear to anyone else that Jack was unhappy — that, perhaps, he had never even loved her at all — but Laura refused to see it. She didn’t see the way he avoided the bakery, didn’t see how his eyes squinted shut whenever they passed Pinnacle Lane. She didn’t notice that he rarely spoke to anyone during their infamous parties, that while she served guests from trays of cheese balls and deviled eggs, Jack spent most of the night standing in the corner, smiling blandly while the ice melted in his highball glass. She didn’t see it because when it came to love, she saw what she wanted to see. Laura had always been a good wife. The years she’d been married to Jack Griffith, she’d spent in a love-induced fog, believing that Jack was happy with the life they’d created together and, more significant, that he loved her.

  On this summer solstice, Laura Lovelorn returned home late in the evening to find her husband sitting in the dark, an empty bottle clutched in his hands, his breath reeking of bourbon.

  “I’m a fool, Laura,” he blubbered. “I lost the love of my life tonight.”

  Laura leaned down to stroke her husband’s hair. “What are you talking about, sweetie? I’m right here.” She kissed his forehead.

  Jack looked up at her, blinking. “I wasn’t talking about you.”

  Laura smiled sweetly. “Who, then?”

  “Viviane. Viviane Lavender.”

  And as Jack continued to blubber on about a secret life, a life of love and betrayal, the fog finally lifted from Laura’s eyes.

  “Oh,” Laura had whispered. “Oh my.”

  When he was finished, she walked into the bedroom where she’d slept alone now for so many years. She pulled her suitcase from the closet and packed her belongings, carefully choosing the items she’d take with her and deciding which ones would have to stay until later. She dragged her suitcase out into the hall and told Jack she was leaving him. H
e only waved at her halfheartedly with his bottle, which told Laura how very wrong she’d been. Jack Griffith had never loved her, not as she thought he had and never as he loved Viviane Lavender.

  Laura threw the heavy suitcase into the back of the car and backed out of the driveway. Turning out onto the street, she saw the flashing lights and swarms of people filling the end of Pinnacle Lane. She pulled the car to the side of the road and got out, shielding her eyes from the heavy current of rain pouring from the sky.

  She saw Viviane Lavender’s son before she’d even had time to find out what had happened. Looking at him, she could only shake her head. Henry was a mirror image of Jack Griffith in his former years. Yet there was a look behind the boy’s eyes that was much different from anything Laura ever saw in Jack’s. It was as if Henry carried the world, misshapen and imperfect, in his lovely wide pupils.

  How could she not have seen it?

  Laura grabbed Wilhelmina’s hand in her own. “I just want to help,” she said. Wilhelmina peered over Laura’s shoulder at the crowd. “Help, huh? Well, we might need a bit of that.”

  In the bakery Wilhelmina flipped the switch on the coffee pot. She pulled the porcelain cups and saucers from the cupboard, lining them up on the front counter, each cup balanced on its particular plate. The coffee would have to do until she got the oven started. Penelope sent Zeb off for supplies as Wilhelmina began feeding the brick oven with logs of dried eucalyptus, dismissing any ideas for pastries or other desserts. What everybody needed was bread. Hearty, sustainable bread warm from the oven, with thick crusts on the outside and soft on the inside, topped with butter, honey, or hazelnut spread.

  When Zeb returned, Wilhelmina pointed him to the hand mill and set him to work grinding the fresh spelt, rye, and red wheat they would use to make pain de campagne. She gave Rowe and Cardigan the job of pounding the dough for the baguettes and showed Laura Lovelorn how to tend the fire.