The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender

by Leslye Walton

  Gabe was in charge of breakfast, and each morning prepared simple culinary comforts: plate-size pancakes with gobs of butter and maple syrup licking down the sides; browned links of sausages; slices of smoked bacon; hard-boiled eggs — all served using Emilienne’s good china and linen napkins and the heavy silver knives and spoons. Gabe put everything on a tray and brought it upstairs to my room, bringing Henry along with him. In his own silent way, Henry was best at getting me to eat, and on the days when I wouldn’t, well, there was always Trouver.

  Lunch was brought up by Cardigan, who dutifully arrived at our front door every afternoon, first just as the sun moved to its one o’clock spot, and then a little later in the day once school began. She brought her schoolwork with her, reading aloud from the books whose pages she’d been assigned and whispering secret plans she’d made for us when I was better.

  “When you’re better . . .” she’d begin.

  Most of the time Cardigan spent the hours of her visit lying next to me, holding my hand as we stared at the wall in silence. Once I turned my unfocused eyes to my best friend and said, “This suits you,” meaning Cardigan’s new, simplified look.

  To which Cardigan replied, “This doesn’t suit you,” meaning everything else.

  Dinner always varied. Sometimes it was brought by my mother. Sometimes it was Penelope or her husband, Zeb, who did card tricks with his calloused hands as I took a few meager bites from my meal. On the days Wilhelmina would come, she’d bring with her tiny satchels of dried herbs, which she’d hand to Viviane with specific instructions for water temperature and seeping time before heading upstairs. When it was ready, Viviane brought the bitter tea with my dinner. We watched and listened as Wilhelmina stood by the open window and sang in a low, melodious voice, tapping out the rhythm of her healing chant on the elk-skin drum she held in her hand. When Wilhelmina sang, my heart slowly became the beating of the drum. My breathing steadied, and I fell into a semi-hypnotic state not unlike that brought on by the chalky white pills, but a much more pleasant one.

  I often thought I was going crazy — or maybe not going but already there. As if my future was only a locked room with white painted walls and white painted floors, with no windows or doors or any means to escape. A place where I opened my mouth to scream but no sound came out.

  Instead of dying, instead of slowly disappearing until only a broken body remained, what happened was quite the opposite — my body began to repair itself.

  I was grateful to the nurse who came every day to change my bulky bandages, even when it was quite clear that I no longer needed them. The nurse never said a word to either my mother or grandmother. I appreciated this; it gave me time to think, and I needed that time, what with all these images of death muddying my thoughts.

  Then one night I awoke to find a man sitting by my bed, one hand covering the place where his face had been shot off.

  “Don’t be afraid,” the man said. His words were thick and warped, as if his voice were leaking out of parts of his body other than his mouth.

  “I’m not,” I replied, my own voice strange with disuse. “I know who you are.”

  If the man could have smiled, he would have. “And who am I, then?”

  “You’re death, of course.” I sighed. “To be honest, I find it comforting that you’ve been looking for me as much as I’ve been looking for you. Will it be long now?”

  “Not long.”

  I shivered. “What is it like? Being dead?”

  “What do you think it is like?”

  I pondered this question, noticing only then that I was still clutching one of Rowe’s letters. “I think death is something like being drugged or having a fever,” I whispered. “Like being a step away from everyone else. A step so large and wide that catching up quickly becomes impossible, and all I can do is watch as everyone I love slowly disappears.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “We all have a choice.”

  I laughed cruelly, but I didn’t care. “Do we? What about you? Did you choose to come here? To spend your afterlife as a misshapen monster?”

  “Ah, ma petite-nièce, I volunteered.”

  “Why?”

  The man stood. “Love makes us such fools,” he said, his transparent form shimmering slightly before disappearing completely.

  For the first time in six months, I pulled myself up into a sitting position. I lowered my weak legs to the floor and tried to walk across the room in shaky steps to the window. The maple tree outside stood against the dark sky, its bare limbs shivering in the cold. I looked down at the road knowing that in only a matter of hours it would bring Rowe home on break for the holidays. I had read every one of his letters so many times it was as if each word had been permanently inscribed on the inside of my eyelids. I knew that in the second letter he misspelled the word existence, replacing the second e with an a; in the fourth he forgot to dot the i in believe. I slept with them not under my pillow but clutched in my hand, with the sweat from my dreams leaking from my palms and smudging the ink. And I’d read the last line of the letter I received only a few days before — the final Rowe would send before coming home — until the words had lost all meaning to my head and only my heart still understood.

  I loved you before, Ava. Let me love you still.

  IN THE BEDROOM across the hall, my grandmother was deep in a dream. In it she was back in Beauregard’s Manhatine, in the apartment with the cracked porcelain kitchen sink and the bureau with the drawer where, once upon a time, baby Pierette had slept. Her three siblings sat waiting for her around the wooden table, their faces and bodies whole and intact — René’s handsome face handsome yet again, Margaux’s heart beating underneath her solid rib cage, Pierette fluffing her bright-yellow hair.

  René stood and wrapped Emilienne in his arms, then picked her up from the ground with one easy lift and plunked her into the chair in between her sisters.

  “We’ve been waiting for you.” Margaux motioned at the two decks of cards sitting in the middle of the table. “None of us can remember how to play bezique.”

  “You can’t play bezique with four players,” Emilienne answered. “You’re thinking of pinochle.”

  Pierette wrinkled her nose. “What’s the difference?”

  Emilienne shuffled the cards, marveling at the agility of her fingers, at the plump skin across her hands. Pausing in her card playing, she wrapped a curl of her thick hair around her finger, relishing the black color that the years had faded first to gray and then to white. On her feet were a pair of laced black shoes, and on her head, newly painted with red poppies, was the cloche hat.

  “I never liked that hat,” Pierette mused.

  “I think I liked you more as a bird,” Emilienne answered, and the four began to laugh.

  Emilienne drifted back into consciousness. In the dark she could barely make out the shadowed shapes in her bedroom: the faded wedding picture propped up on the bedside table, the rose-colored chair with the cat hair matted to the side, and the man sitting in the chair, his handsome face as handsome as it once was.

  “None of us can remember how to play bezique,” René said.

  “I think you mean pinochle.” Emilienne pulled the metal string on the lamp near her bed, and the light cast a soft glow across the room.

  “Do I?”

  “Yes, I think you do.” Emilienne rose from the bed and shook out her dark hair from the chignon she would no longer wear at the nape of her neck. She slid her hand into the crook of René’s offered elbow and gave it a light squeeze with young agile fingers.

  “We were hoping you’d be able to play us a tune on that harpsichord of yours,” he said as he led her from the room.

  “Oh? Well, I think that would be lovely.”

  I peered out into the hallway, startled to find it empty. Hadn’t I heard someone out there? I crept past my doorway, each step announcing itself with a long wailing creak. I paused and listened to the ni
ght sounds of the house: the motorized purr of one of the cats asleep under my bed, the soft swishing of the long hair on Trouver’s legs as the dog ran in his dreams. There was the distant hum of the refrigerator downstairs, my mother’s soft breathing from the room across the hall.

  A soft glow spilled into the hall from under my grandmother’s door. I walked toward it. I turned the doorknob slowly. Blinking in the light, I saw Emilienne tucked in her four-poster bed. Her eyes were closed, her white hair spread out across the pillows, her lips slightly parted as if she were waiting to speak.

  I leaned down and pressed my face close to hers, determined not to breathe until I felt my grandmother’s breath on my cheek. After a few moments of struggling, I finally exhaled and leaned my forehead against her cold cheek.

  No one had occupied the third floor of our house since the days of Fatima Inês. It was believed that the room upstairs had long ago belonged to her and that her ghost kept everyone away from that floor. I learned the truth behind this myth when I entered the room with cautious, shaky steps. It was not the ghost of Fatima Inês that greeted me.

  Birds perched on the rafters, each tipping its head curiously as I made my way past the dilapidated canopy bed, the dresser, the rocking horse. Their nests rested along the beams; their droppings covered the floor. They called to one another in a language only they understood. I glanced around at these strange-looking birds with big black crow bodies and tiny white dove heads, noting that never before had I seen such a bird. Not in the sky above my house. Not in the trees in my yard. And not in Nathaniel Sorrows’s front room. These were Fatima Inês’s birds — the very descendants of the doves who had escaped from their hutches to breed with the crows. Somehow, they were more resilient than all the other birds in the neighborhood. This I found most heartening.

  The birds fell silent when I opened the door to the rickety widow’s walk and stepped outside. I could see all of Seattle glowing beneath a handful of stars. The full moon cast a shimmering silver light on the ground below. My bare feet began to burn from the cold, and I looked down at the house next door.

  Marigold Pie’s house sat abandoned and vacant. They’d found Marigold in one of the upstairs bedrooms looking a bit like a whale-size Sleeping Beauty with stale cookie crumbs scattered across the pillow. When she finally awoke, Marigold, who had no intention of losing weight, joined a circus traveling through Seattle. She spent the rest of her years as the carnival’s beloved Fat Lady in a tent between the Human Pincushion and Errol, the cloven-hoofed boy. She often sent me postcards from her travels. Later, at the occasion of her death, Marigold willed me Nathaniel’s journal — discovered in her yard the night of my attack. It took me years to open its pages, even longer to read them.

  Stalks of tall purple herbs gradually claimed her yard. Now, in December, the honey-sweet scent of lavender was finally strong enough to cover the horrid stench of the birds found rotting throughout the house. All that remained of Nathaniel Sorrows was a permanent field of purple flowers, a black mark on the concrete, and a bitter taste in the back of the throat the very few times his name was mentioned.

  A car turned onto Pinnacle Lane, and I watched as it made its way up the Coopers’ driveway. Two shapes emerged from the car. The larger one was undeniably Zeb Cooper, which meant the other had to be Rowe.

  I smiled then in spite of myself. I smiled past all of my misgivings and reservations, past all previous heartbreak and any future heartbreak, because Rowe had come back. It was true, what he had written to me. Suddenly the weary burden of my attack didn’t seem quite so heavy as I remembered something else he wrote.

  You don’t have to carry it by yourself.

  “It is all right, now? Yes?”

  I turned around to see a translucent figure moving among the birds. Wrapped around her was the hooded green cloak that once hid her thick eyebrows and chapped lips from suspicious neighbors; it was the same cloak I’d used to hide my wings from mine.

  I nodded. Yes. It was all right.

  And with that, the ghost of Fatima Inês waved good-bye to her birds and slowly faded into the night.

  AT THE EDGE of the town’s reservoir, on the neighborhood’s highest point — the hill at the end of Pinnacle Lane was a close second — stood a little white house. Hidden by a grove of maple trees, the house had once been occupied by an old man and his wife. They had spent their autumn days scooping five-pointed leaves of orange, gold, and red from its still waters and turned the radio up when young lovers visited the isolated place, smiling at one another as they closed the curtains against the night.

  From the attic window of the little white house, one could see the whole neighborhood, which some say was the very reason Jack Griffith bought it. Standing underneath the eaves, Jack could peer across the calm reservoir waters to where Viviane Lavender had once watched the moon disappear, where months earlier a group of cynical teenagers had met the myth they’d never quite believed. From there, Jack could see all the contributions of little Fatima Inês de Dores and her ship captain brother: the post office, the drugstore, the brick elementary-school building, the Lutheran church. He could see Emilienne’s bakery, where customers came to purchase a morning sticky bun from the American-Indian woman behind the counter, where the wafting scents of cinnamon and vanilla comforted even the surliest souls. He could see the new police station and the rows of identical houses that had sprung up after the war. And he could see, at the end of Pinnacle Lane, a house painted the color of faded periwinkles. It had a white wraparound porch and an onion-domed turret in the back. The second-floor bedrooms had giant bay windows. A widow’s walk topped the house, its balcony turned toward Salmon Bay.

  I like to think that when Jack Griffith looked up at that moment, he saw a figure on the balcony perched precariously on the widow’s walk atop the Lavender house, surrounded by a flock of peculiar birds singing an unusual song only they seemed to understand. I like to think that he saw me, the loosened ends of my long bandages and the wispy tangled curls of my hair reaching out to the wind, the skirt of my nightgown billowing in melodic waves. I like to think that he watched as I climbed over the side of the rickety widow’s walk, my toes perched on the ledge, my fingers clasped lightly to the railing behind me. Perhaps he noted, with quiet irony, that never before had anyone more resembled an angel. I like to think that he marveled at the mass of bandages that unraveled completely and tumbled to the ground, and at the pair of pure white wings that unfolded from my shoulder blades and arched, large and strong, over my head.

  But, mostly, I like to think that Jack Griffith, my father, smiled as I let go of the railing behind me and, stretching my wings to that star-studded sky, soared into the night.

  fin

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I feel incredibly fortunate to have the support of a group of people without whom this book would have been nothing more than a fictional world I visited during conversation lulls:

  Bernadette Baker-Baughman, agent extraordinaire and literary super-goddess, who believed in Ava from the very beginning. There aren’t enough words to describe how lucky I feel to have such a rock star for an agent.

  My editor, Mary Lee Donovan, whose fathomless dedication and encouragement helped make this book into what it is today. I owe so much gratitude to the entire Candlewick and Walker Books family for their hard work — most especially Sherry Fatla, Gill Evans, Sarah Foster, Angela Van Den Belt, Tracy Miracle, and Angie Dombroski. A very special thank-you to Pier Gustafson for the incredible job on the family tree, and Matt Roeser for the book jacket and cover design. It is far more beautiful than anything I could have imagined. Also, many thanks to the extraordinary Chandler Crawford for helping introduce Ava to the world, as well as to Gretchen Stelter, Nick Harris, and Christine Munroe for their tireless enthusiasm and insight.

  Of course, none of this would have been possible without the constant love and support of my family and friends. Many thanks to Andrea Paris for inviting me over to her dad’s little white
house on the reservoir when we were in eighth grade. The beauty of that place never left me. Thank you, David Seal, for telling me I was already a writer when I told you that was all I wanted to be, and Whitney Otto for believing this little book of mine was something worth reading. Liz Buelow, my first reader, for your brilliance, honesty, and all those late-night brainstorm sessions over sushi and sake.

  Thank you to my girls — Anna, Annelise, Carissa, Duffy, Maren, Megan, Nova, Reba, Raquel, and Stephanie — who know me better than anyone and love me anyway. You are the strangest, most beautiful people I know, and I’m grateful for you every day. To my gorgeous students, thanks for making me laugh and for thinking I’m cool even though we all know I’m not. You’re the lights of my life. To my parents, thank you for allowing me to grow into a very imaginative (if not slightly delusional) adult. It’s served me well. My irmã, Nichele, thank you for always telling me like it is, and thanks as well to my three-year-old niece, Kaeloni, who’d never forgive her tía for not thanking her in her first book.

  And finally, to my Good Luck Charm for being right all along. I can’t remember exactly what it was you said, but I swear I remember everything else. Tenho saudades tuas.