The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender (12 page)

Viviane watched a tribe of carpenter ants surround a glob of boric acid and honey, a toxic concoction Emilienne had put out underneath the porch swing. The ants resembled black petals around a golden circle. The ants drank their fill, then made their way back to their nest in the wall. There they unknowingly poisoned their babies before dying themselves. Viviane imagined the nests as tombs, the bodies piling up.

By this point Viviane Lavender had loved Jack Griffith for twelve years, which was far more than half of her life. If she thought of her love as a commodity and were to, say, eat it, it would fill 4,745 cherry pies. If she were to preserve it, she would need 23,725 glass jars and labels and a basement spanning the length of Pinnacle Lane.

If she were to drink it, she’d drown.

In the kitchen Emilienne feigned interest in the dish towel in her hand as Viviane slowly made her way back into the house, her steps awkward under her tremendous belly.

“Is it getting warm out there?” Emilienne asked, her tone more gruff than she intended. Did she always sound so cold? she wondered. So stern? So heartless?

“Hmm. A bit,” Viviane replied.

The sound of hammer against nail could be heard coming from upstairs, where Gabe was converting one of the bedrooms into a nursery. The noise made Viviane wince.

“Viviane —” Emilienne started.

Viviane raised her head, and in that moment, when mother and daughter locked eyes, Emilienne felt a rush of cold fill her lungs. As her head flooded with images of last midsummer’s night — a night of broken dahlias and broken promises — Emilienne recalled a time when love, and not longing, filled her, too, with its icy breath.

Before Emilienne could say what was on her mind, Viviane turned and walked out of the kitchen. “I’m going to take a nap.”

“On your way, go take a look at the damn nursery!” Emilienne shouted after her. Emilienne threw the dish towel on the counter and ran her hands miserably over her face. “I’m going to the bakery,” she murmured to no one.

Emilienne used the bakery to hide from the horrible mess that was her daughter’s life.
Pregnant
, she thought disbelievingly,
and with Jack Griffith’s child, no less.
That talent for avoidance was something that Wilhelmina never failed to mention when Emilienne came in on her days off.

The bakery’s success had now lasted eighteen years thanks to Emilienne’s skills as a French
pâtissier
and Wilhelmina Dovewolf’s clever nose for business. It was her now-partner Wilhelmina’s idea to hire local high-school boys to walk door to door through the neighborhood carrying baskets of fragrant loaves and morning buns. As business thrived, the routes became longer, and these boys — eventually known as Emilienne’s Bakery Boys — began using bicycles to make deliveries, balancing their breadbaskets on either side of the back tire. Their shiny red bikes became a familiar sight not only on Pinnacle Lane, but also well into the Ballard neighborhood and up past Phinney Ridge.

The bakery survived the Depression by selling jams, jellies, cured meats, and eggs whenever Emilienne could get them. She kept her customers loyal by offering them store credit. Some attributed the very survival of the neighborhood to Emilienne during those tough times — if someone was hungry, they could always get bread from the bakery.

They added wedding cakes to their pastry repertoire after beloved high-school teacher Ignatius Lux married Estelle Margolis in a small ceremony at the Lutheran church. The celebration ended with a four-tiered cake baked by Emilienne just for the occasion. Happy smiles were shared between the bride and groom, but it was the cake their guests remembered — the vanilla custard filling, the buttercream finish, the slight taste of raspberries that had surely been added to the batter. No one brought home any slices of leftover cake to place under their pillow, hoping to dream of their future mate; instead, the guests of Ignatius Lux and Estelle Margolis ate the whole cake and then had dreams of eating it again. After this wedding unmarried women woke in the night with tears in their eyes, not because they were alone, but because there wasn’t any cake left. Needless to say, the cake later became one of the bakery’s most popular items, requested for every event, large or small.

Emilienne picked up the keys to the bakery from the counter and made her way to the front door. Emilienne kept the keys on a leather rope worn smooth from the hours it spent hanging around her neck. They never left her — she even kept them on her pillow as she slept.

Emilienne stepped onto the porch, blinking in the spring sun. As she closed the door, the sound of Gabe’s diligent working quieted to a distant pounding. At the bakery Emilienne was always in charge. Not even Wilhelmina dared to make a decision without consulting Emilienne first. She sighed. If only that were the case at home.

What actually belonged in a nursery still remained a mystery to Gabe, but he’d managed to make a crib and placed it near the window. He was trying to decide the color for the walls when Viviane slipped into the room behind him.

“Green,” Viviane said, glancing down at the buckets of white and blue between his feet.

Gabe looked up, startled to see her. “What kind of green?” he asked.

“Light, but not lime. More like apple green. Spring green.”

Gabe nodded in agreement. “Spring green it is.”

Gabe never needed very much sleep at all and instead spent most nights the way he spent his days — working on the house, the beat of his hammer and the raking of his saw making their way into my mother’s dreams. Some nights he did no work at all and instead celebrated his renovations with creamy bottles of home-brewed beer. My mother spent those nights in a dreamless sleep.

Gabe watched as Viviane walked around the room. He was pleased to see her bathed. Gabe wasn’t sure if it had been Emilienne’s or Wilhelmina’s doing, but he hoped Viviane herself had washed the cherry juice from her hands, tied the red ribbon in her hair. Perhaps it was a sign of something good to come.

She ran her fingertips across the newly sanded crib, paused to admire the curtains in the windows. Gabe held his breath when she noticed the tiny sculpture hanging above the crib.

“Feathers,” she said, offering a vague smile.

“Well, I thought, maybe, it would be . . .” Gabe stammered, unsure how to explain what compelled him to collect discarded feathers from the neighborhood birds and hang them over the place where Viviane’s child would sleep.

Once, after a particularly wet night of celebrating, Gabe had found himself in Viviane’s room, kneeling by her bed. Even though she was miserable, even though she was filthy — her feet were encrusted in dirt, and there were circles of red juice around her frowning mouth and on the palms of her hands — he still found her beautiful. He had lightly pressed a hand to the mound of her belly. In case she were to ask him, he had thought about names for the baby. Maybe Alexandria or Elise for a girl, and if a boy, Dmitry.

As he was about to pull his hand away, he felt it: a light fluttering from beneath his hand. And though Gabe knew the common term was
quickening
, he could hardly keep from laughing out loud: it had felt just like wings!

Viviane smiled again. “Feathers are fine, Gabe,” she said, and walked out of the room, leaving Gabe to stumble over the fact that for the first time, Viviane Lavender had said his name. That fact filled Gabe with so much hope that he grew another two inches just to have enough room to hold it all.

Hardly a soul slept the night my mother was in labor. Nocturnal birds gathered on the lawns like pious parishioners to eat noisily, their doomed prey screaming wildly into the dark. Earlier in the day, the crows and sparrows had tormented the neighborhood with angry calls, flying into windows and after small children. Viviane, however, was unaware of the strange disturbance her upcoming delivery had brought to the neighborhood birds.

Gabe drove her to the hospital in the clunky Chevy truck he’d bought for the odds-and-ends jobs he took around town. Emilienne was still at the bakery, and there was no time.

“No time!” Viviane screamed from the passenger side of the truck, her clenched fists as tight as the ball of her belly. She squeezed her eyes shut in pain, and a slick layer of sweat gathered above her upper lip.

Gabe reached across the old truck and grabbed her hand — slightly disgusted with himself for finding pleasure in being able to touch her at such a time.

“Hold on, there, Vivi,” he said. “We’ll be there soon.”

Gabe was forced to remain in the waiting room as Viviane was whisked away by a pair of apron-clad nurses, who quickly set her up in a sterile white room before their squeaky shoes took them back down the hall.

Alone, my mother cried and screamed. Screamed for the nurses, for Jack, even for her mother — though Emilienne was hardly the type to hold her daughter’s hand or wipe her forehead with a damp cloth. And when the pain felt too great, when it felt like the contractions would split her in half, the squeaky shoes finally returned, bringing with them a cold syringe of relief.

Just before slipping into a deep twilight sleep, Viviane swore she saw giant feathers falling from the ceiling, an image she attributed to the anesthetic.

When I was born, the on-call doctor examined the forceps in his hands in bewilderment before going in search of family in the waiting room.

According to the nurses in attendance, moments after I made my entrance, I opened my eyes and pointed a pinkie finger toward the light. This was an admirable feat considering I first had to unfold a pair of speckled wings sprouting from the edges of my shoulder blades.

My twin came as a surprise to them all — most especially the doctor, who had to be rushed back for his birth. It was later debated whether or not my wings had anything to do with how Henry turned out. But that wouldn’t explain the many others like him — others who were born just as strange as Henry but without a feathery twin.

It took two hours for the press to catch wind of my strange birth. Soon there they were, crowding the hospital hallways, the nursing staff shooting them malicious looks. The head nurse was able to keep the cameras and journalists from the actual hospital room, but outside our window the devout gathered into the night, holding candles and singing hymns of praise and fear. The crowd was so dense, it took Gabe four hours to pick up Emilienne from the bakery and bring her back to the hospital. It took another four hours to take her back when Emilienne declared that, after an uncomfortable forty-five minutes, she had been away from the bakery too long.

It was the nurse’s aide who attended to us during most of our stay, who emptied my mother’s bedpan and enticed her with tiny cups of green Jell-O and bottles of chocolate milk. The nurse’s aide was a feverish reader of the Bible and brought in pages of notebook paper on which she had jotted down all the feminine forms of Michael, Raphael, and Uriel she could find.

“She really does need a name,” she said.

As a newborn, I was lovely in every sense of the word, or so I’ve been told.

I had dark eyes and a full head of black hair like my mother’s on the day she was born — right down to the ringlet at the back of my head. Other than the fact that I had wings, I was perfect. And even the wings weren’t that bad. Only a few days old and I was already able to wrap them around myself like a swaddling blanket.

“I like Michaela,” the nurse’s aide said, standing in the doorway. “Or maybe you could call her Raphaela.”

It usually took Gabe a while to get from the elevator to the hospital room. He had to will his fingers to stop shaking and his chest to stop heaving first. When he did arrive, it was with a ceremonious bumping of his head on the door frame and a bouquet of flowers, wilted from his tight and sweaty grip.

“I was thinking you could call her Ava,” he said, rubbing his head and handing the flowers to the nurse’s aide. She gave him a quizzical look before adding the bouquet to the array of brown flowers from his other visits.

“What angel was ever named that?” she asked.

“It means bird,” Viviane said softly. She tried not to look disappointed, but she and Gabe and Emilienne all knew that a very large part of her was still hoping Jack would walk through the door. She didn’t care if he brought her flowers. Or even an apology. She just needed him to be there. She needed him because that was the only thing that made sense.

Then, for a moment, my mother caught a glimpse of Gabe’s good heart and forgot that her own was in mourning. For a moment, she saw in him a common soul and smiled at the thought of spending the next fifty years sleeping in the crook of his long arm or walking together in stride — arms matching arms, step matching step. But then she remembered Jack and all those months she’d spent waiting for a love that never returned, and she wrapped her heart in its burial shroud once again.

“Well, fine,” the young aide said, rolling her eyes. “Name her whatever you want, but what about the other one?”

To Viviane, one of the worst parts about all the attention — the reporters, the newspaper articles, the crowds of worshipful followers — was that it focused on one twin, as if I were a single entity. What were twins but a pair? They came together for a reason, after all. But maybe worse was that underneath her motherly indignation lay the underlying fear that Viviane wasn’t so sure about the other one either. He was small and quiet, too quiet for an infant. He went limp when anyone tried to hold him. It seemed to Viviane that she’d given birth to not one oddity but two.

“Henry,” Viviane decided. “I want to call him Henry.”

Gabe smiled. “Ava and Henry.”